HMS Bayntun (K310): Four U-Boats Sunk in Just Over a Year

The First of Her Kind

HMS Bayntun began life as USS Bayntun, laid down at the Boston Navy Yard on 5 April 1942 and launched on 27 June that year, the very first American-built Captain-class frigate transferred to the Royal Navy under the Lend-Lease programme, on 20 January 1943.

She displaced 1,430 tons at full load, powered by four General Motors diesel engines, and carried three 3-inch guns, Bofors and Oerlikon cannon, a Hedgehog mortar and depth charge projectors, a well-equipped anti-submarine escort built specifically for the demanding North Atlantic convoy war.

Those four General Motors diesels mark her out as one of the smaller of the two Captain-class types. The class came from two American destroyer escort designs: the diesel-electric Evarts boats, of which Bayntun was one, and the larger turbo-electric Buckleys such as HMS Balfour. In both cases the engines drove generators and the generators drove electric motors on the shafts, because America had run out of the specialised machine tools needed to cut large reduction gears and building escorts without gearing was quicker than waiting for gear cutters. Being first in the queue for transfer, Bayntun reached the Royal Navy in January 1943, at the point in the Atlantic battle when it mattered most.

She took her name from a genuine fighting admiral rather than an abstract virtue. Sir Henry William Bayntun commanded the 74-gun HMS Leviathan at Trafalgar in 1805, closing with and battering the French flagship Bucentaur along with the Santisima Trinidad and the San Agustin, and the following January he bore Nelson's guidon in the water procession at the admiral's own funeral.

Whether the U-boats she went on to hunt appreciated the irony of being sunk by a ship named for one of Nelson's own captains is not recorded. Commissioned into the Royal Navy on 13 February 1943 under Lieutenant Richard Lazenby RNVR, Bayntun sailed for Bermuda the following month to work up, her departure briefly delayed when several of her crew had to be left behind there in quarantine with scarlet fever.

After working-up exercises in Bermuda, she joined the 44th Escort Group and arrived at Derry in Northern Ireland on 23 April 1943 in company with her sister ships HMS Bazely and HMS Berry, and settled into convoy escort duty out of Londonderry for the following two years.

That run was interrupted in September 1943 when an accident in her forward motor room caused serious flooding, keeping her under repair at Belfast until early December.

A Remarkable Run of U-Boat Kills

Bayntun proved to be a remarkably lethal submarine hunter.

Five days into 1944, while screening convoy OS 64 out of Londonderry, her escort group detected a U-boat on 6 January and gave chase; Bayntun made three depth-charge attacks in the fading daylight and the Canadian corvette HMCS Camrose made five more, and when wreckage coated in diesel oil rose to the surface two days later, the kill was confirmed as U-757, commanded by Korvettenkapitan Friedrich Dietz, with all 49 of her crew lost.

The rest of 1944 was quieter, though rarely dull. Bayntun joined an unsuccessful hunt for U-575 in the Bay of Biscay that March after the German boat had torpedoed HMS Asphodel, took part in a fruitless search for U-482 off Tory Island that September following the loss of HMS Hurst Castle, and shepherded a straggling merchantman away from a suspected U-boat that October without result.

That November, on a routine Channel patrol, she recovered the bodies of four sailors lost overboard from the South African-crewed frigate HMSAS Transvaal, a reminder that not every task an escort performed involved the enemy at all.

That extraordinary fortnight in February 1945 is worth explaining, because three submarines in fifteen days is not luck. By the last year of the war the Germans had abandoned the mid-Atlantic wolfpack entirely. Snorkel-equipped boats could stay submerged almost indefinitely, so they moved inshore, into the coastal waters around Britain, Ireland and Norway, where the traffic was dense and the water shallow and awkward for sonar. They were extremely hard to find. What found them was a system: signals intelligence and shore-based direction finding narrowing the search area, then support groups of frigates arriving and staying, working an area methodically for days on end rather than passing through it with a convoy.

