HMS Stalker (D91): The Carrier Whose Pilots Kept Walking Back
A San Francisco Freighter Called Hamlin
HMS Stalker was ordered as a cargo ship. Her keel went down at the Western Pipe and Steel Corporation in San Francisco during 1941 as a United States Maritime Commission Type C3 freighter, and she was launched on 5 March 1942 as USS Hamlin, sponsored by Mrs William H Shea, by which point the United States Navy had already requisitioned her for conversion into an auxiliary aircraft carrier.
She never served a day under the American flag. On 21 December 1942 she was commissioned as USS Hamlin at San Francisco, decommissioned the same day, and handed straight to the Royal Navy, becoming HMS Stalker under Captain H S Murray-Smith.
It is the shortest career in the United States Navy imaginable, and it was purely a piece of Lend-Lease paperwork: the Americans had to own her for a moment in order to give her away.
She was one of the Attacker class, the first group of American escort carriers handed to Britain, built by Western Pipe and Steel in California and by Ingalls in Mississippi. It is worth keeping that straight, because the second group, the Rulers, all came from Seattle-Tacoma and included HMS Emperor (D98) and HMS Khedive (D62).
Stalker fought alongside both of those ships and was a sister to neither. Her actual sister, and her companion through very nearly the whole war, was HMS Hunter (D80).
Somebody at the Admiralty enjoyed naming these ships. The eleven Attackers were Attacker, Battler, Chaser, Fencer, Hunter, Pursuer, Ravager, Searcher, Stalker, Striker and Tracker, which is less a list of warships than a thesaurus entry for a man following you down an alley.
It was a deliberate choice, and an optimistic one for a group of converted freighters whose actual job turned out to be circling patiently above other people’s beaches.
Underneath the names they were modest ships: 14,170 tons, 486 feet long, a hangar 262 feet by 62, and room for about twenty aircraft. What mattered was that Britain could have a great many of them very quickly, which was not true of anything else that could fly a fighter.
The photograph at the top of this article is a good deal more interesting once you know that. It shows her off the California coast in 1942, brand new, in the water she was built in, before she had crossed an ocean or flown an aeroplane in anger.
A Very Large Aircraft Lorry
Her first job was freight, which is what almost every escort carrier did on her maiden crossing. She sailed from New York on 5 March 1943 with convoy UGF6, loaded with American aircraft, reached Casablanca on the 16th, went on to Gibraltar, joined a fast convoy home and arrived on the Clyde on 5 April.
On the 17th she went into Chatham Dockyard to be made acceptable to the Royal Navy.
In August 1943 she embarked 833 Squadron with Swordfish and 880 Squadron with Seafires, sailed for Gibraltar on the 3rd, and on 1 September left for Malta. She was there by the 5th. Four days later she was off an Italian beach.
Force V, and the Calm That Broke the Seafires
Operation Avalanche, the landing at Salerno on 9 September 1943, was mounted just beyond the range at which fighters from Sicily could usefully stay overhead, so the air cover had to come off ships. Force V, under Rear Admiral Philip Vian, was the support carrier HMS Unicorn (I72) and four escort carriers, Attacker, Battler, Hunter and Stalker, with the fleet carriers HMS Illustrious (87) and HMS Formidable (67) in Force H behind them.
The cruiser HMS Charybdis (88) brought Eisenhower towards the invasion, and it was at Salerno that the Germans first used radio-controlled bombs in the Mediterranean, which is a story told properly in the articles on HMS Warspite (03) and HMS Uganda (66), both of which were hit.
What happened to the aeroplanes is told in Unicorn's article, and in Hunter's, which covers the one carrier that came out of it with barely a scratch and why. The short version is that the Bay of Salerno lay flat calm, an escort carrier could not make enough speed to generate the wind a Seafire needed to land safely, and the fighter force destroyed itself on its own decks.
Stalker's own contribution on the first day was 265 sorties. That is an extraordinary number from a converted freighter with twenty aircraft aboard, and it means her flight deck was cycling aircraft continuously from before dawn until dark. Her fighters also beat off air attacks on the fleet during the day.
She lost three aircraft, all from 880 Squadron, one badly damaged and two written off.
Ten Days With a Panzer Division
One of those three is the reason this article has the title it does.
Sub-Lieutenant D Cameron, a New Zealander, was shot down on the first day and put his Seafire down on the beach at Salerno, in among a battle that was still very much undecided. He was captured by a German Panzer division and held for ten days.
Then he escaped, and walked back to Allied lines, and was returned to his squadron.
It is worth pausing on the geography of that. A naval pilot who takes off from a ship expects, if things go badly, to end up in the sea.
