She berthed alongside on the 24th after successfully ne-gotiating the narrow entrance to Esquimalt, a difficult harbour for such a large ship, made more so by the tor-pedo and anti-submarine defences.
The carrier was exer-cising in the Strait of Georgia the following day when at 1526, about two hours before high water, she took ground in a light silt whilst travelling at a fair speed. The grounding occurred so gradually that nothing untoward was noticed on the bridge until it was realized that the ship had stopped.
Luckily the weather was quiet with little sea or wind and thousands of tons of water and oil were pumped out during the next 48 hours to lighten Nabob. A number of naval vessels were soon on the scene, including another escort carrier, HMS Ranee, which with HMC Ships Armentieres and Haro tried un-successfully to tow off the stranded vessel.
Canadian and American salvage tugs arrived and, on the fifth attempt from the initial grounding, the ship was refloated on 28 January.
Nabob was dry docked at North Vancouver but no damage had been sustained and she was able to sail for active service with the Fleet on 8 February, 1944.
At San Francisco the Royal Navy’s 852 Squadron of Avengers was embarked and off San Diego, the next port of call, flying trials kept all hands busy. Exercises completed, Nabob made transit of the Panama Canal with a frigate
HMCS New Waterford, and a week later berthed at Nor-folk, Virginia. During the period in harbour the Com-manding Officer took the opportunity of visiting his ad-ministrative authority, the British Admiralty Mainte-nance Representative, in Washington and also of going to Ottawa to impress on Headquarters the urgency of making certain changes.
As a result of his efforts ap-proval was given for Canadian scale of victualling to be instituted in the ship and for RN personnel, other than Fleet Air Arm, to be paid at RCN rates .12 The proposal that Nabob should become one of HMC ships was also made at this time but not acted upon.
With a much more contented company on board Na-bob embarked passengers and 45 Mustang fighters, which were secured on the flight deck, at New York for transportation to the United Kingdom.
She was at sea again on 23 March, taking station in one of the columns of a transatlantic convoy (UT-10), whose 26 ships had a U.S. cruiser and a dozen destroyers as escort. After an uneventful passage Nabob called briefly in Liverpool to land her passengers and then made her way up to the Clyde, where all personnel and aircraft of the squadron left for the Royal Naval Air Station at Machrihanish.
The carrier returned to Liverpool for a further refit, dur-ing which she was fitted with a high frequency direction finder, but in June recommenced her work-up trials, 852 Squadron having rejoined.
The current training programme ended at the Tail-of-the-Bank, off Greenock, and Nabob, in company with a sister ship, HMS Trumpeter, left the Scottish anchorage again on 31 July. On passing the boom gate at Scapa Flow both ships joined the Home Fleet and were placed under the administrative orders of the Rear-Admiral Commanding First Cruiser Squadron.
A week later the experience gained in many exercises was put to the test under operational conditions.
Enemy shipping was getting considerable natural pro-tection by using the Norwegian “leads” or channels run-ning between the coast and outlying islands. It was therefore decided to mine these waters so that vessels on passage would have to come out into the open sea, where they could be attacked by land-based fighters from the United Kingdom. Preparations and exercises occupied Nabob, with Force 4,† until 9 August, when the ships under the orders of CS-1 flying his flag in In-defatigable sailed for the Norwegian coast
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Two Wildcats were put up by Nabob the following forenoon as air cover for the fleet and after lunch the 12 Avengers of 852, carrying a mine apiece, were cata-pulted or flown off. In the air the squadron took departure astern of Trumpeter’s 846 Squadron; with Seafires, Fireflies and Hellcats provided by Indefatigable as fighter protection, the minelayers shaped course in the dull, grey afternoon towards Lepsorev Channel and Haarhamsfjord. Landfall was made on Stornholm Light, where the squadrons dispersed and began their run-up in sub-flights of three.
