Category Archives: warship wednesday

Big Rick off Sumatra

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Some 80 years ago today, the curious shot of the mighty (Free) French battleship Richelieu, sailing as part of the British Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean, slewing her pointing her over-bored 380 mm/45 (14.96″) Model 1936 guns at Japanese-occupied Sabang (Sumatra) in the Dutch East Indies during Operation Crimson, 25 July 1944.

The Crimson operation, Task Force 62, had a three-hit punch that day:

First, built around two British carriers (HMS Illustrious and HMS Victorious) each filled with Corsairs, strafed and mutilated the Japanese airfields around Sabang.

Meanwhile, a bombardment group— battleships HMS Queen Elizabeth, HMS Valiant, Richelieu, battlecruiser HMS Renown, heavy cruiser HMS Cumberland, light cruisers HMS Nigeria, HMS Kenya, HMS Ceylon, HMNZS Gambia and the destroyers HMS Rotherham, HMS Relentless, HMS Racehorse, HMS Rocket and HMS Rapid, lit of some 1,300 shells (294 – 15″, 134 – 8″, 324 – 6″, ca. 500 – 4.7″ and 123 – 4″).

Finally, a daring little surface action group made up of the destroyer-sized Free Dutch cruiser HrMs Tromp and the destroyers HMS Quilliam, HMS Quality, and HMAS Quickmatch, entered Sabang harbor for a high-speed shoot-up.

In all, Crimson cost just two Allied lives: a war correspondent killed on Quality and a petty officer on Quilliam, both due to hits from Japanese coastal batteries.

Richelieu, who escaped German capture or British destruction immediately after the fall of the Second Republic in June 1940 with only 296 shells to her name (and 198 quarter charges), served the Vichy French in colonial African ports– ruining three of her guns in the Battle of Dakar against the British in November 1940– until November 1942 when said ports went over o the Allies.

Her sister, the incomplete Jean Bart, famously lost an artillery duel with the USS Massachusetts at Casablanca and, using her guns, American shipyards were able to (sort of) get Richelieu back in the fight, specially making some 900 shells and providing Navy multi-tube SPD charges.

Richelieu, after she arrived in New York Harbor for repairs and refitting, on February 11, 1943, note her wrecked turret. 80-G-40855

The refurbished Richelieu aerial port, off New York Harbor, New York, August 26, 1943. 80-G-78789

As detailed by Navweaps:

During Richelieu’s refit in the USA in 1943, her three ruined guns were replaced by guns removed from Jean Bart’s Turret I. It is apparently untrue that Richelieu’s guns were bored out to 15.0″ (38.1 cm) during this time, as French records indicate that they remained at 380 mm (14.96″). Sometime after this refit, new APC projectiles designed to meet French specifications were specially built for her by the Crucible Steel Company of America.

“The US designed-and-manufactured APC projectiles were externally identical to the French design and weighed the same, with the exact same cavity shape and percentage. The base fuze was the US Mark 21 BDF. The filler was Explosive “D”, not TNT. The base plug was the standard US Navy design, as was its threaded sides and other details. The biggest visual difference in the blueprints between the US and original French APC projectiles was that the AP cap and nose shape was that of the US Navy 14″ Mark 16 Mod 8 AP projectile: Oval nose under the cap and a flat-tipped-cone-faced, moderately thick, moderately hard (circa 555 Brinell maximum) AP cap with the windscreen threaded to near its softened (circa 225 Brinell) lower skirt edge just above the forward bourrelet, not at the maximum-hardness upper-face edge as with most foreign and later US Navy AP shells (even the 14″ Mark 16 MOD 10 AP shells had the new-model, short-windscreen AP caps late in World War II). This odd-ball late-1930’s US Navy standard cap and windscreen design allowed the windscreen-holding threads to be cut into softer metal — less expensive — and made the windscreen several inches longer than later designs (also slightly heavier, of course); there was a narrow gap between the inside of the lower windscreen and the slightly-narrowed AP cap side above the threaded area. The caps were soldered on with a ring of 8 (I think) shallow pits in the nose at the bottom edge of the cap having the cap edge bent into them (forming “dimples”), reinforcing the solder; identical to the US AP cap attachment method. The windscreen might have had the plugged cut-outs for an internal dye bag used in US World War II large-caliber AP projectile to allow water to ram though the windscreen on water impact and dye the splash, but I am not certain; it most certainly did not use the French “K” dye-bag design.”

Warship Wednesday, July 24, 2024: To the Sea, to the World

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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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, July 24, 2024: To the Sea, to the World

Official U.S. Navy Photograph, from the Naval History and Heritage Command collections. Catalog #: NH 97002

Above we see khaki-clad officers of the newly-formed Republic of Korean Navy standing by as their country’s first large warship, the PC-461-class subchaser Baekdusan (also seen as Bak Dusan, Bak Du San, Pak Tu San, and Paktusan) (PC-701) has her teeth installed– a 3″/50 DP gun– at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, March 1950.

Bought via subscription and a tax on the service’s sailors (!) she would soon sail into harm’s way and the history books.

The PC-461 Class

Designed to provide a beefy little sub-buster– similar to Britain’s corvettes and sloops– that could float in shallow enough water (10-foot draft) to perform coastal operations but still have enough sea-keeping abilities and range (4,800 nm at 12 knots) to escort cross-ocean convoys without needing the same anti-ship capabilities as found on patrol frigates and destroyer escorts, the Navy ordered some 400 small submarine chasers based on a modified design of one of the pre-war Experimental Small Craft program’s “X-boats” the diesel-powered USS PC-451.

USS PC-451 was designed in 1938 and commissioned on 12 August 1940. Some 173 feet long, the 270-ton steel hulled diesel-powered subchaser could carry two 3″/50 DP guns, six 20mm guns, two Mk 20 Mousetrap projectors, two depth charge racks, and two K-gun depth charge throwers, all while making nearly 19 knots and just requiring a 65-man crew.

The follow-on PC-461 went a bit heavier and, carrying twin 1,440 bhp diesel engines, could break 22 knots (when clean) and tote essentially the same armament, and ship out with QHA sonar (as well as small set SF or SO or SCR-517A radars after 1942).

PC-461 was laid down in July 1941– just five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor– and eventually, some 343 of her class would be constructed by March 1945 across 13 small shipyards, all non-traditional to the Navy.

Camouflage Measure 32, Design 12P drawing prepared by the Bureau of Ships for a camouflage scheme intended for application to 173-foot submarine chasers (labeled on the drawing as PC-578 class). This plan, approved by Captain Torvald A. Solberg, USN, is dated 19 July 1944. It shows the ship’s starboard side, exposed decks, and the superstructure ends. 19-N-73643

USS PC-483 is underway in a Navy Kodachrome. Note the ship’s camouflage pattern. 80-GK-00428_001

USS PC-546 underway off the U.S. East Coast, circa 1942. Interestingly, these ships carried a false stack, as the diesel exhaust was routed through the hull sides. 80-G-K-13278

USS PC-546 from the stern.

Another stern shot of the 546 boat, note her thin 23-foot beam, welded hull, and already thinning hull black applied in a rush, sloppy fashion.

USS PC-472 underway near Hampton Roads, Virginia, 31 August 1942. Note her armament layout including a 3″/50 forward, another aft, two 20mm Oerlikons on the bridge wings, two stern DC racks, and two K guns. NH 96481

The PC-461s were some of the smallest U.S. Navy ships to carry a legit sonar listening set.

Undergoing a course of instruction with Naval sonar equipment aboard the USS PC 592 are two Naval Reservists, Seaman First Class F.C. Semkin and Apprentice Seaman G.S. Jackson, Naval Base, SC. Accession #: L55-03

Depth Charges (probably Mk. 6 type) mounted on a “K-gun” projector, and on ready service holders, on the stern of a 173-foot submarine chaser (pc). Taken at the sub-chaser training center, Miami, Florida, 11 May 1942. Note depth charge racks in the background. 80-G-16048

Depth Charge explodes in the wake of a U.S. Navy submarine chaser (PC) during World War II. The photo was taken before April 1944. The 173s could carry as many as 30 depth charges, with a cumulative “throw” of some 5 tons of high explosives. 80-G-K-13753

Submarine chasers and crew. (PC-483, 461, 466), Key West. As the number of AAA guns expanded, crews would grow to as many as 80 officers and enlisted, against a planned complement of 65. 80-GK-00427_001

A motor whaleboat was carried amidships along with a small crane to launch and recover it.

USS PC-620 is seen in Key West in this LIFE Kodachrome. Note her whaleboat, crane, after 3″/50, and depth charges galore.

“Easy Does It!” Crewmen of A 173-foot submarine Chaser (PC) stowing their craft’s dory, after hoisting it from the water, circa 1942. Note Camouflage paint on the boat. The photo was received from the Third Naval District on 17 May 1943. 80-G-K-16426

The PC-461s ranged far and wide, seeing service in every theatre. Four (PC 566, PC 565, PC 624, and PC 619) claimed kills on German U-boats, two (PC 487 and PC 1135) with sinking Japanese fleet boats, three (PC 558, PC 626, and PC 477) with scratching German and Japanese midget subs, two (PC 545 and PC 627) with killing Italian torpedo boats, and two (PC 1129 and PC 1123) with stopping Japanese suicide boats.

“USS PC 565 shown a short time after sinking German U-boat, U-521, with a depth charge, only the Commanding Officer escaped. The vessel fell away from his feet as he climbed out of the conning tower, June 2, 1943.” 80-G-78408

When it comes to the butcher’s bill, six PC-461 class sisters were lost to a combination of enemy action and accidents during WWII while another 24 were seriously damaged.

Meet PC-823

Laid down by the Leathern D. Smith Shipbuilding Company, Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, on 8 November 1943, USS PC-823 was launched the following January and commissioned on 24 July 1944. The yard was very busy, cranking out Type N3 and Type C1 Liberty ships, Tacoma-class patrol frigates, and net layers besides 42 PC-461s.

