HMS Apollo (M01): The Minelayer That Ran Aground Carrying Eisenhower

A Fast Minelayer for a Fast-Moving War

HMS Apollo, the eighth Royal Navy ship to carry the name, was an Abdiel-class minelayer commissioned in February 1944 after completing sea trials.

Displacing 2,650 tons standard and capable of high speed on 72,000 shaft horsepower geared turbines, the class was built around the simple principle of laying mines quickly and getting away again before the enemy could react, and Apollo carried up to 160 mines alongside a respectable anti-aircraft armament of 4-inch guns, Bofors and Oerlikon cannon.

Those seventy-two thousand horses deserve dwelling on, because they made these the fastest ships the Royal Navy ever built in any number. That is a full cruiser's machinery in a hull of two and a half thousand tons, and it gave nearly forty knots light and thirty-eight at deep load. A fleet destroyer of the same era managed about thirty-six. The class was designed on the principle that a minelayer's protection is not armour but the ability to leave, and it worked: six ships were built, Abdiel herself, Latona, Manxman, Welshman, Ariadne and Apollo, and half of them did not survive the war.

What that speed was actually used for was rather different from minelaying. A ship that can do thirty-eight knots and has a very large empty compartment where the mine deck sits is an almost perfect blockade runner, and the class spent much of the Mediterranean war carrying troops, ammunition, aviation spirit and stores into Malta at speeds that made air attack difficult and submarine attack close to impossible. It was not a safe trade for all that. Latona was bombed off Bardia in October 1941, Welshman was torpedoed by U-617 in February 1943, and Abdiel was mined at Taranto in September 1943, which is a bleak sort of end for a minelayer. Apollo, commissioned into the second pair in 1944, joined a class that had already lost half its strength.

She joined the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow shortly after commissioning, then moved to Plymouth to prepare for the invasion of France, laying mines off Brittany between Ushant and Île Vierge as part of the wider effort to protect the invasion flanks.

A Grounding With Eisenhower Aboard

Apollo's most extraordinary moment came on 7 June 1944, the day after D-Day, when she embarked the Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay and other senior SHAEF officers for a visit to the assault area off Normandy.

The passenger list that day is worth reading properly. Alongside Eisenhower stood Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, the Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief for Operation Neptune, which is to say the man responsible for putting the entire invasion across the Channel. Ramsay had run the evacuation from Dunkirk four years earlier and had then planned the largest amphibious operation ever mounted, and he was killed in an aircraft crash near Paris in January 1945 without ever seeing the end of the war he had done so much to shape. On 7 June 1944 he and the Supreme Commander were standing on the bridge of a British minelayer that ran onto a sandbar.

Eisenhower had specifically asked for the fastest ship available and, by his own later account, pressed her captain to keep up the speed; in the course of the tour Apollo ran aground, and Eisenhower himself recalled that they had simply “got in a little too close” to a sandbar.

The grounding damaged her propellers badly enough to force an unplanned transfer of her distinguished passengers to HMS Undaunted, an awkward moment for any ship's captain, and one that must have made for a fairly memorable few minutes on the bridge.

It could very easily have finished a captain's career, and the reason it did not is worth noting. Eisenhower had asked for the fastest ship available and had pressed for speed once aboard, and when he came to write the episode up years later he did so in terms that put no blame on the ship at all. Apollo bent both propellers and had to hand her passengers over to a destroyer, and then spent three months being put right, first at Sheerness and then on the Tyne. The Supreme Allied Commander carried on with his war. It is one of the very few occasions on which a grounding was the most senior person aboard's own fault and everybody knew it.

She received temporary repairs at Sheerness before permanent work at a yard on the Tyne, completed by September 1944.

Minefields That Found Their Mark

Once back in service, Apollo was deployed to the Western Approaches, where she and her sister minelayer HMS Plover laid more than 1,200 mines in deliberately positioned “deep trap” minefields off Cornwall, sown at a depth that let surface convoys pass safely over the top while catching U-boats manoeuvring beneath them.

