Their role was unglamorous, but essential.
To the US Navy, although initially classified as auxiliary carriers, AVCs, they soon became escort carriers or CVEs, sometimes known to their crews as ‘Jeep carriers’ to the Royal Navy, they were always auxiliary carriers, nicknamed by the members of the wartime Royal Navy as ‘Woolworth carriers’ to the crews of the endangered merchantmen in convoys on the North Atlantic and to Arctic Russia, they were protection but to the more cynical, they were Combustible, Vulnerable, Expendable.
