HMS Vindex (D15): Four U-Boats, the Arctic Convoys and the Pacific Bus Service
A Cargo Ship on the Tyne
HMS Vindex was laid down at Swan Hunter's yard at Wallsend on the Tyne on 2 July 1942 as a refrigerated cargo liner for the Port Line, meant to carry meat and fruit home from Australia and New Zealand. Before she was launched the Admiralty took her over.
The Battle of the Atlantic was still being lost in the gap in mid ocean where no aircraft from the shore could reach, and every hull that could carry a flight deck was wanted. On 20 October 1942 she was formally requisitioned for conversion to an escort carrier, and she was launched as HMS Vindex on 4 May 1943.
She was one of the three Nairana Class ships, with her sister Nairana at Clydebank and the slightly different Campania at Belfast. Unlike the American-built escort carriers, which had a light hangar and flight deck built on top of a merchant hull, the British ships had their hangar and flight deck worked into the structure of the ship.
They were slower than the American ships, at about 17 knots from two diesel engines, and had only one lift, but they were well built for the cold and the weather of the northern seas. Vindex carried about eighteen aircraft.
Her name, Latin for a champion or avenger, was first used for a seaplane carrier of the First World War, and her motto meant "By day and by night, by sea and sky".
The photograph at the top of this page was taken on 26 November 1943, with the ship alongside at the builders. She had been commissioned on 15 November under Captain Horace Bayliss, ran her trials in the North Sea, and was accepted into the Navy on 3 December.
On 15 December an Avenger made the first landing on her deck in the Clyde, and three days later the Swordfish and Sea Hurricanes of 825 Naval Air Squadron flew on board off the Cumbrae light. The squadron was the one that had lost all its aircraft attacking the German battlecruisers in the Channel Dash of February 1942, and it was to stay with Vindex for most of her war.
A Difficult Start
Her first weeks were not happy ones. Flag Officer Carrier Training visited her on 20 January 1944 and thought poorly of her, and two days later she dragged her anchors in Rothesay Bay and collided with the escort carrier Pursuer, which put her in dock for repairs until late February.
When flying began again, two aircraft crashed in a single day, and a few days later Sub Lieutenant Broadley was killed in a ditching. The cause of much of the trouble turned out to be water in the aviation petrol, which went on bringing down her aircraft for months.
In the meantime she served as a target for submarines exercising in the Clyde, and her aircraft practised against them.
Hunting With Walker
On 8 March 1944 she sailed from the Clyde for her first anti-submarine patrol west of Ireland, with the Canadian ships of the 6th Escort Group, and a few days later Captain Frederic Walker's 2nd Escort Group of sloops, led by Starling, joined her.
Rather than stay with one convoy, the carrier and the groups were sent to hunt U-boats in the waters the convoys had to cross, and Vindex flew her Swordfish by night as well as by day, refuelling the escorts from her own tanks. On 11 March one of her Swordfish was hit by flak from a surfaced U-boat, and its air gunner, Leading Airman C.
Stone, was fatally wounded; he was buried at sea two days later. On 13 March a U-boat fired at the carrier herself while she was refuelling a Canadian destroyer, and she avoided the torpedo by turning hard.
On 15 March Swordfish A, with Lieutenant G. Bennett, Sub Lieutenant P. S. Couch and Naval Airman J. J. Palmer on board, found a U-boat by radar and called up Walker's sloops, which hunted her down and sank her with depth charges.
She was U-653, lost with all her 51 men, and the three airmen were mentioned in despatches. The aircrew were sure they could have done more.
Of 127 depth charges the squadron dropped during the patrol, only two exploded, a fault later traced to wrongly assembled charges of a new design, and three more U-boats attacked by the Swordfish got away. The weather was cruel.
On 24 March a Swordfish crashed on landing at night with two depth charges still on its racks; the crew climbed out before the petrol caught fire, but the charges went off and blew a hole in the flight deck, and Mason's record says a sailor asleep in a compartment below was killed by a splinter. By 28 March, when she came back to the Clyde, four Swordfish had been written off and three aircrew had died.
The second patrol, from 24 April, was with the frigates of the 5th Escort Group. On 5 May she proved that she could land on her Swordfish while the frigate Aylmer was refuelling astern of her, so that flying no longer had to stop while the escorts took on oil. That day Sub Lieutenant A. E.
Martin of the New Zealand reserve baled out of his Sea Hurricane after an engine failure; he was picked up by the frigate Goodson but died of exposure. At five past six the next morning Sub Lieutenant F. O. B. Sheffield, in Swordfish V with Sub Lieutenant J. Vallely and Chief Petty Officer M.
Dale, straddled the conning tower of a U-boat with two depth charges west of Ireland, and the frigates Bickerton, Bligh and Aylmer came up and finished her. She was U-765, and this time eleven of her men survived. Mason's record names the boat as U-785, but U-765 is the one credited to Vindex.
On 11 May a Swordfish crashed on deck and went over the side; Sub Lieutenant McIlwraith was pulled out alive but died, and Sub Lieutenant Webb and Petty Officer Airman Mears were never found.
While she was in the Clyde that summer the cause of the petrol trouble was found at last, in the way the fuel system was pressurised, and it was put right. Her Swordfish were also replaced by the new Mark III, with a centimetric radar set under the fuselage and rockets to help it off the deck.
In July she searched for a U-boat that had attacked fishing trawlers west of Cape Wrath, and on 6 July a rocket fired by accident on the flight deck killed one of her ratings.