Smith Shipbuilding in 1944, with at least eight PCs under varying stages of construction. Today the yard is run by the Fincantieri Marine Group and builds LCSs and the Navy’s new Constellation-class frigates. (Photo: Andy Laurent, Greenbay Route)

PC-843, early after her commissioning, likely still on the Great Lakes in the summer of 1944. via the Historical Collections of the Great Lakes.

War!

Assigned to the western Atlantic during the tale-end of World War II, apparently assigned to air-sea rescue duties, PC-823 doesn’t have a page in DANFS nor any war diaries/history on file with the NARA, but it is known that she was in Bermuda on VJ Day.

She did not earn any battle stars and was decommissioned on 11 February 1946, custody transferred to the Maritime Commission for further use, while retained on the Navy List.

King’s Point

With the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at King’s Point on Long Island losing the series of loaned tall ships it had used for training during the war, the low-mileage PC-823 was disarmed, painted a gleaming white and transferred on 18 May 1948 for use as a training ship.

Rather than pick up the now-traditional name of TS Kings Pointer, she was instead re-named Ensign Whitehead, in honor of one of the alumni of the USMMA who had been lost during the war while serving with the Navy.

Via the King’s Point Alumni Association:

The Wall of Honor includes the name of Fredrick Cowper Whitehead, Jr., a Kings Pointer who graduated on December 24, 1943. Soon after graduation, he was sworn in as an Ensign, USNR. On January 27, 1944, he was assigned to the USS Lansdale (DD 426), currently operating in the Mediterranean. Whitehead reported aboard the Lansdale on March 26 in Oran. The ship was serving as a convoy escort with radio jamming equipment intended to thwart German radio-guided bombs.

On April 20, about two dozen German bombers attacked the convoy. The bombs and torpedoes hit the SS Paul Hamilton. Silhouetted by the explosion of the SS Paul Hamilton, the Lansdale became the target of the second and third wave of bombers. The torpedoes struck the Lansdale in the starboard engine room, where Whitehead was on watch. The ship ultimately foundered and the Captain ordered the crew to abandon ship. A count of the survivors showed 47 men, including Fredrick Whitehead Jr., as missing and presumed dead.

Ensign Whitehead, USNR was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the European-African-Middle East Area Campaign Medal. Based on his service as a Cadet/Midshipman, he was also awarded the Atlantic War Zone Bar, the Mediterranean-Middle East War Zone Bar, the Victory Medal, and a Presidential Testimonial Letter.

However, the USMMA soon found better ships available for use and by the end of 1949, she was laid up at the Academy, pending disposal.

Meanwhile, in Korea…

The South Korean Navy (Daehan-minguk Haegun) was formed on 11 November 1945 as the “Maritime Affairs Association” (Haebangbyeongdan) in the American-occupied zone of the formerly Japanese-occupied Korea. As such, it is the senior service of the Republic, with the ROK Army not formed until 1948 and the ROKAF in 1949. Numbering just 70 members led by former merchant mariner Sohn Won Yil, it inherited a series of small coastal craft at the former IJN yard at Jinhae and served in a brown water coast guard role with a modicum of American support until South Korea became independent in August 1948. It was then that it morphed into the Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN), with now-Admiral Sohn becoming its first CNO.

By early 1950, the force had grown to 7,500– including 1,200 ROK Marines. Its naval list counted 11 former Japanese Cha-1 class 85-foot wooden-hulled auxiliary submarine chasers (the Daejeon class in Korean service), two slow 13-knot 140-foot Japanese-designed gunboats (Chungmugong I & II) left incomplete on the ways at Jinhae that were finished in 1947, as well as 17 YMS-type small minesweepers (dubbed the Kang jim or Geumgangsan class in Korean service, with MSC pennant numbers) from the U.S. Navy. The largest weapons were single-barreled 40mm Bofors fitted on the YMSs in place of their original 3″/50s.

Between 1947 and 1950, the backbone of the nascent ROKN was 17 136-foot wooden-hulled coastal minesweepers transferred from the U.S. Navy. The first two are seen here, Geumgangsan (MSC 501) ex-YMS354; and Gyeongju (MSC-502) ex-YMS358. Of the 17 transferred, two defected to the DPRK in the late 1940s, two were lost at sea, and two were lost to mines in 1950. Those left would remain in service into the 1970s.

In short, it was still firmly a near-shore operation. Their primary concern was to clear the thousands of sea mines left over in their local waters dating as far back as 1904, police against Chinese pirates, and keep roaming Japanese fishing boats away.

By late 1949 the five-year-old ROKN felt it was ready for some blue water, or at least some green water, ships.

Headed Home

The solution for the cash-strapped force was to hit everyone’s paycheck for seed money which would be augmented by selling scrap metal left over from the war, officer’s wives tending laundry, and donations from lawmakers including President Syngman Rhee himself.

As detailed in a February 1950 edition of Time magazine:

A year ago a group of Korean enlisted men at Navy headquarters in Seoul got the idea of chipping in each month to buy a man-o’-war. They sounded out Commander in Chief Admiral Sohn Won Yil, who promptly queried his base commanders to see what their enlisted men thought of the idea. They liked it.

Soon afterward 5% of each enlisted man’s $10 a month and 10% of each officer’s pay was deducted to fill the purchase kitty. Meanwhile, Korea’s ambassador to Washington was told to start looking for a ship. Last September Korea’s government plunked down $18,000 of hard-won cash to buy a sturdy little 175-ft. patrol craft, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy’s training ship Ensign Whitehead.

Some 16 hand-picked officers, led by Captain (future CNO) Park Ok-gyu, were flown to New York and then spent two weeks at King’s Point getting the gist of how to run their new sub-chaser. With their ship moored at Harbor Boat Building Company’s yard, the officers invested sweat equity into a new coat of haze gray and a new hull number, PC-701. Shifted to the USCG’s Pier 8 (Rector Street) in New York on Christmas Eve, custody was transferred on 26 December 1949 in a small ceremony that included the South Korean Ambassador (and future prime minister) Chang Myon.

The ROKS Baekdusan, named for the highly revered Baekdu (Paektusan) or “white-head mountain,” was Korean.

Fantail of the Baekdusan the day the ship transferred from the USN to the RoK Navy in 1949, with ROKN officer raising the Taegeukgi. (RDML Lauren McReady, USMS – Lauren McReady Collection, American Merchant Marine Museum, Kings Point, NY.)

Spending New Year in Miami and transiting the Panama Canal, the little ship put into Hawaii on 24 January where one 3 anti-aircraft gun and six .50 caliber machine guns, authorized for transfer by the Secretary of Defense, were installed at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard.

Leaving Pearl for Korea on 20 March 1950, she stopped briefly at Guam to purchase a whopping 100 3-inch shells and fuel from the U.S. Navy base there before heading to South Korea. When she arrived at Jinhae Bay on 10 April, she was the first significant warship under Korean control since the country’s Joseon-era navy was disbanded in 1905.

Note the Taegeukgi stenciled on her wheelhouse

Photo of the 60-strong crew of the Baekdusan ship taken at Jinhae Pier 2 on 20 May 1950. Note the mix of American-style officer’s khakis and blues balanced by Japanese-style jumpers and flat caps for the ratings. 

And just in time, too, because then came…

Another War!

When the North Koreans unleashed their military against their neighbors to the South, Baekdusan earned the distinction of sinking a 1,000-ton Soviet-supplied transport ship that was trying to destroy the Pusan Port wharf facilities in the Korean Strait.

Vectored to the mystery ship in the late hours of 25 June, she chased it down between the Oryukdo Lighthouse and the Tsushima Lighthouse and began hailing it repeatedly to stop. Closing to within 90 meters of the interloper, the two ships soon began exchanging fire, swapping 3-inch shells for incoming 85mm shells and heavy machine gun fire from the Nork vessel. After a four-hour running fight, in which Baekdusan fired 50 shells before her main gun seized up, the black smoke-belching mystery ship sank at 0:30 a.m. on 26 June, reportedly carrying some 600 highly-trained North Korean commandos of the 766th Independent Infantry Regiment with it to the bottom.

Baekdusan, riddled with shrapnel and machine gun hits, suffered four wounded and two– Private First Class Kim Chang-hak and Private First Class Jeon Byeong-ik– killed.

Battle of the Korea Strait (Photo source: War Memorial of Korea, Korean Cultural Information Service)

Has Pusan been wrecked by a battalion-sized assault on the first day of the war, the 400,000 shells and 2.5 million rounds of ammo landed there by USAT Sgt. George D. Keathley and USNS Cardinal O’Connell on 28 June, followed by the 24th Infantry Division starting on 3 July, probably wouldn’t have happened. Had that not occurred, the war may have been lost in the first month.

As detailed by Samuel J. Cox, Director NHHC:

The “Battle of the Korea Strait,” as the ROKN would call it, had major strategic importance. At the time, the port of Pusan was very poorly defended. Had the North Korean surprise operation succeeded, the outcome of the war might have been very different, because by the beginning of August, Pusan was the last remaining port in South Korea that had not fallen to the North Koreans. It would be the only initial entry point for the U.S. forces that prevented the North Koreans from overrunning the entire Korean Peninsula.

She would go on to perform yeoman work for the rest of the war, including at the pivotal Inchon Landings (Operation Chromite) in September.

Inchon Invasion, September 1950. The first wave of U.S. Marines headed for the landing beach in LCVPs, on 15 September 1950. This landing is probably on Red Beach, on the northern side of the Inchon invasion area. PC at the far right is a unit of the Republic of Korea Navy. NH 96877

Ultimately, the U.S. Navy transferred another five PC-461s to the ROKN during the war– no cash required! These included ex-PC 799 (Geumgangsan), ex-PC 802 (Samgaksan), ex-PC 810 (Jirisan), ex-PC 485 (Hanlasan), and ex-PC 600 (Myohyangsan), added to the South Korean naval list as PC-702 through 705. Of these, Jirisan was sunk by a mine off Wonsan in 1951 while Hanlasan was later lost in a typhoon.

