As part of NORAD’s recently completed Operation Noble Defender, Canadian CF-18s and USAF F-16s saw an expeditionary deployment from their bases in Quebec and Alaska across the Artic Circle to Pituffik Space Base (ex-Thule AB) in Greenland to operate from there for two weeks.
They were supported by assorted KC-135s, E-3s, C-150s and CH-149s.
Airmen that supported the 18th Fighter Interceptor Squadron from Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, for Operation NOBLE DEFENDER, pose for a group photo at Pittufik Space Base, Greenland, Feb. 5, 2025. Operation NOBLE DEFENDER is an air defense operation under the direction of the North American Aerospace Defense Command designed to demonstrate the command’s ability to defend the approaches of North America from current and future threats while integrating across domains with partners and allies. NORAD routinely conducts sustained, dispersed operations in defense of North America through one or all three NORAD regions, including Alaska, Canada, and the continental U.S. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Christopher Ruano)
F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft assigned to the 18th Fighter Interceptor Squadron from Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, are placed on the flightline during Operation NOBLE DEFENDER at Pittufik Space Base, Greenland, Jan. 29, 2025. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Christopher Ruano)
A CF-18 Hornet from 425 Tactical Fighter Squadron out of 3 Wing Bagotville, Quebec, and a CC-150 Polaris from 437 (T) Sqn out of 8 Wing Trenton, Ontario, deployed in support of the Canadian NORAD Region (CANR) carry out air-to-air refueling during Operation NOBLE DEFENDER on February 3rd, 2025. (Capt Rachel Brosseau)
CH-149 Cormorant from 413 Transport and Rescue Squadron out of 14 Wing Greenwood, Nova Scotia, deployed to Pituffik, Greenland, in support of the Canadian NORAD Region (CANR), ready to respond to potential distress calls from NORAD assets during Operation NOBLE DEFENDER. (Capt Andrew Birchall)
During the operation, local temperatures were regularly below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, with the coldest days reaching minus 29 degrees F (-34 C) and a wind chill of minus 56 degrees F (-49 C). Maintenance and Civil Engineering airmen operated tirelessly in these conditions to ensure aircrews were able to conduct flying missions.
Official wartime caption: “Japanese balloon, Fu-Go [Fugu, 河豚; 鰒; フグ]. A completed Japanese balloon is inflated for laboratory tests at a California base. It was recovered at Alturas, California, January 10, 1945. Ineffective as it is, however, the Japanese balloon is an ingenious device. The balloon itself at a maximum altitude is a true sphere, 100 feet in circumference. It is made of five layers of mulberry paper, each about as thick as cigarette paper, but strong and water-repellant when cemented together. It is filled with hydrogen. Suspended like a chandelier below the envelope by 19 shroud lines, each 45 feet long, is a device for automatic control of altitude. The bomb load is attached to the ‘chandelier’ with an automatic release mechanism. The balloon is further equipped with automatic demolition blocks which are supposed to destroy it in the air. On many of the balloons recovered the self-destroying device failed to function.”
Print received August 1945 from Publications Sec., AC/AS, Intelligence. Used in the August 1945 issue of “Impact.” Copied August 27, 1945. U.S. Army Air Corps (Air Force) photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. 342-FH-3B23422
It is estimated that an amazing 9,300 Fu-Go balloons were launched from Japan against the U.S. and Canada from Coastal Honshu Island between November 1944 and April 1945.
While only 285 were documented as reaching North America, as many as 1,000 may have made it this far, meaning their wreckage is likely sprinkled over remote forests and lakes, waiting.
Surely this is something China would never consider doing again, right?
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Warship Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025: Frozen Comanche
USCG image.
Above we see the 165-foot (A) Algonquin-class U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Comanche (WPG 76) with her warpaint on, circa 1942, while part of the oft-forgotten Greenland Patrol during WWII. With Greenland and its defense in the news right now, it is worth revisiting the ship that started the whole discussion, so to speak.
The Algonquins
In 1934, the Coast Guard moved to construct a half dozen new ice-strengthened patrol gunboats (by Navy standards). These were based on the successful circa 1915 165-foot ice-breaking cutter Ossipee (WPG 50) but constructed with a reinforced belt at the waterline and a cutaway forefoot, features that, combined with their geared turbine drives– the first for the USCG– were thought capable of breaking up to two feet of sea ice.
USCGC Ossipee, view taken circa 1916, shortly after her completion. NH 89751
Coast Guard 165-foot cutter Ossipee, Boston Navy Yard, April 1932. Note her 3-inch guns forward. Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection
The plating doubled around the bow, the cutaway forefoot, short length, and medium draft made these cutters good ice boats. They had a heavy steel belt around the vessel at the waterline and relatively short bilge keels, so in a seaway they had a tendency to roll considerably.
Built for a total of just under $3 million in Public Works Administration construction allotments, three of these new cutters– Algonquin (WPG-75), Comanche, and Mohawk (WPG-78) — were awarded on 14 October 1934 with Pusey & Jones Company of Wilmington, Delaware while a week later on 23 October a second trio– USCGC Escanaba (WPG-77), Onondaga (WPG-79) and Tahoma (WPG-80)-– were contracted with Defoe on the Great Lakes at Bay City, Michigan.
Using a pair of side-by-side Foster-Wheeler high-pressure boilers to feed a centerline 1,500shp Westinghouse double-reduction geared turbine mated to a single screw, the Algonquins could make a paint-peeling 12.8 knots at full RPMs or a more economical 9.4 knots, with the latter allowing a 5,000nm range– long enough legs to wallow across the Atlantic if need be or pull far-off Bering Sea and International Ice Patrols.
Algonquin on trials in the Delaware River, 1934
A peacetime crew of six officers and 56 men could handle the cutter and a main battery of two 3″/50 guns, curiously arranged abreast of each other on the foc’sle, backed up by a pair of two quaint old 6-pounders off the bridge wings, provided a top-side armament. Typical of Coast Guard cutters for the time, the 3-inchers were almost always well greased up and covered, only fired on annual gunnery exercises, while the 6-pounders were used more liberally for law enforcement, saluting, line-throwing, and signaling. Typical peacetime allowances per cutter included 55 service rounds and 110 “Navy” blanks per 6-pounder and 60 service rounds per each 3-incher.
There were also enough small arms to send a light platoon-sized (30-man) landing force ashore, arranged in a six-man HQ team, two eight-man rifle squads, and an eight-man machine gun detachment. The 1938 small arms allowance for cutters of this size was for 40 M1903 Springfield rifles with bayonets and slings, 15 M1911 pistols with two magazines apiece, two M1917 Lewis guns, and at least one Thompson sub gun, all fed by 2,400 rounds of .30 caliber ball for the Lewis guns and rifles and a whopping 6,000 of .45 ACP for the pistols and Tommy guns. A full 38 sets of “landing force gear” including a FAK, mess kit, canteen, web belt with pouches, haversack, and pack carrier was stored for such use.
Coast Guard cutter crew made up in landing force kit. Note the M1903 Springfield rifles. USCG Historian’s Office, CG-09231220211-G-G0000-025
These cutters also had magazines for legacy 238-pound guncotton or smaller new 150-pound TNT electrically detonated “wrecking mines” used in destroying derelicts– or in reducing hazardous icebergs and blasting paths in the ice sheet.
Coast Guard destroying a derelict with TNT mines. March 1927. An explosion on the water throws lumber through the air. In the foreground is the railing of a Coast Guard ship with the American flag flying. The caption reads, “Destroying a derelict with TNT mines. The Coast Guard destroys or removes from the path of navigation hundreds of such derelicts each year.” NARA 26-G-03-21-27(1)
As detailed by a 1935 Yachtsman article, these cutters typically carried a 36-foot motor launch with a 20hp engine, two 26-foot Monomoy type surf boats, and a 19-foot surf boat, the latter three vessels oar-powered.
Electrified, these cutters had an extensive radio suite (three transmitters and four receivers) with the vessel’s radio call letters prominently displayed for overhead aircraft, interior and topside lighting, refrigerators and reefers sufficient for length patrols, and a pair of remote-controlled 12-inch incandescent searchlights on the flying bridge overhead.
Meet Comanche
Our cutter is the second to carry the name of the fierce Native American tribe in the USCG.
The first, a 170-foot vessel which was the service’s first attempt at a “modern” steam cutter in 1897, originally commissioned as the USRC Windom and, after serving during the Spanish-American War and the Great War, policed against rumrunners in the Gulf of Mexico during Prohibition before she was disposed of in 1930.
The original USCGC Comanche, formerly USRC Windom, seen in 1920. CG Historian’s Photo.
Our Comanche, laid down at Pusey & Jones in late 1933, was launched in September 1934 and commissioned in December.
Comanche seen on 26 November 1934, post-delivery but before commissioning in a rare period color photo. Note she does not have her Navy-owned main and secondary batteries fitted yet but does have her gleaming white hull, buff stack and masts, and black cap.
The Coast Guard has never been overstaffed and the plankowners of her first crew were transferred hot from the old cutter Gresham, which was being decommissioned for the first time and was co-located at Wilmington. As Gresham still had stores aboard while Comanche did not, her crew had to walk back to their old cutter for meals for the first several days.
Her 1934 deck log for commissioning, detailing her initial five officers and four men transferred from the USCG inspector office at the builder’s yard while 43 other men came from Gresham:
One of her enlisted inherited from Gresham, 44-year-old S1c Maurice D. Jester, listed above, had volunteered for the service in 1917 as a surfman. A chief boatswain mate by 1941, Jester was given a temporary lieutenant’s commission post-Pearl Harbor and, in command of the 165-foot USCGC Icarus (WPC-110), would sink one of the first U-boats (U-352) by an American ship in WWII, earning a Navy Cross in the process.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Comanche was stationed at Stapleton, New York on Staten Island, and carried out the typical varied missions of the Coast Guard, often deploying to Florida for patrols and naval training exercises in the summer.
CGC Comanche in service, 1930s, note she has her armament installed
A page covering a typical day while on one such stint deployed to the Sunshine State:
Having an ice-cruncher bow, she also pulled down the additional task of light ice-breaking on the Hudson River in winter.
Comanche Hudson River ice patrol, Saugerties, 1938
Comanche Hudson River Ice Patrol, 1939
March 1936. “This image depicts the Coast Guard cutter Comanche, which found the pictured vessels stuck fast in the ice off Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and broke the ice to free them.” NARA 26-G-04-27-36(8)
War! (In Denmark)
Despite being neutral, Denmark was invaded by Germany on 9 April 1940.
German Linienschiff Schleswig-Holstein off Denmark on April 9, 1940, sending landing forces ashore
This led to a tense occupation that, for the first three years or so, still “allowed” the Danes to keep their military, so long as it remained in skeletal format hiding in its garrisons and ports.
The majority of the ships of the Royal Danish Navy would be immolated or drowned by their faithful crews in August 1943 when the Germans moved to capture them once the veil of civility was removed from the occupation. Despite being almost totally disarmed and de-fueled to comply with German armistice requirements, a handful of vessels managed to make it across the Oresund to neutral Sweden or were lost trying.
A few vessels outside of metropolitan Denmark- such as the two armed Icelandic Coast Guard cutters Aegir and Odinn and two smaller vessels in Greenland waters which we will get to- escaped German custody or destruction to prevent such custody. A beautiful 212-foot three-masted schoolship, the Danmark, filled with Danish merchant marine and naval cadets, was on an extended visit to America in 1940 and would end up clocking in after Pearl Harbor, crew included, to train over 5,000 USCG and USMM officer cadets during the war as USCGC Danmark (WIX-283).
Meanwhile, in giant colonial Greenland, the world’s largest island, the entire armed Danish military presence in April 1940 amounted to the Royal Danish Navy inspektionsskip Maagen and opmålingsskib (survey ship) Ternen. Small shallow draft sailing cutters with auxiliary diesels had an 11-member crew, a single ancient low-angle 3-pounder (37mm) M/84 cannon, and some small arms. Four larger corvette/frigate-sized inspection ships existed– Besytteren, Islands Falk, Hvidbjornen, and Ingolf— but were in Denmark getting ready for their summer patrols and thus were trapped there under German occupation.
The Royal Danish Navy’s opmålingsskib (survey ship) Ternen, left, and inspektionsskip Maagen, right, wintered in Greenland waters and thus were there in April 1940, escaping German capture. They were small cutters, at about 70 feet oal and 100 tons displacement, good for about 8 knots on their single diesel engine.
