HMS Striker (D12): From Attacking the Tirpitz to the Skies Over Okinawa

Built in San Francisco, Lent to Britain

HMS Striker was built by the Western Pipe and Steel Corporation in San Francisco, laid down on 15 December 1941 as the American escort carrier Prince William before being renamed and transferred to the Royal Navy under the Lend-Lease Agreement, actually launched under her new name of Striker on 7 May 1942. She was delivered to the US Navy on 28 April 1943 and formally handed over to the Royal Navy three weeks later, on 18 May 1943, one of the many American-built escort carriers that helped bridge Britain's wartime shipbuilding shortfall. Captain Frank Michael Walton commanded her from November 1942, seeing her through fitting out and acceptance, before Captain William Power Carne took over in February 1944 for the remainder of her wartime career.

Into the Atlantic Convoy War

After crossing the Atlantic with Convoy HX246 and completing modifications at Chatham, Striker joined the 1st British Escort Group in December 1943, providing anti-submarine air cover for convoys through the following winter, including Convoy HX278 out of New York in February 1944 and the combined convoy OS70/KMS44 through the Mediterranean the following month, unglamorous but essential work protecting the Atlantic supply line at its most vulnerable point.

The Ships That Kept Blowing Up

There is something about the American-built escort carriers that the record of a successful one like Striker conceals. They were merchant hulls with a flight deck put on top, built at speed in yards that had never made a warship, and the compromise that made them cheap made them fragile: thin plating, no armour worth the name, and, critically, aviation fuel stowage designed to commercial rather than naval standards. Petrol vapour is the thing that kills ships. The Royal Navy found this out twice in five months, at a cost that is difficult to state calmly.

HMS Avenger (D14) was torpedoed off Gibraltar in November 1942 and detonated, leaving twelve men alive out of five hundred and fifty-five. HMS Dasher blew up in the Firth of Clyde in March 1943, in home waters, in daylight, with no enemy anywhere near her, and killed three hundred and seventy-nine. In both cases the immediate cause was petrol. What followed was a wholesale reworking of the aviation fuel arrangements in every American-built escort carrier the Royal Navy had, along with the fire-fighting and the ventilation, before the Admiralty would let them near an operation. Striker was one of the ships that got the modified standard, and it is the main reason there is nothing dramatic to write about her hull.

Two more of the type are here and they show the range of what the class did: HMS Activity (D94) fought the Atlantic convoy war, and HMS Atheling (D51) ended up doing the same aircraft ferrying job as Striker.

Striking at the Tirpitz

Transferring to the Home Fleet that March, Striker took part in a whole run of strikes against German shipping off Norway, each one carrying its own faintly domestic-sounding codename: Operation Ridge in April, hitting a small convoy and its escort; Operation Hoops in May, striking another convoy and coastal oil installations; and Operation Potluck, in which her own Sea Hurricanes tangled with German Me 110 fighters and forced them to jettison their bombs. In June she and the escort carrier HMS Fencer took part in a rather more theatrical operation, sailing north of the actual D-Day beaches and broadcasting bogus radio traffic to convince the Germans that a second invasion of their own northern coastline was imminent, buying time and attention away from Normandy without a shot being fired. By August, the campaign had built towards its real target: Operation Goodwood, a week of repeated carrier strikes against the German battleship Tirpitz herself at her Norwegian anchorage, one of the Royal Navy's most sustained and dangerous ongoing campaigns of the war, aimed at neutralising a single ship whose mere presence tied down a significant portion of Britain's home fleet. Striker's own aircraft took part in the third of these strikes, on 24 August, which claimed two hits on the battleship.

Eight Decks and No Explosion

Goodwood is worth being honest about, because it failed. Four separate strikes were flown against Tirpitz in Altafjord between 17 August and 2 September 1944, and the third of them, on 24 August, was the big one: thirty-three Barracudas, twenty-four Corsairs, ten Hellcats and ten Fireflies off three fleet carriers with the escort carriers in support. Two bombs hit. One was a 500-pounder that landed on the crown armour of a main turret and achieved nothing at all. The other was a 1,600lb armour-piercing bomb, and it did everything that was asked of it: it struck amidships just forward of the bridge, went down through eight decks including the main horizontal armour, and came to rest deep in the ship's vitals. Then it failed to detonate.

Had it gone off, Tirpitz would very probably have been finished then and there, and the Fleet Air Arm would have the credit. Instead the campaign wound up having established two things beyond argument: the Barracuda was too slow to reach the anchorage before the Germans could lay a smokescreen over it, and no aircraft the carriers could operate carried a bomb heavy enough to be relied on against that much armour. The job was accordingly handed to RAF Bomber Command, which sank her in November with 12,000lb Tallboys dropped from Lancasters. The earlier and considerably more successful carrier attack, Operation Tungsten in April 1944, is covered in HMS Pursuer (D73).

133 Sorties to the Kola Inlet

In August and September 1944, Striker escorted the Arctic convoys JW 59 and RA 59A to and from the Kola Inlet in northern Russia, her embarked aircraft flying 133 sorties during the passage, gruelling flying in some of the most hostile weather any Royal Navy aviator faced during the entire war.

Ferrying Aircraft Over Okinawa

Nominated for the British Pacific Fleet, Striker transited to Australia via Suez and went on to serve as a replenishment carrier attached to Task Force 112, usually working in company with the fellow escort carrier HMS Ruler, ferrying replacement aircraft out from forward bases at Leyte and Manus to the fleet carriers of Task Force 57 engaged in the brutal fighting around the Sakishima Gunto islands during the Okinawa campaign, unglamorous but absolutely vital logistics work that kept the front-line carriers flying.

The ferrying work in the Pacific sounds like a demotion and was in fact the hardest problem the Royal Navy had to solve in 1945. The fleet it sent east was designed for a European war, where a ship is never more than a few days from a dockyard, and it was being asked to operate several thousand miles from the nearest British base, alongside an American navy that had spent three years building the logistics to do exactly that. Everything had to be carried out to the fleet and handed over at sea or at a forward anchorage: fuel, ammunition, food, spare parts, replacement aircraft and replacement aircrew.

That organisation was called the Fleet Train, it was assembled largely out of merchant ships and borrowed hulls, and it was the difference between the British Pacific Fleet being a real formation and being a gesture. Striker's part in it was aircraft: flying replacements out from Leyte and Manus to the fleet carriers off the Sakishima islands, which were losing aeroplanes to kamikazes, to flak and to deck accidents faster than anybody had planned for. HMS Berry Head (A191) is the same idea taken to its logical end: a dockyard that sails.

On 6 May 1945, that role briefly became a much grimmer one, when wounded from HMS Formidable, badly hit by a kamikaze two days earlier, were transferred aboard Striker for passage back to Leyte, a stark reminder of what her own aircraft deliveries were ultimately keeping in the fight.

Returned to America and Scrapped

After further service supporting operations in Hong Kong and Singapore, Striker returned to British waters in November 1945 and was handed back to the United States Navy on 12 February 1946, struck from the Naval Register on 28 March 1946 and sold for scrapping to the Patapsco Steel Scrap Company that June, closing out a career that had taken her from the Atlantic convoy lanes to the Arctic and finally to the Pacific rather more quickly than her modest wartime fame might suggest.