Kum Kang San/Geumgangsan (South Korean submarine chaser, formerly USS PC-799) At the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, California, on 16 June 1950, following transfer to the South Korean Navy. She is flanked by her sister ships Chiri San/Jirisan (Korean PC-704) to the left and Sam Kak San/Samgaksan (Korean PC-703) to the right. USS Polaris (AF-11) is in the right background. Note men working on a 3″/50 dual-purpose gun mounted on Kum Kang San’s foredeck as well as American ensigns from the mainmast and small Taegeukgi on the bridge wings. NH 85494

Kum Kang San/Geumgangsan P-702 (South Korean submarine chaser, formerly USS PC-799) with her Taegeukgi flying off the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, 17 June 1950, following transfer to the South Korean Navy. NH 85482

Chiri San/Jirisan P-704 (South Korean submarine chaser, formerly USS PC-810) underway off the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, California, 17 June 1950, with her Taegeukgi in the wind following transfer to the South Korean Navy. NH 85490

Sam Kak San/Samgaksan (Korean Submarine Chaser, # 703, formerly USS PC-802). The crew fires the ship’s 3″/50 gun “at the Communist-led North Koreans along the west coast of Korea” (quoted from the original caption). The photograph is dated 18 December 1951. Note the American kapok life jackets, Army OD fatigues, and M1 helmets. NH 97332

Baekdusan along with sisters Geumgangsan and Samgaksan, were decommissioned on 1 July 1959, due to corrosion and the general aging of the ships. Myohyangsan, found to be in better condition, was retained. 

The ROK Navy’s 173s via the 1960 edition of Janes

The three stricken subchasers were soon stripped of usable equipment and scrapped, their place on the ROKN naval list taken by three newly transferred sisterships: ex-USS Winnemucca (PC 1145), ex-USS Grosse Pointe (PC 1546), and ex-USS Chadron (PC 564) giving the South Koreans a four-pack of PC-461s on patrol into 1975, by which time they were replaced by a six-pack of larger (1500-ton, 306-foot) Rudderow-class destroyer escorts.

Epilogue

The “disposable” PC-461 class, besides the U.S. and ROK navies, served under the flags of more than 20 other countries. They remained in service around the globe until the late 1980s when the last two in active, ex-USS Susanville (PC 1149) and ex-USS Hanford (PC 1142), were retired by Taiwan.

Some 40,000 bluejackets sailed on the PCs during the “Big Show” and immediately after. The chronicle of their war is the 400-page PC Patrol Craft of World War II: A History of the Ships and Their Crews by William J. Veigele, a former PC sailor, first published in 1998.

It’s a good read if you can find it

The class is remembered by the Patrol Craft Sailor Association.

Several relics endure of Baekdusan.

Her main mast was installed at the Republic of Korea Naval Academy in 1965 and is preserved there, as is her 3″/50.

Her plans are in the U.S. National Archives.

The two ROKN bluejackets killed on Baekdusan that night in June 1950 had their names given to new Yoon Youngha class missile boats, ROKS Kim Changhak (PKG-727) and ROKS Jeon Byeongik (PKG-732).

ROKS Kim Changhak (PKG-727)

The ROKN very much remembers their story and that of their ship.

Today, the ROKN has grown to over 70,000 personnel and operates 160 vessels, putting it squarely as one of the largest and most modern naval forces on the planet.

The country’s first flat-top, the 45,000-ton Kyunghyang CVX-class lightning carrier, is planned to be named after the humble Baekdusan and her fearless crew.

The motto of the ROK Navy is 바다로, 세계로 (badalo, segyelo= To the sea, to the world).

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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Roses and Beantown

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Some 80 years ago this week, a great view of the brand-new U.S. Navy Cleveland-class light cruiser USS Pasadena (CL-65) snapped from a Squadron ZP-11 blimp while underway off Boston at 1400 hrs on 21 July 1944. The ship’s position was 42 45’N, 70 50’W, course 110 degrees. Pasadena is painted in Camouflage Measure 32, Design 24d. Note two Kingfisher floatplanes on her stern and her large surface search radar

The official U.S. Navy photograph is now in the collections of the National Archives. Catalog #: 80-G-237944

A 15,000-ton “light” cruiser, CL-65 was the second naval vessel to carry the name of the California Rose City and was built by Bethlehem Steel in Quincy, Massachusetts, and was constructed in just 488 days, commissioning on 8 June 1944.

Following her shakedown cruise off the East Coast and in the Caribbean, Pasadena joined TF 38, the fast carrier force, at Ulithi just before Thanksgiving 1944 and was soon neck deep in operations against Luzon and Formosa in support of the Philippine campaign. She would earn five battle stars during World War II and witnessed the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay– anchored alongside Missouri– some 451 days after she was commissioned.

Unlike many of her sisters, she was able to take her war paint off and at least spend a few years in peacetime service before she was decommissioned on 12 January 1950, some 1,593 days after VJ Day.

Pasadena (CL-65) entering Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, during an NROTC Midshipmen’s cruise in the Summer of 1948. The photograph was released for publication on 9 August 1948. NH 98201.

Pasadena lingered in Pacific Reserve Fleet mothballs at Bremerton for 22 years– somehow skipping the Korean War– and was then sold for scrap, her name freed up for a Los Angeles-class attack submarine (SSN 752) that had her keep laid in 1986.

Good Morning, Guam!

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In this great Kodachrome, we see the superdreadnought USS New Mexico (Battleship No. 40) is seen firing her after 14″/50 guns during the Operation Stevedore pre-invasion bombardment of Guam, circa 14-20 July, some 80 years ago this month.

Taken by a Combat Photo Unit Two (CPU-2) photographer, looking aft along the port side from the forward sky lookout position. The official U.S. Navy photograph is now in the collections of the National Archives. 80-G-K-14233 (Color)

The old battlewagon, between 12 and 30 July, expended some “1,100 tons of high explosive projectiles” on enemy positions in support of the assault on and liberation of the American possession– and that was taking a two-day break on 15-16 July to head to Saipan to get more ordnance!

USS New Mexico (BB-40), with 1,275-pound 14-inch HC projectiles on deck, while the battleship replenished her ammunition supply off Saipan before the invasion of Guam, in July 1944. The photograph looks forward on the starboard side, with triple 14″/50 gun turrets at left. Note floater nets stowed atop the turrets and rangefinders. The official U.S. Navy photograph is now in the collections of the National Archives. 80-G-K-14228 (Color)

Over 19 days, New Mexico fired:

  • 1,621 14-inch high-capacity shells
  • 964 5″/51 high-capacity shells
  • 475 5″/51 common shells
  • 2,333 5″/25 AA common shells
  • 422 5″/25 star shells
  • As well as “small amounts of 20mm and 40mm ammunition in close-in fire on the landing beaches”

The daily tally– some of it from as close as 2,800 yards (which is point-blank for a battlewagon!)–  is as follows:

With a lot of this fire called in and corrected by her embarked OS2U floatplanes, this included a “believe it or not” hit on a Japanese gun emplacement:

New Mexico, who skipped Pearl Harbor only because she had been shipped to the East Coast for service on the Neutrality Patrol six months before that Day of Infamy, received 6 battle stars for her World War II service, all in the Pacific.

Decommissioned almost immediately post-war after a 26-year career that included serving in both world wars, she was sold for scrapping in 1947.

Warship Wednesday, July 17, 2024: Under Four Flags

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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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, July 17, 2024: Under Four Flags

Above we see the sailors of the Northern Red Banner Fleet loading the 24-spigot Hedgehog ASW device on their new (to them) Wickes/Town-class destroyer, Zhivuchy/Zhguchiy (“Tenacious”), which they took over from the British some 80 years ago this week, on 16 July 1944.

By this point in the war– her second– she had already passed through American, British, and Canadian hands and still had some fighting left on her dance card.

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.

Wickes class USS Yarnall (DD-143): Booklet of General Plans – Inboard Profile / Outboard Profile, June 10, 1918, NARA NAID: 158704871

Wickes class USS Yarnall (DD-143): Booklet of General Plans – Main Deck / 1st Platform Deck / S’ch L’t P’f’m, S’ch L’t Control P’f’m, Fire Control P’f’m Bridge, Galley Top, After Dk. House and 2nd Platform Deck. / June 10, 1918, Hold NARA NAID: 158704873

Wickes class. A close-up of her stern top-down view of plans shows the Wickes class’s primary armament– a dozen torpedo tubes in four turnstiles and stern depth charges.

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 Fairfax

Our subject, USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93), was the first ship named in honor of Virginia-born RADM Donald McNeil Fairfax whose distinguished service in the Civil War included command of USS Cayuga, Nantucket, and Montauk.

Rear Admiral Fairfax, seen as an LCDR/CDR above, served with distinction in the Civil War and retired on 30 September 1881 after 43 years of service. He died at Hagerstown, Maryland, on 10 January 1894, aged 75.

Our tin can was laid down on 10 July 1917 at Vallejo by the Mare Island Navy Yard; named Fairfax (Destroyer No. 93) on 14 July 1917 in General Order No. 311; launched on 15 December 1917; sponsored by the daughter of the yard commandant.

The future USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93) is being prepared for launching, at the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, circa 15 December 1917. NH 70607

Fairfax was commissioned on 6 April 1918, almost a year to the day that America entered the Great War.

She was beautiful in her original dazzle pattern war paint.