Other than the two cutters, the only other armed body in Greenland were the police under their inspector (Politiinspektør for Østkysten), the multi-hatted Danish polar explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen– who was back in Denmark at the time. The force had two stations (politistationer), at Eskimonæs (to cover the Norddistriktet) and Ella Ø (to cover the Syddistriktet), with just two officers at each location. This was to enforce the law over a territory about three times larger than Texas. Even this token group was only created in 1933 to answer the dispute with Norway over what was called Erik Raudes Land in north-east Greenland, with the League of Nations arbitrating that if Denmark wanted to continue to claim all Greenland as its territory, it had to maintain a permeant presence.
Although Norse settlements went back to the 9th Century, the island’s population in 1940 was still just hovering around 18,000, and the four police officers and 22 navy personnel described above were all that was needed for its constabulary purposes.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military had long bumped along the Greenland coast, including the Navy visiting it during the Polaris expedition of 1871–1873, the Juniata and Jeannette expeditions in 1873 and 1879-81, the Greely Relief Expedition in 1884, and the well-known Peary Arctic Expedition in 1898-1901.
In 1928, the 125-foot USCGC Marion carried out two full months of extensive oceanographic and iceberg studies of the region, fleshing out charts and adding to the general knowledge of the 450,000 sq. miles of the Davis Strait, with copies forwarded to the Danish Hydrographic Office. Her skipper was LT Edward Hanson “Iceberg” Smith, a polar ice nerd who had attended MIT before joining the Revenue Cutter Service in 1910, loved working the International Ice Patrol and went on to attain a Ph.D. in oceanography from Harvard.
USCGC Marion alongside a glacier in Baffin Bay, Canada. August 1928. The Active-class patrol boat, built for the Rum War, would go on to serve through WWII and was only disposed of in 1962. NH 46401
In 1933, the American Geographical Society wrapped up a trip to nearly all the fjords in Greenland between 72°30’ and 74°North latitude including photogrammetric mapping of the valleys, glaciers, and mountains and depth charting the fjords with echo-sounding equipment. Five years later, American meteorologist Clifford MacGregor conducted a groundbreaking study on the formation of polar air masses over Greenland.
To complicate things, the chief industry in Greenland in 1940 was an immense and strategically important cryolite mine at Ivittuut (Invigtut, also seen as Ivigtut)– a vital mineral used at the time to smelt aluminum. The largest known natural deposit of cryolite in the world was at Ivittuut, where about 150 mostly Canadian and Scandinavian miners toiled in the pits for the rare substance under the employ of the Kryolith Mine-og Handelsselskabet A/S.
Kryolitminen, Ivigtut, Greenland, 1937. The ships are the Danish patrol gunboat Hvidbjørnen (right) and the mine’s tender, the 1,200-ton coaster SS Julius Thomsen. Hvidbjørnen, trapped in Denmark in 1940, was scuttled by her crew during the war while Thomsen, taken over by the British, survived and kept up a regular transit between Canada and America and the mine during the war. THM-18645
With all this in mind, the two Danish Landsfogeder (governors) of Greenland, Eske Brun and Aksel Svane, invoked a 1925 emergency clause that allowed the colony to govern itself in the event of war. Moving forward, the Landsfogeder coordinated with the Danish ambassador in Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, to act as a sovereign nation per the Monroe Doctrine for the U.S. to protect Greenland and keep it neutral.
Kauffmann met with his American counterparts in D.C. on 10 April 1940, the day after the Germans rolled into Denmark. The response was warm.
But first, there needed to be a U.S. presence in Greenland.
Comanche to the rescue!
With the State Department in high gear to recognize the new (if temporary) independent government in Greenland and with the blessing of the island’s local administrative councils, Comanche, then in New York City’s Pier 18, made ready to sail in early May 1940. This shortcutted the planned British “Force X” being organized in Canada to seize the island.
Comanche took aboard Consul James K. Penfield and Vice-consul George L. West, on State Department orders. Also sailing on the cutter would be Maurice R. Reddy, the assistant director of the American Red Cross, tasked with assessing Greenland’s need for supplies as the last ship from Denmark had arrived the previous October. She also carried a detachment of five spare Coast Guard radiomen which would be landed to operate the infant consulate’s radio station and provide security.
Every nook and cranny of the 165-foot cutter was packed with extra provisions, heavy on canned goods, salted meats, and tinned fish. The crew was issued heavy sheepskin coats and purchased commercial in the city’s garment district. Also included as cargo, as detailed by the New York Times, was a “complete outfit of office furniture for the consulate,” and a “fairly large quantity of lumber fastened down on the forward deck. It was supplied to the Red Cross and will be used to build sheds to shelter supplies sent later.”
The poor little 165-foot Comanche was so loaded down (thanks largely to the superhuman efforts of the Despatch Agent, Mr. Fyfe) that even the Captain’s shower was stuffed with boxes of books, skis, snowshoes, rubber boots and duffle bags full of parkas, woolen underwear and heavy socks. But in spite of its load it pitched and rolled its way to St. Johns with such gusto that we thought we’d never know the meaning of the word horizontal again, except in the very unsatisfactory relative sense of a body in a bunk (when it wasn’t pitched out onto the deck).
Leaving NYC on the 10 May 1940– the same day Germany invaded neutral Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland on his sweep through the Lowlands while the British preemptively occupied Iceland for the Allies– the little overseas mission arrived at Godthab (now Nuuk), on Greenland’s west coast, on 20 May.
A thrilled-looking U.S. Consul James K. Penfield (right) and Vice Consul George L. West Jr. (left) arrive in Greenland aboard Cutter Comanche. (Acme News Pictures Inc. 1940).
Discharging her cargo and passengers, Comanche proceeded 200nm down the coast to become a station ship at Arsuk Fjord, directly adjacent to the cryolite mining concern.
Soon, 14 Coastguardsmen recently “discharged” from the service took up newly established positions as uniformed security guards on the staff of the Invigtut cryolite mine, paid a hefty $125 per month (the average non-rate in the USCG made about $50 a month) for the next 12 months with a $225 bonus for completing the contract, all paid by the local Greenland government. The funds to pay these guards, as well as to buy a “surplus” 3″/50 gun, eight Lewis guns, and 55 M1903 rifles landed via USCG cutter, along with shells and bullets for said ordnance, came from a $1 million cash deal from Uncle Sam for local goods negotiated by Brun in a delegation carried back to America by the USCGC Campbell.
This original detachment was soon joined by a 15th man, late from the interned training ship Danmark. A replacement shift of 20 similarly recruited “newly civilianized” USCG men would arrive in July 1941 and guard the mine until May 1942 when the U.S. Army took over the watch.
Comanche at Shipshaven, Ivigtut Greenland 1941
Besides Comanche, two larger cutters soon followed: the 327-foot Treasury class cutters Campbell (June 1940) and Duane (August) with both of the 5-inch gunned twin-screwed cutters suffering issues in the ice. By 10 September both the 327s were sent back to the U.S. The icebreaking USCG Northland also arrived in August and would operate on the wild east coast of Greenland where a plan was made with local officials to clear the remote Northeast coastline of its 20-odd inhabitants with the assistance of the Free Norwegian Navy gunboat Fridtjof Nansen.
Comanche was relieved at Ivittuut on 4 September 1940 by the 250-foot Lake class cutter Cayuga. By January 1941, Northland and Cayuga had returned to the U.S. for the worst of the winter, leaving behind the 15 guards at the mine and five radiomen at the consulate to hold down the island until April 1941 when Cayuga and Northland would return.
Meet the Greenland Patrol
On the first anniversary of Germany’s occupation of Denmark, 9 April 1941, the U.S. and Greenland entered into a formal defense agreement.
With a special U.S. survey team, carried by Cayuga to Greenland, working from Ternen and the local Greenland administration’s motorboat JP Koch, coupled with Northland’s J2F Duck, efforts were made to map the coast. The 240-foot USCGC Modoc (WPG-46) arrived in May and joined the efforts– coming uncomfortably close to the running fight against the German battleship Bismarck and the Royal Navy in the process.
On 1 June 1941, the South Greenland Patrol, under USCG LCDR H.G. Beford, was established around Modoc (flag) Comanche, the 110-foot icebreaking harbor tug USCGC Raritan (WYT-93), and the famed polar schooner Bowdoin (commissioned in the Navy on 16 June as IX-50).
A week later the sister organization, the Northeast Greenland Patrol, was formed in Boston around Northland, USCGC North Star, and the 70-year-old retired cutter Bear, the latter recommissioned in naval service as USS Bear (AG-29). The force would be led by now-LCDR Iceberg Smith, USCG.
With the two patrols consolidating in Greenland waters by mid-July, by early August the first PBY flying boats were arriving, the first maritime aircraft based year-round on the island. The PBYs would eventually be operated by a dedicated unit, Patrol Squadron Six (VP-6 CG) as an all-Coast Guard outfit home based at Narsarssuak (Narsarsuaq), Greenland, a base soon coded as Bluie West One (BW-1).
By early September, Comanche, with an Army survey team aboard, was back in local waters making reconnaissance patrols of the Southeast Greenland fjords. She would later go on to establish the lce Cap Station at Igtip Kangertiva, a bay on Greenland’s southeast coast that went on to be dubbed “Comanche Bay” for obvious reasons as well as Weather Station Able (later Bluie West 7) at Gronne Dal (Grønnedal).
The survey work by these cutters and aircraft resulted in the 178-page volume “Greenland Pilot & Sailing Directions” by 1941.
Quietly, the entire Coast Guard was transferred to the Department of the Navy on 1 November 1941, by Executive Order 8929, although it should be noted that, under E.O. 8767 of June 1941 the USCG was authorized to operate as a part of the Navy.
USN ONI 56 Escanaba class 165As including Comanche and Onondaga
Eventually, there were upwards of 25 Allied– primarily American– bases in Greenland during WWII.
At its height, some 5,500 military personnel were based on the island.
(Note Comanche Bay)
In 1942 alone, 86,000 tons of cryolite were shipped to the U.S. and Canada for use in aluminum production.
Meanwhile, on 26 June 1942, the first large-scale trans-Atlantic ferry flights of Allied military aircraft to Britain using Greenland and Iceland began. Comanche was there, as noted by her XO in a post-war interview, serving as the visual aide and radio beacon at the fjord entrance to the main airbase, Narsarsuak, for the first USAAF trans-Atlantic flight of B-17s. The ship logged the arrival of 26 B-17s on that first day, from 2:40 am to 10:30 pm.
The so-called North Atlantic Route, saw three fields in Greenland– Narsarssuak (BW-1), Angmagssalik (Bluie East 2), and Sondrestrom (BW-8)– used as a stopover between Maine/Newfoundland and Iceland, trans-shipping as many as 300-400 aircraft per month, primarily B-17, B-24 and B-25 bombers, to Europe.
B-17s ferry flight through Greenland Jan 1945 U.S. Air Force Number 122001AC 342-FH_000017
War comes to the Greenland Patrol.
Comanche was tied up at Ivigtut on 7 December 1941, a dry Sunday that saw local temperatures hovering around 34 degrees. By that point, she had spent most of the previous 19 months in the Danish colony’s waters.
While I can’t find that the Germans ever attempted a serious move against the cryolite mine at Invigtut, they did come to Greenland in search of something else.
As early as 11 September 1941, the cutter North Star, visiting Eskimonaes, had a report from local hunters of a flagless two-masted steamer poking around Young Sound. Chased down the next day, the steamer was the 105-foot Norwegian sealer Buskoe who had delivered a German agent– Jacob R. Bradley– and meteorological personnel ashore.
With a need to help forecast the weather in Europe and the Atlantic, and being cut off from meteorological reports from Canada in 1939 and America in 1941, the Germans needed weather stations in the Arctic. This led to somewhat disjointed efforts by the German Army, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine weather services to establish their own. Even the Abwehr got involved with their own hybrid weather/listening stations.
The Kriegsmarine sowed the icy Barents and Greenland Seas with at least 15 unmanned Wetterfunkgerät See (WFS) radio-transmitting weather buoys. While their employment would seem ideal, these 33-foot tall buoys were not well-liked by the U-boat crews tasked with deploying them as they took nearly two hours of assembly on the surface in calm seas with the boat’s torpedo crane as muscle– and that’s if everything went right. Plus they had a planned lifespan of 10 weeks once deployed but most of them went dark well short of that.
Most of the 15 assorted manned stations were established in Svalbard (Spitzbergen) while one (Schatzgräber) was set up off Russia’s arctic coast on Franz Josef Land. An unmanned station was even set up (and only found decades later) on the coast of Labrador!