To North Russia
With the convoy went the old battleship Royal Sovereign and eight former American destroyers, all being handed over to the Soviet Navy. On 21 August the sloop Kite, one of Walker's old group, was torpedoed by U-344 and sank with almost all her men.
At half past eight the next morning Bennett and Couch, the same crew who had found U-653, caught U-344 north-west of Bear Island in Swordfish X and sank her with depth charges, with all hands. Her Sea Hurricanes joined in with rockets and cannon against the U-boats on the surface.
Between 20 and 24 August the two carriers flew 444 hours over the U-boat area and made fourteen attacks, and on one day 825 Squadron alone flew 127 hours in twenty four hours. That month Vindex also made the first landings with the Morrison blind approach system, an aid for bringing aircraft down in darkness and poor visibility.
On 24 August U-354 was sunk by the sloop Mermaid and the frigate Loch Dunvegan.
On the way home with RA 59A, on 2 September, a patrol of three Swordfish found U-394 on the surface south-east of Jan Mayen and attacked through her fire with rockets. Their depth charges again failed to explode, but they held the U-boat down until the destroyers Keppel and Whitehall and the sloops Mermaid and Peacock came up and sank her.
Neither convoy lost a ship. Back in the Clyde, on the night of 25 September, Vindex dragged her anchors once more and struck the liner Queen Mary, newly arrived from America with Winston Churchill, damaging her gun mountings and sponsons.
With 811 Squadron instead of 825 she took the admiral's flag north again in October for JW 61 and RA 61, with Nairana and Tracker. It was a hard voyage for the new squadron.
Just after midnight on 28 October a Swordfish crashed into the sea; Captain Bayliss wanted to lower a boat for the crew, but the admiral overruled him, and the body of Lieutenant Walsh was recovered while Sub Lieutenant Carr was never found.
On 3 November another Swordfish went over the side and its observer was lost, and on 8 November a heavy swell broke the lashings on two Wildcats, one of which went overboard.
Then 825 came back, and at the end of December she sailed as the only carrier for JW 63 and RA 63, again with Dalrymple-Hamilton's flag and with Diadem. Commander John Williams had taken over from Bayliss on 26 December.
Both convoys got through without loss to the enemy, but the homeward convoy of 33 ships ran into a gale that rose to hurricane force, and by dawn on 17 January 1945 only seven were in sight. On 18 January Vindex, Diadem and the escorts brought about twenty five of the merchant ships into Thorshavn in the Faroes.
Her last Russian convoys were JW 66 and RA 66 in April and May 1945, with Rear Admiral Cunninghame-Graham's flag and the escort carrier Premier. Her Swordfish laid sonobuoys across the approaches to the Kola Inlet, where a pack of U-boats was waiting, and the escorts sank U-307 and U-286 there on 29 April, though the frigate Goodall was torpedoed and lost.
On 3 May, days before the German surrender, her Wildcats damaged a Ju 88.
The Pacific Bus Service
After the war in Europe her ship's company was cut down, since she was no longer to fly operationally, and she was sent east as an aircraft transport for the British Pacific Fleet. She loaded Spitfires and Barracudas as deck cargo at Belfast, with Fireflies in her hangar and drafts of men for the ships in the Far East, and sailed from the Clyde on 1 July 1945, by way of Suez, Colombo and Trincomalee.
She reached Sydney on 13 August, two days before the Japanese surrender. From then on she was the fleet's carrier of men and stores, which earned her the nickname of the "Pacific Bus Service".
On 20 August she sailed for Hong Kong, arriving on 8 September. There she took on board some three hundred Australian prisoners of war, among them 126 survivors of the garrison captured on Ambon in 1942, and sixty two civilians from the internment camp at Stanley, and brought about 426 former prisoners home to Sydney.
A second voyage north took her to Hong Kong and to Wewak in New Guinea, from where she brought 367 Australian soldiers home in early December, and at Christmas she carried 512 servicemen and women to Hobart, arriving on Christmas Eve. Early in 1946 she made a third trip to Hong Kong and carried aircraft and vehicles to the occupation forces in Japan.
She left Sydney for home on 26 April 1946, by way of Singapore, Colombo, Durban and Simonstown, a voyage of more than four months.
According to Mason, American aircraft supplied under Lend-Lease were taken out from Ceylon and dropped into the Indian Ocean, since they could not be paid for or returned, and at Simonstown she took on gold bullion and the Greek Crown Jewels, welded into a magazine, for the passage to Britain.
Port Vindex
She was paid off into reserve, and on 2 October 1947 the Port Line bought her back. She was rebuilt by Swan Hunter, the yard that had begun her, with everything above the hangar deck cut away, and in 1949 she entered service as the refrigerated cargo ship Port Vindex, carrying meat and fruit between Britain, Australia and New Zealand as she had been meant to do all along.
She sailed for the company for twenty two years before being sold for scrap, and breaking up began at Kaohsiung in Taiwan on 23 August 1971. Her bell, and that of her sister Nairana, are kept at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton.
Vindex earned the battle honours Atlantic 1944 and Arctic 1944 to 1945. Her aircraft shared in the destruction of four U-boats, sinking one of them alone, and from her first patrol she worked her Swordfish by night as well as by day. The other ships of her class are in the Nairana Class escort carriers collection.
You Might Also Like
Prints featured in this article
Every print is made to order in the UK, with free UK delivery.
Lee writes the ship histories and fleet features for Hampshire Prints. He served in the Royal Navy, and some of the modern fleet photographs on this site are his own, taken from the Portsmouth shoreline.
More about Lee
Leave a comment
Do you or your family have a connection to her? Share your memories below; we read every one.