HMS Ballinderry (K255): A Rescue Off Gibraltar in the War's Final Winter

A Frigate From the North East

HMS Ballinderry was a River-class frigate built by the Blyth Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, laid down on 6 November 1941 and launched on 7 December 1942.

The name is worth a moment, because the River class did something the Royal Navy has rarely done. A hundred and fifty-one ships needed a hundred and fifty-one names, and the Admiralty took them from the rivers of the British Isles, which meant reaching well past the obvious ones. Ballinderry is a river in County Tyrone that runs west into Lough Neagh, and she was in good company: Bann, Lagan, Foyle, Moyola and Blackwater all went to sea in the same class, alongside the Tay, the Test, the Exe and the Wear. It is one of the very few occasions on which Irish rivers appear in any number on the Navy List, and it happened for the entirely unromantic reason that the class was too big for any tidier scheme. A ship named after a river most people in Britain have never heard of, built on a river most people in Britain have never heard of, is about as fair a description of the escort war as you could ask for.

She displaced up to 1,830 tons at deep load, capable of 20 knots on triple expansion engines, and carried two 4-inch guns alongside up to ten 20mm Oerlikon cannon, Hedgehog anti-submarine projectors and depth charges, a solid, unglamorous convoy escort typical of her class.

The builder is the point, not a footnote. Blyth Shipbuilding sat on a small river mouth on the Northumberland coast and was, before the war, a modest commercial yard with no business building warships at all. That it produced a front-line ocean escort is the entire justification for the River class: the design was deliberately kept to mercantile construction standards and reciprocating steam machinery, so that firms exactly like this one, with no experience of naval work and no access to turbine plant, could turn out an escort good enough for the mid-Atlantic. A hundred and fifty-one were built. Very few of them came from a yard anyone had heard of.

She commissioned on 2 September 1943 under Lieutenant Commander Edmund Aikman, RNR, who remained her only wartime commanding officer, staying in the post right through until January 1946.

One commanding officer for the whole commission is unusual and worth noticing. Edmund Aikman had her from September 1943 to January 1946, which is nearly two and a half years of convoy escort work: the same man on the bridge for every crossing, every alarm, every night the asdic found something and every night it did not. Escort commands turned over faster than that as a rule, because the strain of them was recognised even at the time. A ship's company that keeps the same captain that long ends up being run a particular way, and it is one of the details a bare service record never conveys.

A Rescue West of Gibraltar

After working up at Tobermory, Ballinderry spent her war on convoy escort duty, shepherding Gibraltar convoys such as OS 60/KMS 34 in late 1943 and SL 152/MKS 43 the following spring, the patient, largely unremarkable work that made up the bulk of most River-class frigates' service.

Her convoy record survives in full, and it is worth setting out because it shows what the phrase convoy escort duty actually meant. Between October 1943 and February 1945 Ballinderry was assigned to twenty-seven convoys. The pattern is almost metronomic: out with an OS convoy, home with an SL, out with an OS, home with an SL, roughly every three weeks for two years. OS 060 out in December 1943, SL 144 home over Christmas, OS 064 out in January, SL 148 home in February, and on and on through OS 068, OS 072, OS 076, OS 080, OS 084 and OS 092, each with its homeward partner. In the last months she switched to the Mediterranean series, KMS out and MKS home. Twenty-seven crossings in twenty-eight months, in a ship that could make twenty knots flat out and spent most of her time doing seven or eight to keep station on a convoy that could not go faster.

The letters are not random and they are worth decoding, because they describe the whole shape of the war she fought. Convoys were designated by a route code and a serial number, with O for outward, H for home, F for fast and S for slow. OS meant Outward South: ships leaving United Kingdom ports for the collecting point at Freetown in Sierra Leone. SL was the reverse, Sierra Leone home. KMS and MKS were the slow series running to and from the Mediterranean once it had been reopened in 1943. So Ballinderry's war was the West African run, down past Ireland and Biscay and the Portuguese coast to the bulge of Africa and back again, which was neither the North Atlantic nor the Arctic and is consequently the theatre almost nobody writes books about. It was also the route by which everything for the Middle East, India and the Far East travelled while the Mediterranean was shut, and it carried a very great deal of the war.