As part of this, the Kriegsmarine moved to establish no less than four fixed (Edelweiss I and II, Holzauge, and Bassgeiger) as well as one migratory (Zugvogel, on sea ice) weather station in Greenland during the war.
The counter to this was Greenland’s first and only army, the locally-recruited Nordøstgrønlands Slædepatrulje (Northeast Greenland Sledge Patrol), which blended Danish police officers and Danish, Greenlandic and Norwegian fur trappers into an irregular force, almost devoid of military training, that would get into at least two firefights with German weather troops along the 700-mile stretch of Greenland’s most rugged coastline.
The Northeast Greenland Sledge Patrol would grow to 27 members during WWII. Armed with their own hunting rifles and a few short M1889 Danish Krag engineer carbines (ingeniørkarabin) and uniformed only with an armband, one member of the patrol would perish in a fight with weather station Holzauge personnel.
The Germans, for their part, sometimes went on the offensive, with their own patrols burning down half of Greenland’s police stations, when they attacked the Eskimonæs station (BE-5) in March 1943, driving off the two Danes in residence at the time. While destroying radio and weather equipment, they were good enough to leave a storage shed with food largely untouched and the post’s Danish flag unceremoniously stuffed into a box
The station was attacked by a German force on the night of March 23-24, 1943. The Germans burned the main building but first took down the flag and left it in a box. Note the kennels of the sled patrol.
It was in this atmosphere that the Greenland Patrol carried on their war.
Original caption: White Phantoms of the Northern Seas. The breathless beauty of an iceberg floating from the Arctic holds the gaze of Coast Guardsmen, lining the rail of a combat cutter. Frequently, the sturdy Coast Guard Cutters on the Greenland Patrol encounter these floating islands of glistening ice – dazzling to look upon but hazardous to the ships that pass over the northern lanes.
Coast Guard in Greenland: USCG crew on a water-cooled .50 caliber Browning mans their gun on patrol. 17 October 1942. NARA 26-G-10-17-42(2) 205580166
Kungnat Bay, Greenland. Coast Guard sentry keeps watch as the armed trawler USCGC Arundel (WYT-90) lends assistance to a freighter in the middle distance, 1 February 1943. 26-G-3491
The ensuing so-called “Weather War” saw well-armed and J2F-4 amphibian-equipped USCG combat icebreakers round up 60 German POWs, smashing two weather stations in the process while capturing a third that was recently evacuated, and chasing down three armed Kriegsmarine trawlers– Kehdingen, Coburg, and Externsteine, taking the last as a prize.
This image depicts a Coast Guardsman on watch aboard a vessel in Greenland, painted by Coast Guard Combat Artist Norman Millet Thomas, in February 1943. NARA 26-G-02-06-43(1)
This image depicts a USCG landing party from the cutter Northland (WPG-49) gathering captured German remote radio-weather station equipment that had been parachuted in on Northeast Greenland, in September 1943. Note the M1903 Springfields, shaggy dog, and the mixture of blue, grey, and OD Navy and Army gear. NARA 26-G-3501
German POWs on deck of the USCGC Northland (WPG-49) in 1944 as part of the Weather War off Greenland. These may be from the Cape Sussie weather station (Unternehmen Bassgeige), taken down in late July 1944, and landed by the German trawler Coburg.
Comanche at times also served as a floating kennel, running sled dogs from location to location in addition to her work clearing paths through the ice, standing guard at the cryolite mine, and escorting convoys.
From her July 1943 deck log:
Fighting Arctic Wolves
Besides the defense of the cryolite mine and the skirmishes of the Weather War already mentioned, it should be pointed out that the fight against German U-boats, even in these frozen waters off Greenland, was very real.
On 4 September 1941– three full months before Pearl Harbor, the destroyer USS Greer (DD-145) narrowly missed a torpedo fired by U-652 in Greenlandic waters while en route to Iceland.
Comanche served on numerous convoys (SG-19, SG-29, SG-30, SG-37, SG-52, SG-74, GS-27, GS-34, GS-39 et.al.) running ships from Newfoundland to Greenland and back, often tossing ash cans and Mousetrap rockets on suspect underwater contacts.
Comanche, still in her peacetime scheme, escorting SS Munago, 1941, South Greenland, Peary Museum
Comanche in her wartime outfit. She carried a QCL-2 sonar, SF radar, had her 6-pounders replaced with 20mm Orelikons, mounted two depth charge racks, carried four “Y” gun projectors (with allowance for 14 depth charges) had two 7.2-inch Moustrap ASW rocket devices installed.
The report from one such brush with a sonar contact incident:
She also had to pick up the pieces.
Such as in the rescue of freighter USAT Nevada in December 1943. The 950-ton cargo ship, part of Convoy 5G-36, en route from St. John’s to Narsarssuak, became separated in 20-foot high seas and 60-mile-per-hour winds snow squalls that ended with her holds flooded.
Comanche was the closest to her and went to work, catching up to her while still about 200 miles south of Greenland.
From her deck log :
Steamship Nevada (American Freighter, built 1915) photographed from the deck of the USCGC Comanche (WPG-76) as Nevada was foundering in the North Atlantic, circa 15-18 December 1943. Comanche was able to rescue twenty-nine of those on board Nevada, but thirty-four lost their lives during the abandonment of the storm-crippled ship. In 1918-1919 Nevada had briefly served as USS Rogday (ID # 3583). NH 66258
Her most famous rescue came during the sinking of the 5,649-ton USAT Dorchester, a pre-war M&MT cruise ship built for 314 passengers that had been turned into a 750-space troopship. On Dorchester’s fifth convoy run (third to Greenland), leaving outbound on 29 January 1943, she was assigned to SG-19 out of St. Johns bound for Narsarssuak with a complement of seven officers, 123 crewmen, 23 Navy armed guards, 16 USCG, 597 Army personnel and 155 civilian passengers.
M&MT passenger steamer S.S. Dorchester (1926-1943) photographed during 1942 as a USAT SC-290583
Riding shotgun on SG-19 was Comanche and her sister USCGC Escanaba (WPG 77) as well as the larger 240-foot cutter USCGC Tampa (WPG-48). Also in the convoy were the Norwegian steam merchants Biscaya and Lutz, whose holds were full of cargo and building materials to construct bases.
Six days out, in heavy seas and rough weather while 150 miles southwest of Greenland’s Cape Farewell, U-223 (Kptnlt Karl-Jürg Wächter) crept in close enough at 0102 in the predawn of 3 February to fire five torpedoes at the largest vessel in the little arctic convoy– Dorchester— and the transport soon went down. While Tampa moved to shepherd Biscaya and Lutz to nearby Skovfjord (Tunulliarfik) on Greenland’s southern tip, Comanche and Escanaba stood by in the dark and frigid waters to pick up survivors.
Using the “rescue retriever” technique for the first time– which amounted to a rubber-suited volunteer on a line dropping overboard and coming back up with a person– Escabana scooped up 81 survivors from the water and rafts and 51 from one lifeboat. Lacking the same protective suits as used on her sister, nonetheless, three officers and nine enlisted men of Comanche personally picked up 41 survivors from another lifeboat and 57 from rafts and the freezing water.
After the Dorchester slipped beneath the waves on 3 February 1943, the USCGC Comanche and Escanaba rescued dozens of survivors from the doomed Army troopship. (Painting by Robert Lavin, via U.S. Coast Guard History Office)
Dorchester Torpedoed by Perry Stirling, showing Escanaba and Comanche picking up survivors (USCG painting)
Of the more than 900 souls aboard Dorchester, the sea claimed 674, largely due to hyperthermia, with men succumbing to the cold within minutes of hitting the water. The sinking of Dorchester is regarded by the Navy as the “heaviest loss of personnel suffered in any U.S. convoy during the war.”
Among those lost to Poseidon were four Army clergy members, all lieutenants– Methodist minister George L. Fox, Reformed Church in America minister Clark V. Poling, Catholic Church priest John P. Washington, and Rabbi Alexander B. Goode– who voluntarily gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out then reportedly joined arms, said prayers, and sang hymns as they went down with the transport. They are well-remembered as the “Immortal Chaplains” and were posthumously granted the Chaplain’s Medal for Heroism in 1961.
Speaking of heroism, one of Comanche’s fearless retrievers, STM 1c Charles Walter David, Jr., 25, suffering from hypothermia and pneumonia, died in a hospital ashore in Greenland after the rescue operation and he was interred in the permafrost. In addition to saving Dorchester survivors, he is also credited with bringing Comanche’s XO, a fellow retriever, back after the officer was suffering exposure.
His widow Kathleen W. David, and newborn son, a young son, Neil Adrian David, were presented with his Navy and Marine Corps Medal, posthumously.
Further illustrating the danger of the waters around Greenland during the war, Escanaba was lost on the early morning of 13 June 1943 in an explosion off Ivigtut, with the official conclusion that she was struck by either a torpedo or a mine. Only two of her crew survived. Another smaller cutter, the converted trawler Natsek (WYP-170) would vanish without a trace in December 1942 while out of Narsarssuak bound for Boston. Meanwhile, Northland sighted and attacked a U-boat in the Davis Strait on 18 June 1942 reportedly almost catching a German torpedo for her trouble.
All in all, nearly 50 American warships served on the Greenland Patrol during the conflict, almost all of these Coast Guard assets. Of those cutters, four of Comanche’s five Algonquin class sisters clocked in, with the only exception being USCGC Onondaga (WPG-79) who spent the war fighting the Japanese in Alaskan waters.
Upwards of 300,000 U.S. military aircraft were produced during the war, with the rare mineral harvested from the Greenland shale a big part in making that happen.
Post War service
VE Day found Comanche at the USCG Yard at Curtis Bay, Maryland undergoing a much-needed 30-day overhaul that she entered on 17 March 1945. Once she emerged, she caught orders to proceed to Iceland for air-sea rescue duties from June through September 1945.
Once the Coast Guard transferred back to the Treasury Department from the Navy on New Year’s Day 1946, Comanche had her war-time armament removed, and her homeport shifted to Norfolk. However, the service, flush with very new ships (13 255-foot Owasco class cutters were commissioned in 1945-46) shoehorned into a peacetime budget, soon put all the remaining Algonquins into storage in an “in commission, in reserve” status, with reduced crews.
Comanche decommissioned 29 July 1947. Cleared for disposal, she was sold on 10 November 1948 to the Virginia Pilots Association who used her as a floating office and barracks boat until 1984 when the 50-year-old historical cutter was donated to the Patriot’s Point Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, for use as a floating museum.
The nuclear-powered freighter NS Savannah, the retired 327-foot Treasury-class cutter USCGC Ingham (WPG 35), and the former USCGC Comanche, all the way to the right, almost unrecognizable after 35 years as a pilot boat, at Charleston’s Patriots Point Naval Museum in the late 1980s. Savannah has been in Baltimore since 2008 and Ingham is now at Key West.
Comanche’s career as a museum ship was short-lived, being seriously damaged by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and closed.
This led to her donation to the South Carolina DNR for use as a reef in 1992.
She is located 22.5 miles North of Charleston Harbor at a depth of 110-120 feet and is a popular wreck dive.
A few stirring interviews with her wartime crew remain. One of these is with EM 2c Richard N. Swanson, one of the volunteer retrievers on the Dorchester rescue who earned his Navy and Marine Corps Medal the hard way.
Patriot’s Park saved some of the relics still aboard Comanche in 1992 and has them at the park. They also donated one of her wartime 2,100-pound anchors to the Florence Veterans Park ashore in SC.
The cutter’s 1934-marked bell has been at the Arlington, Virginia barracks of the Coast Guard Ceremonial Honor Guard since at least 1999, where it is used in annual remembrances and individual “ringing out” ceremonies.
The Honor Guard was established in 1962 and performs an average of 1,200 ceremonies each year across the United States. It is housed in the Coast Guard’s old Washington Radio Station in Alexandria and Comanche’s well-polished bell is on its quarterdeck.
The service recycled the name for a third Comanche.
The Coast Guard acquired the former Navy 142-foot Sotoyomo-class auxiliary ocean tug USS Wampanoag (ATA-202) and placed her in commission as the medium endurance cutter Comanche (WMEC-202) in February 1959. Based in California except for a two-year stint in Corpus Christi, Texas, she was involved in several high-profile blue water rescues across a 21-year second career.
The third Comanche (ex-Wampanoag) is preserved as a floating museum in the Seattle area.
On 16 November 2013, the Coast Guard officially commissioned the USCGC Charles David Jr (WPC 1107) in honor of Comanche’s lost Dorchester retriever. His body had been reinterred at Long Island National Cemetery post-war.
