HMS Alacrity (U60): The Sloop That Arrived Just Too Late for One War and Just in Time for Another

Built for a War That Was Nearly Over

HMS Alacrity was a Modified Black Swan-class sloop, one of the Royal Navy's excellent convoy escort and anti-submarine designs, built by William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton. Ordered on 12 August 1941, she had a notably long road to completion: not laid down until 5 April 1943, launched on 1 September 1944, and finally commissioned on 13 April 1945, less than a month before the war in Europe ended.

The yard is worth a detour. William Denny and Brothers launched ships from Dumbarton from 1844 until 1963, and Alacrity was their yard number 1381. Denny's largest contribution to naval architecture, though, was not a ship at all but a shed. In 1882 the firm built the world's first commercial ship model experiment tank, a trough of water roughly the length of a football pitch in which scale hulls were towed to measure their resistance before a single plate of the real thing was cut. The idea came from William Froude's work at Torquay, and Denny's partners were talked into paying for it on the reasoning that knowing in advance was cheaper than finding out afterwards. The tank outlasted the shipyard by decades and is still there, part of the Scottish Maritime Museum, which is a better memorial than most Clyde yards managed.

Fully worked out, she displaced around 1,490 tons standard, rising to nearly 1,950 tons deep loaded, and ran to just under 300 feet in length with a 38-foot 6-inch beam. Twin Parsons geared turbines gave her 4,300 shaft horsepower and a top speed of just under 20 knots, and she carried six 4-inch guns alongside Bofors and Oerlikon anti-aircraft weapons, with a peacetime complement of around 192 officers and men.

Whatever role her designers had envisioned for her against the U-boats of the Atlantic, she arrived far too late to play it in anger.

Which is a genuine pity, because the family she belonged to was the most lethal submarine-hunting line the Royal Navy ever put to sea. Twenty-five Modified Black Swans were launched between 1942 and 1945, and the earlier ones included the ships of Captain Frederic Walker's 2nd Support Group. HMS Starling and her consorts hunted as a coordinated pack, holding a contact for hours on end until whatever was underneath either came up or stopped being a problem. The group is credited with twenty-three U-boats and Starling alone with fourteen, which makes her the most successful anti-submarine ship of the war. Another sister, HMS Amethyst, would find her own fame four years later in a Chinese river. Alacrity was built to the same recipe and never fired at a submarine in anger in her life.

Under her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander John Clutton-Baker, she spent her first documented duties running anti-submarine drills off Tobermory on 3 and 4 May 1945 alongside HMS Volatile, HMS Rother, HMS Widemouth Bay and the Canadian corvette HMCS Matane, training for a battle that was, within days, effectively over in Europe altogether.

Tobermory was no gentle finishing school. The working-up base on Mull, commissioned as HMS Western Isles, was run for most of the war by Commodore Gilbert Stephenson, a man in his mid-sixties who had come out of retirement and was known throughout the escort fleet as the Terror of Tobermory, on the strength of a well-earned reputation for removing officers and ratings he judged unfit within hours of their arrival. His staff ran 1,132 courses and worked up 911 escort ships, and the crews who passed through accounted for 91 U-boats between them. Alacrity received the treatment in the very last days it could still have mattered.

A Quiet Postwar Start

With the war at an end, Alacrity sailed for the Far East in June 1945, calling at Colombo before reaching Hong Kong that September, where she served for a time as guardship at Shanghai with the 32nd Escort Flotilla.

There was a certain symmetry in that posting. An earlier HMS Alacrity had been a steam yacht built in 1900, bought by the Admiralty in 1919 and renamed, and she spent her short naval career as flagship for the Commander-in-Chief on the China Station, working out of Wei-hai-wei and calling regularly at Shanghai and up the Yangtze before paying off in 1922. A world war and a quarter of a century later, the name was back on the same river doing much the same job. The Royal Navy has always been fond of that sort of continuity, even when nobody sets out to arrange it.

