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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2023: Weaving the Falls

Above we see a circa 1941 image of a Royal Canadian Navy officer aboard the 4th group Town class destroyer HMCS Niagara (I57) making his bunk with a very interestingly camouflaged Mk I “battle bowler” style helmet at the ready. As for the U.S. Navy crest on a bunk cover?

There is a good reason for that, one that goes back 105 years ago this week.

The Wickes

Our ship was one of the iconic first flights of “Four Piper” destroyers that were designed in 1915-16 with input from no less an authority as Captain (later Admiral) W.S. Sims. Beamy ships with a flush deck and a quartet of boilers (with a smokestack for each) were coupled to a pair of Parsons geared turbines to provide 35.3 knots designed speed– which is still considered fast today, more than a century later.

The teeth of these 314-foot, 1,250-ton greyhounds were four 4-inch/50 cal MK 9 guns and a full dozen 21-inch torpedo tubes.

They reportedly had short legs and were very wet, which made long-range operations a problem, but they gave a good account of themselves. Originally a class of 50 was authorized in 1916, but once the U.S. entered WWI in April 1917, this was soon increased and increased again to some 111 ships built by 1920.

Of the 111 Wickes completed, there were three subclasses besides the 38 standard-design vessels built at Bath Iron Works, Cramp, Mare Island, and Charleston. Then came the 52 Bethlehem-designed ships built at the company’s Fore River (26 ships) and Union Iron Works (26 ships) led by USS Little, the Newport News-built variants (11 ships) starting with USS Lamberton, and New York Shipbuilding-built variants (10 ships) led by USS Tattnall.

The subclasses were constructed to a slightly different set of plans modified by their respective builders, which made for some downright confusing modifications later. In addition, the Bethlehem-designed Little variants tended to have shorter legs and proved unable to cross the Atlantic in a single hop without stopping in the Azores for refueling or completing an underway replenishment.

Anyway…

Meet Thatcher

Our subject was the first warship commissioned to honor RADM Henry Knox Thatcher, USN. Born in 1806, this grandson of Maj. Gen. Henry Knox (George Washington’s artillery master) was first appointed to West Point in 1822 then, after being out sick and resigning, subsequently received an appointment as a midshipman with the Navy the following March at age 16, spending the next four years at sea aboard the frigate USS United States in the Pacific. Then came a string of seagoing assignments as a junior officer in the antebellum period (schooner Porpoise, sloops Erie and Jamestown, frigates Delaware and Brandywine, storeship Relief) before earning his first command, that of the sloop Decatur in 1857.

The Civil War saw him promoted to captain and later commodore, commanding the sloop Constellation in European waters, the screw frigate Colorado with the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, and a division of Porter’s squadron against Fort Fisher. The war ended with him in command of the Western Gulf Squadron tasked with the reduction of Spanish Fort and Blakeley– the last two holdouts in Mobile Bay– then accepting the surrender of Sabine Pass and Galveston, the last rebel ports.

Appropriately, USS Thatcher (Destroyer No. 162) was laid down on 8 June 1918 by Fore River at Quincy, Massachusetts; launched 105 years ago this week on 31 August 1918 sponsored by Miss Doris Bentley, the grandniece of RADM Thatcher; and, too late for the Great War, was commissioned on 14 January 1919, with LCDR Francis Warren Rockwell (USNA 1908)– a Navy Cross holder for his time on the destroyer USS Winslow (DD-53) during WWI and future VADM who later commanded the 16th Naval District in the Philippines at the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific— as her first seagoing skipper.

In all, USS Thatcher’s construction only lasted just 220 days, a wonder of wartime shipbuilding.

Her active-duty U.S. Naval career was correspondingly short, spanning just 40 months but she was part of the support group for the pioneering NC-4 flying boat crossing of the Atlantic in May 1919.

Transferred to the Pacific in the autumn of 1921, Thatcher operated out of San Diego, conducting exercises and training cruises off the West Coast with reduced manning (her last three skippers were ensigns and LTJGs) until decommissioned there on 7 June 1922.

She would sway quietly along with others of her kind in the California mothball fleet for another 17 years.

Brought back to life

With war coming again to Europe, Thatcher was recommissioned at San Diego on 18 December 1939, then transferred to the Atlantic the following spring after shakedowns and workups.

Transiting the Panama Canal on 1 April 1940, just before the German blitzkrieg against France and the Low Countries, Thatcher conducted Neutrality Patrols and training cruises off the east coast and in the Gulf of Mexico through the summer of 1940.

Headed to serve the King

With Europe again at war, on 2 September 1940, FDR signed the so-called Destroyers for Bases Agreement that saw a mix of 50 (mostly mothballed) Caldwell (3), Wickes (27), and Clemson (20)-class destroyers transferred to the Royal Navy in exchange for limited basing rights on nine British overseas possessions. Canada would receive seven of these ships including five Wickes, doubling the number of destroyers in the Canadian Navy in days. 

In respect of Canada’s naming tradition for destroyers, all seven RCN flush deckers were named for Canadian rivers, ideally, those that ran in conjunction with the U.S. border, a nice touch. Thatcher, therefore, became HCMS Niagra, so named after the river that becomes the Falls in New York.

Sailed by scratch USN crews from Philadelphia, Thatcher and five of her sisters arrived at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 20 September 1940, the third group of the “flush deckers” transferred.  