His granddaughter was the ship’s sponsor.
Rear Adm. Jake Korn, Coast Guard Seventh District commander; Sharon David, granddaughter of the cutter’s namesake and sponsor of the Coast Guard Cutter Charles David Jr; and Chris Bollinger, president of Bollinger Shipyards; look at information about Charles W. David Jr. before the commissioning ceremony. Steward’s Mate 1st Class Charles David Jr. was posthumously awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his part in saving the lives of nearly 100 U.S. Army soldiers and members of his own crew during World War II. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Mark Barney.
Likewise, former Comanche plank owner, the sub-busting LCDR Maurice Jester, has his name on a sistership of David, USCGC Maurice Jester (WPC-1152).
In 1951, the Danish Naval Station Grønnedal was established as a year-round home for Greenland Command, since 2012 the Arktisk Kommando, which has a permanent staff of 36 civilians and military personnel in a big blue building in Nuuk.
Arktisk Kommandos hovedkvarter in Nuuk
In the summer, a force of three modern 1,700-ton Knud Rasmussen class OPVs, augmented by another four 3,500 Thetis-class OPFs, roam the Greenlandic littoral.
Danish patrol vessel HDMS Knud Rasmussen (P570) ice-breaking in Greenland waters, December 2022, around Narsaq, Narsarsuaq, and Qassiarsuk
The Greenland Police is still seen as a district of the Danish state police, numbering 300 members. There is no local territorial defense force.
The Danish Home Guard (Hjemmeværnet), which numbers some 44,000 volunteers in Denmark, has activated small groups to support operations in exercises in Greenland in recent years, but doesn’t have HJV units among Greenland’s cities and towns.
The six-month Arktisk Basisuddannelse course, open to only to Greenlanders, mimics the Danish military basic training course and blends field and classroom instruction
The program has been recruiting youth from among 13 towns and settlements across Greenland and graduated its first 19 students in November 2024.
Arktisk basisuddannelse (Arctic Basic Education) students, Greenland’s first “home guard” style class. While many may go on to join the Arktisk Kommando or Greenland police and fire agencies, it isn’t a requirement.
When it comes to U.S. bases, the Americans pulled out of most of the BW/BE stations by 1947 with a few exceptions: BW-1 (Narsarsuaq) closed in 1958 and Stromfjord (BW-8) in 1992, while Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule AB, formerly BW-8) is still very much a thing, supported by the USCG, MSC, and Canadian Coast Guard and operated by the Space Force. The Army had Camp Century (including a novel underground nuclear reactor) there in the 1960s. The USAF also had four unmanned DEW stations in Greenland between 1960 and 1990.
The Coast Guard, meanwhile, still frequently gets to Greenland waters where they continue to work with local and Danish forces.
USCGC Campbell transited south along the west coast of Greenland overnight with the Royal Danish Navy vessel HDMS Knud Rasmussen and rendezvoused in a position just offshore of Evighedsfjorden (Eternity Fjord). CGC Campbell received HDMS Knud Rasmussen’s Executive Officer, Commander Bo Ougaard, on board to serve as an ice pilot and provide local knowledge to assist CGC Campbell in safely entering and transiting Evighedsfjorden. Once inside Eternity Fjord, CGC Campbell launched their MH-65 Dolphin aircraft and proceeded up the fjord to the head where the glacier begins. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Seaman Kate Kilroy DVIDS 200907-G-NJ244-002
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
Ships are more than steel and wood And heart of burning coal, For those who sail upon them know That some ships have a soul.
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This week, some 85 years ago, Canadian maritime artist Donald Mackay’s painting depicts the open sea bridge of the destroyer HMCS Restigouche (H00) escorting a large convoy of troop ships, including the four-funneled 45,000-ton Cunard liner-turned-troopship RMS Aquitania (center left), across a brooding North Atlantic.
Beaverbrook Collection of War Art CWM 19710261-4245
Mackay is likely portraying troop convoy TC 1, which left Halifax with half (some 7,449 soldiers) of the newly formed Scotland-bound 1st Canadian Infantry Division on 10 December 1939. One officer (center) communicates with another ship by signal lamp, while an officer (left) records the message as a lookout stands by. The two large loops (right) are the direction-finding aerial used for navigation. Other navigational equipment is visible, including a gyroscopic compass repeater (center) providing compass directions.
It was Aquitania’s first WWII troop transport operation, carrying 2,638 troops and sailing in company with fellow liners/troopships Empress of Britain (1,303 troops), Empress of Australia (1,235 troops), Duchess of Bedford (1,312 troops), and Monarch of Bermuda (961 troops). The force was escorted by the old Royal Sovereign class battleship HMS Resolution along with the Canadian tin cans HMCS Fraser, Ottawa, Restigouche, and St. Laurent while an over-the-horizon cover force was built around the carrier HMS Furious, the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, and the light cruiser HMS Emerald. They would be met at 20’E by a dozen RN tin cans of the 6th and 8th Destroyer Flotillas, to help shepherd the Canucks through the wolves.
Between her Great War and WWII service, Aquitania sailed more than 500,000 miles and carried nearly 400,000 Commonwealth soldiers around the globe for the King.
As for Restigouche, completed in 1932 as HMS Comet, the “C” Class destroyer was purchased from Britain and commissioned in the Royal Canadian Navy on 15 June 1938. Like Aquitania, Convoy TC 1 was her first WWII convoy and the little greyhound would ride shotgun on no less than 72 by March 1945 including fully seven of the 14 big TC runs that brought Canada’s five Europe-bound field divisions and their reinforcements to the Continent. She also served off Normandy on D-Day and helped clean out the Bay of Biscay.
Her hard-working hull was often streaked with red iron oxide, and she was nicknamed “Rustyguts” by her crew.
Period Kodachrome of the Canadian destroyer HMCS Restigouche (H00), circa 1944-1945. Canadian Navy Heritage photo CT-284
HMCS Restigouche, River-class destroyer of the RCN during WW2. LAC Kodachrome. MIKAN 4821961
She earned five battle honors and her motto was Rester droit (Steer A Straight Course).
Paid off on 5 October 1945, she was broken up the following year.
The Coast Guard Cutter Stratton (WMSL 752) transits Glacier Bay, Alaska, on Aug. 1, 2024, while patrolling the region. U.S. Coast Guard courtesy photo.
She also logged 334 deck landing qualifications with CG Air Station Kodiak’s MH-60 helicopter aircrews, responded to the 738-foot cargo tanker SS Pan Viva which was beset by a storm north of Dutch Harbor, conducted 20 boardings, did a GUNEX off Dutch Harbor, steamed with the Flight IIA Arleigh Burke USS Kidd (DDG 100), called at CFB Esquimalt (where she picked up three RCN ship riders) and pulled off the “first at-sea refueling evolutions for a national security cutter in the high latitudes.”
It would seem that the crew of Stratton has earned the holidays off.
The Northern Lights illuminate the night sky above the Coast Guard Cutter Stratton (WMSL 752) while operating in the Arctic, Aug. 28, 2024. Stratton’s crew returned to its homeport in Alameda, Calif., on Nov. 4, after completing a 110-day patrol in the Arctic Ocean, Chukchi Sea, and Bering Sea. U.S. Coast Guard courtesy photo.
110 Years Ago. October 1914. RN LCDR Norman Wilkinson‘s depiction of the sailing of Canada’s First Contingent of troops, the Canadian Expeditionary Force, over 31,000 strong, from Canada to England to fight the Germans.
Beaverbrook Collection of War Art Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, 19710261-0791
“After taking soldiers, horses, and equipment on board in Quebec City, the liners carrying the First Contingent formed up with British warships in Bay of Gaspé, Quebec, before leaving for England. Along the way, they were joined by another liner carrying soldiers from Newfoundland and by several other warships, including one of the Royal Navy’s largest battlecruisers, the 26,000-ton HMS Princess Royal, seen here in the foreground.”
The force, including the whole of the 1st Canadian Division and supporting units, comprised 1,547 officers; 29,070 men; 7,679 horses; 70 guns (QF 18-pounders), 110 motor vehicles, 705 horsed-pulled vehicles, and 82 bicycles. They were the first tranche of what would be more than 650,000 Canucks sent “Over There.” To put those numbers into perspective, Canada in 1914 had a population of just 8 million. The current Canadian Army is authorized at just 22,500 active personnel (and is 13 percent short of those numbers), drawn from a population of some 39 million.
The flotilla of 31 merchantmen was protected by seven battleships and cruisers under convoy commander RADM Robert Phipps-Hornby CMG, Commanding North America and West Indies Station, with his flag in the old 14,000-ton Canopus class battlewagon HMS Glory. Several flotillas of destroyers would join once the convoy was nearing the sea area of maximum U-boat threat southwest of Ireland.
As for the artist. Wilkinson achieved fame for inventing the dazzle-painting technique, a form of camouflage applied to a ship’s hull to make it more difficult to detect.
In his April 1917 proposal to the British War Office, he described it as “large patches of strong colour in a carefully thought out pattern and colour scheme.
The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Delbert D. Black (DDG 119) sails alongside the U.S. Coast Guard cutter USCGC Northland (WMEC 904) and the Royal Canadian Navy offshore patrol vessels HMCS Margaret Brooke (AOPV 431) and HMCS Harry DeWolf (AOPV 430) while conducting a photo exercise during Operation NANOOK (OP NANOOK) in the Atlantic Ocean, Aug. 18, 2024. OP NANOOK is the Canadian Armed Forces’ annual series of Arctic exercises designed to enhance defense capabilities, ensure the security of northern regions, and improve interoperability with allied forces. Delbert D. Black participated in the operation alongside the U.S. Coast Guard and Canadian and Danish allies to bolster Arctic readiness and fulfill each nation’s defense commitments. (U.S. Navy photo 240818-N-MA550-1086 by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Rylin Paul)
In that time, no (as in zero) new ice-capable ships have been added to the fleet or even progressed so far as to be christened. This while the country’s only medium polar icebreaker has suffered a fire that forced her to abort her latest NSF mission and the country’s only heavy polar icebreaker going through never-ending cycles of rebuilding the 50-year-old ship for 240 days a year to be able to accomplish the annual Deep Freeze resupply mission to Antarctica.
The Canadians have four of these 6,600-ton/340-foot vessels in service and two under construction with two more on order for the RCN and two unarmed near-sister Arctic and offshore patrol ships (AOPS) for the Canadian Coast Guard which are currently under construction. The eighth and final ship will be delivered in 2028. The cost is about $700 million U.S. per hull.
The Wolfs are ugly, but have a good bit of capability, being capable of operating year-round in Polar Class 4-5 ice (up to 3.9 feet of first-year ice), while embarking a big helicopter (the 30,000-pound Sikorsky CH-148 Cyclone, which goes four tons heavier than the HH/SH/MH-60) and UAVs along with two large 28-foot cutters and a 40-foot landing craft.
Slow (17 knots) they have long legs (6,800nm unrefueled), able to cover the entire 1,900-mile span of the Northwest Passage, or the shorter Seattle-to-Kodiak or Boston-to-Thule runs with ease. The complement is 65, with spare berthing for embarked heli/drone dets and scientific nerds.
Armed for a constabulary “presence” and sovereignty mission they carry an enclosed Mk 38 Mod 3A 25 mm cannon and provision for a few .50 caliber mounts. In USCG service, this could be repeated and the Mk 38 updated to a 30mm gun– which is already planned for the Polar Security Cutter. I say add some Naval Strike Missiles for some serious teeth.
Produced by Irving Shipbuilding in Halifax, Nova Scotia, they are a tweak of the Norwegian Coast Guard NoCGV’s Svalbard (W303), a 6,400-ton/340-foot icebreaker and offshore patrol vessel that entered service in 2001.
Ordering while the line is hot speeds up delivery and reaps the benefit of the RCN being the beta tester on the first flight ships, allowing improvements and lessons learned to be folded into the new USCG hulls. Crews could be spun up quickly by deploying chiefs and junior officers on RCN vessels.
Further, the Trudeau government would likely be open to selling 2-3 of the ships already under construction to the U.S. to speed up the acquisition process then “forgetting” to replace them for RCN, and CCG. If nothing else, they could be launched at Irving and finished in American yards (or at the USCG Yard) with Irving’s assistance to soothe the “not made here/American jobs” noise in Congress.
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.
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.
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Warship Wednesday (on a Thursday) Aug. 22, 2024: Ghosts of Gagil Tomil
Via the U.S. Navy SEAL Museum.
