HMS Albacore (J101): Five Years Sweeping Mines, Fifteen Years in Reserve

Built for the Unglamorous Work

HMS Albacore belonged to the Algerine class, the Royal Navy's workhorse minesweeping design of the Second World War, built specifically to handle the heavier equipment needed to deal with magnetic mines that the smaller, earlier Bangor class simply could not carry.

Built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, she was ordered on 15 November 1940, laid down on 24 July 1941, launched on 2 April 1942, and commissioned on 16 June 1942, entering service under the command of Lieutenant Commander John David Lewis Williams just in time for one of the largest Allied operations of the war.

Fully worked out, the Algerine class ran to around 225 feet in length and displaced between 850 and 1,030 tons depending on load, with a top speed of 16.5 knots, enough to keep pace with the convoys they were built to protect while still carrying the sweeping gear and stores their smaller Bangor-class predecessors had no room for.

First, though, she had to be taught her trade, which meant working up at Tobermory and then minesweeping training in the Firth of Forth. It paid off almost at once. On 30 July 1942 Albacore became the first ship of the entire Algerine class to raise a mine, and she did it on exercise, in Scottish coastal water, six weeks after commissioning. Given how many she would go on to account for, it was a reasonable opening statement.

Tobermory was not a gentle finishing school. The working-up base on Mull was run by Commodore Gilbert Stephenson, known throughout the escort fleet as the Terror of Tobermory, and what he did to arriving ships is described in the article on HMS Alacrity (U60). A ship that went to the Mediterranean and swept a thousand mines had first been taken apart and put back together by a man in his sixties in a Hebridean anchorage.

Albacore made her first operational passage that August, joining the 9th Minesweeping Flotilla at Harwich for home-waters work before she and the flotilla were pulled into something rather bigger that autumn.

Clearing the Way for Torch

That October and November, Albacore took part in Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa, escorting Convoy KMS A1 through the Strait of Gibraltar before joining the Beer Sector escort covering the landings at Algiers, part of the minesweeping screen protecting troop and supply ships bound for the beaches.

It was precisely the kind of work minesweepers existed for: unglamorous, rarely photographed, and utterly essential to making sure the ships actually carrying the invasion force reached shore safely.

Two days after the Algiers landings the flotilla found out what the Mediterranean was going to cost. In the small hours of 15 November 1942, off Bougie, the Italian submarine Ascianghi put two torpedoes into HMS Algerine from about seven hundred metres. The name-ship of the class went down within minutes some five miles north of Cap Carbon, taking eighty-four of her company with her, including every one of her six officers. Albacore was among the ships that went in to pick up survivors from the rafts. Eight men in total lived through it. The class had been in the Mediterranean for ten days.

A Long Mediterranean Watch

What followed was less a series of battles than a long, methodical campaign against something that never shot back and never gave up. In May 1943 the 12th Flotilla began Operation Antidote, the clearance of a passage through the Galita and Sicilian Channels, starting from Bizerta on 5 May. By 7 June they had destroyed 126 mines and opened the route. It is the sort of achievement that gets a line in a signal log and no headline anywhere, and without it the invasion of Sicily could not have sailed.

In July Albacore was detached with HMS Acute and HMS Circe to work with the 14th Flotilla for Operation Husky, sweeping ahead of the Sicily landings on 12 July. September took her to Salerno for Operation Avalanche, where the flotilla dealt with 135 mines in the assault area inside the month. By the end of 1943 the 12th Minesweeping Flotilla had swept 770 mines since it first arrived at Gibraltar, which works out at rather more than two a day, every day, for a year.

The pattern held into 1944. On 21 January she joined HMS Rinaldo and HMS Waterwitch of the 19th Flotilla to provide the swept channel off Anzio, arriving with the landing force rather than after it, because a beachhead supplied by sea needs clean water before it needs anything else.

Albacore's war continued in the Mediterranean theatre, including anti-submarine exercises off Malta in May 1944 alongside HMS Stratagem and HMS Tenacious, keeping her skills sharp even as the wider war moved toward its conclusion elsewhere.

That May the flotilla worked its way up the Italian west coast in support of the bombardment around Gaeta, where on 11 and 12 May the sweepers came under heavy fire from shore batteries while cutting 89 mines, which is a difficult day at the office by any standard. In June they cleared the entrance to Civitavecchia. In July came Operation Lobster, the clearance of the channels into Leghorn, and by 25 July the port was open to shipping with 250 mines swept out of the way. By October the 12th Flotilla's running total stood at 1,013 mines, a figure the Supreme Commander, Mediterranean thought worth formally recognising.

