HMS Albrighton (L12): From Dieppe to the Cold War German Navy

Built Under Fire

HMS Albrighton was ordered from John Brown and Company on 4 July 1940 as part of the 1940 War Emergency Programme, and even her construction did not go entirely smoothly: work at the Clydebank yard was slowed by damage from German air raids before she was finally launched on 11 October 1941 and commissioned on 22 February 1942.

She was a capable Hunt-class escort destroyer, armed with four 4-inch guns, a scattering of lighter anti-aircraft weapons, torpedo tubes and depth charges, and fitted with radar and sonar to hunt for exactly the kind of threats she would soon be facing in the Channel.

The Hunts have a design story worth telling, because they very nearly did not float properly. The first of them, HMS Atherstone, was given an inclining test in 1939 and found to be dangerously unstable. The inquiry that followed turned up a straightforward arithmetic error: the class had been drawn round six 4-inch guns that the hull could not actually carry. A twin mounting came off, the superstructure and the funnel were cut down, ballast went in, and every ship of the class was quietly amended before anyone had to explain it in public.

Albrighton belonged to the last group, the Type III, where the Admiralty gave up another twin 4-inch mounting on purpose rather than by necessity, and put a pair of 21-inch torpedo tubes amidships in its place. The point was that a Hunt in the Channel or the Mediterranean was not going to spend the war shepherding convoys across an ocean. She was going to run into German ships at night at close range, and for that she wanted a torpedo. Everything Albrighton went on to do makes rather more sense once you know that the ship was deliberately armed for exactly it.

Early Action in the Channel

After working up under her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Ronald John Hanson, Albrighton joined the 1st Destroyer Flotilla at Portsmouth in April 1942 for convoy escort and anti-E-boat patrol work, and did not have to wait long for her first real action.

On the night of 18 to 19 June 1942, she and the Steam Gun Boats SGB 6, SGB 7 and SGB 8 attacked a German convoy in the Baie de la Seine, torpedoing and sinking the German minesweeper R 41. The action then turned against them: German E-boats ambushed the flotilla on the way home, and SGB 7 herself was sunk by gunfire, a reminder of how quickly these Channel skirmishes could swing either way.

Rescue Under Fire at Dieppe

Albrighton's most harrowing early test came during the Dieppe Raid, Operation Jubilee, on 19 August 1942, when she sailed escorting landing craft into one of the most costly and controversial Allied operations of the war.

When her fellow Hunt-class destroyer HMS Berkeley was struck by bombs and left crippled, Albrighton moved in to rescue survivors from the sinking ship before finishing her off by scuttling, a grim but necessary task carried out under difficult conditions as the wider raid unravelled around her.

The bare account undersells the moment. Three Dorniers came through the fighter cover and put two bombs into Berkeley just forward of her bridge, killing thirteen of her people and breaking her beyond any hope of saving. Albrighton came alongside, took off everyone still living, then backed off and torpedoed her. Berkeley was the only destroyer the Royal Navy lost at Dieppe, and the ship that finished her was one of her own sisters, which is the sort of duty nobody joins for and somebody always has to do.

A Run of Successful Actions

The following months brought a string of genuine successes. In October 1942 she took part in operations against the German auxiliary cruiser Komet, sunk with all hands off Cherbourg.

Komet is worth a paragraph of her own. She was a commerce raider, a merchant ship rebuilt with concealed guns to prey on Allied shipping, and she was a week out of Hamburg on her second cruise under Kapitän zur See Ulrich Brocksien when the Channel forces caught her. The killing blow came from a motor torpedo boat, MTB 236, whose commanding officer, Sub-Lieutenant Robert Drayson, fired two torpedoes at very close range. Komet blew up. There were no survivors from a crew of 251. The wreck was found off Cap de la Hague by the marine archaeologist Innes McCartney in 2006, lying upside down in two pieces with most of her middle simply gone.

That November she escorted Convoy KMS 2 toward Gibraltar ahead of Operation Torch and helped the damaged destroyer HMS Marne back to safety, and on 11 November she joined HMS Porcupine and the Dutch destroyer HrMs Isaac Sweers in rescuing 238 survivors from the torpedoed Dutch troopship Nieuw Zeeland.

Between December 1942 and April 1943 she featured in three separate successful attacks on Axis vessels, sinking the German auxiliary Sperrbrecher Beijerland, the Italian blockade runner Butterfly, and the German anti-submarine trawler UJ1402, though that last engagement, on 27 and 28 April 1943, cost her eight of her own crew killed and 25 wounded in return.