Above we see UDT-10 swimmers (left to right) S1c Leonard Barnhill, SP(A)1c John MacMahon, LT M.R. Massey, SP(X)1c Bill Moore, and QM3c Warren Christensen on the cramped mess deck of the Balao-class fleet boat USS Burrfish (SS-312) on the early morning of 17 August 1944. Note the hearty “welcome home” breakfast of eggs, bacon, and coffee fortified with medicinal 6-year-old Overholt straight rye whiskey along with the diver’s working uniform of grease, grenades, knives, and swim trunks.
These men would mount the first and only submarine-launched reconnaissance operation accomplished by the Pacific UDTs during WWII, some 80 years ago this month.
Some of them are still missing.
The Balao Class
A member of the 180+-ship Balao class, she was one of the most mature U.S. Navy diesel designs of the World War Two era, constructed with knowledge gained from the earlier Gato class. Unlike those of many navies of the day, U.S. subs were “fleet” boats, capable of unsupported operations in deep water far from home. The Balao class was deeper diving (400 ft. test depth) than the Gato class (300 feet) due to the use of high-yield strength steel in the pressure hull.
Able to range 11,000 nautical miles on their reliable diesel engines, they could undertake 75-day patrols that could span the immensity of the Pacific. Carrying 24 (often unreliable) Mk14 Torpedoes, these subs often sank anything short of a 5,000-ton Maru or warship by surfacing and using their deck guns. They also served as the firetrucks of the fleet, rescuing downed naval aviators from right under the noses of Japanese warships.
Some 311 feet long overall, they were all-welded construction to facilitate rapid building. Best yet, they could be made for the bargain price of about $7 million in 1944 dollars (just $100 million when adjusted for today’s inflation) and completed from keel laying to commissioning in about nine months.
An amazing 121 Balaos were completed through five yards at the same time, with the following pennant numbers completed by each:
Cramp: SS-292, 293, 295-303, 425, 426 (12 boats)
Electric Boat: 308-313, 315, 317-331, 332-352 (42)
Manitowoc on the Great Lakes: 362-368, 370, 372-378 (15)
Mare Island on the West Coast: 304, 305, 307, 411-416 (9)
Portsmouth Navy Yard: 285-288, 291, 381-410, 417-424 (43)
Our subject is the only U.S. Navy warship to carry the name of the tiny Atlantic swellfish. Built by the Portsmouth Navy Yard, she was laid down on 24 February 1943, launched that June, and commissioned on 14 September– her construction spanning just 202 days.
Officers and crewmen salute the colors as the Burrfish (SS-312) slides into the Atlantic at Portsmouth Navy Yard, Portsmouth, N.H., 18 June 1943 via Subvets
Her first skipper was 32-year-old LT (T/Cdr) William Beckwith Perkins, Jr., USN (USNA 1932), late of the Panama Canal Zone’s guardian submarine “Sugar Boat” USS S-11 (SS 116). A Keystoner born in Upper Turkeyfoot Township, Pennsylvania, he was the grandson of a swashbuckling horse soldier, Isaac Otey Perkins, who rode with the 5th Virginia Cavalry Regiment during the Civil War. Meanwhile, his uncle, Col. Nathaniel James Perkins, was head of the Fork Union Military Academy, which LT Perkins attended before his appointment to Annapolis.
After a four-month 8,000-mile shakedown cruise from New London to Key West– where she took part in two weeks of ASW exercises– through the Panama Canal to Pearl Harbor where Burrfish arrived on 6 January 1944, she prepped for her first war patrol. This included 11 underway exercises (four at night), degaussing, and sound listening tests.
1943-1944 USS Burrfish commanding officer William Beckwith Perkins, Jr. on the right in the second row.
War!
Getting into it, Burrfish departed Pearl Harbor on 2 February 1944 for her 1st War Patrol. She was ordered to patrol in the Caroline Islands area. She was a new boat with a green crew. It was the first war patrol for not only her skipper but also for 53 of her 83-member crew– some of which were added just a day before sailing. Her XO, LT Talbot Edward Harper (USNA 1937), had made five patrols already on the USS Greyback.
Burrfish met the enemy for the first time on 10 February– a Betty bomber while she was on the surface– and both left unharmed.
Sailing through a Japanese convoy on Valentine’s Day 1944 and firing off four unsuccessful Mark 14 torpedoes, she was depth charged for two hours, counting 22 strings of cans while she went deep– 500 feet– to avoid death. Keep in mind test depth on Balaos was listed as 400 feet.
She was depth charged again by a Japanese destroyer (8 cans) on 17 February.
This pace continued for the rest of the month, concluding on Leap Day when she fired three unsuccessful Mark 14s at a large Japanese freighter accompanied by two escorts and received 33 depth charges in return.
March likewise brought a three-torpedo attack on an escorted transport on the 3rd, which was unsuccessful.
Recalled, Burrfish ended her 1st War Patrol at Midway on 22 March, with several leaks from depth charge attacks and her unusable No. 1 torpedo tube which was jammed in two feet. She had counted 30 Japanese air contacts and 13 ship contacts in her 9,561-mile, 53-day sortie but failed to claim any.
A Combat Insignia for the patrol was not authorized by ComSubPac.
Three weeks later, repaired, rearmed, restored, and refueled, she left on her 2nd War Patrol on 14 April, ordered to stalk the Japanese Home Islands, east of Kyushu and south of Honshu. Her crew at this point was mostly made up of men who had earned their “dolphins” and she carried fish with updated warheads.
Logging 16 shipping contacts, mostly trawlers, Burrfish hit paydirt on the early morning of 7 May when she came across a tanker and, after stalking it for three hours, pumping three Mk 14-3As into its hull.
Post-war review boards confirmed she sank the German oiler Rossbach (5984 GRT) formerly the Norwegian A/S Norsk Rutefart-operated D/T Madrono, south of Murotosaki, Japan. She had been seized by the Hilfskreuzer Thor in June 1942.
The Britsh-built Madrono was caught by Thor while traveling in ballast from Melbourne to Abadan. While her Norwegian crew spent the rest of the war in Yokohama, Burrfish sent the tanker to the bottom with her German prize crew aboard.
Burrfish ended her second patrol at Pearl Harbor on 4 June, having covered 9,370 miles in 52 days, and was allowed her first Combat Insignia for her successful patrol. Her original XO, Talbot Harper, left the boat to receive command of USS Kingfish (SS 234), which he would take out on four war patrols and bag seven Japanese ships, earning the Silver Star in the process.
Then came the Yap operation
Frogman mission
With the need to map Axis-held beaches and clear obstacles for follow-on landings, the Navy began standing up what would become Navy Combat Demolition Units and later Underwater Demolition Teams in the early summer of 1943. Basic training was conducted in a nine-week program at Fort Pierce, Florida, later followed by six weeks of advanced training at the NCDT&E depot in Maui for Pacific-bound UDTs. The first teams to see combat were UDT-1 and UDT-2, which hit the beach during Operation Flintlock at Kwajalein and Roy-Namur in January 1944.
These “Demolitioneers” were primarily recruited from the Seabee dynamiting and demolition school but also included bluejackets from the fleet and the occasional Coast Guardsman. In the end, some 34 UDT teams were formed, 21 of which saw combat. Organized in four dive platoons and one HQ section, the units consisted of 13 officers (plus an Army and Navy liaison officer) and 70 (later 85) enlisted men. One team, UDT-10, absorbed five officers and 24 enlisted who had been trained as OSS Special Maritime Unit combat swimmers whose group, Operational Swimmer Group (OSG) II had been pushed into more mainstream use by Nimitz.
It was in early June that it was decided, by request of 3rd Amphibious Force Commander, VADM Teddy Wilkinson to ComSubPac, that a submarine make a reconnaissance of the Japanese-occupied Palau Islands so that Wilkinson and his staff knew what they were up against.
Burrfishdrew the duty and was specially modified to carry a pared-down UDT platoon and its equipment. Two 7-man LCRS rubber rafts and several sets of oars were stored deflated in a pair of free-flooding, ventilated, 8-foot-long cylindrical tanks fitted to the sub’s deck abaft the conning tower. The boats were inflated topside through the use of a special valve fitted to her whistle line. Four torpedoes were landed from her forward torpedo room and the empty skids were arranged with mattresses for the 11-man team.
Special equipment, a German-made Bentzin Primarflex camera on a custom bracket, was rigged to allow the sub to take panoramic photos via her periscope while submerged. The trick had been learned on the USS Nautilus off Tarawa by her XO, LT Richard “Ozzie” Lynch who had tried and failed with three Navy-issued cameras before experimenting with his own personal Primarflex to outstanding results.
The Navy soon acquired a dozen of the German cameras, primarily second-hand via discreet classified ads in photography magazines, for submarine surveillance use.
Burrfish was also detailed to collect hydrographic data on the ocean currents in and around the islands.
The UDT Special-Mission Group assigned to Burrfish comprised Lt. Charles Kirkpatrick as commander, an unnamed support member, and nine assorted swimmers. Five of these divers– QM1c Robert A. Black, Jr. (8114404); SP(A)1c John MacMahon (4027186); SP(X)1c William Moore (6339607); S1c Leonard Barnhill (8903302); and QM3c Warren Christensen (8697250)– were OSS OSG II men from the newly formed UDT-10 which had only arrived from Fort Pierce that June and was just wrapping up its advanced training in Maui. Two (LT M.R. Massey and CGM Howard “Red” Roeder) were instructors tapped from UDT-1’s battle-hardened Maui training cadre. While two senior men (CBM John E. Ball and CM3c Emmet L. Carpenter) were drawn from the staff of Sub Base, Pearl Harbor.
This 11-member UDT det was carried in addition to Burrfish’s 72-member crew, 53 of which had already earned their dolphins on prior patrols.
Burrfish departed from Pearl Harbor for her 3rd War Patrol with her frogmen on 11 July, topping off her tanks at Midway on the 15th before continuing West. Starting on the 22nd, she began experiencing severe Japanese air activity whenever she surfaced and observed the patrol planes to be DF-ing her radar so she secured her SD and SJ sets and relied on her primitive APR-1 radar warning receiver and SPA-1 pulse analyzer equipment for the rest of the mission.
Closing with Angaur and Yap Islands by 29 July, she spent the next three weeks inspecting the beaches each morning and conducting submerged pericope photography– filling 16 rolls of 35mm film– and closely verifying and updating the pre-war Admiralty charts she had on hand for the islands. Bathythermograph cards were scrutinized and carefully logged to note thermoclines.
Night drifting on the surface with the UDT recon team posted as topside lookouts while the radar gang listened to the APR/SPA gear allowing Burrfish to effectively discover and map out the four Japanese search radars in the area.
On 9 August, Burrfish rendezvoused with sister USS Balao some 20 miles offshore. After challenging and confirming each other from 30,000 yards via quick SJ radar blips, a rubber boat was sent over at 2300 to transfer the film and data collected thus far so that, should Burrfish be lost in her subsequent inshore beach recon via swimmer, at least the collected intel would get back to VADM Wilkinson’s staff.
It was at Gagil Tomil on the night of 18/19 August that three men– Black, Roeder, and MacMahon– failed to return to Burrfish before dawn forced the sub to withdraw and submerge.
As noted by the DPAA on the three missing men:
After setting out, one team returned to the boat after one of the swimmers became exhausted in the surf. His partner then returned to the island. The two men now in the boat waited until past the appointed rendezvous time for the swimmers to return. With no sign of the others, the men in the boat rowed closer to shore to investigate. They risked discovery by using flashlights to attempt to make contact, but received no response. Finally, the two men were forced to abandon the search and return to the submarine.
Scouting the shoreline the next day from dangerously close in, Burrfish failed to catch sight of the trio.
They repeated the same forlorn wait on the 20th.
Ordered to leave, LCDR Perkins regretfully complied. All three of the missing swimmers eventually received the Silver Star, posthumously.
Crew members of UDT 10 on submarine Burrfish at Peliliu. L-R Chief Ball, John MacMahon (MIA), Bob Black (MIA), Emmet L. Carpenter, Chief Howard Roeder. Via the U.S. Navy SEAL Museum.
Perkins noted in his report, “In this officer’s experience, this group of men was outstanding – both professionally and as shipmates. They have had a long and difficult cruise in the submarine but have acquitted themselves admirably. It is a tragedy that Roeder, MacMahon, and Black are not on board.”
Burrfish concluded her 3rd Patrol at Majuro in the Marshall Islands after 47 days at sea on 27 August, logging 10,600 miles. It was deemed a successful patrol due to the quantity and quality of information obtained, with a Combat Insignia authorized by ComSubPac. However, all further UDT operations in the Pacific would be via littoral capable surface ships, typically APDs (converted destroyers, aka “Green Dragons”) and LCIs/LSTs.