Decommissioned from the U.S. Navy on 24 September 1940, Thatcher was renamed HMCS Niagara (I57) and, headed for a refit for RN service by HM Dockyard Devonport, departed Halifax on 30 November; proceeded eastward via St. John’s, Newfoundland where she joined Convoy HX 080 as an escort on 10 December.

She wasn’t struck from the U.S. Navy List until 8 January 1941.

Besides HX 080, she would ride shotgun with no less than 13 Atlantic convoys in 1941 as part of the Newfoundland Escort Force (NEF), 17 in 1942, 16 in 1943, and one in 1944 for a total of 48 wartime convoy runs.

During this service, she was often a lifesaver, for instance escorting the battered Danish merchantman Triton into Belfast in January 1942, rescuing the survivors of the American merchantman SS Independence Hall two months later, then picking up 12 shaken survivors from the sunken steamer SS Rio Blanco, which had been torpedoed by U-160 in April; followed by 8 survivors from the Norwegian tanker Kollskegg that sent to the bottom by U-754.

Harold William John Tomlin, a Royal Navy official photographer, took a series of detailed shots of the (reserve) officers and crew of HMCS Niagara in action, likely in 1941, and they are preserved in the collections of the Imperial War Museum.

U-570

Niagara’s most famous exploit was in the capture of U-570, a low-mileage German Type VIIC boat operating out of Trondheim, in August 1941.

After being damaged by depth charges from a British Hudson aircraft (269 Sqn RAF/S) in the North Atlantic south of Iceland and surfacing showing a white bed sheet on her tower, Niagara and the destroyer HMS Burwell (H 94)— another destroyer for bases vessel, formerly the Clemson-class four-piper USS Laub (DD-263)— together with a quartet of armed trawlers– HMT Kingston Agate, Northern Chief, Westwater and Windermere— were dispatched to the scene, arriving the next morning.

Taking off 43 Germans under the bizarre Kptlt. Hans-Joachim Rahmlow, just seven days into his first war patrol, then installing a prize crew aboard, the trawlers took turns towing the damaged U-boat to Thorlakshafn, Iceland where she was beached, and very thoroughly inspected, detailed plans of her forwarded across all Allied channels.

While Rahmlow had managed to jettison the boat’s the boat’s Enigma machine and codebooks, an officer from HMS Burwell retrieved documents with plain language and enciphered messages which helped the British to read Enigma messages.

Further, the boat was in fine shape with British inspectors noting, “Internally the damage was negligible and consisted mostly of a few broken gauges, gauge glasses, and light fittings probably caused by the depth charges and also by ignorantly conceived attempts to destroy various fittings.” Her motors, engines and pumps, compressors, auxiliaries, etc., appeared to be undamaged and battery compartments dry and sound.

The swashbuckling pistol-wearing skipper of Niagara, LT Thomas P (“Two-Gun”) Ryan, OBE, RCN, a Great War minesweeper veteran, one-time mercenary in South America, and a former police inspector in Ireland, conducted the initial interrogations of the captured German POWs, who were relieved to be (in their understanding) headed to a much quieter life in Canada.

Formal RN interrogators cited U-570’s crews’ shocking lack of experienced hands, noting, “The chief petty officers, and to a lesser extent, some of the petty officers, expressed great concern at the inadequacy of the training and the lack of U-Boat experience, not only of the men but also of the officers and petty officers; no attempt was made to disguise the incompetence of the crew and the officers were severely criticized by all the men.”

U-570 became the British submarine HMS Graph on 5 October 1941 and, as the first operational German U-boat under Allied control– the more famous Type IXC U-505 wasn’t captured by the U.S. Navy until June 1944 — was key to understanding the tactics that would go on to win the Battle of the Atlantic.

Importantly, the U-570/Graph was the only U-boat to see active service with both sides during the war, sent back out for her first Royal Navy war patrol on 8 October 1942.

Back to the war…

Niagara served and served hard, the unforgiving life of a tiny and aging greyhound in the North Atlantic. Suffering from structural weakness and with her boilers worn out, coupled with the fact that other, more modern escort ships were joining the fleet and needed crews, by March 1944 she was pulled from frontline service.

She continued to serve as Torpedo Branch training ship at Halifax throughout 1944 and, shifting to St. John, New Brunswick the following year, would endure in this important service.

Paid off and placed on the Disposal List on 15 September 1945, Niagara was sold to International Iron and Steel for demolition on 27 May 1946 then taken in tow to Hamilton where she arrived at the Breaker’s Yard on 12 December 1947.

Epilogue

The old HMCS Niagara is well remembered by the Royal Canadian Navy Historical Project, For Posterity’s Sake.

Her wartime replacement bell (the original USS Thatcher bell was retained by the U.S. Navy, disposition unknown) has for some time been in the Niagara Falls Museum.

As for the U.S. Navy, a second USS Thatcher, a Fletcher-class destroyer (DD-514), was built at Bath in Maine– just miles from where RADM Thatcher was born– and commissioned on 10 February 1943. She was rushed to the Pacific– helping to sink the Japanese destroyer Hatsukaze during the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay in November 1943– and earned 12 battle stars for World War II service.

There has not been a third USS Thatcher.

As for the name HMCS Niagara, the Royal Canadian Navy’s liaison base as part of the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C. was known as the shore establishment HMCS Niagara from 1951 to 1965.

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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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