Possibly the best Wickes class profile I’ve ever seen. USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93) at anchor in the San Francisco Bay area, 21 May 1918. Photographed by the Mare Island Navy Yard during the ship’s trials. NH 2025

USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93) making smoke while steaming at 25 knots during trials in the San Francisco Bay area, 21 May 1918. NH 55612

USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93) making smoke while running at 25 knots, during trials in the San Francisco Bay area, 21 May 1918. Photographed by the Mare Island Navy Yard. Note this ship’s pattern camouflage. NH 23

USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93) at anchor in the San Francisco Bay area, 21 May 1918. Photographed by the Mare Island Navy Yard during the ship’s trials. NH 54131

USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93) at anchor in the San Francisco Bay area, 21 May 1918. NH 54132

War!

A war baby born an ocean away from the fighting, Fairfax soon found herself with orders for Hampton Roads, where she arrived in early June to escort a convoy across the Atlantic, a role she would continue for the rest of the year.

Destroyers Israel and Fairfax with battleship Virginia in the distance. NH 109504

U.S. Navy Destroyer on convoy duty in 1918. This ship may be USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93), whose camouflage scheme was very similar, though not identical, to that seen here. Courtesy of Jack L. Howland, 1983. NH 95211

While on a Hampton Roads to Brest convoy on 18 October, she raced to a distress signal from the 6,744-ton American cargo ship SS Lucia, torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine SM U-155 (ex-Deutschland, Korvettenkapitan Ferdinand Studt, commanding) some 1,200 miles off the U.S. East Coast.

SS Lucia, built in 1912, was an Austrian-flagged merchant ship that was interned at Mobile, Alabama in 1914 while the U.S. was still The Great Neutral. Seized by the United States Government in April 1917, she was operated by the U.S. Shipping Board and later by the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps as ID # 3090. Signal Corps Photo # 165-WW 274A-10 while in Mobile, circa 1917, via NARA.

S.S. Lucia (Austrian/American Freighter, 1912) sinking in the western Atlantic after she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-155, on 17 October 1918. A boatload of survivors is in the process of leaving the ship. This ship was intended to become USS Lucia (ID # 3090) but was lost before the Navy could acquire her. Donation of Dr. Mark Kulikowski, 2005. NH 51459-A

Luckily, Lucia took 22 slow hours to submerge fully, allowing Fairfax to rescue 86 survivors. The only souls lost were four killed in the torpedo explosion. The steamer had been fitted at great cost with controversial Donnelly buoyancy boxes that made her “unsinkable,” which may have had something to do with her slow death.

USS Fairfax Description: (Destroyer # 93) underway with the survivors of S.S. Lucia on board, circa 18 October 1918. They were later transferred to the USS Huntington (Armored Cruiser # 5). NH 54134

Sinking of S.S. Lucia 17 October 1918. Motor launch arrives alongside USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93) with a load of survivors from the American steamship Lucia. This boat is from the USS Huntington (Armored Cruiser # 5). NH 41727

Sinking of S.S. Lucia 17 October 1918. Motor launch from USS Huntington (Armored Cruiser # 5) leaving USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93) with survivors from the American steamship Lucia. Fairfax is visible in the background. NH 41728

Immediately after the conflict came to a halt, Fairfax remained overseas, and, on 3 December 1918, she deployed to the Azores to the troop transport George Washington (Id. No. 3018) carrying President Woodrow Wilson, and escort her to Brest so that Wilson could attend the Versailles Peace Conference.

USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93) view of the ship’s forward and midship superstructure, probably taken at Brest, France, in late 1918 after she shed her camouflage. Photographed by Zimmer. Note the small identification number painted below her pilothouse, canvas weather screens, and the 1-pounder automatic anti-aircraft gun mounted by her forward smokestacks. NH 54135

USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93) in harbor, circa late 1918. Photographed by Zimmer. NH 54136

That mission completed, she sailed for home on 28 December, arriving at Norfolk on 8 January 1919.

Quiet Peacetime Interlude

No more camo! USS Fairfax (Destroyer # 93) at anchor, 11 October 1919. NH 54137

While many of the Navy’s new Wickes-class destroyers were soon mothballed following the “War to End all Wars”– and many of those later disposed of or converted to other roles such as minelaying/sweeping or tending seaplanes in the 1920s and 30s– the sun shined on Fairfax and, after helping shepherd the historic first aerial crossing of the Atlantic made by Navy seaplanes (towing the crippled NC-1 to shore), she was only laid up for not quite eight years, from 19 June 1922 to 1 May 1930, then recommissioned.

Incidentally, it was in 1920 that she served as the first command of LCDR (later VADM) Willis Augustus (Ching) Lee Jr. (USNA 1908), just after Lee returned from winning seven medals in the 1920 Antwerp Olympics and two decades before he would teach the Japanese just how good radar-controlled gunnery can be at night.

Once brought out of her short stint in mothballs, Fairfax’s peacetime role consisted primarily of conducting training cruises for both East and West Coast members of the Naval Reserve and summer cruises out of Annapolis carrying midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy to the Caribbean. She alternated this duty with regular gunnery exercises, fleet reviews, and fleet problems, a stint with the Special Service Squadron out of Balboa in the Canal Zone, and patrols in Cuban waters.

She was captured alongside at Annapolis on 18 March 1939 when the remains of Hiroshi Saito, the late Japanese Ambassador to the United States, were transferred to the cruiser USS Astoria (CA-34) for return to Japan.

Note the large hull numbers. Page from the Japan Times Weekly, published in Tokyo, 20 April 1939, page 523, NH 76141

She also participated in the 1939 New York City World’s Fair.

USS Fairfax (DD-93) at Poughkeepsie, New York, 17 June 1939. Courtesy of Donald M. McPherson, 1969. NH 67728

War, again

When Europe blew the lights out again in September 1939, Fairfax was assigned to the increasingly tense Atlantic neutrality patrol.

All was not calm on this duty, and a sistership, USS Greer (DD–145), was fired upon by German submarine U-652 in September 1941, leading to FDR’s “shoot on sight” order for threatening ships under American escort while supposedly at peace. The next month the destroyer USS Reuben James (DD-245) was sunk by U-552 near Iceland, still six weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

However, by that point, Fairfax had already been transferred to the Admiralty.

White Ensign

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 (repeated in 2024 by the way), ideally, those that ran in conjunction with the U.S. border, a nice touch. In British service, they would receive names of small cities, and be known therefore as the Town class.

Sailed by scratch USN crews from Philadelphia the “flush deckers” sailed to Halifax in several small groups to prepare for a warm handover.  

Transfer of U.S. destroyers to the Royal Navy in Halifax, Sept 1940. Wickes-class destroyers USS Buchanan (DD-131), USS Crowninshield (DD-134), and USS Abel P. Upshur (DD-193) are in the background. The sailors are examining a 4-inch /50-cal deck gun. Twenty-three Wickes-class destroyers were transferred to the RN, along with four to the RCN, in 1940 under the Destroyers for Bases Agreement. (Library and Archives Canada Photo, MIKAN No. 3199286)

Group of U.S. Navy and Royal Navy ratings who took part in the transfer of destroyers to the Royal Navy and Royal Canadian Navy, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, ca. 23-24 September 1940. LAC A104093

Naval ratings unloading a torpedo before the refit of an unidentified Town-class destroyer of the Royal Canadian Navy, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, March 1941. LAC A105202

Ratings of the Royal Navy taking over former U.S.N. destroyer at Halifax, 1940. LAC A104109

Union Jacks hoisted aboard former U.S.N. destroyers transferred to the Royal Navy, Halifax, 1940. LAC A104096

Decommissioned from the U.S. Navy on 23 October 1940 (she wasn’t struck from the U.S. Navy List until 8 January 1941), Fairfax was taken into custody by RCN personnel in Halifax on 26 November 1940, pending the arrival of an RN crew that would take her to St. Johns for repairs and across the Atlantic to Devonport for fitting British equipment.

During this period, she was commissioned as the sixth HMS Richmond (G 88) on the RN’s list going back to 1655. As such, she carried forth a trio of previous battle honors from those vessels: Quebec, 1759 – Havana, 1762, and Chesapeake, 1781.

Ready for action by June 1941, she was assigned to the 17th Escort Group based in Newfoundland and would ride shotgun on 11 convoys by the end of the year (HX 132, SC 034, OB 339, SC 037, HX 138, ON 001, TC 012B, HX 148, ON 017, SC 047, SC 048, and UR 017).

HMS Richmond G88 passing McNab’s Island, Halifax, NS, via Forposterity’s Sake

In her first convoy of 1942, UR 017, she had the misfortune of encountering the 10,000-ton type EC2-S-C1 Liberty ship SS Francis Scott Key, which crumpled her bow on 31 March 1942. This forced her to Liverpool for five months of repair, after which she was sent back to Halifax to rejoin her convoy defense mission. However, this was cut short when she suffered a collision with the Norwegian cargo steamer SS Reinholt (4801 gt), sending her back to Liverpool for repairs until June 1943.

Oh, Canada

Sent to Halifax once again to get back to convoy work, the twice-cracked Fairfax/Richmond was sheep-dipped into the Royal Canadian Navy, becoming HCMS Richmond in July 1943.

While in Canuk service, she chalked up another nine convoy runs (ON 198, ONS 016, HX 255, SC 142, ONS 018, XB 076, ON 204, HX 262, and ON 207) between just 22 August and Halloween.

The Red Banner

With the Soviets pouting over not getting an immediate slice of the surrendered/interned Italian Navy in late 1943, the Western Allies made a big push to send a nice package of mixed destroyers, submarines, subchasers, cruisers (USS Milwaukee), and even battleships (HMS Royal Sovereign) to appease Stalin. Of course, many of these ships were extremely worn out, mechanically unreliable, and had been repeatedly repaired– so you know Fairfax/Richmond was lumped into this bag.

With that, Fairfax reverted to RN service, arrived back in the Home Isles on 27 December 1943, was paid off, de-stored, and laid up in the Tyne where she sat until taken up by Palmer’s Yard for a brief refit pending transfer to the Russkis.

