HMS Searcher (D40): From the Tirpitz Raid to the Last Air Raid in Europe
Launched Empty, and Towed Away to Be Finished
HMS Searcher was put together in a way that says everything about how Britain got its escort carriers. Her keel went down at the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation in February 1942, and after a hundred and thirty-eight days on the ways she was launched in June, hull complete with her engines and her flight deck support beams in place and very little else.
Then a tug took her away. The USS Tatnuck towed her from Seattle down the coast to Oregon, where a Portland yard finished the job.
She was delivered on 7 April 1943 and commissioned into the Royal Navy the same day, in a ceremony brisk enough that Captain G O C Davies simply read out the commissioning warrant and the ship was HMS Searcher, pennant number D40.
That is a shipbuilding programme running flat out: launch the hull to clear the slipway for the next one, tow the unfinished ship somewhere else, and let a second yard put the top half on. She was one of the Attacker class, eleven ships that gave Britain flight decks it could not otherwise have had, and her sisters run through these pages: HMS Attacker (D02) herself, HMS Hunter (D80), HMS Stalker (D91), HMS Pursuer (D73) and HMS Striker (D12) among them.
On paper she was modest: 14,170 tons, 486 feet long, a flight deck 442 feet by 80, about twenty aircraft and a ship's company of 646. She went to Liverpool in the summer of 1943 and spent three months at Harland and Wolff having British radar fitted, Type 79B for air warning and Type 272 for surface search, because an American carrier could not talk to a British fleet until somebody made her.
A Wildcat Ship, and Nothing Else
Searcher flew Grumman Wildcats from 1943 to the end, 898 Squadron and 882 Squadron with the Wildcat V, and 882 again in 1945 with the Wildcat VI.
The Wildcat was not fast and it was not elegant. It was a barrel with wings, it folded small enough to suit a cramped hangar and a slow lift, its undercarriage was cranked up by hand, and it would come aboard a short deck in poor wind without breaking itself, which is precisely the quality the Seafire lacked and which cost the Fleet Air Arm dozens of aircraft at Salerno.
Searcher never had that problem, and the reason is not that her pilots were better. It is that somebody had given her the right aeroplane.
A Year of Learning to Be a Warship
She sailed from Seattle at twelve minutes past nine on the morning of 13 May 1943, bound for Balboa and the Panama Canal, and went from there to the Norfolk Navy Yard for repairs, which is a slightly ominous thing for a five-week-old ship to need. She crossed to Britain with convoy HX 246 out of New York at the end of June and reached Liverpool on 13 July.
Then came Harland and Wolff and the radar, and then the part of an escort carrier's life that nobody writes books about. She worked up through the autumn of 1943 and spent the back end of the year on Atlantic convoy defence, which meant flying anti-submarine patrols over a convoy in North Atlantic winter weather, day after day, in the hope of seeing nothing.
Late in the year her machinery gave enough trouble that she had to be escorted into New York, an escort carrier being escorted, and she did not resume Atlantic work until February 1944.
It is easy to skip past a year like that. It is also where the ship was made.
By the time she went north in the spring of 1944 she had a captain who had been aboard for over a year, two squadrons who had been flying off her since the previous autumn, and a ship's company who had learned their trade in the worst flying conditions in the world with nobody shooting at them. That is why the next twelve months read the way they do.
Tungsten
She joined the Home Fleet in March 1944. Her first job in northern waters was covering the Russian convoy JW 58, one of the most heavily protected convoys of the whole Arctic run, and on 3 April she was in the force that struck the German battleship Tirpitz in Altafjord.
The fleet carriers HMS Furious (47) and HMS Victorious (R38) flew the Barracudas; four escort carriers including Searcher put up the fighters; and the cruiser HMS Royalist (C89) led them out. The strike itself is told at length in Royalist's article and in Pursuer's, and HMS Diadem (84) covers the cruiser screen.
Searcher's record of it is short and mostly about the weather. Conditions at the flying-off position at four in the morning on the 3rd were as good as anybody could have asked, and the aircraft went off as planned.
She had already paid her entrance fee a week earlier: on 27 March, during the exercises beforehand, Sub-Lieutenant M C Brown of the New Zealand reserve went over the side in Wildcat JV377 and was killed. He never saw the operation he had been working up for.
