HMS Activity (D94): The Cargo Ship That Became a U-Boat Killer

A Cargo Ship Interrupted

HMS Activity had one of the more roundabout starts to naval life of any ship on this list. She began at the Caledon shipyard in Dundee as Telemachus, a refrigerated cargo liner being built for the Alfred Holt Line, with construction under way from as early as 1940. Before she could ever carry a single crate of cargo, the Ministry of War Transport requisitioned her in February 1941 and renamed her Empire Activity, and then in January 1942 the Admiralty took her over again, this time for conversion into an escort carrier. A ship that had started life destined for the refrigerated meat trade ended up, a little over a year later, launching Swordfish biplanes against German submarines in the Arctic.

She was launched in her new form on 30 May 1942 and commissioned that autumn, working up at Lamlash and sorting out teething problems at Rosyth before formally entering service. Her early months were spent as a deck landing training carrier, teaching pilots the particular art of putting an aircraft down safely on a small, pitching flight deck, useful preparation work rather than combat, but essential all the same.

Into the Arctic

Activity's real war began properly in January 1944, when she embarked 819 Naval Air Squadron and joined the Second Escort Group for convoy duty. Through the opening months of that year she escorted a string of Atlantic convoys, before her aircraft found their moment in the brutal, freezing waters of the Arctic convoy route.

Escorting the outbound Convoy JW 58 at the end of March 1944, aircraft flying from Activity and her fellow escort carrier HMS Tracker combined with other escorts to sink the German submarine U-288 in the Barents Sea, a joint effort involving Swordfish, Avenger and Martlet aircraft working the target with depth charges and rockets. Her aircraft are also credited with a share in the sinking of U-355 and in damaging three further U-boats during the same operation, a genuinely impressive return for a ship that only a couple of years earlier had been intended to carry frozen meat rather than aircraft.

From the Arctic to the Far East

By August 1944, with the U-boat threat in the Atlantic and Arctic increasingly under control, Activity was redesignated a ferry carrier, switched from hunting submarines to transporting aircraft and personnel out to the Far East, arriving in Ceylon on 23 October 1944. While en route to Sydney the following year, she came across the survivors of the SS Peter Silvester, a merchant ship sunk by the German submarine U-862 on 6 February 1945, and rescued 92 of them from the water, a reminder that even a ship reassigned to ferry duty could still find itself doing genuinely lifesaving work far from any battle.

She went on to support the reoccupation of Singapore following the Japanese surrender before finally returning home on 20 October 1945, her war, in all its unexpected variety, finally over.

Back to Where She Started

In a pleasing bit of symmetry, Activity's naval career ended much as it had begun: back in merchant hands. She was sold to Glen Line on 25 March 1946 and converted by Palmers Shipbuilding into the merchant vessel Breconshire, entering commercial service in September 1947, more than seven years after her keel had first gone down as a cargo ship interrupted by a war. She spent the next two decades quietly earning her keep as an ordinary merchantman, remaining in service until April 1967, when she made her final voyage from Kobe to the scrapyard at Mihara in Japan, arriving on 24 April 1967 to be broken up.

It is a quietly satisfying shape for a career: a cargo ship taken away from her intended trade to help win a war in the Arctic, credited with a share in sinking two U-boats and rescuing 92 shipwrecked sailors along the way, before being handed back to commercial life to finish out her days exactly as she was originally meant to, just under a very different name.