Her new crew arrived in early July for a fortnight of training on their new vessels, and, officially transferred on 16 July 1944 as Zhivuchy (011), after the name of a destroyer sunk in the Black Sea in 1916, she set out the next day for Loch Ewe as escort for HMS Royal Sovereign (now dubbed Archangelsk), along with seven other high-mileage Wickes/Clemson tin cans that had been part of the Bases for Destroyers deal (Derzkij, Dejatelnyj, Doblestnyj, Dostojnyj, Zarkij, Zguchij, and Zostkij), and 11 SC-497 class 105-foot subchasers. Interestingly, these “Town” class Wickes/Clemsons would be known as the Zhivuchy-class in Soviet service. 

Tagging along with the 33-ship RN convoy JW59 for the White Sea, this little hodge podge of most third-hand warships sortied from Loch Ewe on 15 August and arrived in Soviet waters at the Kola Inlet ten days later. In the running ASW battle to get there, the convoy lost the British sloop HMS Kite (U 87) to U-344 (ace Kptlt. Ulrich Pietsch) which was in turn sunk by a Swordfish from the jeep carrier HMS Vindex (D 15). As a bonus, U-354 (ace Oblt. Hans-Jürgen Sthamer) was sunk on 24 August by HMS Mermaid and HMS Loch Dunvegan.

In Soviet service, Fairfax/Richmond/Zhivuchy, under Captain 3rd Rank Nikolay Dmitriyevich Ryabchenko, spent her career in ASW patrols in the frozen Barents and White Seas. While on such a beat with Dejatelnyj (ex-HMS Churchill, ex-USS Herndon, ex-CG-17) on 8 December, they came across a German U-boat that they had been bird-dogging for three days. When the steel shark broke the surface, Ryabchenko ordered Zhivuchy to ram.

According to Russian sources, it is believed Zhivuchy sank U-387 (Kptlt. Rudolf Büchler) with all hands, although Western sources generally chalk that boat up to the British corvette HMS Bamborough Castle (K412), in roughly the same area at the same time.

Sadly, Dejatelnyj would be sunk just a month later on 16 January 1945 by U-956 (Mohs), taking the commander and 116 men with her. Only seven men were picked up by the Derzkij.

The Northern Fleet destroyer Zhivuchiy (011) is seen wearing her Soviet pennant.

As for the end of her career, the Soviets kept their Wickes/Clemsons for several years after VJ-Day, even if they didn’t need them. Heck, the last one wasn’t returned until 1952!

Fairfax/Richmond/Zhivuchy was eventually repatriated to Rosyth in poor condition on 24 September 1949, scheduled immediately for disposal, and then broken up for scrap by BISCO at Grangemouth the following summer.

She earned two battle honors while under British/Canadian service: Atlantic 1941-43 – Arctic 1942.

Epilogue

Few relics remain of Fairfax. Her engineering drawings and some logs are in the National Archives.

Neither the U.S. nor Canadian fleets have added a second Fairfax or Richmond to their naval lists, however, the Royal Navy has commissioned a seventh Richmond, a Type 23 frigate (F239) that has been in service since 1995.

020612-N-9407M-518 The Atlantic Ocean (Jun. 11, 2002) — British frigate HMS Richmond (F-239) launches an AGM-84A “Harpoon” missile during a joint U.S. and British exercise in which the decommissioned ship USS Wainwright was sunk in the Atlantic Ocean. Ships used in these types of exercises are inspected and made environmentally safe before sinking, and are disguised to create reefs for marine life. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Isaac Merriman. (RELEASED)

She recently deployed to the Red Sea and fired the first Sea Ceptor combat launch in RN history.

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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Canadian Mosquitos in Full Color

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How about this great original Kodachrome of Type G class torpedo boats of the 29th Canadian Motor Torpedo Boat Flotilla. The lead boat, MTB-460, was lost to a German mine off the coast of Normandy on 2 July 1944, some 80 years ago this month, with a loss of 10 officers and men.

Library & Archives Canada MIKAN No. 4950981

As well as two more taken at the same time:

MIKAN 4821111

MIKAN 4821109

Displacing some 44 tons, these 71.75-foot MTBs had a beam of just 20 feet and could operate in anything over 6 feet of water at a combat load. Capable of 39 knots on a trio of Rolls-Royce V-12s running on 100 octane avgas, they carried a single 6-pounder forward, a twin 20mm AAA DP gun aft, and a pair of forward-firing 18-inch torpedo tubes. Complement was 3 officers and 14 men, about the same as the standard American 80-foot Elco PT boat which had a heavier armament. They were constructed by the British Power Boat Company at their Hythe, Southampton boat yard and originally designed as motor gun boats (MGBs) but modified to carry torpedoes.

The RCN fielded two squadrons of MTBs during the last two years of WWII, the aforementioned 29th Flotilla which exclusively used BPB-made G-Type MTBs (No. 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 485, 486, and 491) and the 65th, which used earlier Fairmile D types (Nos. 726, 727, 735, 736, 743, 744, 745, 746, 748, and 797).

As detailed by the Royal Canadian Navy:

Motor torpedo boats (MTBs) were small warships about 22 metres long and six metres wide. Equipped with powerful engines, torpedoes, light naval guns, and machine guns, the Canadian MTBs operated chiefly at night in the English Channel as fast attack boats that disrupted enemy shipping off the coast of occupied Europe and defended Allied shipping from the German’s own fast attack boats and midget submarines. The MTBs also played an important role on D-Day when they helped protect the huge Allied fleet from German warships.

The MTB crews had an extremely dangerous job – their boats were small, the seas of the English Channel were rough, and German guns and mines were never far away.

The worst day in the history of the 29th MTB came on 14 February 1945 when five boats of its remaining eight boats were destroyed in a conflagration in Oostende which left 26 of its members dead.

Warship Wednesday, July 10, 2024: Priceless Cargo

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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

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Warship Wednesday, July 10, 2024: Priceless Cargo

U.S. Navy photograph, 80-G-276964, now in the collections of the National Archives.

Above we see the Bouge-class escort carrier USS Copahee (CVE-12) underway outbound from Garapan anchorage off Saipan on 8 July 1944, some 80 years ago this month, bound for San Diego where she would arrive on the 28th. Her deck cargo is interesting, and on closer look:

Show a load of captured Japanese planes– some never before seen in the West– to be used for intelligence and training purposes. This invaluable cache would prove a boon to Allied intelligence and some of these aircraft remain as a legacy of the war in the Pacific today.

It was all in a day’s work for Copahee, who reliably shipped aircraft around the theater by the thousands during her un-sung career.

About the Bogues

With both Great Britain and the U.S. running desperately short of flattops in the first half of World War II, and large, fast fleet carriers taking a while to crank out, a subspecies of light and “escort” carriers, the first created from the hulls of cruisers, the second from the hulls of merchant freighters, were produced in large numbers to put a few aircraft over every convoy and beach in the Atlantic and Pacific.

Of the more than 122 escort carriers produced in the U.S. for use by her and her Allies, some 45 were of the Bogue class. Based on the Maritime Commission’s Type C3-S-A1 cargo ship hull, these were built in short order at Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Corporation, Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, and by the Western Pipe and Steel Company of San Francisco.

Some 496 feet overall with a 439-foot flight deck, these 16,200-ton ships could only steam at a pokey 16 ish knots sustained speed, which negated their use in fleet operations but allowed them to more than keep up with convoys of troop ships and war supplies. Capable of limited self-defense with four twin Bofors and up to 35 20mm Oerlikons for AAA as well as a pair of 5-inch guns for defense against small boats, they could carry as many as 28 operational aircraft in composite air wings. They were equipped with two elevators, Mk 4 arresting gear, and a hydraulic catapult.

Most of the Bogue class (34 of 45) went right over to the Royal Navy via Lend-Lease, where they were known as the Ameer, Attacker, Ruler, or Smiter class in turn, depending on their arrangement. However, the U.S. Navy did keep 11 of the class for themselves (USS Bogue, Card, Copahee, Core, Nassau, Altamaha, Barnes, Breton, Croatan, Prince William, and our very own Block Island), all entering service between September 1942 and June 1943.

Meet Copahee

Our subject was the only warship named for the small sound of the South Carolina coast, by the naming convention for the rest of her class. Launched 21 October 1941 by Todd-Pacific Shipyards, Tacoma, as a C3-S-A1 cargo ship SS Steel Architect under a Maritime Commission contract, she was acquired by the Navy almost two months to the day after Pearl Harbor– 8 February 1942– and commissioned as an Aircraft Escort Vessel, AVG-12 just two weeks after the Battle of Midway on 15 June 1942.

USS Copahee (ACV-12) underway off Port Angeles, Washington, on 30 August 1942. 80-G-11503.

Her war diary notes that she was the first American escort carrier commissioned on the West Coast. It also notes that her original cargo ship nameplate, Steel Architect, was still on her bow at the time.

Her hull number designation was changed to ACV-12 as an Auxiliary Aircraft Carrier on 20 August 1942 and to CVE-12, an escort carrier, on 15 July 1943, but this was all academic as she was already deployed for both of these changes.

War!

Once she joined the fleet, Copahee was placed under the direct command of ComAirPac, which she would serve until May 1944 when she transferred to ComCarTransRonPac.

USS Copahee (ACV-12) off Puget Sound Navy Yard on 17 August 1942. Note the barrage balloons aloft in the background. NH 55384

USS Copahee (ACV-12) Mess Attendants manning a 20mm machine gun, in a gun tub beside the flight deck, 9 September 1942. The carrier was then en route from Alameda, California, to the southwest Pacific. 80-G-71586

Sailing with TG 2.16, her first cruise was to Noumea in September 1942 with a load of 59 carrier aircraft. She then, escorted by TG 63.8 including three destroyers and the cruiser USS Helena, carried 20 desperately-needed F4F Wildcats of MAG 14 (VMF-121) to within launching distance of Guadalcanal on 9 October, where they flew off to Henderson Field.