Two Flying Boats and a Bad Fortnight
What followed was a Norwegian spring of small, sharp operations against coastal shipping, and Searcher was in most of them: Ridge Able and Ridge Baker against the convoys off Bodo and Rorvik in April, then Croquet and Hoops in May.
Croquet, at the start of May, produced her first real success in the air. Her Wildcats caught two Blohm und Voss 138 flying boats and shot both down, the second of them shared between five aircraft, four of 898 Squadron and one of 882.
Sharing a kill five ways is the sort of thing that sounds like bureaucracy and is in fact an accurate description of what happens when a slow flying boat is jumped by a section of fighters who all get a burst in.
Hoops, a week later, cost her a pilot. Sub-Lieutenant I A Cotching RNVR went into the sea in Wildcat JV538 and was killed.
It is worth being precise about that, because published accounts of this ship have a habit of borrowing the air fighting of 8 May 1944 from another deck entirely; the Hellcat pilots who did the scoring that day flew from Emperor, and their story is in her article, not this one.
Dragoon: Eighteen Sorties Out of Twenty-Eight Spent Watching Shells
In July 1944 she went to the Mediterranean with Task Force 88 for the invasion of southern France, in the group alongside Attacker, Emperor, Khedive and Pursuer. Her first day's flying is a neat summary of what these ships were actually for by 1944.
Of 28 sorties flown on 15 August, three were fighter-bomber attacks and seven were force cover over the fleet. The other eighteen were bombardment spotting.
Spotting is the job nobody paints. A warship eight or ten miles offshore cannot see what she is shooting at; a pilot circling over the target can, and spends an hour reporting corrections by wireless while being shot at from the ground.
Eighteen sorties out of twenty-eight means Searcher spent that day largely as a pair of eyes for other people's guns.
It was expensive. Her squadron went into the operation with 24 Wildcats and came out of it eight days later with 19: four lost to enemy action and one written off in a barrier crash, with one pilot killed and two missing.
Sub-Lieutenant A Share of the New Zealand reserve was killed attacking the airfield at Orange-Caritat. Sub-Lieutenant N J Gardiner got back with an empty petrol tank and had the engine cut on him while he was still taxiing up the flight deck, which is the sort of margin these operations were flown on.
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The Aegean
Released at the end of August, she joined the British Aegean Force and spent September working over the Dodecanese and Crete: covering the landing on Kythira, strafing vehicles on Cretan roads, sinking caiques, and spotting for bombardments again. It was the same unglamorous business as southern France in worse charts and smaller targets, and the destroyers' side of it is in the articles on HMS Termagant (R89) and HMS Teazer (F23).
She was released from the Mediterranean on 21 October and went home to refit.
Twenty-Sixth of March, 1945
She came out of refit on 29 January 1945 under a new captain, J W Grant having relieved Captain Davies after nearly two years in command. She re-embarked 882 Squadron, now flying the Wildcat VI, rejoined the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow on 4 March with a pair of Fireflies of 746 Squadron added to her strength, and went back to Norway for the last time.
The pattern of those last months was weather as much as enemy. Operation Newmarket in April was abandoned because of it.
Anyone who imagines carrier operations off Norway in early spring as a series of dashing strikes should understand that a great deal of it was steaming about in the dark waiting for a forecast that never came good.
Operation Cupola in the middle of March was air minelaying in Norwegian waters under fighter cover, which is a strange use of a carrier and was done well. Then, on 26 March, during a shipping strike off Trondheim, she had the best morning of her war.
Six to nine Messerschmitt 109s came in at the strike and her Wildcats broke the attack up completely. Three were shot down and two more damaged, and Searcher lost nothing at all. Sub-Lieutenant A F Womack got the first at a quarter to eleven.
Five minutes later Sub-Lieutenant R F Moore and Sub-Lieutenant J A P Harrison shared the second between them, and Lieutenant Commander R A Bird damaged a third.
By March 1945 the Wildcat was an old aeroplane, comfortably outclassed on paper by the 109 in almost every measurable respect, and this was very near the end of its career in British service. Three shot down and two damaged for no loss is a result that has nothing to do with the specification sheet and everything to do with a squadron that had been flying the same aircraft off the same deck for well over a year.
