HMS Ruler (D72): The Borrowed Carrier That Sailed Into Tokyo Bay

Built in Washington State, Flying a British Ensign

HMS Ruler began life as the Bogue-class escort carrier St. Joseph, built by the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation and laid down in March 1943.

Launched that August, she was transferred to Britain under Lend-Lease arrangements and commissioned into Royal Navy service as HMS Ruler on 22 December 1943, one of a substantial fleet of American-built escort carriers that helped make good the Royal Navy's shortage of aircraft carrier hulls at a critical stage of the war.

Fittingly for a ship whose whole story is really about borrowed identity, Ruler went on to lend her own name to an entire class: in Royal Navy service she and her near-identical sisters became known as the Ruler class, sometimes the Ameer class, even though the Americans who built them thought of them simply as a later, safety-improved batch of the Bogue design. Before she saw any active service, she was sent to Burrard Dry Dock in Vancouver for a refit to Royal Navy standards, adapting an American warship for British ways of doing things.

Why She Went Into Dock Before She Did Anything

A later, safety-improved batch is doing a great deal of diplomatic work in that sentence, and the reason for the refit is two dead ships. The first was HMS Avenger (D14), an American-built escort carrier torpedoed off Gibraltar in November 1942. One torpedo. She detonated and went down in a few minutes and twelve men out of five hundred and fifty-five came out of the water.

The second was worse, because there was no enemy involved at all. On 27 March 1943 HMS Dasher was exercising in the Firth of Clyde, between Arran and Ardrossan, in home waters, in daylight, when she suffered an internal explosion and sank. Of the 528 men aboard, 379 died, a great many of them in burning petrol on the surface of the water. The court of inquiry could find no negligence and blamed a defect that could not have been detected. The Admiralty's own private conclusion was blunter, and it is worth quoting: safeguards against accidents of this nature are, by our standards, practically non-existent in the petrol arrangements and hangars of these American-built escort carriers.

That is what Burrard Dry Dock at Vancouver was for. The aviation fuel stowage was rebuilt to British practice, the ventilation and firefighting arrangements were overhauled, and a good deal else besides. It was not fussiness or national pride: it was a direct response to nine hundred dead men in two ships. Ruler and her batch were built with most of the improvements from new and then had the rest fitted before they were let anywhere near an operation, which is why she spent the first months of her existence in a Canadian dockyard rather than the Atlantic.

Guarding the Atlantic Lifeline

Through 1944, Ruler served in the North Atlantic protecting the vital flow of men and war materiel from the United States to Britain and on to the fighting fronts beyond, the kind of unglamorous, essential convoy protection work that escort carriers like her were purpose-built to provide, screening merchant shipping against the ever-present threat of submarine attack.

A Ferry Service for Fighter Aircraft

Beyond convoy escort duty, Ruler made three dedicated transatlantic ferry voyages that year: Hellcats and Corsairs delivered to RNAS Speke by 6 May, a return trip to New York for Avengers and more Hellcats delivered on 11 June, and a third run from Norfolk, Virginia that unloaded at Greenock on 18 November. It was, in effect, a floating aircraft delivery service, helping keep the Fleet Air Arm supplied with the modern American fighters and torpedo bombers it increasingly relied on as the war progressed.

Into the Pacific War

In early 1945, Ruler transferred to the Pacific Theatre, joining the British Pacific Fleet's fleet train as part of the 30th Aircraft Carrier Squadron. Her job wasn't to launch strikes herself but to fly fighter cover over the vulnerable replenishment area where the fleet's warships refuelled and rearmed at sea, vital if distinctly unglamorous work she carried out through the Okinawa campaign that May. Her aircrew over these months included Hellcats of 885 Squadron, Fireflies of 1772 Squadron and a detachment from 716 Squadron.

The fleet train deserves explaining, because it was the hardest thing the Royal Navy attempted in the whole Pacific war and almost nobody has heard of it. The British had spent three centuries fighting within reach of a base. In 1945 they were asked to keep a fleet in action off Japan from a main base at Sydney, four thousand miles away, with the forward anchorages another thousand miles beyond that. There was no British dockyard, no British oil, and no British anything within reach. The Americans, who had spent three years building exactly this capability, were politely sceptical that the Royal Navy could feed itself.

What was assembled was a scratch fleet of oilers, store ships, repair ships, hospital ships and escort carriers, a great many of them requisitioned merchantmen with borrowed crews, whose job was to meet the fighting fleet at sea and refuel and rearm it without going home. Ruler's part was to fly fighters over that replenishment area while it happened, because a fleet stopped in the open ocean with fuel hoses across to a tanker is the most vulnerable thing in naval warfare. It is entirely unglamorous, it was done in appalling heat, and without it the British Pacific Fleet could not have operated at all.

She got a rather more direct taste of the shooting war on 14 June, during a strike on the Japanese base at Truk, when six Seafire fighters from HMS Implacable lost sight of their own carrier and put down instead on Ruler's flight deck, glad of anywhere to land at all, a small reminder that in the vastness of the Pacific even an escort carrier's spare deck space could be a lifesaver.

The carrier those Seafires had lost is here as well: HMS Implacable (R86), a full armoured fleet carrier who went from hunting the Tirpitz in Norwegian fjords to striking the Japanese home islands. The Seafire was a navalised Spitfire with famously short legs and a landing gear that did not enjoy carrier decks, so six of them arriving unannounced over an escort carrier in the middle of the Pacific, low on fuel and asking permission, is about as Seafire an incident as the type produced.

Present at the Surrender, and a Voyage Home for the Freed

Ruler entered Tokyo Bay on 31 August 1945, present for the immediate aftermath of Japan's surrender, and went on to perform one of the more remarkably moving duties of her entire career, transporting 450 former prisoners of war to Sydney by 27 September, carrying men who had endured years of brutal captivity on the first stage of their journey home to freedom. She was greeted into Sydney Harbour by the Governor-General of Australia himself, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, a fittingly senior welcome for the cargo she carried.

Returned to America and Quietly Scrapped

With the war won, Ruler returned to Norfolk, Virginia on 28 January 1946 and was decommissioned the following day, formally handed back to the United States Navy as her Lend-Lease service came to its natural end.

She was sold that May and scrapped within the year, a quiet close for a carrier whose brief but varied career had carried her from convoy escort in the North Atlantic to the very heart of the Pacific victory and the liberation of Allied prisoners of war.

Two of her sisters are here too, and between them they cover the range of what these borrowed ships did. HMS Pursuer (D73) flew fighters over the Barracudas that crippled Tirpitz in April 1944, and HMS Atheling (D51) spent her war moving aircraft about the Indian Ocean. Thirty-odd of these hulls came across under Lend-Lease and every one of them went back afterwards, which is the point of the arrangement and also, for a ship that had carried 450 men out of Japanese captivity, a slightly cold way to finish.