HMS Balfour (K464): The Borrowed American Escort That Helped Sink U-672

An American Hull for a British Crew

HMS Balfour began life as USS McAnn, a Buckley-class destroyer escort laid down for the US Navy on 19 April 1943 at the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation's Hingham Shipyard in Massachusetts.

The yard that built her is worth knowing about, because it did not exist when the war began. Within weeks of Pearl Harbor a survey party arrived at Hingham on the Weymouth Back River in Massachusetts, a hundred and fifty acres were cleared round the clock, and what went up on the site produced destroyer escorts on something close to a production line. It is described in full in the article on HMS Holmes (K581), another of the Captain class from the same slipways. Balfour was laid down there in April 1943 and commissioned into the Royal Navy in October, which is a little under six months from keel to a warship in commission on the other side of an ocean.

Before she could be completed as an American ship, she was allocated to Britain under Lend-Lease on 10 June 1943, becoming one of the Captain-class frigates that supplemented the Royal Navy's own escort fleet during the war's most demanding years.

The Captain class is worth explaining, because seventy-eight ships is a very large number to acquire without building any of them. They came across under Lend-Lease from two American destroyer escort designs, thirty-two of the diesel-electric Evarts type and forty-six of the turbo-electric Buckleys, and they arrived at exactly the point in 1943 and 1944 when the Royal Navy needed escorts faster than British yards could produce them. Balfour was one of the Buckleys.

The naming is the charming part. The Admiralty decided these ships should carry the names of the captains who had served under Nelson at Trafalgar, which is why the class fields Blackwood, Berry, Duckworth, Hardy and the rest. There turned out to be more ships than there had been captains at Trafalgar, so the policy quietly widened to take in admirals and captains of reputation from further back. Balfour is one of those. The result is a class of American-built ships, crewed by British sailors, carrying the names of officers from the age of sail, which is a fair summary of how the Royal Navy handled the whole arrangement.

Balfour himself is one of the widened-policy names, and he had a considerably better war than most people who end up as a footnote. George Balfour was made lieutenant in 1745 and got his chance in 1758 at the siege of Louisbourg, when Boscawen ordered him and Captain John Laforey to take six hundred men in ships' boats, at night, into a defended harbour, and cut out the two French ships of the line lying in it. They did. Balfour took the Bienfaisant, a 64, and the loss of those two ships is generally reckoned to have tipped the siege; he was made captain of the Bienfaisant a fortnight later, which is about as direct a reward as the eighteenth-century navy offered. He was still at it twenty-two years later, commanding the 74 Culloden at Rodney's Moonlight Battle off Cape St Vincent in January 1780 and helping force the Spanish San Julian to strike without losing a man.

And then the Saintes. On 12 April 1782, off Dominica, Rodney met de Grasse and broke the French line, taking de Grasse himself and ending the Franco-Spanish plan to take Jamaica; it is the action that closes the naval side of the American war. Balfour was there in Conqueror, another 74, and Conqueror had seven men killed and twenty-three wounded, which by the standards of that day is a ship that was properly engaged rather than one that watched. He saw no further active service after 1783, was superannuated as a rear-admiral in 1787, and died on 28 June 1794 at St George's Square in Portsmouth. A hundred and forty-nine years later a turbo-electric escort built on a river in Massachusetts was wearing his name in the Channel.

She was launched on 10 July 1943 and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 7 October that year as HMS Balfour, carrying the pennant number K464. At 306 feet long and displacing 1,430 tons, she carried three 3-inch guns, Bofors and Oerlikon cannon, torpedo tubes and a full anti-submarine outfit, powered by an unusual turbo-electric drive that gave her a respectable 23 knots.

That unusual propulsion has an entirely mundane explanation, and it is a good illustration of what industrial mobilisation actually looks like. Turning a turbine's very high revolutions into a propeller shaft's low ones normally needs reduction gearing, and cutting large precision gears requires specialised machine tools that America simply did not have enough of. Gear-cutting capacity, not steel or engines or shipyards, was the bottleneck in destroyer construction. So the answer was to skip the gears: let the turbine drive a generator, run the current to an electric motor on the shaft, and control the whole thing with a switch. It was heavier and less efficient and it worked, and it let yards build escorts that would otherwise have sat waiting for a gear cutter.

Guarding the D-Day Flank

Balfour served with the 1st and 18th Escort Groups across the North Atlantic, off Normandy and in the English Channel, and in June 1944 played her part in the D-Day landings by forming part of an anti-submarine barrier west of Land's End, helping ensure German U-boats could not slip through to attack the vast invasion fleet from an unguarded flank.