1945 made up for the wait. On 3 February, in the Norwegian Sea, Bayntun combined with the frigates HMS Braithwaite and HMS Loch Eck to sink U-327, commanded by Kapitanleutnant Hans Lemcke, killing all 46 aboard a boat that had only just been sent to front-line duty after months spent training crews; for decades her loss was wrongly logged as missing with 52 men, until a historian corrected the record in 2009.

The 2009 correction to U-327's loss is worth a note of its own, because it is a reminder that this history is still being written. For sixty years she was logged as missing with fifty-two men aboard, and the work of one historian going back through the records established what had actually happened to her and how many had been in her. Wrecks are still being found on the seabed, German records are still being cross-checked against Allied attack reports, and credits are still being moved from one ship to another. What is written here about who sank what is the current best understanding, not the last word.

Eleven days later, on 14 February, Bayntun detected another U-boat and called in Braithwaite, HMS Loch Dunvegan and Loch Eck once more to sink U-989, whose captain, Oberleutnant Hardo Rodler von Roithberg, died with the rest of his 47-man crew on his 27th birthday; two men briefly reached the surface but did not survive long enough to be pulled from the freezing water.

Just three days after that, on 17 February, Bayntun and Loch Eck between them sank U-1278, commanded by Kapitanleutnant Erich Muller-Bethke, killing all 48 aboard, an extraordinary run of four confirmed U-boat kills within thirteen months that few individual escort ships anywhere in the Atlantic could match.

Notice how those three kills are recorded, as well. Bayntun with Braithwaite and Loch Eck; Bayntun with Braithwaite, Loch Dunvegan and Loch Eck; Bayntun and Loch Eck. Nobody sank anything alone. A hunting group could hold a contact for as long as it took, one ship keeping the submarine located while another attacked and a third stood by, which is the entire reason support groups existed and the reason a submerged boat that had been found in 1945 was, in practice, already lost. The men inside U-327, U-989 and U-1278 knew that as well as anybody.

Bayntun kept hunting to the very end of the war, though not always successfully: she made an inconclusive attack in the Bay of Biscay that March, investigated a reported sinking with Loch Eck later the same month, and believed she had destroyed another U-boat on 26 April, only for postwar German records to show no submarine was actually lost that day.

Her very last wartime task, once Germany had surrendered, was arguably the strangest: on 27 May 1945 she helped escort eight surrendered U-boats from Stavanger in Norway across to Scotland, the hunter now shepherding the hunted, before a second such escort run took her to Bergen and back.

And the last job is the one that ought to be remembered. On 27 May 1945 Bayntun escorted eight surrendered U-boats from Stavanger to Scotland: eight submarines running on the surface under a British warship's guns, crewed by men she had spent two years trying to kill. A hundred and sixteen of those boats ended up being towed out into the Atlantic and sunk in Operation Deadlight, and the story of the anchorage they were gathered at is told in the account of HMS Alacrity. For an escort captain who had spent the war hunting them, watching eight of them steam obediently along in line ahead must have taken a certain amount of getting used to.

Back to America

With the U-boat threat effectively broken, Bayntun was reduced to reserve on 14 June 1945 and returned to US Navy custody at Harwich on 22 August that year, recommissioned that same day under Lieutenant Commander John Shinners with a crew who had, only hours earlier, handed their own ship, the frigate Fury, back to the Royal Navy in the very same swap.

The Harwich handover deserves a moment too, because it is a neat illustration of how Lend-Lease was unwound. Every borrowed ship had to go back, and both navies were trying to get their own people home, so the practical answer was to swap crews on the spot: a British ship's company handed the frigate Fury back to the Royal Navy in the morning and took over Bayntun from her British crew the same day, then sailed her to America. Two ships, two crews, one afternoon, and a great deal of paperwork. It is not a glamorous end to a career that accounted for four submarines, but it is a tidy one.

She crossed the Atlantic with Task Group 21.3 that August, was formally decommissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 19 October 1945, and was eventually sold for scrapping to a New Jersey merchant, Thomas Harris Barker, on 17 June 1947, her brief but properly devastating loan to the Royal Navy having accounted for four German submarines in a war where every single U-boat sunk represented convoys, cargo and lives saved many times over.