She underwent a refit at Auckland, New Zealand between February and June 1946, returning to Hong Kong afterwards as Senior Officer's Ship of the 1st Escort Force, British Pacific Fleet, and picking up a new pennant number, F60, along the way. She was redesignated to the 3rd Frigate Flotilla in 1949 as the Navy reorganised its escort forces for the new peacetime era.

The change of letter was more than administrative tidying. In the late 1940s the Admiralty gave up on the sloop as a category altogether and rated the survivors as frigates, which is why a ship laid down as U60 turns up in every later record as F60. Nothing whatever changed about the ship. The Navy simply stopped using a word that had meant a dozen different things since the age of sail, and Alacrity was reclassified into a type that had not existed when she was ordered.

An Unexpected Second War

Alacrity's quiet peacetime routine ended abruptly in the summer of 1950, when she was deployed with United Nations naval forces for service in the Korean War, joining the international coalition assembled to resist the North Korean invasion of the South.

It was, in its own way, a stranger fit for her than the war she had originally been built for: a ship designed around the Battle of the Atlantic instead spent her war swapping coastlines, serving first with the East Korean Support Group patrolling the Sea of Japan alongside the cruiser HMS Jamaica and, coincidentally, her own class's name-ship, HMS Black Swan, before relieving the American destroyer USS Mansfield on patrol off Korea's west coast that July.

The British ships worked out of Sasebo in southern Japan, and the group carried the workmanlike designation Commander Task Group 96.5. It was not a quiet billet. Earlier that same month, on 8 July 1950, Jamaica was bombarding targets on the east coast when a North Korean 76mm gun found her and killed six of her ship's company. Whatever the Modified Black Swans had been drawn up to fight, in Korea the danger came from the land.

Cho-do and Sokto are worth locating on a map, because their position is the entire point. Both lie off the North Korean coast between the 38th and 39th parallels, which is to say a long way behind the front line, and both were held throughout the war by United Nations forces and anti-Communist Korean irregulars who used them as bases for raids, radar watch and the recovery of downed aircrew. On 6 January 1952 the UN Command formally handed Task Force 95, the blockading and escort force, responsibility for defending eleven such islands north of the parallel and four more just below it. Holding them meant keeping warships inside gun range of a hostile coastline night after night, waiting for an invasion that might never sail.

Through the second half of 1951 she stood anti-invasion watch off Cho-do and Sokto Island on the west coast, and by early 1952 had shifted back to the east, where she was hit five times by North Korean shore batteries while providing gunfire support for the American minesweeper USS Osprey off Songjin, a reminder that a war fought largely with guns rather than torpedoes could still draw blood from a ship built to hunt submarines.

She left Hong Kong for home that August, sailing by way of Singapore and Malta, and paid off at Portsmouth in October 1952, her active seagoing career effectively over after just seven years, split oddly between a European war she arrived too late for and an Asian one she had never been designed with in mind.

She did not come home empty-handed. Alacrity carries a single battle honour, Korea 1950-52, and it is the only one on her record. A ship laid down for the Battle of the Atlantic, and still learning her trade off Mull when that battle finished, earned her one and only distinction in the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan, the better part of seven thousand miles from the convoy routes her designers had drawn her around.

A Long Wait for the Scrapyard

Reserve, in her case, meant Lisahally on Lough Foyle below Londonderry, where she was laid up from 1953. That anchorage has a history worth knowing. It was to the naval jetty at Lisahally that the first surrendered U-boats were brought on 14 May 1945, and thirty of them lay tied to pontoons there before being towed out into the Atlantic and sunk in Operation Deadlight over the winter that followed. So Alacrity spent her last years afloat moored on the same water that had held the fleet she was built to hunt and never once met.

Alacrity sat in reserve for several years before finally being placed on the disposal list in 1956 and sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation for scrap. She arrived at Dalmuir on 15 September that year for initial breaking by W. H. Arnott Young, before being moved on to Troon in November so the West of Scotland Shipbreaking Company could finish the job, a process not completed until March 1957, closing out a career that had, through no fault of her own, always seemed to be arriving just slightly out of step with whichever conflict was actually happening around her.