HMS Tracker (D24): Sinking a U-Boat East of Bear Island

Built as a Merchant Ship, Converted for War

HMS Tracker began life as a Maritime Commission contract ship laid down at Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding in Tacoma, Washington, originally intended as the merchant vessel Mormacmail before being purchased by the United States Navy and converted into an escort carrier at Willamette Iron and Steel in Portland, Oregon.

Launched on 7 March 1942 and commissioned on 31 January 1943, she was transferred to the Royal Navy and renamed Tracker under the Lend-Lease Agreement.

Escorting the Arctic Convoys

Through 1943 and 1944, Tracker served as an escort carrier for North Atlantic and Arctic convoys, initially operating Swordfish torpedo bombers and Seafire fighters from 816 Naval Air Squadron, before switching to Grumman Avengers and Wildcats of 846 Naval Air Squadron in January 1944, keeping pace with the rapidly evolving technology of naval aviation.

What that switch of aircraft meant is worth spelling out, because flying from an escort carrier in the Arctic is close to the hardest thing anybody was asked to do at sea. The deck is four hundred and forty feet long and moving in three dimensions; there is no angled deck, no mirror sight and frequently no horizon; the aircraft ice up; and a ditching in water at that latitude gives a man perhaps three minutes. The Swordfish she started with was a fabric-covered biplane designed in 1933, chosen for the job precisely because it could get airborne off a short pitching deck in a gale when nothing faster could. Trading it for Avengers in January 1944 doubled the range and the load and made every landing harder.

Sinking U-288

In April 1944, Tracker's aircraft, working alongside those from HMS Activity, were responsible for sinking the German submarine U-288 east of Bear Island during the brutal Arctic convoy JW 58, a particularly significant success in some of the most physically demanding waters any Royal Navy escort carrier operated in during the entire war.

The Convoy That Went Right

JW 58 is not simply another Arctic convoy and it deserves its numbers. Forty-seven merchant ships left Loch Ewe on 27 March 1944, three more joined from Iceland, and the escort was enormous: two escort carriers, Tracker and Activity, a cruiser, a large number of destroyers and two support groups, under an admiral who had been given the resources to fight rather than merely to protect. The Germans put a wolf pack and a stream of shadowing aircraft against it.

Not one merchant ship was lost. Four U-boats were destroyed and six German aircraft were shot down, most of them by fighters from the two carriers catching the shadowers that had spent two years reporting convoy positions with impunity. It is the most successful Arctic convoy of the war and it marks the point at which the route changed character: from 1944 the Germans were no longer able to get at these convoys in any serious way, and the argument that had cost so many ships in 1942 and 1943 was effectively settled by the arrival of air cover that stayed with the convoy all the way through.

There was an oddity in the cargo too. Sailing with JW 58 was the American light cruiser Milwaukee, on her way to be handed over to the Soviet navy: part of a three-cornered arrangement under which the surrendered Italian fleet was divided among the Allies, and the Soviet share was made up with British and American ships instead because nobody wanted to sail Italian warships into the Arctic. She became the Murmansk. HMS Activity (D94), whose aircraft shared the kill on U-288 with Tracker's, has her own account of the same passage.

A Collision During D-Day

On 10 June 1944, during operations supporting the Normandy landings, Tracker collided with the Canadian frigate HMCS Teme, sustaining bow damage that required repairs at Liverpool lasting until that September, an unfortunate accident amid the general chaos and intensity of the D-Day period.

HMCS Teme is worth following, because she had a worse war than the collision suggests. A River-class frigate of the Royal Canadian Navy, she was repaired after running into Tracker, went back to work in the Channel, and on 29 March 1945, five weeks before the end of the war in Europe, was torpedoed by U-315 off Falmouth. The explosion took sixty feet off her stern. She was towed in, declared a constructive total loss and scrapped, having been hit twice in nine months by two entirely different things, one of them friendly. The escort carriers themselves were more fragile than they looked, and what that cost is set out in HMS Striker (D12).

Pacific Ferry Duty, and a Long Retirement

Tracker went on to ferry aircraft and personnel in the Pacific theatre before being returned to the United States Navy in November 1945. Sold the following year, she became the Argentine merchant ship Corrientes, continuing a long working life far from her original wartime purpose before finally being scrapped in 1964.