This group was led by Major Joseph “Joe” J. Foss, who, flying his Wildcat from Henderson, shot down his first Japanese A6M Zero just four days later. Within a month, he had accounted for 23 “kills” over Guadalcanal with the “Cactus Air Force.”

Commander of VMF-121, Maj. Joe Foss (fourth from left resting his chin on his fist) stands with some of his pilots next to their F4F Wildcat fighters on Henderson Field.

Sent back to the rear without any aircraft, Copahee would be on hand for carrier aviator quals off the Coast of California and Hawaii for the rest of 1942, then in January 1943 would get back into the business of shuttling aircraft (as many as 80 at a time between deck cargo and hangar), aircrews, ordnance, engines, and equipment from the West Coast to the front lines, alternating with carrier landing qualifications/refreshers whenever she came back home.

A U.S. Marine Corps Vought F4U-1 Corsair of Marine Fighting Squadron 213 (VMF-213) Hell Hawks is warming up for a fight from the flight deck of the escort carrier USS Copahee (ACV-12), on 29 March 1943. Date 29 March 1943. National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.253.7154.022

USS Copahee (ACV-12) Off the Mare Island Navy Yard, 9 May 1943. Note the deck load of SBD and PV-1 planes. She would also carry the PV-1s of VB-144 to NAS Kaneohe, Hawaii. Upon arrival, the squadron began an intensive period of combat training and operational patrols over the ocean near the Hawaiian Islands before shifting to Tarawa. Copahee would also later carry PV-1-equipped VPB-148 from NAS Moffett Field, California to Hawaii in May 1945. 19-N-46207

USS Copahee (ACV-12) Off the Mare Island Navy Yard, 9 May 1943. Stern view. 19-N-46208

Same as the above, 19-N-46204

Starboard, same location and date as the above. 19-N-46205

USS Copahee passing under the Golden Gate Bridge on her way out to sea on 15 July 1943. Mare Island photo # 5188-43.

Unloading SBDs to barge from USS Copahee (CVE 12) at Midway Island, May 21, 1943. 80-G-88086

Changing colors on USS Copahee (CVE 12) upon arriving at Townsville, Australia, September 25, 1943. 80-G-88137

An Army P-40 after being unloaded from USS Copahee (CVE 12) at Townsville, Australia, before being taken to the Air Depot, September 27, 1943. 80-G-88121

Brisbane, Australia, 11 March 1944. Army P-38 (Lightning) on the flight deck of USS Copahee (CVE-12). The carrier departed San Francisco, California, on 22 February and remained in Brisbane until 13 March.

She also brought back things from her travels.

Copahee in the summer of 1943 shipped a captured A6M3 Model 32 Zero-Sen (Hamp/Hap) (MSN 3030, Q-102), late of the 582nd Kokutai, which had been inherited by U.S. Army troops at Buna in December 1942, back to the states.

An abandoned Mitsubishi A6M3 Model 32 Zero fighter. It was flown by Lieutenant Junior Grade Kazuo Tsunoda stationed at Buna base, New Guinea. The plane made a crash landing after being damaged by a USAAF Bell P-39 Airacobra on 26 August 1942. This aircraft, with V-187 and V-190, were captured and Buna and used by Allied forces. U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.488.159.030

9 April 1944, Copahee in her new camo scheme at San Diego, from her War History

Across the first half of June 1944, she would serve as a replacement carrier for Task Force 58, conducting operations off Saipan until the 16th– directly supporting the mission up close and in real-time. In this, she shuttled 124 carrier aircraft to fleet carriers.

It was at Saipan’s Aslito airfield that American troops captured a motherlode of aircraft and assets left behind by the Japanese Imperial Navy. These would include over a dozen late-model A6M Zekes of the 261st Kokutai and a scratch-and-dent Kate.

Aslito Airfield, June-July 1944. Japanese Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” on Saipan at Aslito airfield. 80-G-307726

Recognizing the importance of this cache, the Navy’s Technical Air Intelligence Unit – Pacific Ocean Areas (TAIU-POA) wanted it all and soon the Navy’s go-to transport carrier was inbound from Eniwetok, arriving off Charan Kanoa, Saipan on the morning of 7 July then leaving the next day bound for San Diego.

This mix included at least 13 Zeke variants including several that would later be made flyable: A6M2 (MSN 5352), A6M5 (MSN 5356), A6M5 (MSN 5350), A6M5 Model 52 (MSN 4340), A6M5 Model 52 (MSN 1303), A6M5 (MSN 2193, 61-608), A6M5 (MSN 4361,61-131) and A6M5 Model 52 Zero (MSN 5357, 61-120). The cargo also included the first Nakajima B5N2 (Kate) Type 97 Carrier Attack Bomber (MSN 2194, tail-code KEB-306), a specimen of the 931st Kaigun, along with an assortment of spare parts that included 37 engines and “2,000 cubic feet of Japanese general aviation gear.”

4320 on USS Copahee belowdecks

The aircraft soon made their way into ONI publications and were widely exhibited across the country.

“ONI Know Your Enemy” Zeke 61-131 from Copahee

“ONI Know Your Enemy” Kate from Copahee

Zeke 4340 TAIC 7 1946 Victory parade, Wright Field

After unloading her cargo and receiving a short yard period to address repairs, Copahee was back at it, leaving Alameda on 4 September 1944 with a load of new aircraft headed to Hawaii.

In late October 1944, she carried several carrier aircraft late of the CVG-81 from USS Hancock, including the entirety of VA-174– equipped with SB2C-3 Helldivers — from Hawaii to Guam where USS Wasp would embark them for the Philippine campaign. In March 1945, Copahee would again carry VA-174 and CVG-81 elements, this time for transit back to the States.

Besides her ferry work, she conducted over 3,000 carrier qualification launches during her six periods tasked as a West Coast training carrier during the war, sadly resulting in two pilot fatalities. At least 710 aviators logged landings on Copahee.

From commissioning through VJ Day, Copahee steamed 249,638 miles (keep in mind this was usually at 12-14 knots), transporting an amazing 2,232 aircraft and 13,719 passengers. She was underway some 67 percent of her career.

Take a look at the variety in the 657 aircraft that she carried just in the first six months of 1945:

She also carried an immense amount of avgas and ordnance to forward areas. For instance, 769,000 gallons were delivered to Hawaii in 1944 alone.

Early model Mark XIII torpedo after bodies on USS Copahee CVE-12 Oct 29, 1943. She delivered no less than 147 torpedoes to forward areas from the West Coast

Ordnance delivered is staggering from one little 16,000-ton jeep carrier:

Another interesting facet of her War History is the evolution of her armament:

At the end of the war found Copahee at Hunters Point undergoing yard repairs. She then spent the rest of the war on “Magic Carpet” duty, returning homeward-bound servicemen from Saipan, Guam, Eniwetok, and the Philippines to the west coast.

She began deactivation at Alameda on 21 December 1945 and was decommissioned and placed in reserve with Tacoma’s mothball fleet on 5 July 1946.

Copahee received one battle star for World War II service, for the capture and occupation of Saipan in June 1944.

On 1 March 1959, while laid up, she was redesignated an Escort Helicopter Aircraft Carrier, and her hull number changed on paper to CVHE 12. Stricken sometime after, she was sold for scrap in 1961.

Of the rest of the Bogue class, USS Block Island (CVE-21) along with British-operated sister HMS Nabob (D 77) were lost to German U-boats during the war. Likewise, the same could be said for sistership HMS Thane (D 48) would be so crippled by U-1172 in 1945 that she was not returned to service.

As for the class’s post-war service, they were too small and slow to be utilized as much more than aircraft transports, and most of the British-operated vessels were returned to the U.S. Navy, retrograded back to merchantmen, and sold off as freighters.

Of the ten U.S.-operated Bogues, most were sold for scrap or for further mercantile use sans flattop and guns, with Card, converted to an aviation transport (AKV-40, later T-AKV-40) in the 1950s, remaining in service into Vietnam where she was embarrassingly holed by Viet Cong sappers in Saigon. The last of the class in American service, she was scrapped in 1971.

The final Bogue hull, the former Smiter-class escort carrier HMS Khedive (D62), continued operating as the tramp freighter SS Daphne as late as 1976 before she met her end in the hands of Spanish breakers.

Epilogue

Few relics remain of Copahee. Her War History and diaries are in the National Archives.

Her bell is supposedly on loan by the NHHC to a school in California, although some say it may have since gotten out into private hands and has been spotted as a yard ornament.

Photo via Navsource

The U.S. Navy has yet to reissue her name.

Her 16 war dead, lost to accidents in high-tempo operations, are remembered on a plaque installed at the National Museum of the Pacific War.

Meanwhile, at least one of the A6M5 Model 52s (MSN 4340, 61-131) she brought back to the West Coast in July 1944 is preserved in the Smithsonian’s collection.

Mitsubishi A6M5 Reisen (Zero Fighter) Model 52 ZEKE (A19600335000) at the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum. Photo taken by Eric Long. Photo taken on December 29. 2016. (A19600335000.3T8A4453) (A19600335000-NASM2018-10400)

A second A6M5, (MSN 5357, 61-120) remained in flyable condition as N46770 until very recently and appeared in several scenes of 2001’s Pearl Harbor. She is in the collection of the Planes of Fame Air Museum, Chino.

The others have been lost to history.

Joe Foss made it off of Guadalcanal, received the Medal of Honor from FDR personally, and later became a brigadier general in the Air National Guard after the war. Turning to politics, he became the 20th Governor of South Dakota in 1955 and passed in 2003, aged 87.

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.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International.

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

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I’m a member, so should you be!