The anti-submarine barrier she formed part of was one of the most concentrated operations of the war. The German plan for the invasion was to send everything available from the Biscay bases into the Channel, and the Allied answer was to make the approaches impassable: a continuous screen of escort groups and support groups in the water, and an air patrol overhead so dense that any submarine on the surface would be found within minutes. A U-boat without a snorkel had to surface to charge batteries. A submerged boat on batteries could make three or four knots and would run out. The barrier did not have to sink them. It only had to stop them getting through, and it did.

A Contested Kill and a Confirmed One

On 25 June 1944, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Cecil Bluett, who led the ship throughout this period, Balfour attacked a sonar contact with her Hedgehog mortar and was initially credited with sinking U-1191, a claim that was later withdrawn once the full picture of the submarine's actual fate became clear, a fairly common occurrence in the fog of anti-submarine warfare, where confirming a kill was often far harder than achieving one.

The withdrawn credit for U-1191 deserves a word, because it happened a great deal and it was nobody's dishonesty. Assessing a kill in 1944 meant judging from oil, wreckage, a bubble of air and the absence of any further contact, all of it in the dark under a ship going twenty knots. After the war the Admiralty went through every claim against captured German records and reassigned a very large number of them: submarines credited to one ship turned out to have been sunk elsewhere by somebody else, or to have been lost to a mine, or to have made it home. Balfour's crew did everything right on 25 June. The submarine simply was not there.

In this particular case, though, we now know exactly what happened, and it is stranger than a simple over-claim. Earlier on 25 June 1944, in position 50.01 north, 02.59 west, the Captain-class frigate HMS Bickerton of the 5th Support Group had caught U-269 and worked her over with four depth-charge attacks: the first took her lights out, the second sprang the seals on her propeller shafts, the third wrecked her pipes and valves, and her commander brought her up to abandon and scuttle, at which point she went down. Thirteen of her men died and thirty-nine were picked up. Hours later, two miles away in position 50.03 north, 02.59 west, Affleck and Balfour got a contact, attacked it, and brought up oil and wreckage. They had found U-269's brand-new grave. Everything they saw was real; it simply belonged to somebody else's submarine, sunk that morning.

U-1191, meanwhile, was still afloat. She lasted another eight days, and was sunk on 3 July 1944 in the Channel south-west of Brighton by a combined attack from the destroyers Onslaught and Oribi, the escort destroyers Brissenden, Wensleydale and Talybont and the frigate Seymour. All fifty of her crew were lost. Her wreck was not located until 1995, and it was finding it that finally sorted out a claim, a correction and a second claim that had sat unresolved for half a century. It is worth stating plainly that Balfour's people spent the rest of the war believing they had sunk a U-boat that was still at sea, and that nobody could have told them otherwise.

She had more definitively verified success on 18 July 1944, when she damaged U-672 with depth charges, forcing the submarine to the surface; her crew scuttled the boat themselves the following day rather than risk further attack, a result that counted as a genuine, confirmed success for Balfour's escort group. All 52 of U-672's officers and men were picked up and spent the rest of the war as prisoners.

U-672 is worth a sentence of her own, because she is a good illustration of what the U-boat arm had become by 1944. A Type VIIC commissioned in April 1943 under Oberleutnant Ulf Lawaetz, she made four war patrols and sank nothing at all. She was put through four wolfpack operations in the winter of 1943 and 1944, achieving nothing in any of them, and on 24 April 1944 she was caught on the surface south-west of Ireland by a Canadian-flown Sunderland and severely damaged. She was patched up and sent into the Channel after the invasion, which by July was very close to a death sentence, and Balfour found her north of Guernsey. Lawaetz brought her up, got every one of his fifty-two men out onto the casing, opened the seacocks and let her go. They were in the water overnight and were picked up the next day. A boat that killed nobody, and on which nobody was killed, is a rarity in that service, where roughly three men in four never came home.

Her last year is the part the record skips, and it was not idle. In January 1945 Bluett handed over to Commander Clive Gwinner, DSO, DSC, a retired officer brought back for the war who had already commanded another Lend-Lease ship, the former American coastguard cutter Lulworth, on the Atlantic convoy routes in 1941; his story is in the article on HMS Lulworth (Y60). On 3 January Balfour sailed as senior escort of convoy CU 53, one of the fast tanker convoys running up from the Caribbean and New York, with the rest of the 1st Escort Group in company. She was still working in March, at anti-submarine exercises off Loch Alsh and Tobermory. The U-boats had moved into the coastal waters by then, snorkelling, sitting on the bottom among wrecks and tide races where Asdic was next to useless, and the escort groups spent the last winter of the war hunting them in the most difficult sonar conditions of the entire campaign.

Back to America

With the war won, Balfour returned to the United States under the command of Lieutenant Commander J.D. Davey, formally transferring back to the US Navy at New York on 25 October 1945, and was sold on 28 October 1946, her brief but properly useful loan to Britain complete, having spent barely two years in Royal Navy service but making a real, measurable contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic and the security of the D-Day invasion fleet in that short time.