HMS Annan (K404): British-Built, Canadian-Crewed, U-Boat Killer

A British Ship for a Canadian Crew

HMS Annan was a River-class frigate built by Hall, Russell and Company at Aberdeen, laid down on 10 June 1943 and launched that December, named, in keeping with the class's tradition, after a river in Scotland.

The yard that built her is worth knowing about as well, and it is not the sort of firm that usually turns up in a warship's history. Hall, Russell of Aberdeen made its living building trawlers for the northern fishing grounds and had done since the 1860s, which is precisely why the Admiralty gave it River-class frigates: a firm that builds boats to work the Arctic in winter already knows how to produce a strong, sea-kindly hull cheaply, and that was the entire premise of the class. The yard, and what became of it, is set out in the article on HMS Anglesey (P277).

The River class exists because the Flower class corvette was not good enough, and everybody knew it. A Flower was small, slow, wet and desperately uncomfortable, and could not keep up with a convoy in bad weather, let alone chase anything. William Reed at Smiths Dock, the same firm that had produced the Flower in the first place, went back to the drawing board and came up with what he initially called a twin-screw corvette: a hull half as long again at just over three hundred feet, a proper forecastle to keep the sea off the bow, two shafts instead of one, better accommodation for a crew of around 160, and seven thousand miles of range at fifteen knots.

The clever part was what he kept. The machinery was still reciprocating steam rather than turbines, and the construction methods were still the mercantile ones the Flowers had proved, which meant the ships could go on being built by yards with no warship experience and no access to turbine plant. A hundred and fifty-one of them were built in the end, for Britain, Canada, Australia, the United States and others. It is a design that gets almost no attention next to the corvettes and the destroyers, and it did more of the actual work of the Atlantic than either.

The arrangement she was built under is worth explaining too. The Royal Canadian Navy went into the war with a handful of ships and came out of it as one of the largest Allied navies afloat, and no country can expand at that rate on its own yards alone. Canada built the great majority of her own seventy River-class frigates, but a handful, Annan among them, came from British yards and were handed over complete. She kept her British name, took a Canadian ship's company, and served as HMCS Annan for the whole of her fighting career, which is why the same ship appears in the records under two sets of initials.

Rather than joining the Royal Navy directly, she was transferred to Canada and commissioned for the Royal Canadian Navy at Aberdeen on 13 January 1944, retaining her British name throughout, a fairly common arrangement during the war as Commonwealth navies expanded rapidly using British-built hulls and needed crews to match.

She was a solidly armed convoy escort, carrying twin 4-inch guns forward, a 12-pounder aft, eight 20mm cannon, a Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar, and up to 150 depth charges, more than enough firepower for the U-boat hunting work that would define her short but eventful career.

Into the Normandy Campaign

After working up, Annan joined Escort Group 6 based at Londonderry, and was soon heavily involved in Operation Neptune, the naval component of the D-Day landings, escorting convoys and running anti-submarine patrols from 5 June 1944 onward, part of the enormous logistical effort required to keep the invasion of Normandy supplied and protected from German submarine interference.

Sinking U-1006

Annan's defining moment came on 16 October 1944, when her escort group encountered the German submarine U-1006 south-east of the Faroe Islands.

The boat she killed is worth a paragraph, because her record puts the whole late-war U-boat campaign in a sentence. U-1006 was commissioned on 11 January 1944 under Oberleutnant Horst Voigt, his first and only command, two days before Annan herself was commissioned at Aberdeen. She then spent eight months in a training flotilla in the Baltic, which is what a new boat did by 1944, because the Atlantic had become so dangerous that crews needed far more working up than they had in 1941 and there was no longer any point in sending them out unprepared. She joined an operational flotilla in August and sailed on her first patrol. She sank nothing. Nine months and five days after she was commissioned she was on the bottom south-east of the Faeroes with six of her men dead and forty-four of them in a Canadian frigate. That is a fair description of the last year of the U-boat war: hundreds of boats, very few sinkings, and a casualty rate among the crews that no other service in any navy came close to.

Working alongside the Canadian frigate HMCS Loch Achanalt, which made the initial contact, Annan drove the U-boat to the surface with depth charges; once up, U-1006's crew fired back and even attempted a torpedo shot that detonated prematurely close to Annan, but stood little chance once she illuminated and opened fire on them.

The action itself repays a closer look, because a surfaced U-boat in 1944 was not a beaten opponent. U-1006 came up because depth charges had made staying down impossible, not because her crew had given up, and the moment she was on the surface her gun crews began shooting back and she got a torpedo away. It ran and detonated prematurely close alongside Annan, which is the sort of near miss that gets remembered in a wardroom for years. The exchange that followed was very one-sided, as a frigate against a submarine on the surface always is, and it was over quickly. Then came the part that is easy to skip past: Annan stopped in open water at night, in submarine-infested seas, to pull forty-four Germans out of the sea.

Annan finished the job with two more depth charges once the crew had abandoned ship, then pulled forty-four survivors from the water out of a crew of fifty; six of U-1006's men did not survive.

For this and her wider Atlantic service, she earned battle honours for Atlantic 1944 and North Sea 1944.

A Long Second Career in Denmark

Annan was handed back to the Royal Navy at Sheerness on 20 June 1945, her Canadian wartime service complete, and was sold to the Royal Danish Navy on 22 November that year, renamed Niels Ebbesen after the fourteenth-century Danish nobleman who killed Count Gerhard III of Holstein, and put to use as a training ship carrying up to 90 naval cadets.

The name Denmark gave her is a good one, and worth getting right. Niels Ebbesen was a Jutland squire who, on the night of 1 April 1340, walked into Randers with a small band of men, found Count Gerhard III of Holstein in his bedroom and killed him. Gerhard had held Jutland and Funen in pawn for eight years, and his death ended Holstein rule in Denmark and led directly to a Danish king being restored to the throne. Ebbesen himself was killed in battle against Holstein forces before the year was out. He has been a Danish national symbol of resistance to German domination ever since, which gave the name a certain extra weight for a ship handed over six months after the German occupation of Denmark ended.

Denmark bought a sister River-class frigate at the same time, and together the pair became known in Danish service as the Holger Danske class.

Why Denmark was in the market for second-hand British frigates in November 1945 is the part that gives the transfer its weight. On the morning of 29 August 1943 the German occupation authorities moved to disarm the Danish armed forces, and the Royal Danish Navy, unable to get out of its own harbours because German guns covered the exits, was ordered at eight minutes past four to scuttle itself. Of fifty-two vessels, thirty-two went down at their moorings, fourteen were seized undamaged, four made a run for Sweden and two were in Greenland. Denmark ended the war with essentially no navy at all. So a country that had destroyed its own fleet rather than hand it over spent the first winter of the peace buying frigates from Britain and naming one of them after the man who killed a German count in his bedroom in 1340.

She served Denmark for the better part of two decades, going through several refits along the way, finally being decommissioned on 8 May 1963 and broken up that year at Odense, closing out a career that had taken her from a Scottish shipyard to Canadian service, a decisive U-boat kill off the Faroes, and finally two decades training a new generation of Danish sailors.