Cameron ended up in a field in Italy in the hands of an armoured division at the exact moment the German counter-attack was trying to push the whole invasion back into the water, and he got himself out of it on foot.
Two days later the ship lost a man to something far more ordinary and no less final. On 11 September Sub-Lieutenant G C Mercer of 833 Squadron came aboard in LR631, bounced over every crash barrier the deck had, and went over the bow into the sea. He was killed.
The barriers exist precisely to stop that happening, and on a short deck in a light wind they did not always work.
She stayed off the beachhead on the 10th because the airfields ashore were not ready to receive her aircraft, and on the 12th she finally flew her squadrons onto a captured airfield and was released. She reached Bizerta on the 13th, was back at Gibraltar by the 24th, escorted a military convoy at the end of the month, and was in a Liverpool yard for refit by 11 October.
A Winter of Being Taken Apart
The nine months between Salerno and southern France are the least eventful stretch of her war and quietly the most important. She embarked two Seafire squadrons, 809 and 897, in December 1943 and worked them up in the north-western approaches.
In February she went into a commercial yard on the Thames for further conversion, and in March one of her aircraft lifts was replaced, the replacement being taken out of HMS Slinger. Escort carriers were built fast enough that cannibalising one to keep another flying was a normal transaction rather than a scandal.
In April, refit finished, she was sent to Scapa Flow to join the Home Fleet for a strike on the Norwegian coast that was then called off, and she never did fly an operation in northern waters. Emperor flew that sort of work all spring, and her article covers what it involved.
Stalker was released in May, joined a Mediterranean convoy on the 14th, and was at Gibraltar by the 25th.
Dragoon: 337 Sorties and a Corvette
Back in the Mediterranean, she was sent to Malta to join the carrier task force assembling for the invasion of southern France.
She was in Task Group 88.2 with Hunter and the American escort carriers Tulagi and Kasaan Bay, inside a Task Force 88 whose flagship was the cruiser HMS Royalist (C89). Emperor and Khedive were in the other British group.
Over thirteen days she flew 337 sorties. A good many of them were spotting, reporting the fall of shot for the battleship HMS Ramillies (07) as she shelled targets inland, and that is the least glamorous and most useful thing an escort carrier ever did: an aeroplane over a hill, a wireless, and a fifteen-inch gun eight miles out at sea that cannot see what it is hitting.
The wider invasion sequence, from Sicily onwards, is followed in the articles on HMS Tumult (F121) and HMS Troubridge (R00).
On 26 August, near the end of it, Lieutenant C E H Jefferson was killed when his aircraft was hit by flak during a strafing run and crashed at Montelimar.
More to Explore
Into the Hands of the Maquis
And then it happened again. At 0753 one morning during the operation, Sub-Lieutenant A R Rawbone made a forced landing north-west of Nimes in Seafire MA999. He was seen from the air running towards a farmhouse, and that was the last anyone aboard knew of him for some time. He was later reported to be in the hands of the Maquis.
Two pilots, one invasion apart, both shot down over occupied Europe, both of whom got themselves home overland. It says something about the Seafire that a fair number of its pilots survived being put down in a field, and something about southern France in August 1944 that a man running towards a farmhouse had reasonable odds of finding friends inside it.
The Aegean: Cablegram, Manna and a Church Spire
Released on 28 August, she was at Alexandria by 2 September and joined the British Aegean Force, whose job was to make the eastern Mediterranean untenable for German garrisons trying to get home. Her autumn reads like a list of very small wars: attacks on Crete and Rhodes, a return to Alexandria to replenish, then out again on 25 September in company with the cruiser HMS Black Prince (81) and a screen of destroyers.
She covered minesweeping off Kithera on the 26th, supported a bombardment on the 27th, and spent the 28th to the 30th attacking the caiques and small craft the Germans were using to evacuate the islands.
In October she struck shore targets ahead of the landings in Greece on the 13th, flew cover over the main landings on the 15th for Operation Manna, went after railways and shipping off Cape Stavros on the 17th, and bombed Rhodes on the 19th. Over the whole Aegean period she flew 277 sorties and lost five Seafires.
The destroyers' side of that campaign is in the articles on HMS Termagant (R89) and HMS Teazer (F23).
Two of those five are worth naming. Sub-Lieutenant A D Perry of 809 Squadron was strafing a German motorised column when flak hit him; his Seafire then struck the spire of the church of Agios Pavlos and went into the ground burning.
Sub-Lieutenant G S Macartney was luckier, baling out after flak damage and being picked up out of the sea by the destroyer Tuscan.
Captain L C Sinker had relieved Captain Murray-Smith in September, midway through the campaign.
She sailed from Alexandria on 29 October in company with Hunter, reached Plymouth on 10 November, and went into refit for the Far East. She had been at sea, more or less continuously, from the Clyde to Salerno to the Riviera to Rhodes, for fourteen months.