Morphing from PTs to PTFs (and a visit with PTF-26)

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The Navy went big on Motor Torpedo Boat (PT) models in World War II, producing an amazing 690 PT boats between 7 December 1941, and 1 October 1945— and that’s not counting the early PT-1 through PT-9 prototype boats, the 10 Elco 70s (PT-10-19), 48 early Elco 77s (PT-20 through 68), two prototype 72-foot Huckins boats (PT-69 and 70), and 69 reverse Lend-Lease 70 foot Vospers.

PT 76, a 78-foot Higgins-made boat in Womens Bay, Kodiak Island, Alaska circa 1943. NARA

The thing is, while these mosquito boats covered themselves in glory during their very up-close and personal war in the Med, Pacific, and English Channel, they very rarely got in solid torpedo attacks on enemy vessels. Their best employment came as fast scouts, lifeguard boats for downed aviators, running agents and commandos in the bad guy’s littoral, and in (typically nighttime) surface gun actions against enemy barges and coastal craft.

With that, the Navy got (almost) entirely out of the PT boat biz after 1945, torching or otherwise disposing of hundreds of boats overseas in the PTO and ETO and only keeping a few around for auxiliary purposes.

Then in the 1960s, with the Navy involved in littoral operations in Vietnam and not having anything smaller than 164-foot Asheville-class gunboats and leftover WWII 180-foot PCE-842-class patrol craft that needed 10 feet of water under their hulls to operate, the call went out for Fast Patrol Craft (PTF) which were basically nothing but PT boats sans their torpedoes.

At first the last remaining 1940s PT-boats were simply converted: the 89-foot Bath-built aluminum hulled PT-810 was pulled out of mothballs on 21 December 1962 and reclassified as PTF-1 while the Trumpy-built aluminum hulled 94-foot PT-811 became PTF-2 on the same date.

These were soon augmented by 14 Norwegian-built 80-foot Nasty boats (PTF-3 through PTF-16) ordered between 1962 and 1965.

Bow shot of Norwegian built, (left) and a U.S.-built PTF boat running at high speed together during trials off Virginia Capes, Early May 1963. “First Action Photographs of U.S. Navy PTFs. The U.S. Navy recently placed into service four patrol torpedo boats. The four boats, PTF-1 through PTF-4, are the only PT Boats in active service with the Navy. Assigned to Commander, Amphibious Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet, the four boats are based at Little Creek, Virginia, and are used in amphibious support and coastal operations, and with the Navy’s SEAL (Sea-Air-Land) teams. SEAL Teams are units specifically trained to conduct unconventional and paramilitary operations and to train personnel of allied nations in these techniques. PTF-1 and PTF-2 are reactivated U.S. Navy PT Boats with torpedo tubes removed, their armament consists of 20-millimeter and 40-millimeter guns for surface and anti-aircraft action. The top speed is more than 45 knots. PTF-3 and PTF-4 were purchased from Norway to fulfill an immediate requirement by the Navy.” Photograph released May 13, 1963. 330-PSA-101-63 (USN 711287)

Following the success of these new mosquito boats in the coastal waters of Southeast Asia, the Navy ordered six Trumpy-built Nasty boats (PTF-17 through PTF-22), which were delivered by 1970.

Then came an updated design, the four-strong (PTF-23 through PTF-26) 95-foot aluminum hulled Osprey class, built by Sewart Seacraft of Berwick, Louisiana.

PTF-23 class fast patrol boat Under construction at Stewart Seacraft, Inc., Berwick, Louisiana, 24 October 1967. Note engines on the floor at right and PCF in the right background. NH 95839

Entering service in 1968, PTF-26 spent three years in Vietnamese water with her sisters then was retrograded to the West Coast where she was assigned to Coastal River Squadron One at Coronado, then later used as a range control boat at the Pacific Missile Test Center. Finally retired from the Navy in 1990, she then spent most of the next 30 years as a school ship first for the Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco and then for the non-profit as T/V Liberty.

More recently acquired by the Maritime Pastoral Training Foundation Ltd, PTF-26 has returned to its camouflage livery and is on her way to becoming an inland waterways training boat located in Golconda, Illinois where she will be offered to cadets from 164 different NJROTC and Sea Scout units across the Midwest.

The last of this line of more than 800 PT boats and follow-on PTFs, PTF-26, recently appeared in Mobile opposite Austal and I was able to grab a few snapshots of her.

The deck gun is fake, btw. Chris Eger photo

Chris Eger photo

Note her stern still has the T/V Liberty name. Also, that is the PCU USS Pierre (LCS-38) fitting out across the river at Austal, the last of the Independence-class littoral combat ships. Kind of a nice bookend with the last Indy LCS and last PTF in the same frame. Chris Eger photo

“Each weekend, 12-15 cadets or scouts will do more than take a tour of a U.S. Navy PT boat,” said Rev. Kempton Baldridge, MPTF’s managing director and a retired Navy chaplain, in a January interview. “They will eat, sleep, and train aboard as crew trainees. With a USCG licensed captain in command, PTF-26 will get underway with cadets or scouts as crew, guided by adult officers of their own unit. In port, cadets will learn everything there is to know about PTF-26. When ‘visit ship’ is held on Saturdays and Sundays for members of the public, qualified uniformed cadets and scouts of the crew will conduct tours, just as on board Navy and Coast Guard vessels.”

Fair winds and good luck, Two-Six Boat, there aren’t that many mosquitos left.

The Literary Ghost of ATM

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Here we see a great shot of the Wickes-class flush-deck “four stacker” USS Mahan (Destroyer # 102) at anchor during the early 1920s, following conversion to a light minelayer. The round Mine Force emblem is painted on her bow. As noted by the National Museum of the U.S. Navy, “Though redesignated DM-7 in July 1920, she probably continued to wear her destroyer number for some years thereafter.”

U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. NH 46924

Named for esteemed Edwardian-era naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, Destroyer # 102 was laid down on 4 May 1918 by the Fore River Shipyard, at Quincy, Mass.; sponsored at launch three months later by the late RADM Mahan’s niece, and commissioned on 24 October 1918– just three weeks before the end of the Great War.

While her service was limited– she was decommissioned and scrapped in 1929 without firing a shot in anger– she went on to become somewhat immortal as a fictional version of Mahan appears, alongside her four-piper sistership USS Walker, in Taylor Anderson’s Destroyermen series of alternate history novels.

Warship Wednesday, June 26, 2024: A Tin Can with Teeth

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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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, June 26, 2024: A Tin Can with Teeth

Photograph by LT. L. Pelman, Admiralty Collection, Imperial War Museum catalog number A 20319.

Above we see a group of ratings aboard the Beagle class destroyer HMS Bulldog (H 91) with their mechanical mascot “which does everything but eat,” on 11 November 1943, at Portsmouth. Don’t let the clever lads and their tin pup fool you, Bulldog’s crew had already accomplished more in the war for the Atlantic than any other destroyer men would and, just six months after this image was snapped, add to their war record by bagging their second U-boat of the conflict.

The A/Bs

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) and Ambuscade (1,173 tons), each capable of making 37 knots on 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.

HMS Amazon (D39) underway at sea in 1942. She and near sister HMS Ambuscade (D38) formed the basis for British destroyer designs from 1927 until the Tribal class was ordered in 1936. IWM FL 515.

The lessons learned from these two test vessels led to two runs of very similar ships, the 8-hull A class (Acasta, Achates, Active, Antelope, Anthony, Ardent, Arrow, and Acheron) along with a destroyer leader with room for a commodore (HMS Codrington), a second flight 8-hull B class (Basilisk, Beagle, Blanche, Boadicea, Boreas, Brazen, Brilliant and Bulldog) with corresponding destroyer leader (HMS Keith), and two further A’s for the RCN (HMCS Saguenay and Skeena). In all, some 20 ships.

The A/B class destroyers, from the 1931 Janes.

Powered by two Parsons geared steam turbines, each with their own shaft, using steam provided by three Admiralty water-tube boilers equipped with superheaters, these 1,350-ton (standard) 323-foot greyhounds were extremely fast, able to hit 35 knots. Armed with four more modern QF 4.7″/45cal Mk IX singles and a pair of quadruple 21-inch torpedo tubes, they could hold their own. Able to (kind of) sweep mines, they initially carried little ASW gear as, after all, when they were designed, the Versailles Treaty had barred Germany from making or owning U-boats. Of course, that would change.

Meet Bulldog

Our subject was the sixth HMS Bulldog (or HMS Bull Dog) in RN service in a tradition going back to 1794 that included two ships that fought the French, a steam-powered paddle sloop that saw hot service from Palermo to Haiti, an Ant-class gunboat in the last half of the 19th Century, and a Great War-era Beagle-class destroyer that struck Turkish mine off Gallipoli. This earned our destroyer five battle honors (Toulon 1793, St Lucia 1796, Baltic 1854-55, Dardanelles 1915-16, English Channel 1915-16) before she was even commissioned.

Ordered on 22 March 1929 under the 1928 Programme as Yard No. 1411 from Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson Ltd, Wallsend, the future HMS Bulldog (H91) was laid down on 10 August 1929, launched the following December, and completed on 8 April 1931 at £221,408.

Dispatched to join the 4th Destroyer Flotilla with the Mediterranean Fleet, Bulldog showed the flag, participated in fleet exercises, and came to the rescue of those affected by the 1932 Ierissos earthquake in Greece.

Bulldog in Venice, pre-war

Reassignment to the Home Fleet in September 1936 brought an almost non-stop series of tense patrols off the Spanish coast during the Civil War in that country, alternating with yard periods, for the next three years.

War!

When the declaration of war between Germany and Great Britain hit in September 1939, Bulldog was in Alexandria as escort and plane guard for the carrier HMS Glorious.

HMS Glorious November 1939 at Socotra in Yemen destroyer HMS Bulldog alongside

With German raiders and blockade runners at large in the Indian Ocean, a hunting group (Force J) consisting of Glorious, Bulldog, the destroyer HMS Daring, and the old battleship HMS Malaya was sent to those waters for the rest of the year.

