Steel Artisan

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Steel Artisan
HMS Attacker
Technical data (overview)
Other names: USS Barnes , HMS Attacker , Castelforte , Castel Forte , Fairsky , Philippine Tourist II
Ship type: Transport ship, aircraft carrier escort ship, tanker, cruise ship, restaurant ship
Tonnage: 7,800 ts
Drive: Steam turbine
Length: 149.8 m
Width (above): 32.0 m
Draft: 7.9 m
Builder: Western Pipe & Steel Company
Keel laying: April 17, 1941
Launch: September 27, 1941

The Steel Artisan was a ship that for 39 years for different owners, rebuilt several times and sailed the oceans under different names. It is considered to be a prime example of unusual ship histories.

Construction process

On April 17, 1941, a C3 ship with the Hull number 171 was laid down in the US shipyard Western Pipe & Steel Company in San Francisco, California . It was ordered by the Isthiam Steam Ship Company .

The ship was taken over by the United States Navy during the construction phase . After being launched and named Steel Artisan on September 27, 1941, it was immediately converted into an "escort aircraft carrier" . The ship had a size of 7,800 tons (ts) , was 465 feet, or around 150 m long, and ran 18  knots . It was equipped with a complete flight deck, had a single hydraulic catapult and two lifts to transport the aircraft between the flight deck and the hangar below, which could accommodate 20 aircraft. The processes of take-off and landing with retaining and catch hooks worked like on the large girders. The crew consisted of 646 people. The ship was named USS Barnes , US Navy code: AVG-7 , this coding was changed to ACV-7 on August 20, 1942 and shortly afterwards to CVE-7. The ship was put into service on September 30, 1942.

Based on the Lend-Lease Act passed by the United States Congress on February 18, 1941 , the ship was handed over to the Royal Navy on the day of commissioning . There it was named HMS Attacker with the identifier D02 .

Used in World War II under the name HMS Attacker

While still in San Francisco, the Attacker took a squadron of Swordfish torpedo bombers on board and on December 12, 1942, under the command of Captain William P. Shirley-Rollison, drove through the Panama Canal to the Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia , where it arrived on New Years Day 1942 and hers Put out aircraft cargo. She was then moved to the Quonset Point Naval Base in Rhode Island , where she stayed for the next two months. On March 2, 1943, she transported the Swordfish squadrons 838 and 840 to Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles . From there she escorted an eastbound tanker convoy to the Firth of Clyde Bay off Scotland . After this voyage, the Attacker in Liverpool was rebuilt to Royal Navy standards. These changes included an extension of the flight deck, the installation of larger ballast tanks and a modification of the fuel supply system for the aircraft. In addition, the ice cream machine was dismantled as an unacceptable luxury for soldiers in the United Kingdom, as were the high-performance washing machines in the laundry.

"Modernized" in this way, the Attacker was assigned to the Mediterranean fleet on August 3, 1943 and initially relocated to Gibraltar; shortly afterwards followed together with some sister ships the briefing in the formation of the Force V under Rear Admiral Sir Philip Vian . This association had played a key role in the liberation of Sicily and was now involved in the preparation of Operation Avalanche , which led to the Allies landing in the Gulf of Salerno on September 9, 1943 . For this purpose, the Attacker had taken Seafire Squadron 879 on board, which has now remained here for a long time. However, landing on the small flight deck was so difficult that only 26 of a total of 115 Seafires deployed remained undamaged during Operation Avalanche .

After Operation Avalanche , the Attacker returned to Great Britain from Salerno and was converted from an escort carrier into an attack carrier in Rosyth . On May 12, 1944, Harold B. Farncomb took command and rejoined the Mediterranean fleet. The base was initially Gibraltar.

June 4, 1944 could already have brought the end of the ship: at dawn the alarm red was suddenly triggered, but before the defenses could form, a German torpedo bomber had already dropped its deadly load. An error in the positioning caused the torpedo to just pass the attacker and crash into the quay wall of Gibraltar. The attacker got away with minor injuries.