The deep trap idea deserves explaining, because it is a genuinely elegant piece of nastiness. An ordinary moored mine sits just below the surface, where it will catch anything with a keel. A deep trap field is moored a great deal lower, well beneath the draught of any surface ship, so a convoy passes over the whole thing without touching it. What it catches is a submarine, which has to run deep to stay hidden and therefore travels at exactly the depth the mines are waiting at. It only works if you know where the U-boats prefer to pass and roughly how deep they run, and by late 1944 the Admiralty had a very clear idea of both. U-325 and U-1021 went into fields Apollo had laid.

Apollo laid minefield HW A1 on 29 November 1944, later fatal to the submarine U-325, and minefield HW A3 on 3 December, later fatal to U-1021, a concrete return on the unglamorous, painstaking work of minelaying that rarely gets the same attention as a direct gun action but was every bit as deadly.

She went on to lay further minefields off Norway near Utsira in January 1945 and took part in Operation Trammel, laying mines in Russia's Kola Inlet that April, before the war's final weeks saw her carry out the considerably more ceremonial task of returning Norway's Crown Prince Olav and his government-in-exile to Oslo following VE Day.

Operation Trammel deserves setting out, because British warships laying mines inside Soviet waters is not a common entry in anybody's log. The difficulty was that every Arctic convoy had to funnel into the Kola Inlet, the approach to Murmansk, and by the spring of 1945 the Germans knew it perfectly well and were keeping U-boats waiting in the approaches for ships that had no room to manoeuvre. So the Royal Navy sailed a minelaying force from Scapa Flow on 17 April: Apollo with the minelaying destroyers Obedient, Opportune and Orwell, screened by the anti-aircraft cruiser Dido. They reached the Kola Inlet on the 21st, laid a defensive deep field of 276 mines across the approaches on the 22nd under cover of the frigates of the 19th Escort Group, and were back at Scapa on the 26th.

It is the same idea as the deep traps off Cornwall, executed several thousand miles further north and on somebody else's doorstep: a field laid low enough for the convoys to pass over and exactly deep enough to catch anything running submerged beneath them. It was, by then, three weeks from the end of the war in Europe.

The Norwegian job the following month closes a circle that had been open for five years. Crown Prince Olav embarked in Apollo at Rosyth and was landed at Oslo on 13 May 1945, the first of the Norwegian royal house to come home. The King followed on 7 June, sailing from Edinburgh in the cruiser HMS Norfolk with Crown Princess Märtha and the grandchildren, and Olav went out to meet them in the Oslofjord so that the family could come in together.

The date was not chosen at random. 7 June 1945 was five years to the day since King Haakon and the Crown Prince had been carried out of a collapsing Norway aboard the cruiser HMS Devonshire, on the afternoon of the most argued-over signal in Royal Navy history. Two British warships, five years and one war apart, carrying the same family out and back again. Apollo's part was to take the Crown Prince in first, which is not a bad thing for a minelayer to have on her record alongside a bent pair of propellers and a Supreme Allied Commander.

Of the six Abdiels, three were gone by the time Apollo finished her war and only Manxman, Ariadne and Apollo were left. Manxman had the most extraordinary career of the lot, including a run into Genoa disguised as a French destroyer, and it is told in the article on HMS Manxman (M70). Six ships, half of them sunk, and the survivors ended up as flagships, trials ships and royal transports, because a very fast hull with a very large empty compartment in it turns out to be useful for almost anything.

She reached Melbourne on 1 August 1945, arriving in the Pacific just before Japan's surrender brought the entire war to a close.

Flagship of the Home Fleet

Apollo went into reserve in 1946, and her pennant number changed from M01 to N01 in 1948 as the navy reorganised its minelayer designations.

She was recommissioned in 1951 and carried relief supplies to Jamaica after Hurricane Charlie, took part in the 1953 Fleet Review for Elizabeth II's Coronation, and in November 1954 became flagship to the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet, a considerable honour for a ship that had begun her career grounding a Supreme Allied Commander off the Normandy beaches.

Her later career included a less dignified moment on 25 August 1960, when she was involved in a collision at Portsmouth with HMS Battleaxe and HMS Wakeful, suffering stem damage in the process.

She was paid off in 1961 and scrapped by Hughes Bolckow at Blyth, Northumberland, arriving there for breaking up in November 1962, bringing to a close the career of a ship whose war had been unusually eventful for a class better known for quiet, deadly efficiency than for VIP mishaps and collisions.