A Headquarters Ship for D-Day

Command passed to Lieutenant John Joseph Symonds Hooker in September 1943, and it was under him that, in February 1944, Albrighton was converted into a headquarters ship ahead of the invasion of Europe, serving in that capacity as an escort for landing craft and a reserve command vessel during the D-Day landings from 6 June 1944.

That August, back in a more conventional fighting role, she carried Belgian commandos of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando to the Ile d'Yeu on the night of 25 to 26 August, in a raid designated Operation Rumford, aiming to help them capture the island's German garrison.

The unit she was carrying deserves an introduction, because No. 10 Commando was unlike anything else in the British order of battle. It was formed on 2 July 1942 and it was Inter-Allied in the literal sense: instead of companies it had national troops, French, Belgian, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Polish and Yugoslav, made up of men who had got out of their own occupied countries and wanted to go back. By the end of the war it was the largest commando in the British Army. The Belgians Albrighton put ashore on the Ile d'Yeu were one of those troops.

And then there was No. 3 Troop, which everybody called X Troop. It was recruited in July 1942 out of the alien companies of the Pioneer Corps, the units into which Britain had shovelled the refugees it did not know what to do with, and it consisted almost entirely of German speakers: Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs and others, most of them Jewish, at least one of whom had already been through Dachau and Buchenwald. They reported for training on 24 July, went to Aberdovey in Wales and then to Achnacarry, and every single one of them was given a British name and a complete false personal history, because a man captured with a German-Jewish name on his identity discs would not have been treated as a prisoner of war.

A hundred and thirty men passed through it. They never fought as a formed troop; they were parcelled out in ones and twos to other commandos and to the Army generally, as assault troops who could also interrogate a prisoner on the spot, read a captured document and question civilians. Twenty-one of them were killed and twenty-two wounded, which is among the worst casualty rates any British unit sustained in the war. They were fighting the country most of them had been born in, under names that were not theirs, and if they had been taken they would probably have been shot.

Which puts the last part of this ship's story in a rather particular light. In August 1944 Albrighton was carrying men of a commando that included a troop of German and Austrian Jews operating under invented English names. Fifteen years later she was commissioned into the West German Navy and spent nine years teaching German sailors their trade. Nobody planned either of those things, and the distance between them is about as good a measure of what happened to Europe in those fifteen years as any ship in this series provides.

The Germans had already slipped away to the mainland, taking their 75mm gun battery with them, but on the way home Albrighton intercepted and captured two trawlers carrying 22 German sailors who had, by most accounts, murdered their own officers and were making a run for neutral Spain; she sank both trawlers before returning to port. She was reconverted to a standard destroyer configuration in early 1945.

She was damaged in a collision with a landing ship, LST 238, on 23 May 1945, just weeks before the European war ended, and was subsequently allocated to the Eastern Fleet.

A Second Career in a Former Enemy's Navy

After the war, Albrighton settled into reserve at Devonport, moved to Gibraltar in 1953, returned to Britain in 1955, and was hulked in January 1956. Her story, however, was far from finished.

In May 1956 she was selected for transfer to West Germany, and after a refit in Liverpool was commissioned into the newly reconstituted West German Navy on 14 May 1959 as Raule, pennant number F217, serving as an anti-submarine training ship with modified armament for nearly a decade, a striking symbol of how thoroughly the postwar alliance structure had reshaped former adversaries into Cold War partners.

She was not alone in going. Three Hunts made the crossing into West German service: Oakley became Gneisenau, Eggesford became Brommy, and Albrighton became Raule. A fourth ship joining them at the gunnery school, Scharnhorst, had spent the war as the Royal Navy sloop HMS Mermaid. The name she was given honoured Benjamin Raule, a Dutchman who settled in Brandenburg in 1676, leased the Great Elector the ships his navy was founded on and ended up as its Director General, which is a considerably older piece of German naval history than anything either navy had been arguing about lately.

The arithmetic of it is worth setting out. In three years of war this ship helped sink a German raider with 251 men aboard, a German minesweeper, a Sperrbrecher, a German anti-submarine trawler and two trawlers full of mutineers, and lost eight of her own crew doing it. She then spent nine years teaching German sailors how to hunt submarines. Both things are true, and the second one is arguably the more remarkable.

She was finally decommissioned in 1968 and sold for scrap to Eisen and Metall of Hamburg in 1969, closing out a career that had taken her from rescuing sailors under fire at Dieppe to training the sailors of a country Britain had so recently been fighting.