On August 15, 1944, Operation Dragoon began to land Allied troops in southern France. A new front was opened between Cannes and Toulon with over 2,000 ship units and around 5,000 aircraft, including the Attacker as the lead ship of a group of aircraft carriers. The newly replenished Seafire squadron 879 was also back on board.

In September 1944, the Attacker was deployed in the Aegean Sea, where Captain Farncomb, the senior officer, commanded the naval operation in the Eastern Mediterranean from October 1944. From the Attacker from the area were around the Gulf of Thessaloniki and the island of Kos bombing and attacks against Rhodes and Crete flown. The attacker later secured the air support for the liberation of Athens by Commonwealth troops.

After these operations, an overhaul of the ship was absolutely necessary. The team was given a breather in the Italian resort of Bari and the attackers were brought to the Taranto naval shipyard for four months .

After this overhaul, she sailed to Alexandria in April 1945, now under her new captain George F. Renwick, where she again took her Seafire squadron 879 on board and joined the British East India Fleet, initially in Colombo and later in Trincomalee was stationed in Sri Lanka . During the next few months, the ship did not take part in any active combat operations, as it was used in the aircraft ferry service to India and South Africa.

The Attacker left the port of Trincomalee on August 17, 1945 in the direction of Penang to join the task force of British Task Group B , which was led by the battleship HMS Nelson under Vice-Admiral Sir Frederic Wake-Walker .

On September 2, 1945, Admiral Wake-Walker accepted the surrender of the rest of the Japanese forces aboard the Nelson in the port of Penang . On the same day, the attacker left Penang to accompany a convoy of troop ships through the Strait from Malacca to Singapore . This sea route was still heavily mined, the seafires of the attackers were able to locate these mines and render them harmless. On September 7, 1945, the ship entered the port of Singapore with a festive ceremony as the first British main ship after the Japanese surrender.

In the following week, the attacker received the order to take the British soldiers recently liberated from the Japanese prison camps on board and bring them back to Great Britain. The 8,100-mile journey home began on September 14, 1945. On November 11, 1945, the ship reached the port in the Firth of Clyde off Scotland. Two days later, Captain George F. Renwick also resigned from command.

The attackers had to carry out one last “act of war” : bring American soldiers from Europe to the USA. She went to Southampton , took the crews on board and cast off on December 14th. Exactly on Christmas Eve 1945 she arrived in Norfolk, Virginia.

On January 5, 1946, the ship was returned to the US Navy in the Norfolk Navy Yard and on February 26 of the same year the Attacker was removed from the US Navy list of ships.

Demilitarization

Due to the decommissioning of numerous ships from the US Navy, a large amount of ship tonnage came onto the free market, including the Attacker on October 28, 1946 , which was now entered in the shipping register under the name Castelforte . In 1947, the New York company National Bulk Carriers Inc. acquired the ship and removed the reinforcement and flight deck, and the plan was to convert it to a tanker. This work was stopped before it was completed because Alexandre Vlasov bought the ship for his company Navcot Corporation in 1950 .

Used as a passenger ship under the name Fairsky

The ship was idle for the next two years. Alexandre Vlasov registered it with his company Sitmar Lines in 1952 and sent it to the Newport News shipyard to have it converted into a reefer ship. Vlasov wanted to participate in the at that time attractive business of meat transport from South America to Europe, but before the ship was finished, this boom was over and so this work was also stopped, again before it was completed. In 1953 it was renamed Castel Forte , but the ship remained unused until Vlasov decided in 1957 to have it converted into a passenger ship at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Ney York. In December 1957, the necessary work on the hull was completed and the ship went to Genoa, where the interior work was carried out. 192 two-bed, 5 three-bed, 261 four-bed and 3 six-bed cabins were set up. Although only seven cabins, located on the sundeck, had their own toilet and shower, the entire facility was unprecedentedly comfortable for the time, which established the later good reputation of all Sitmar ships. A swimming pool was available on the boat deck, there were three restaurants and all the interiors were air-conditioned. Earlier this year, 1958, the ship was in the name Fairsky baptized and the shipping register of Liberia for the Fairline Shipping Corporation , a subsidiary of Sitmar , registered.

