Here we see this amazing shot, some 80 years ago this week, of the Ruler (Bogue) class Royal Navy escort carrier HMS Nabob (D 77) as she doggedly returns to base, very well trimmed aft, her stern low down in the water, after being hit by a German torpedo on 22 August 1944.
She lost 21 of her crew but the survivors couldn’t quit her.
Hudson, F A (Lt) Royal Navy official photographer Imperial War Museums (collection no. 4700-01) A 25368.
Constructed in Seattle under the name USS Edisto (ACV/CVE-41), Nabob instead entered British service on 7 September 1943, with over two-thirds of her crew being Canadian.
Less than a year later and half a world away, Nabob, loaded with Wildcat Mk V fighters and Avenger Mk.IIs from 852 and 856 Naval Air Squadrons, were in the main force attacking KMS Tirpitz in that German battlewagon’s Norwegian stronghold during Operation Goodwood.
It was then, after the first strike was recovered, that a Type VIIC U-boat on its 8th patrol, U-354 (Oblt. Hans-Jürgen Sthamer), encountered our little “jeep” carrier and pumped a spread of FAT torpedoes into her just after 01.14 hours on 22 August 1944. One hit, blowing a 32-foot hole below her waterline aft of the engine room and causing extensive flooding.
Sthamer tried to finish off the wounded carrier with a Gnat torpedo but it was instead soaked up by the Buckley-class destroyer escort HMS Bickerton (K 466), sending the greyhound to the bottom of the Barents Sea with 38 dead.
The British sloop HMS Mermaid and the frigate HMS Loch Dunvegan would in turn send U-354 and all hands to the cold embrace of the sea floor courtesy of dozens of depth charges.
Nabob, her engine room shored up against the open ocean, managed to limp to Scapa Flow some 1,070 miles at a steady ten-knot clip. She somehow even managed to get a few of her Avengers airborne when a sonar contact suggested another U-boat blocking her path.
As her galley and mess facilities were out of service, the skeleton crew that shepherded their hogging carrier back to Scotland had to get by on “short rations and rum for the five days it took to get the ship home.”
It was a marvel of damage control and was cited as an example to emulate in RN publications for years.
Declared a constructive loss as repair to her warped shaft could not realistically be accomplished she was returned to U.S. Navy custody in March 1945.
Sold for scrap the next year to a breaker’s yard in Holland, she was in fact found still serviceable and, converted to mercantile service, steamed for another 30 years.
Never doubt a Jeep carrier.
Often regarded by some as Canada’s first aircraft carrier, her ship’s bell was retained by the RCN and is in the Naval Museum of Halifax, CFB Halifax. Although her crew cut off her guns and jettisoned several of her planes to cut weight and correct trim lest water poured into her hangar deck from the stern, they couldn’t bring themselves to 86 the bell.