April 1940 saw Bulldog join in the screen escorting the carriers Glorious and Ark Royal back to UK Home Waters for the Norwegian campaign, during which our destroyer was tasked with supporting other operations. It was shortly after she broke with the carriers that Bulldog came to the rescue of the torpedoed K-class destroyer leader HMS Kelly (F01)-– commanded by Lord Louis Mountbatten– and towed the ship back to Tyne.

Assigned to the 1st Destroyer Flotilla for the evacuation of the BEF from France in June 1940 (Operation Cycle), Bulldog received three bomb hits off Le Harve on 10 June and had to spend the next three months in repair, returning to service in September with a raid with three other destroyers on the port of Cherbourg.

Convoy duties, Enigma, and Sub-busting

Bulldog then spent the rest of 1940 on escort and sheepdog duty. In February 1941, she was nominated for escort service in the Western Approaches and, between 17 March 1941 when she joined HG 055, and 14 March 1945 when she left MKS 087G, would ride shotgun on no less than 50 convoys.

While part of the 3rd Escort Group accompanying convoy OB 318, Bulldog, HMS Broadway, and the corvette HMS Aubretia engaged the German Type IXB submarine U-110 (Kptlt. Fritz-Julius Lemp) east of Cape Farewell, Greenland on 9 May 1940.

After depth charging her to the surface a boarding party from Bulldog under SLt David Balme including stoker Cyril Lee, telegraphist Allen Long, and Able Seamen Sidney Pearce, Cyril Dolley, Richard Roe, Claude Wileman, Arnold Hargreaves and John Trotter, spent six hours aboard the sinking German submarine and managed to bag its intact Enigma machine, in its entirety, to include the prized current Kurzsignale preset codes book.

B Class Destroyer HMS Bulldog with U-110 in the background on May 9th, 1941

As detailed by the Independent in 2016:

They arrived soon after midday to windward of her. Balme clambered up her curved, slippery surface, and, revolver at the ready, mounted the fixed ladder of the 12ft conning tower. Going down inside, he had two hatches and more ladders to negotiate. It meant replacing the weapon in its holster to grip with both hands and descend bottom-first. If any Nazi crewman had stayed on board, he thought, I’m an easy target.

An eerie blue light bathed the U-boat’s nerve center in the chamber below, an array of unfamiliar wheels and dials. A hissing came from somewhere, and he could hear the ocean slosh against the hull. There might be booby traps; there might be scuttling charges set to explode. He went up to the bow: nothing; the stern, too, was empty.

He formed his men into a chain to pass out books and documents. They included a stoker, Cyril Lee, and a telegraphist, Allen Long. The stoker’s job, to restart the engines, proved too risky, but the telegraphist at once told Balme: “This looks like an interesting bit of equipment, Sir.” It resembled a typewriter but lit up strangely when Long pressed the keys. It was a German naval “Enigma” cipher machine. The party found daily settings and procedures for its use. Written in soluble ink, they risked being lost if dropped in the sea, but, Balme recalled: “Nothing even got wet.”

As noted by the National Museum of the Royal Navy, “This discovery was one of the greatest ever intelligence coups and undoubtedly saved thousands, if not millions, of lives.” No less a person than King George VI called the find “perhaps the most important single event in the whole war at sea.”

Balme received the Distinguished Service Cross while the other members of the away team were Mentioned in Despatches, and skipper CDR Addison Joe Baker-Cresswell, RN, received the Distinguished Service Order.

A party from HMS Bulldog prepares to board U-110. IWM HU63114

Bulldog kept U-110 afloat for 17 hours then let the towline slip, ordered to let the submarine go to the bottom to preserve the Enigma capture secret.

HMS Bulldog (H-91) moored to a buoy on the east coast, on 17 April 1945

Bulldog would also chalk up a solo kill against the Type VIIC U-boat U-719 (Oblt. Klaus-Dietrich Steffens) on 26 Jun 1944– 80 years ago today– north-west of Ireland. All hands were lost on the German boat.

Operation Nest Egg

It was aboard the cramped decks of our little destroyer that the nearly five-year German occupation of the Channel Islands ended. She was the headquarters ship for Force 135, Operation Nest Egg, commanded by Brigadier Alfred Ernest Snow, OBE, which was sent to liberate the islands.

A week after Hitler’s suicide, HMS Bulldog, escorted by her sister Beagle, arrived off St Peter Port in Guernsey and a declaration of unconditional surrender was signed t 0714 on 9 May 1945 by Generalmajor Siegfried Heine, deputy commander of the German garrison, after some back and forth between Brigadier Snow, chief of the British “Omelet” delegation, and one young Kapitänleutänant Armin Zimmerman, the aide to the garrison’s overall commander, Vizeadmiral Friedrich Hüffmeier, late of the KMS Scharnhorst.

The surrender party was transported by the German minesweeper M4613 to Bulldog.

A scene on board HMS Bulldog during the first conference with Captain Lieutenant Zimmerman before the signing of the surrender document which liberated the Channel Islands. Left to right around the table are: Admiral Stuart (Royal Navy), Brigadier General A E Snow (Chief British Emissary), Captain H Herzmark (Intelligence Corps), Wing Commander Archie Steward (Royal Air Force), Lieutenant Colonel E A Stoneman, Major John Margeson, Colonel H R Power (all of the British Army) and Kapitänleutänant Armin Zimmerman,(Kriegsmarine). IWM D24595

Generalmajor Siegfried Heine, German deputy commander of the Channel Islands (right), has his identification papers checked as arrives at HMS Bulldog to sign the document of surrender. IWM D 24601

Immediately after the surrender document was signed, the initial Allied force, led by Colonel H.R. Power and Lt.Col Stoneman and consisting of four officers and 21 men, including several from Guernsey, landed at the White Rock at 07:50, the first British forces on the island since June 1940.

Colonel H.R. Power, Chief Civil Affairs Officer, walking across the gangplank from German Harbor Protection Vessel FK04, about to shake the hand of Attorney-General J.E.L. Martel on the White Rock. The St. Peter Port seafront can be seen in the background. Approx. 7:50am, 9th May 1945 Guernsey Museum Object No. GMAG 2006.193.36

In all, the German garrisons in the Channel Islands numbered 26,909 men on 9 May (Jersey: 11,671, Guernsey: 11,755, Alderney: 3,202, and Sark: 281), which had kept a populace of some 40,000 locals under the thumb for a half-decade. Not a bad haul for a couple of worn-out tin cans.

Paid off shortly after, Bulldog earned two somewhat understated battle honors for her WWII service (Atlantic 1941-45 and Arctic 1942-44)

The war was hard on these ships. Of the 20 A/B-class destroyers, 13 were lost or crippled during WWII including Acasta and Ardent, sunk in a surface action with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off Narvik while trying to defend HMS Glorious; Achates lost in the Barents in a one-sided fight with the German cruiser Admiral Hipper; Acheron and Blanche lost to mines, Arrow wrecked in an explosion in Algiers, Codrington and Brazen sunk by German bombers off Dover during the Battle of Britain, Skeena wrecked off Iceland, Keith and Basilisk claimed by the Luftwaffe during Dunkirk, and Boadicea sent sky high by Fritz X missiles fired by KG 100 Dornier Do 217s off Portsmouth a week after D-Day. Saguenay, who lost both her bow and stern in two different incidents, finished the war as an unpowered training hulk.

Of the seven remaining class members– Active, Antelope, Anthony, Beagle, Boreas, Brilliant, and our Bulldog— obsolete for postwar work and thoroughly worn out, they were soon paid off and scrapped by 1948.

Epilogue

Few relics remain of Bulldog.

A set of her 1940 bomb damage repair plans are in the National Archives.

The IWM has two works of art in their collection with Bulldog as the subject.

This evacuation from France was remembered in a period watercolor by maritime artist Richard Harding Seddon.

Signaling HMS Bulldog from the Shore, near Veulette: 10th June 1940. a view of some British soldiers signaling from a beach to HMS Bulldog. The soldiers stand on an unusual white rock formation, the sunset casting long shadows across the beach. Art.IWM ART LD 5986

Bulldog and her sisters Beagle and Boadicea were also portrayed off Bear Island while on Arctic duty in 1943 in a painting by Colin McMillan.

Three Royal Navy destroyers sail in choppy Arctic waters near Bear Island (Bjørnøja), with HMS Boadicea in the immediate foreground. All the ships sail from left to right and beams of sunlight emerge from breaks in the cloud in the background. Art.IWM ART 16598

As for Enigma machine burglar David Edward Balme, naval officer, and wool broker, DSC 1941, he finished the war as an LCDR and later served in the cruiser HMS Berwick and the battle-cruiser HMS Renown before leaving the service in 1947. He died in Lymington, Hampshire 3 January 2016.

Bulldog’s skipper during the Enigma/U-110 capture, CDR Addison Joe Baker-Cresswell DSO, RN, left the service in 1951 having gone on to command the cruiser HMS Caradoc (D 60). A gentleman farmer, he passed in 1997, aged 96.

Post-war, the Royal Navy would recycle the name for the seventh HMS Bulldog (A317), the lead ship of her class of four 189-foot steel-hulled armed survey ships. Commissioned in 1968, she was the last of the four still in service– and the last active RN ship with a wooden deck– when she was paid off in 2002.

Built by Brooke Marine, Lowestoft, the Bulldogs sported a bulbous bow and a high flared forecastle, giving them rather yacht-like lines, in addition to their suite of echo sounders and a Marconi Hydrosearch sector scanning sonar.

The Admiralty in 2021 announced the names for the “Inspirational” Type 31 (Babcock Arrowhead 140) frigate class would include the eighth HMS Bulldog, which had her keel laid in 2023.

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.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

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