It is worth saying what that run was like, since the ships that did it get so little attention. Freetown was the assembly port for the whole South Atlantic, a natural harbour on the Sierra Leone coast where convoys from Britain met convoys from the Cape and ships waited, sometimes for weeks, for enough hulls and enough escorts to move on. It was hot, wet, malarial and boring, and the anchorage was so crowded that ships lay in it for days without shore leave. The escorts had a particular problem of their own: a River-class frigate had the endurance for the route, which is precisely why the class existed, but she had no air conditioning worth the name, mess decks below the waterline in the tropics, and a ship's company living in them for a fortnight at a time. The Atlantic escort war is usually pictured as ice on the guardrails. For Ballinderry it was mostly heat rash.

Her single most notable action came late in the war, on 10 January 1945, when she and HMS Kilbirnie rescued 51 survivors from the British merchant ship Blackheath, which had been torpedoed and badly damaged by the German submarine U-870 west of Gibraltar, a genuine piece of lifesaving carried out in the war's final, still dangerous winter months, when the U-boat threat, though diminished, had certainly not disappeared.

The Gibraltar approaches stayed dangerous to the very end for reasons of pure geography. Everything moving between Britain, the Mediterranean, West Africa and beyond had to funnel past the same corner of the Iberian peninsula, which made it the easiest place in the Atlantic to find a target. And the Strait itself has a strong surface current running in from the ocean, so a submarine could stop her engines and simply drift through into the Mediterranean, silent and almost undetectable. By 1945 there were far fewer U-boats, but the ones still operating had snorkels, could stay submerged for days and were considerably harder to find than the boats of 1942.

One detail ties the rescue to her routine. The convoy she was escorting on 10 January 1945 was OS 102, which she had joined two days earlier and left the same day the Blackheath was hit, right at the western end of the Gibraltar approaches. It was, in other words, an entirely ordinary trip: the twenty-first or twenty-second of the same passage she had been making for fifteen months, on a route she knew as well as anybody afloat. That is how almost every rescue in the Atlantic happened. Nobody was sent to look for survivors; a ship doing her usual job simply happened to be the nearest thing afloat when somebody else's ship was torpedoed, and fifty-one men came home because of it.

The submarine that torpedoed Blackheath is worth following to the end of her own story. U-870 was a long-range Type IXC/40 with one commanding officer for her whole career, Korvettenkapitän Ernst Hechler, who was awarded the Knight's Cross. Three weeks before the Blackheath attack she had sunk the American landing ship LST-359 and damaged the destroyer escort USS Fogg out in the Atlantic. She made it back to Germany afterwards, which by 1945 was an achievement in itself, and on 30 March 1945 she was destroyed by American bombs at Bremen, in the same city where she had been laid down two years earlier. The war ended six weeks later.

A Long Wait in Reserve

Thirteen years in reserve is worth thinking about before we get to it. At the end of the war Britain had hundreds of escorts it no longer needed and no intention of scrapping, because nobody knew what the next decade held, so they were laid up in estuaries and lochs with skeleton care and maintenance parties and a coat of preservative on everything. Some came back for Korea. Most simply sat, moving from one anchorage to another as the reserve fleet was reorganised, until the accountants won. Ballinderry spent rather more of her life laid up than she ever spent at sea.

What became of the class is a decent postscript. The River was the most successful escort design of the war precisely because it was ordinary: a hundred and fifty-one built in British, Canadian and Australian yards, good for the whole width of the Atlantic, and cheap enough to be built by firms who had never seen a warship. The Admiralty liked the concept enough to develop it twice more, into the Loch class and then the Bay class, which took the same hull and machinery and put better weapons and better prefabrication into it. Abroad the Rivers had a long second life: they went to a dozen navies after the war and some were still in service in the 1970s. Ballinderry was not one of them. She sat in reserve at Harwich, then Barry, for thirteen years, was refitted once in 1951 for a war that did not come, and was sold to Thos. W. Ward in 1961 for breaking up at Barrow. She spent two years and four months at sea and eighteen years on a mooring.

Ballinderry was reduced to reserve at Harwich in 1947, underwent a refit at Liverpool in 1951, and remained in reserve until 1954, relocating to Barry in Wales the following year. She was finally sold to Thos. W. Ward for scrapping at their Barrow breaking yard on 7 July 1961, closing out a career whose quiet, steady convoy work had been punctuated by one significant act of rescue in the war's closing weeks.