Late in October 1944 she was sent to the eastern Mediterranean for Operation Manna, the Allied return to Greece, and on 1 November began clearing the passage into Salonika from Skiathos. It was in the Aegean that the flotilla met a new German mine, the type known to the sweepers as Oboe, for the first time and had to work out how to deal with it in the water rather than in a classroom. From 17 December she swept the Dardanelles alongside HMS Fly and HMS Mutine, a job that produced 52 mines and one embarrassment when Acute ran aground on the Turkish coast and had to be towed clear.

Command passed from Williams to Lieutenant Kenneth Horder Higson on 9 April 1943, and then to Lieutenant Gordon Ronald Paterson in August 1945, who remained in command until 11 June 1946.

Peace did not mean rest. Assigned to the 12th Minesweeping Flotilla after VJ Day, Albacore stayed on in the Mediterranean clearing the wartime minefields that still made the sea dangerous for merchant shipping, an international effort coordinated through the Mediterranean Zone Board that kept Allied minesweepers busy for years after the guns had fallen silent.

She refitted at Malta in December 1945, resumed sweeping based out of Genoa from February 1946, and sailed from Malta that April for a further refit at Chatham; by June she was back at work clearing mines in home waters, off the east coast, in the Channel, and off the Dutch coast, doing precisely what her class had been built for: making the sea safe again, one patient sweep at a time.

The Loudest Job of Her Life, and Then Nothing

Her last piece of work was one of the loudest things anyone has ever done deliberately without splitting an atom. In April 1947 she was among the ships present at Heligoland for Operation Big Bang, the Royal Navy's demolition of the island's fortifications using the surplus German ammunition stacked on it. Roughly 6,700 tons of it went up at once: some four thousand torpedo warheads, close to nine thousand depth charges and more than ninety thousand shells, fired at one o'clock on 18 April on the fourth pip of the BBC time signal. The blast came to about 3.2 kilotons of TNT equivalent, the largest artificial non-nuclear explosion made up to that point, and it was felt on the German mainland seventy kilometres away. The island survived, more or less, because the porous sandstone let the shock escape.

What happened to the island afterwards is worth following, because the story does not end with the bang. The Royal Air Force kept Heligoland as a bombing range for another five years and the islanders, who had been evacuated in 1945, were not allowed back. It was, formally, closed.

On 20 December 1950 two students and a professor from Heidelberg, René Leudesdorff, Georg von Hatzfeld and Hubertus zu Löwenstein, got themselves ashore on the forbidden island and raised German, European and Heligolandic flags on it. They were removed, and more people came, and it turned into a national campaign that the British government eventually decided was not worth resisting. Heligoland was handed back to Germany on 1 March 1952.

It is now a duty-free holiday island with about a thousand permanent residents and a great many day trippers off the ferries, walking over ground the Royal Navy rearranged in 1947. An island that Britain detonated 6,700 tons of ammunition on, and then bombed for another five years, was reclaimed by three men with flags.

After that she went back to the day job, clearing mines out of Cuxhaven, and then it simply stopped. Albacore paid off in October 1947 and was reduced to reserve at Chatham. She was five years old. She had swept ahead of four invasions, and she would spend the next fifteen years tied up doing nothing at all, which is the fate of a great many useful ships in a navy that has suddenly run out of war.

She was placed on the disposal list in 1962 and sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation for breaking up by Messrs Cordron. She arrived under tow at Port Glasgow on 9 September 1963, twenty-one years after she had first raised a mine in the Firth of Forth.

The honours board is the short version of all of it: North Africa 1942-43, Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943, Anzio 1944. Four battle honours for a ship whose entire job was to arrive first, in the dark, in water nobody had yet proved was safe, and to make it safe by finding out.

Hers was a career built on exactly the kind of patient, careful work that never makes headlines and keeps shipping lanes open all the same. The convoys that followed her through the Sicilian Channel, the landing craft that ran in to Anzio behind her sweep and the merchantmen that used Leghorn and Salonika afterwards had no particular reason to think about the minesweeper that had gone first. That is rather the point of a minesweeper.