On June 26, 1958, the Fairsky left the port of Southampton with 1430 passengers and an Italian crew on her first voyage, initially destination Fremantle , which she reached on July 21. She also anchored in Melbourne on July 27 , in Sydney on July 29 and in Brisbane on August 1 . Until 1970, the Fairsky was now mainly in the Australian liner service, the stations of the typical travel route were Southampton, Tenerife , Cape Town , Fremantle, Adelaide , Melbourne, Sydney; the return trip was via Brisbane, Wellington , Papeete , Balboa , Cristobal, Curaçao , Lisbon to Southampton.

In December 1961 the ship first entered Auckland on the North Island of New Zealand , in September 1964 it made its first voyage to Tonga and Fiji , Singapore and Colombo were also called. In November 1969, there was serious engine failure between Southampton and Cape Town, the repair took several days and Fremantle was reached 12 days late.

In 1970 Sitmar lost the contracts with the Australian immigration authorities, after which the Fairsky was initially still active in regular travel between Great Britain and Australia, but from February 1972 she remained moored in Southampton. Boris Vlasov has now made the decision to completely convert the company's strategy to the cruise business and to enter the strongly competitive North American market. Together with 3 other ships, the Fairsky now formed the Sitmar cruise fleet and was back in service since November 8, 1973. On June 2, 1974, she left the port of Southampton for the last time, and since then she has been in constant cruise service with headquarters in Sydney until 1977, with some operations also from Darwin .

On June 12, 1977, the Fairsky again left the port of Darwin for Bali . On June 17th the equator was crossed and Jakarta was called. When the ship left Jakarta on June 20, a sampan suddenly appeared in front of its bow. In an attempt to avoid a collision with the houseboat, the Fairsky had to leave the official fairway and rammed the underwater wreck of the Indonesian ship Klinei , the Fairsky was badly damaged below the waterline. In order to avoid the total loss of the ship, the captain maneuvered it to a nearby sandbank and arranged for a controlled flood and set aground. The passengers were taken to Jakarta by lifeboats and flown back to Darwin on June 27th. The hole in the ship's wall could be sealed with concrete, the Faisky was pumped dry and on July 9th she reached the dry dock of Singapore.

Used as a restaurant ship under the name Philippine Tourist II

In the meantime, a fleet renewal had become absolutely necessary for the Sitmar Line. Boris Valsov therefore decided not to repair the Fairsky and sold the ship to the Fuji Warden Company in Hong Kong, where the ship arrived under its own power in December 1977 and was now to be scrapped. But the Peninsular Tourist Shipping Company showed interest in the "old steamer" and bought it to replace their floating hotel and casino called Philippine Tourist . In 1979 the ship was rebuilt by the Bataan Shipyard and Engineering Company in Manila and renamed again, this time Philippine Tourist II . In November of the same year, a fire broke out on board and completely destroyed the ship. It was cannibalized on the south quay of the port of Manila and this time it was once again transferred to the Fuji Warden Company in Hong Kong for final scrapping .

On May 24, 1980, the last remaining Lend-lease escort-aircraft-carrier began to be cut up.