On return to Hawaii, the three remaining OSS OSG II members of the UDT Special Mission Group (Christensen, Barnhill, and Moore) were put in for silver stars (all others recommended for bronze) and rolled into the Maui cadre to train incoming swimmers from the states.
With Station HYPO decoding subsequent enemy transmissions that the three missing UDT men were captured alive by the Japanese and interrogated by notoriously brutal Intelligence specialists who labeled them as members of a “Bakuha-tai” (demolition unit), the pending invasion of Yap was scrubbed, and the group was bypassed in line with the U.S. island-hopping strategy, her 6,000 man garrison surrendering post-war.
Meanwhile, the operation to capture Palau and Peleliu (Operation Stalemate II) would kick off in mid-September.
By that time, Burrfish was already on another war patrol.
Wolfpack Nights
Following a three-week turnaround alongside the sub tender USS Sperry,Burrfish departed from Majuro for her 4th War Patrol on 18 September 1944, bound for the Bonin Islands.
The patrol would be an extended operation in two parts, conducted as an element of a Yankee Wolfpack (Coordinated Attack Group 17.24) under the overall command of CDR Thomas “Burt” Klakring, commander of SubDiv 101, who would fly his flag on USS Silversides (SS 236) as afloat commodore.
The group, unofficially dubbed “Burt’s Brooms,” included not only Silversides and Burrfish but also USS Saury (SS 189), Tambor (SS 198), Trigger (SS 237), Sterlet (SS 392), and Ronquil (SS 396). While several of the boats were very seasoned– Saury, Silversides, and Trigger were on their 11th and 12th War Patrols (and would retire from combat service at the end of the patrol) — others were decidedly green, with Ronquil and Sterlet only on their second patrols.
The first phase, which lasted 48 days in the Nansei Shoto area, saw the Burrfish claim a pre-dawn 27 October kill (not confirmed by post-war boards) on an 8,500-ton cargo ship after she fired six torpedoes into a Japanese convoy and heard three explosions.
She also survived an encounter on 30 October in which an armed vessel fired a 6-round salvo at her before she submerged and another pack member sank her attacker. It is nice to have friends.
Then came a five-day diversion (5-10 November) to Saipan to tie up next to the tender USS Fulton (AS-11), during which Klakring and all of his pack’s skippers would plan their anti-patrol boat sweep between the Bonins and Japan proper. The reason for the sweep was to sterilize the zone ahead of Halsey’s Task Force 38 which was scheduled to raid the Home Islands so that the picket boats couldn’t alert Tokyo of the approaching carriers. However, as Halsey was forced to cancel the raid due to lingering fighting over Leyte at the last minute, the subs were left holding the bag and ran the sweep as more of a dress rehearsal.
Plagued by terrible surface conditions which made torpedo attacks all but useless and gun actions more dangerous to the crews than the enemy, the 15-day/7 submarine sweep only managed to bag just four Japanese pickets as a group (15 November: Silversides sank guard boat Nachiryu Maru No. 12 while Saury bagged the guard boat Kojo Maru. 16 November: Tambor sank Taikai Maru No. 3.).
The fourth came in a surface action on 17 November 1944 Burrfish and Ronquil got in a gunfight with what turned out to be the Japanese auxiliary patrol boat Fusa Maru (177 GRT) south of Hachiro Jima, Japan. In the fight, Burrfish was hit by Japanese gunfire. Two men, Cox. H.A. Foster and S1c R.D. Lopez, were wounded.
It was a close-up affair, with the trawler within 700 yards, and Burrfish received superficial small caliber hits to her after conning tower. Ammunition expended was 9 4-inch (2 Common, 7 HC), 720 rounds of 20mm, and 500 rounds of 30.06 from her M1919s.
Meanwhile, Ronquil also suffered damage from the premature detonation of one of her 40mm Bofors shells which blew two holes in her pressure hull and required a risky topside underway repair (by her XO no less) to be able to dive again.
With Burt’s Brooms disbanded, Burrfish wrapped up her 4th War Patrol at Pearl Harbor on 2 December by tying up alongside USS Pelais, having logged some 15,700 miles across 75 days.
It was at Pearl that LCDR Perkins would depart his submarine, handing command over to LCDR M.H. Lytle, formerly of USS Sturgeon (SS 187) and with eight war patrols to his credit, just before Christmas.
USS Burrfish (SS-312) at Pearl Harbor, circa 1945. Courtesy of H. Leavitt Horton, Sr. NH 92322
Lifeguard Days
Following the Christmas and New Year holidays, Lytle took Burrfish out to sea on 3 January 1945 to begin her 5th War Patrol. She was ordered to take up station south of Japan’s Nanpo Shoto area to serve as a floating lifeguard and weather station to support B-29 raids on the Home Islands. Arriving at the station on the 23rd, she spotted her first incoming “aluminum overcast” wave that afternoon– with her SJ radar set picking up contacts as far off as 34,000 yards.
When USS Pogy (SS 266) and Ronquil entered the area the next day, Lytle, as senior officer afloat, assumed command of the three-boat wolfpack (TG 17.29) and parked astride the Hachija Shima-Chichi Jima shipping lane with the hopes of bagging something between B-29 sorties.
Unfortunately, shipping was slim and the only action Burrfish saw during the patrol was a trio of long-range (15,000 yards) Mark 18 torpedoes sent after a 300-ton Japanese patrol craft on the horizon on 11 February– for which she had to suffer a severe depth charging that required her to put in to Midway for three days of emergency repairs.
Burrfish ended her 5th War Patrol alongside USS Apollo at Guam on 24 February, having covered 8,130 miles in 52 days. ComSubPac did not authorize a Combat Insignia for the patrol.
With repairs pushing back her normal three-week turnaround cycle, Burrfish didn’t begin her 6th War Patrol until 25 March, with orders to patrol the Luzon Strait and off Formosa. A sleeper cruise, her war history notes “Thirty successive days were spent on lifeguard station for the 5th Air Force but no opportunity for rescue presented itself.”
The only “action” seen was in deep-sixing some floating mines and a derelict abandoned 40-foot sampan with her deck guns and in a pre-dawn gunfire raid on the Japanese radio station on Batan Island.
Burrfish ended her 6th war patrol at Saipan on 4 May 1945 after 65 days and 13,600 miles. ComSubPac, in its message not authorizing a Combat Insignia for the patrol, wished “better luck next time” but there would be no next time.
Sent back to her birthplace at Portsmouth Navy Yard at Kittery, Maine for a major overhaul, where she arrived in late June, she was still there when VJ Day hit.
She was decommissioned on 10 October 1946 at Sub Base New London and laid up there as part of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet.
Burrfish is listed as one of the Balaos in Jane’s 1946 entry.
Burrfish received five battle stars for her World War II service and claimed 13,600 tons across her six (three successful) patrols.
Cold War SSR Days
Recommissioned on 2 November 1948 after just two years in mothballs, she went back home to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard for conversion to a Radar Picket Submarine and was redesignated SSR-312 on 27 January 1949.
A total of ten old fleet boats were converted to SSRs under the Migraine I, II & III (SCB-12A) programs.
Burrfish Thames River, circa 1948, on the way to her SSR conversion, via Navsource. Note she has a snorkel and no guns.
Her “Migraine I” conversion included landing her 4-inch gun as well as half of her torpedo tubes and gaining a bunch of radar gear. She retained her open fairwater, with the bridge being shifted to the forward cigarette deck, and a 40 mm Bofors taking the place of her old gun in an instance of one of the final new installations of cannon on an American submarine. Only one other SSR received the Migraine I conversion, the Tench-class boat USS Tigrone (SS-419).
In this modification, the space formerly used as the crew’s mess and galley was turned into a CIC, and the after torpedo tubes were removed to allow the entire after torpedo compartment to be used for berthing. Two of the forward tubes were also eliminated to make additional room for storage and equipment. More importantly, however, the two radar antennas were raised on masts, with an AN/BPS-2 search radar sprouting from the after portion of the sail, and the height finder mounted on a free-standing tower just abaft it. This put the 15-foot search antenna some 40 feet above the water, with the height finder only a little below.
Burrfish returned to duty with the active fleet on 7 February 1950 and was assigned to Submarine Squadron 6 at Norfolk.
Burrfish broadside view during her trials as an SSR, conducted on 27 January 1950, via Navsource
Burrfish as radar picket in Med. Note that her 40mm gun has been removed by this time.
Burrfish as radar picket in Europe, French postcard, 23 May 1952. She still has her Bofors.
Between February 1950 and June 1956, she completed three lengthy deployments with the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean and “participated in several major type and inter-type exercises and operated along the eastern seaboard as a radar picket ship.” During this time she also earned an Occupation Clasp for service in the Med (29 Sep 50 – 23 Jan 51).
As part of SubDiv 62, all of the Atlantic-based radar pickets were collected including Burrfish’ old “Burt’s Brooms” buddy, Requin, two Migraine II conversions: Burrfish (SSR-312) and Tigrone (SSR-419), and the Migrane IIIs Pompon (SSR-267), Ray (SS-271), and Redfin (SSR-272) along with Sailfish.
USS Yellowstone (AD-27) in Augusta Bay, Sicily, during her Mediterranean cruise, May- October 1950. Alongside her are (l-r): USS Sea Robin (SS-407); USS Torsk ( SS-423); USS Sea Leopard (SS-483); USS Burrfish (SSR-312); USS John R. Pierce (DD-753); USS Barton (DD-722); USS Shea (DM-30). In the background is the USS Harry F. Bauer (DM-26). 80-G-428712
On 5 June 1956, with the SSR program winding down and new SSNs arriving in the fleet, Burrfish sailed from Norfolk to New London where she reported for inactivation.
She was placed out of commission, in reserve, on 17 December 1956.
Canadian Service
As we have covered prior, the Royal Canadian Navy had a series of fits and starts that included a pair of small (144-foot, 300-ton) American-built coastal boats, HMCS CC-1 and CC-2, which served in the Great War, another pair of American-made 435-ton H-class submarines (HMCS CH-14 and CH-15) which served briefly in the 1920s, and two ex-Kriegsmarine U-boats (HMCS U-190 and U-889) which served (or at least floated) for a couple years after WWII.
Looking to regrow their nascent submarine arm in 1960 after a 13-year break, the RCN inspected 10 American mothballed diesel boats and picked Burrfish with an initial five-year loan and the agreement that Ottawa would pay for the cost of reactivation and modification. It made sense as Burrfish had only been laid up at this point for three years and had already received both a snorkel and improved higher-capacity batteries in her 1949 SSR conversion.
The mission set for the new boat was to be one of an OPFOR for Canada’s very professional ASW force, with the RCN noting, “During and after the war it had been the custom of the RN to provide ‘tame’ submarines for anti-submarine training in Nova Scotia waters. By 1961, with a growing fleet of new anti-submarine ships based at Esquimalt, it had become desirable to have a submarine stationed there as well.”
She received the name HMCS Grilse (S 71)after a Great War era yacht turned fast torpedo boat and was commissioned into the RCN on 11 May 1961. Notably, while the Canadians had run six different subs prior, Grilse was the first to have an actual name rather than just a number.
HMCS Grilse. Note her “clean” appearance with SSR radars removed and no mounted guns.
H.M.C.S. Grilse – Esquimalt,BC – Aug. 22, 1966
HMCS Grilse
HMCS Grilse
HMCS Grilse
USS Burrfish SS-312 (Balao class) was loaned to Canada and commissioned as HMCS Grilse (71) on May 11th, 1961, seen here at Esquimalt with RCN WWII submarine vets aboard for a tour. Note the details of her snorkel and radar arrangement.
Keeping her slightly longer than her five-year loan, Grilse was withdrawn in December 1968, returned to U.S. Navy custody at Bremerton, and was struck from the Naval Register on 19 July 1969.
Grilse proved such a good investment for the Canadians that they sought to purchase four new Barbel-class diesel boats from the U.S., giving them two boats each at Halifax and Esquimalt, but the ever-thrifty government instead opted for a trio of British Oberon-class boats ordered from HM Royal Dockyard Chatham. These three, HMCS Ojibwa (SS 72), Onondaga (SS 73), and Okanagan (SS 74), entered Canadian service between 1965 and 1968.