Kilbotn
On 4 May 1945 the Fleet Air Arm flew its last raid of the European war, and Searcher was part of it.
Forty-four aircraft went for the German submarine base at Kilbotn, a few miles south of Harstad in northern Norway, where the depot ship Black Watch lay with a flak ship, armed barges and gun positions round the harbour.
In a matter of minutes Black Watch and the flak ship Senja were destroyed and the submarine U 711, moored alongside, went down with them. HMS Norfolk (78) was the flagship for the operation, HMS Trumpeter's article carries the account from the Avenger squadron that made the attack, and HMS Carysfort was in the screen. Searcher's Wildcats of 882 Squadron flew escort.
Her cost was one man. Lieutenant H Morrison of the New Zealand reserve, escorting the Avengers in at low level, took a direct flak hit in Wildcat JV809 and the aircraft came apart in the air.
It is worth knowing what U 711 was, because it turns four minutes over a Norwegian fjord into something more than a tidy statistic. In February 1945, in the Arctic, she had put an acoustic torpedo into the stern of the corvette HMS Bluebell.
Bluebell's own depth charges went up with the hit and she sank in under thirty seconds; one man survived out of a ship's company of about eighty, and that story is told in HMS Cavalier's article. The previous autumn, on convoy JW 59, the same boat had fired at the old battleship Royal Sovereign, by then flying the Soviet flag as Arkhangelsk, and claimed hits she had not made.
Her end was almost anticlimactic. Her captain, Hans-Günther Lange, and a harbour crew of eight got the boat clear of the ships that were being bombed around her and survived; U 711 was damaged in the attack and sank some hours afterwards, and the men aboard were picked up. Four days later Germany surrendered.
Copenhagen, and Then Nothing to Do
On 9 May she sailed for Copenhagen as part of Operation Cleaver, the force sent into a newly liberated Denmark to take the surrender of the German warships there. It is a curious last operational duty for a ship that had spent a year and a half flying fighters off Norway: no flying, no enemy, just a carrier in a Danish harbour while the other side handed its ships over.
She had also, in May, briefly carried a detachment of Barracudas from 825 Squadron, which after two years as a pure fighter carrier must have felt like having lodgers. She refitted in June, was nominated for the 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron in Ceylon, and sailed east in August, ferrying a load of two dozen Wildcats out to the East Indies Fleet.
Japan surrendered while she was on passage and she was never operationally deployed there at all. She paid off on 19 September, put her aircraft ashore on 9 October, and 882 Squadron, which had been aboard for most of two years, was disbanded the same day.
Captain Theo
She sailed for the United States on 14 November 1945 with a skeleton crew and reached Norfolk, Virginia at the end of the month, where she was handed back to the United States Navy.
Like almost all of them she went into trade. She was sold to a Greek owner, Theophilos J Vatis, had her flight deck taken off and became the cargo ship Captain Theo, named for her new proprietor with a directness the Admiralty would never have permitted.
In 1957 Mitsubishi cut her in half and lengthened her, which is a considerable vote of confidence in a hull that had been launched incomplete and towed to another state to be finished. She later traded as the Oriental Banker under Chinese ownership and was eventually broken up in Taiwan.
Exactly when is a question the sources will not settle. One good account has her renamed in 1966 and scrapped at Kaohsiung in 1976; another has her renamed in 1964 and demolished in 1967. Nine years apart, and no way to reconcile them from here, so both are given and neither is asserted.
Four Honours, and Both Ends of a War
Her battle honours read Atlantic 1943 to 1944, South France 1944, Aegean 1944 and Norway 1944 to 1945.
That last one is the one to look at, because of the dates. Norway 1944 to 1945 covers her fighter cover over the Tirpitz strike in April 1944, which was the most successful carrier operation the Royal Navy mounted in European waters, and it covers Kilbotn on 4 May 1945, which was the last aircraft the Fleet Air Arm sent against Germany.
She was there for the first and she was there for the last, and in between she spent most of her time circling patiently above somebody else's battle telling them where their shells were falling.
She was a converted freighter with an old fighter aboard, and she was in at both ends. Not many ships of any size can say that.
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