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.

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 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.

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.

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.