On 2 December 1968, the mothballed USS Argonaut (SS 475) was sold to the RCN for $150,000 and renamed HMCS Rainbow (SS 75), named after one of the first ships ever to enter service with the Canadians back in 1910, giving the Canadian a solid four boats until 1975 when the old Tench-class fleet boat was retired, opting for an all-Oberon force until 2000.
On 19 November 1969, ex-Burrfish/Grilse was expended in a SINKEX, destroyed on the surface while under remote control by the brand new Mk 46 ASW torpedo dropped by a SH-3 Sea King helicopter off San Clemente Island in an early test of that weapon system.
November 19, 1969: HMCS Grilse submarine was sunk by USN off California
Epilogue
Neither the Americans nor the Canadians have used the names Burrfish or Grilse since our SS/SSR-312/S-71 was disposed of.
Her bell, marked Burrfish on one side and Grisle on the other, is on display at CFB Esquimalt.
Burrfish’s war history, plans, deck logs, and patrol reports are in the National Archives.
Six Balao-class submarines are preserved (for now) as museum ships across the country.
Please visit one of these fine ships and keep the legacy alive:
-USS Batfish (SS-310) at War Memorial Park in Muskogee, Oklahoma. –USS Becuna (SS-319) at Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. –USS Bowfin (SS-287) at USS Bowfin Submarine Museum & Park in Honolulu, Hawaii. –USS Lionfish (SS-298) at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts. – USS Pampanito (SS-383) at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park in San Francisco, California, (which played the part of the fictional USS Stingray in the movie Down Periscope). –USS Razorback (SS-394) at Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
Recent expeditions to Palau to help find more information about the trio were mounted by Project Recover in conjunction with the National Navy UDT -SEAL Museum. The case is personal for the Naval Special Warfare community, as it is the only combat mission ever accomplished by NSW operators where men were lost in action and their remains never recovered.
As for the rest of UDT-10, it went on to see much action in at Anguar Island, Palau, and in the Philippines before it was disestablished at Fort Pierce on 2 February 1946. It was not one of the four (UDT-11 and 12 at Coronado, 21 and 22 at Little Creek) downsized teams formed for post-war service. It was never stood back up.
Burrfish’s plank owner skipper, William Beckwith Perkins, who commanded her on her first four war patrols, and who was at her combat periscope when she sank the tanker Rossbach and fought off Fusa Maru, remained in the Navy after the war and retired as a rear admiral in 1959 after 26 years of service. Of the 465 American submarine skippers who pulled at least one war patrol, only about 60 ever managed to earn a star in the promotion-slim postwar sub force (a club he shared with Burrfish’s first XO, Talbot Harper).
Perkins passed in 1992, age 81, at Fork Union, Virginia, and is remembered as a distinguished alumni of the Fort Union Military Academy and Annapolis.
His son, who inherited his papers, has been influential in documenting the loss of the UDT men at Gagil Tomil.
Ships are more than steel and wood And heart of burning coal, For those who sail upon them know That some ships have a soul.
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Warship Wednesday (on a Thursday) Aug. 15, 2024: One Tired Hound
Library and Archives Canada MIKAN 3374382
Above we see Able Seaman Carl Carlson of the F (River) Class destroyer HMCS Qu’Appelle (H69) on 16 August 1944 mugging with one of the bulkheads of his ship that had been neatly peeled open by an enemy 88mm shell during an action against three German VP boats off Brest the month prior. The plucky tin can gave as good as she got and left her assailant at the bottom of the Bay of Biscay before she headed back across the channel.
The well-traveled Qu’Appelle had inflicted worse on the Kriegsmarine earlier in the war– but that was when she was known by a different name.
The E&F’s
Moving on from their Great War-era tin cans, the Admiralty ordered a pair of modern destroyer prototypes in 1927– HMS Amazon (1,352 tons, £319, 455) and Ambuscade (1,173 tons, £326,616), each capable of making 37 knots on superheated oil-fired steam turbine plants and armed with four old-style BL 4.7″/45 Mk I dual purpose guns and six 21-inch torpedo tubes.
The 1927 program destroyer type, of which the Royal Navy would keep in production into 1940. M0064
Further, these ships were super modern for their time and were among the first built with all-steel (rather than fabric) bridges, had a higher freeboard and improved cabin accommodations, and a larger radius of action than preceding classes. Moreover, induced ventilation could be supplied throughout the vessel, for service in the Tropics.
With a little tweak to include more torpedo tubes and newer 4.7″ guns, these became the circa 1928-29 Programme 20-ship A&B class (1,350 tons std, 328 feet oal, 35 knots, 4×4.7″, 8xtt+ depth charges), so referenced as the ships generally used names that started with As and Bs. Every 10th ship was built as a slightly larger flotilla leader with space for a commodore and staff.
This quickly followed with the minimally improved 14-ship (including two flotilla leaders) circa 1929–1931 Programme C&D class (1,375 tons std, 329 feet oal, 36 knots, 4×4.7″, 8xtt+ depth charges).
This naturally led to the 18-ship (including two flotilla leaders) circa 1931-32 Programme E&F class (1,405 tons std, 329 feet oal, 35.5 knots, 4×4.7″, 8xtt+ depth charges), which, as Worth describes, “closely resembles the D class with increased subdivision.” In short, they had an improved hull form over the preceding C&Ds and had three boiler rooms instead of two as well as other minor updates.
The RN similarly kept this incrementally improved line going with the 24-ship (including two leaders) circa 1934-35 Programme G&H class (1,370 tons std, 323 feet oal, 35.5 knots, 4×4.7″, 8xtt+ depth charges), which is beyond the scope of this post, but you can easily see the lineage of these 78 closely related interwar produced British destroyers
The E flight (Echo, Eclipse, Electra, Encounter, Escapade, Escort, Esk, Express, and flotilla leader Exmouth) and F flight (Fame, Fearless, Firedrake, Foresight, Forester, Fortune, Foxhound, Fury, and flotilla leader Faulknor) were constructed in just 26 months between March 1933 and June 1935 because contracts were placed at 10 different yards simultaneously — HM Dockyard Portsmouth, Wm Denny, Hawthorn & Leslie, Scotts, Swan Hunter, Yarrow, Parsons, Cammell Laird, J. Samuel White, and John Brown.
With a full load that approached 2,000 tons in wartime, like the rest of the A&B, C&D, and follow-on G&Hs, the E&F’s main battery was four 4.7″/45 (12 cm) Mark IX guns, arranged curiously to where they could only elevate some 40 degrees, which gave them poor AAA performance.
HMS Foxhound off Freetown, Sierra Leone in August 1943. One of the many British destroyers built during the 1930s with 4.7″/45 (12 cm) Mark IX guns. These are CPXVII mountings which allow elevations of +40 degrees. IWM Photograph A 18772.
Anti-ship punch was in the form of two quadruple 21-inch torpedo tubes on amidships turnstiles, with no reloads. The standard torpedo across all of these destroyer classes was the Mark IX, which was designed in 1928 and introduced in 1930. It carried a 750-pound warhead to 10,500 yards at 36 knots. By 1939, the updated Mark IX** which had a larger 805-pound Torpex warhead and a 15,000-yard range was the standard.
HMS Foxhound’s torpedo crew practice with fish in the tubes. In charge (in white shirt) is the Torpedo gunner. Note the Carley float and water jar lashed to the tubes to save space in the destroyer. IWM (A 18779)
Rounding out the armament for the class were two quad Vickers .50 cals (subsequently added to after 1940), two depth charge throwers, depth charge racks for 20 ash cans, and mechanical minesweeping gear. Importantly, they left the builder’s yards with a Type 121 sonar, a good set with a range of some 2,500 yards, installed.
Meet Foxhound
Our subject was the sixth in Royal Navy service to carry the “Foxhound” moniker going back to an 18-gun Cruizer-class brig-sloop during the Napoleonic Wars. As apt for the name of the small and fast English hunting dog, the Admiralty reissued the name several times in the 19th Century to swift little warships. This legacy gave her two existing battle honors (Basque Roads 1809, Dardanelles 1916) to carry forward.
The fourth and fifth HMS Foxhound, respectively, a 125-foot Forester-class 4-gun screw gunboat launched that served from 1877 through 1897 (but endured in the commercial trade on the Thames until 1975!); and a Beagle class destroyer (H16) that served in the Dardanelles with distinction during the Great War and was sold to the breakers in 1921. (IWM Q 40750 & RMG collection)
HMS Foxhound (H69) was constructed alongside sister HMS Fortune (H70) at John Brown, Clydebank, and, unlike the rest of their sisters, this pair received Brown-Curtis geared steam turbines rather than the more standard Parsons sets for no downgrade in speed (36 knots), performance (36,000shp), or range (6350nm at 15 on 471 tons of fuel oil).
Foxhound was commissioned on 6 June 1935 after a 22-month construction period, just five weeks off from her John Brown-made sister Fortune.
She was sleek and beautiful.
Foxhound H69, prewar Valentine Postcard
Foxhound, pre-war, with her glad rags flying.
Another nice prewar view of Foxhound
With the Es assigned to the Home Fleet’s 5th Destroyer Flotilla while the new Fs made up the 6th DF, Foxhound, and her sisters saw service in the tense period just before WWII, including flotilla-sized cruises to the Red Sea– where the Royal Navy was keeping tabs on the Italian invasion/occupation of Ethiopia–and off Spain where the Civil War was raging.
The Royal Navy at Gibraltar, 1938. Including elements of the Mediterranean Fleet (light grey) and the Home Fleet (dark grey). In addition to the 6 battleships (HMS Nelson, Rodney, Warspite, Malaya plus two R-class), 2 battlecruisers (Hood and Repulse), 2 carriers (Glorious and Furious), and 11 cruisers, whole flotillas of destroyers can be seen including our own Foxhound, to the right, and her shipyard twin sister Fortune, to the left. (click to big up) 5495×1295
War!
Just five months before the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Es in the 5th DF and the Fs in the 6th DF were changed on paper to the 7th and 8th Flotillas respectively.
Operating as a screen for the carrier HMS Ark Royal (91),Foxhound along with sisters HMS Faulknor and Firedrake, sent the Type IX U-boat U-39 (Kptlt. Gerhard Glattes) to the bottom on 14 September 1939 west of the Hebrides. In a case rare for what was to come, Glattes and all 43 of U-39’s crew survived the encounter and were among the first German POWs in England.
A beam view of HMS Foxhound with her war paint on. IWM (A 18777)
Foxhound soon became very well-traveled.
Besides 14 convoy runs between the time she joined Halfax-to Clyde TC 01 in December 1939 and left MKF 022 in September 1943, including the vital Suez to Sydney Pamphlet convoy in February 1943 that carried 30,000 Australian troops back home from Egypt once the Japanese entered the war, our little destroyer seemed to be everywhere.
Foxhound H69
She was in Norway, harassing German shipping early in the war in Operation SK and looking for the seized American merchant vessel SS City of Flint (which a German prize crew from the pocket battleship Deutschland sailed to then-neutral Murmansk).
Masthead look-out of HMS Foxhound goes aloft in sou’wester and oilskin. IWM (A 18778)
She was with the force, centered around HMS Rodney, that chased the battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst in February 1940. Later that year, in December, she would search for the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper. She was also in the great Hunt for the Bismarck in May 1941, screening the carrier HMS Ark Royal.
She took part in Operation Du, a cruiser-destroyer anti-shipping raid into the Skagerrak in which Foxhound chased down several vessels– which all turned out to belong to neutrals.
Foxhound underway IWM FL 13264
Foxhound returned to Norway in early April 1940, where on the 13th she took part in the second Battle of Narvik where nine British destroyers, supported by Swordfish from the aircraft carrier HMS Furious and the offshore guns of the battleship Warspite, ended the Kriegsmarine’s plans for U-64 (the first sunk by aircraft), and eight desperately needed German destroyers, all of which were sunk or scuttled by the end of the day.
Foxhound rescued 11 survivors of the destroyer Erich Giese Z12 from the freezing water that day but two would succumb to their injuries.
Kriegsmarine Zerstörer Z19 Hermann Künne on fire in Trollvika, 13. April 1940
Burning wreck of the destroyer Erich Giese (Z12) 13. April 1940
In June 1940, with the fall of France imminent, Foxhound found herself in Gibraltar as an escort for Ark Royal and battlecruiser HMS Hood. On 26 June, the carrier, battlecruiser, and their hounds were sent towards the Canaries looking for the curiously missing French battlewagon Richelieu, which eventually made for Dakar in the French West African colony of Senegal.
With relations deteriorating with the now kind-of-out-of-the-war French, Foxhound soon found herself with VADM Somerville’s strong Force H off the French Force de Raid’s Algerian anchorage at Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940 (Operation Catapult).