Rangoon, and the Last Year
She joined the 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron of the East Indies Fleet at Trincomalee in March 1945, and on 23 April sailed for Akyab in Burma with Hunter, Khedive, Emperor and Royalist for Operation Dracula, the assault on Rangoon.
She covered the assault convoys on 30 April, and on 2 May eight of her Seafires went in to bomb and strafe the light anti-aircraft positions at Thakutpin, on the west bank of the Rangoon River. Over the operation she flew seventy combat air patrol sorties, four fighter-bomber attacks and ten strikes, and put up 124 hours of air cover.
There was almost nothing to fight, the Japanese having already left Rangoon, and she was back at Trincomalee on 9 May.
She also carried, between April and June, a detachment of 1700 Squadron flying Walrus amphibians. A Walrus is a biplane flying boat with a pusher propeller and the aerodynamics of a garden shed, and it was aboard for exactly one reason: to land on the sea and pick up aircrew who had gone into it.
In an ocean that size, with the nearest friendly coast often several hundred miles away, an aeroplane that could alight alongside a man in the water was worth more than another fighter.
In June she was out again for Operation Balsam, photographing southern Malaya on the 18th and attacking Sumatran airfields on the 20th. In July she exercised with HMS Empress (D42).
In September she was in the Malacca Strait with the covering force for the reoccupation of Malaya, flying reconnaissance on the 9th and air cover over the Port Swettenham landings, and she was at Singapore on the 10th. The formal surrender of Japanese forces in Malaya had been signed aboard HMS Nelson (28) at Penang eight days earlier. She was released on the 13th and sailed for Trincomalee.
Riouw
She reached the Clyde on 22 October 1945, paid off except for a steaming party, was de-stored by the 28th and sailed for the United States on 2 December. On 29 December she was handed back to the United States Navy, three years and eight days after they had owned her for an afternoon.
What happened next was not a scrapyard. She was sold in December 1946 to the Waterman Steamship Corporation of Mobile, Alabama, and sold on in September 1947 to the Dutch government, who took the flight deck off and turned her back into the cargo and passenger ship the drawings had originally called for.
She entered service on 12 November 1947 as the SS Riouw, named for the island group off Sumatra, and spent two decades in the Dutch East Indies trade she had helped to reconquer.
She was renamed Lobito in the late 1960s, sold to Ivory Coast owners in 1970, and finally sold in July 1975 to be broken up at Gandia in Spain, where demolition began that September. She was thirty-three years old and had been a warship for three of them.
There is a small coincidence in that ending. Khedive was taken apart by the same Spanish breakers at Gandia a few months later, in 1976.
Two escort carriers that had worked the same beaches in 1944 and the same ocean in 1945 were cut up in the same yard within a year of each other, three decades after anybody had thought of them as warships at all.
The Name Went On, and Ended in Portsmouth
There is a second HMS Stalker, and she is the reason this ship's name is still occasionally seen in Portsmouth photographs.
She was a Landing Ship Tank Mk 3, L3515, built by Canadian Yarrow at Esquimalt in 1944 and reaching Britain too late for the war. When she was commissioned into the Royal Navy she inherited this ship's crest and battle honours, which is the Navy's way of not letting a record lapse.
She spent her career as a submarine support vessel, first at Londonderry and then at Rosyth, was renamed Galle when the base was privatised in 1997, and became surplus in 2002 when the nuclear submarine work stopped.
She went to Pounds at Tipner in Portsmouth, sat in the mud there for years, and was broken up between 2010 and 2012. She is recorded as the last steam-driven LST to be scrapped.
So the honours won off Salerno and Rhodes and Rangoon by a Californian freighter ended their days on a Portsmouth mudflat, which is a more dignified finish than it sounds.
Six Battle Honours and a Lot of Walking
Her honours read Atlantic 1943 to 1944, Salerno 1943, South France 1944, Aegean 1944, Burma 1945 and East Indies 1945. Six, for a hull ordered as a freighter and in uniform for three years.
What they have in common is that not one of them was won against a fleet. Every single one was earned over somebody else's beach, hill or airfield: soldiers going ashore at Salerno and Saint-Tropez and Rangoon, commandos landing in the Greek islands, a battleship shelling something eight miles inland that only a Seafire pilot could see.
Escort carriers are usually remembered for hunting U-boats in the Atlantic, and Stalker never did any of that. She spent her entire war as a mobile airfield parked off a hostile coast.
And two of the men who flew from her were shot down over enemy ground and simply walked home, one of them out of the custody of a Panzer division. Neither got a headline. Both got back to the squadron, which is presumably all either of them wanted.
Leave a comment