literature

  • Arnold Kludas: The world's great passenger ships. A documentation. Volume V: 1950–1974 , Stalling Verlag; Oldenburg, Hamburg 1974, ISBN 3-7979-1844-5 , p. 76.
  • Peter Plowman: Australian Migrant Ships 1946–1977 . Gazelle Book Services, 2006, ISBN 1-877058-40-8 .
  • Peter Plowman: The SITMAR LINERS Past and Present , Rosenberg 2004, ISBN 978-1-877058-25-7 .
  • Maurizio Eliseo: Sitmar Liners and V Ships . Carmania Press, ISBN 0-9534291-0-5 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ After the end of the war, the Isthiam Steam Ship Company acquired a total of 24 C3 ships from the War Shipping Administration on November 26, 1946 for $ 1,280,730 each; the first of these was again named Steel Artisan . It was scrapped on July 25, 1973 in Kaohsiung , Taiwan .
  2. ↑ Although the crew was only about a third as large as on a standard aircraft carrier, the US Navy set up not only the fair but also permanently open canteens and snack bars for the sale of ice cream and other consumables as well as a high-performance laundry on these ships.
  3. ↑ This Enabling Act, introduced by the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the initiative of Winston Churchill , undermined the strict desire for peace of the American people up until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and allowed the President to sell, rent or lease any military equipment to such governments, whose existence seemed necessary for the defense of the United States. This enabled the American economy to benefit from the arms business even before the country entered the war.
  4. ↑ The Seafire was the naval version of the Spitfire developed for aircraft carriers , a single-seat fighter-bomber built by Vickers that had folding wings as early as 1943
  5. ↑ The invasion plan of Operation Avalanche originally envisaged that the airfield of Montecorvino near Salernos would be captured within 24 hours and that the land-based troops could be supplied by the Attacker and four other aircraft carriers by then . But this plan failed because Montecorvino was taken much later. After four days, Admiral Vian had to withdraw the entire Force V to Palermo because the fuel reserves for the ships and planes were exhausted.
  6. ↑ Harold B. Farncomb was an Australian captain who later became one of the most decorated admirals in the British Crown
  7. ↑ Although the Japanese Emperor Hirohito had declared Japan's full surrender on August 14, 1945, numerous Japanese troops were still scattered, especially in the Malay archipelago, who continued to carry out acts of war.
  8. ↑ For this purpose, the attackers' crew had made the bunks available to their freed comrades, they slept themselves, depending on the weather, either on the flight deck or in the hangar.
  9. ↑ Alexandre Vlasov was the founder of the shipping company Sitmar Lines , which at the end of the 1940s had several ships in the charter of the United Nations International Refugee Organization (IRO) as emigrant ships and which by 1987 became one of the world's leading companies in the passenger and cruise shipping developed.
  10. ↑ In the second half of the 1950s, a wave of emigrants to Australia began, which particularly affected Italy and Greece, but also in Great Britain the demand for ship passages rose by leaps and bounds. Vlasov got a contract with the International Commission for European Emigration (ICEM) in Vienna, initially for four years, later extended by the Australian government until 1970. It had meanwhile become customary for emigrants no longer to use special emigration ships, but in the tourist class to carry ships in regular service.
  11. ↑ Later two more Sitmar ships were to bear this name: 1980 the former Portuguese ship Principe Perfeito , built in 1960 by Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson Limited in Newcastle, and the 1984 by Chantiers de Nord et de la Mediterranee of La Seyne-Sur Mer Built in France and with 46,000 tons, it was once the largest passenger ship in the world, which is still under the name Sky Wonder for Pullmantur Cruises.
  12. ↑ Boris, Alexander Vlasov's son, had now taken over the management of Sitmar
  13. ↑ After the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company , also known as "P&O" for short, as the world's oldest and largest shipping company, founded the P&O Princess Cruise with the Princess Cruise Line in 1965 and their ship Pacific Princess became the star of the TV series THE LOVE BOAT made, the global cruise business expanded almost explosively.
  14. ↑ In addition to the Fairsky, these included the two ships Charinthia and Sylvania , bought by Cunard Line in 1968 , now converted and christened with the names Fairsea and Fairwind, as well as the former troop transporter Oxfordshire , acquired by Bibby Line in 1964 and later renamed Farstar .
  15. ↑ Pamela Joyce Hansen spent her honeymoon on this trip, her report on the accident is available on the Internet
  16. ↑ This was the former Braemar , built in 1953 by JI Thornycroft & Co. Ltd. in Woolston, England and acquired in 1975 by the Norwegian shipowner Fred Olsen