In this, Foxhound, with Capt. C.S. Holland, of the Ark Royal (formerly Naval Attaché at Paris) along with two other officers recently employed as liaisons with the French fleet, was detailed to sail forward and parley with VADM Marcel-Bruno Gensoul. When negotiations fell through, Somerville ordered the shameful bombardment of the anchored French ships, a one-sided gunfight that left 1,300 French sailors dead. Sadly, Foxhound was close enough to see it all– observers in her motorboat recorded the fall of shell– although she suffered no damage.
French battleship Bretagne, on fire and visibly low by the stern, at Mers-el-Kébir, 3 July 1940
She continued to fight against the Vichy with Operation Ration in which Foxhound and four other destroyers intercepted the Casablanca-to-Oran French convoy K 5 in 30 December 1940. They seized the cargo liner Chantilly (9986 GRT), tanker Octane (2034 GRT), and freighters Suroit (554 GRT) and Sally Maersk (3252 GRT), sailing with them back to Gibraltar. K5’s sole escort, the armed trawler La Touilonnaise (425 GRT) offered no resistance and was allowed to continue to North Africa, sans convoy.
Foxhound sailed on several Malta relief missions (Operations Hurry and Operation White in 1940, Operations Splice, Tracer, Railway, and Rocket in 1941), escorting carriers bringing Hurricane fighters and Skua bombers to the embattled island as well as other runs in the Med.
For help fighting off Italian and German bombers, Foxhound and almost all of her remaining sisters had four Oerlikon and a 3-inch/45 QF Mk I AAA installed in place of their quad Vickers .50 mount and one set of torpedo tubes. They also picked up Type 271 Air Search and Type 286/M/P radars.
In February 1941, she helped screen the battlewagons HMS Renown and Malaya, along with the cruiser HMS Sheffield, during Operation Grog, the bombardment of Genoa that left four Italian cargo ships sunk in the harbor.
On 18 June 1941, Foxhound, along with sisters HMS Faulknor, Fearless, Forester, and Foresight, bagged her second U-boat of the war, Oblt. Franz Gramitzky’s Type IID U-138, which was sunk just west of Gibraltar off Cadiz, Spain. Like U-39 prior, Gramitzky and all his crew were saved by the British destroyers, then dutifully interrogated and placed in a POW camp for the duration.
By March 1942, Foxhound was assigned to the Eastern Fleet operating in the Indian Ocean to blunt the sortie of the 1st Japanese Carrier Fleet. She would remain in the region for over a year, operating from Colombo to Durban to Bombay to Aden on convoy support missions, adding such exotic ports as Kilindini, Diego Suarez, and Mombasa to that list.
Foxhound H69 IWM A 18776
Recalled to the Atlantic in May 1943, she sailed back home by working slow long-range convoys as part of West Africa Command to Freetown and Gibraltar, finally arriving at Rosyth three months later.
Foxhound, LAC 3199021
She then put into Humber for a refit as an anti-submarine escort destroyer that would see one of her 4.7-inch guns landed to make room for a 24-cell Hedgehog ASW RL device, two more K-gun depth charge throwers, and another 70 depth charges (for a total of 125!). She was also to receive a Type 291 air-warning radar and an American SG-1 surface-search radar, along with a Type 144 sonar.
By August 1943, Foxhound had tallied some 240,000nm since the beginning of the war, ranging from the Bay of Bengal to Iceland and back. This brought an Admiralty photographer to the ship at Sheerness to document the “fine fighting record” of this hardy little vessel and her U-boat-busting crew.
The Quartermaster sounding “eight bells” on the Foxhound’s bell while at Sheerness. Note the Fox’s brush hanging from the clapper. It was presented by one of her officers. August 1943 IWM A 18775
An officer of HMS Foxhound, a South African, watching a British port come into sight as the destroyer completed her 240,000 miles of record steaming. IWM (A 18774)
While in British service, our little hound earned five battle honors (Atlantic 1939-41, Narvik 1940, Norway 1940, Malta Convoys 1941, and Mediterranean 1941).
Canadian Service
To help make good on the loss of the Canadian destroyers HMCS Fraser (H48), Margaree (H49), and Ottawa (H60) earlier in the war, the Admiralty decided in the summer of 1943 to transfer three (very well-used) E&Fs.
These ships included HMS Express (H61) and the shipyard sisters Fortune and Foxhound. The trio, in line with Canadian naming conventions, took on North American river names and became, respectively, HMCS Gatineau,HMCS Saskatchewan,and Qu’Appelle while retaining the same pennant/hull numbers.
HMCS Qu’Appelle (H69), fresh from her refit, was commissioned in the RCN on 8 February 1944.
HMCS Qu’Appelle, 1944, with her new Western Approaches style camo scheme. LAC 3921890
Soon after she was assigned to Escort Group 12, which was forming up in the Channel ports for the planned Overlord/Neptune invasion of Normandy in June. Foxhound spent the next three months in a series of ASW exercises off Tobermoy and Lough Foyle.
EG 11 and EG 12 were “all Canadian” in makeup and would patrol off Falmouth and Lands End to the deep water curve off the Brittany Coast on D-Day and immediately after.
While supporting the landings on D+2, on 08 June 1944, Qu’Appelle was reportedly attacked Gnats from U-953 (Oblt Karl-Heinz Marbach) with the acoustic torpedoes exploding in the ship’s wake leaving with no damage to the destroyer.
U-953 and a second German boat stalked EG 12 ruthlessly but without joy due to defective torpedoes, as detailed in Normandy 1944: The Canadian Summer:
Lieutenant Commander Alan Easton RCNR, the commanding officer of EG-12’s HMCS Saskatchewan [ex-HMS Fortune] recalled in his memoir, 50 North, that the evening of 7 June was like a “summer excursion” as the group patrolled northeast of Ushant: The four of us were gliding along in line abreast, listening for the sound of U-boats beneath the quiet sea. It was like drawing a net through the water, stretched tightly between the ships, so that it would snag the big fish while letting through the small unwanted ones. But the net did not always hang down as it should temperature gradients sometimes interfered with it.
In the late evening, however, “a low rumble was heard, the unmistakable sound of an underwater explosion.” Presuming it to be a torpedo hitting the bottom or exploding prematurely, EG-12 searched but saw or heard nothing else. An hour later a violent blast shook Saskatchewan, and 70 meters off the ship’s port quarter “a solid column of water shot a hundred feet in the air “when a torpedo exploded just before reaching the destroyer.
By the grace of “a miracle,” in Easton’s words, “this fast-moving, fish-like machine had self-triggered when only four seconds short of wreaking havoc in the bowels of its target.” As the destroyers continued to hunt through the night and the following morning, two other torpedoes exploded close by while another narrowly missed Skeena.
Easton described his frustration:
Where was the enemy who was so persistently endeavoring to sink us? Where were the other U-boats? We had not the slightest idea except that we knew the one who attacked us was probably within a mile or so. The ASDIC could pick up nothing except useless echoes. It was extremely aggravating.
On D+12, Foxhound, with sister Fortune/Saskatchewan and fellow Canuk tin cans HMCS Restigouche and HMCS Skeena, escorted the battleship HMS Anson from Scapa Flow to Plymouth, the latter on her first leg to head to the Pacific.
By July, the primary Kriegsmarine assets in the Bay of Biscay were 50~ Vorpostenboote (Outpost Boats) of 7. Vorpostenflotille, armed trawlers typically equipped with an 8.8cm Flak or two as well as some smaller guns and some primitive chain-based minesweeping gear. They screened the remaining U-boats in Brest whenever they came and went.
Your typical Vorpostenboot, of which the Germans fielded hundreds. Bild 27479778312
Foxhound and her three fellow Canuk DDs, as part of Operation Dredger in the Bay of Biscay off the Pierres Noires lighthouse on the night of 5/6 July, scrapped it out with three German VP-boats that were trying to escort U-741 out to sea. The running battle left V 715 (Alfred I) sunk and V 721 (Neubau 308) crippled and beached. U-741 would be chased down and sunk by British destroyers a month later. Both Saskatchewan and Qu’Appelle caught hits from the VP boats but suffered no casualties. Radar-equipped destroyers vs armed trawlers is almost a predetermined outcome.
By late July, Qu’Appelle was assigned to Operation Kinetic, a plan to ramp up the blockade of the Bay of Biscay by ending the semi-regular German coastal convoys off the west coast of Brittany between Brest and La Rochelle.
As part of Kinetic, on the night of 10/11 August 1944, Qu’appelle, along with Skeena, Restigouche, and HMCS Assiniboine, dismantled a German convoy in Audierne Bay near Brest. Those sunk included the Vorpostenboot V-720 (Neubau 720/307) while two trawlers were forced ashore by a burning farmhouse and the ersatz minesweeper Sperrbrecher 157 (1,425 tons) limped off only to be sunk three days later by the light cruiser HMS Mauritius. However, in the confusion of the running night surface action fought in shallow waters at close range, Skeena’s bow collided with Qu’Appelle’s stern as the Canadian destroyers retired.
This photograph shows the damage to the destroyer HMCS Qu’appelle after a collision with HMCS Skeena during a night-time battle off the French coast. Sailors, including one standing within the ship’s hull (lower right), examine the damage. George Metcalf Archival Collection. CWM 19830436-011
Personnel examining the damaged tiller flat of HMCS Qu’Appelle (H69), England, 16 August 1944 LAC 3596854
Following repair, Foxhound arrived “home” in Canada for the first time on 29 November 1944 when she arrived at Halifax. Sent to Pictou for refit in preparation for service in the Far East, she emerged again on 31 March 1945.
Rather than ship out for the Pacific, Qu’Appelle served as a troop transport on four trips between Greenock and Halifax, bringing Canadian forces back from Europe, and, post-VJ-Day, was paid off on 11 October 1945.
By the 1946 Jane’s, Saskatchewan/Fortune had already been disposed of and the E&Fs in RCN service were listed as the “Gatineau class.”
Broadside view of the snow-dusted HMCS Qu’Appelle (H69) 28 February 1947, likely with HMCS U-190 alongside. In October 1947, the Canadian Navy sank U-190 as a target during Operation Scuttled, a live-fire naval exercise off Halifax. LAC 3209066
Added to the disposal list on 12 Jul 1947, Qu’Appelle was sold later that year for breaking up at Sydney, NS.
HMCS Qu’Appelle earned three battle honors (Atlantic 1944, Normandy 1944, and Biscay 1944) while in Canadian service, adding to her five battle honors earned with the RN earlier in the war.
Epilogue
Some relics of Qu’Appelle endure in Canada, including her 1944 marked bell that she carried off Normandy and in the Biscay blockade. It is preserved at the CFB Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum.
While she has “Qu’Appelle” on the front, it is the destroyer’s original bell, and still says “Foxhound 1935” on the reverse side.
Speaking of which, the Canadians recycled her name for a Cold War-era Mackenzie-class destroyer escort (DDE 264) who, in a salute to the old Foxhound, carried an insignia and logo was the head of a fox. She also utilized the old WWII H69’s bell.
HMCS Qu’Appelle (DDE 264) was in service with the RCN from 1963 until 1992, almost all of it in the Pacific.
After DDE-264 was gone, the name was used for the Royal Canadian Sea Cadets Summer Training Centre and is still retained by the Cadet’s Manitoba division as the Qu’Appelle River meets the Assiniboine River in Manitoba.
Of Foxhound/Qu’Appelle’s 17 E&F class sisters, ten were lost during the war: Exmouth, Eclipse, Electra, Encounter, Escort, Esk, Fearless, Firedrake, Foresight, and Fury, with the Germans, Italians, and Japanese all accounting for the job. Post-war, besides the three sent to Canada, Fame was sold to the Dominican Republic, and Echo was loaned to Greece. All in Commonwealth service were scrapped by 1947 while the Greek and Dominican sisters endured until 1956 and 1968 when their runs were terminated.
Korvettenkapitän Gerhard Glattes, the skipper of U-39 which Foxhound and company bagged in September 1939, spent more than seven and a half years as a POW, only being released in April 1947. His stint was the second longest imprisonment of any U-boat commander, beaten only (by one day) by Kptlt. Günther Lorentz of U-63 (Busch and Röll, 1999). The three torpedoes Glattes fired at Ark Royal— which had no hits– were his only shots of the war. Glattes returned to a very different Germany and passed in 1986, aged 77. He had been preceded in death by U-138’s Kptlt. Gramitzky, who only served five years as a POW passed in Germany in 1978.
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