The attack took the Germans by surprise and it was successfully carried out without loss, all mines being laid. The strike arrived back over the ship as one of the escorting destroyers was attacking an A/S contact dead ahead of Nabob. Rudder was put hard over in an emer-gency turn and the planes had to continue circling until the carrier could resume the landing-on course.
Once the aircraft had touched down they were fuelled, checked and re-armed; shortly afterwards the second strike of 12 Avengers was airborne and heading for the target area. This time the enemy was better prepared but the planes managed to sow their mines as ordered.
The naval force withdrew towards home in the evening having lost an Avenger from Trumpeter, a Firefly, and three Seafires. Thus ended Operation Offspring, the largest Home Fleet carrier minelaying sortie of the war. Whilst the Avengers had laid 47 mines the fighters had destroyed a number of Messerschmitt 110 planes on the ground, set barracks on fire at Gossen, and sunk the 90-ton German mine-sweeper R-89.
Operation Goodwood, Nabob’s next sortie with the Home Fleet, was the largest with Fleet Air Arm (FAA) participation ever planned. The object was to immobilize the German battleship Tirpitz, which lay in Kaa Fjord, Norway. This ship, by her mere presence, constituted a potential threat to the Atlantic and North Russian con-voy routes and forced the Allies to keep a heavy concen-tration of warships at Scapa Flow in case she put to sea.
Tirpitz had been the target for a number of attacks on different occasions, one particularly successful aerial raid having been Operation Tungsten, which was carried out by naval Barracuda aircraft with fighter cover the previous April.
During the forthcoming operation there were to be diversionary fighter attacks on Hammerfest and Banak air-field, the whole to be synchronized with the passage of the United Kingdom-North Russia con-voy, JW-59.13
Force 2 consisting of Nabob, Trumpeter and five frig-ates, HM Ships Bickerton, (Senior Officer), Aylmer, Bligh, Kempthorne and Keats of the Fifth Escort Squad-ron cleared the defences of Scapa Flow on 18 August. Force 1† was within visual signalling distance for the next few days and the ships reached the flying off posi-tion inside the Arctic Circle north of Tromsö on 20 Au-gust. Fourteen Avengers in Nabob were armed with mines in the afternoon but rough weather made it impos-sible to operate aircraft.
The Fleet steamed to the west-ward, the larger ships fuelling the escorts during daylight hours before they all returned to the attack-launching position on the 22nd. Preparations were once more put in hand for the mining sortie against Tirpitz but a signal was received from the Admiral saying that the Avenger squadrons would not take part as cloud ceiling was still too low.
This was a bitter blow particularly to 852 Squadron, which had worked very hard in getting ready for the attack. The bugle call for “Action Stations” was sounded aboard the ship at 1000 and later Nabob flew a protective patrol over the Fleet while two strikes from the large carriers heavily attacked Tirpitz.14 Withdrawal to the westward started again for Force 2, with HM Cruiser Kent in company, during the first dog-watch as Nabob was preparing to fuel some of the escorting frig-ates.
At 1716 there was a heavy explosion on the star-board side aft and Nabob took a 7° list, her draught at the stern increasing to 38 feet and finally to 42 feet. The large between-deck hatches not being watertight, flooding spread to the level of the galley deck, where, fortu-nately, several vents allowed air to escape and this pre-vented the hanger deck from bursting.
Water also ex-tended right to the engine-room bulkhead forward and to tanks in the very stern, the ship slowly coming on to an even keel because of the absence of fore-and-aft bulk-heads in this class of vessel. As the hands had been closed up at “Action Stations” for most of the day, “Up Spirits” had only been piped just before the ship was torpedoed. Members of the supply staff, messmen and others were gathered outside the spirit room and it was amongst them that most of the casualties occurred. The officer overseeing the rum issue had a lucky escape, be-ing carried up two decks by the flood of water after the explosion. Another fortunate man was a stoker, who was washed out of the shaft tunnel and landed unhurt on the quarter-deck. In the ship’s galley, meantime, cooks were desperately trying to avoid the scalding steam from frac-tured pipes which was rapidly filling the compartment
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