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 that June, 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.

After working-up exercises in Bermuda, she joined the 44th Escort Group and arrived at Derry in Northern Ireland on 23 April 1943, operating out of Londonderry on convoy escort duty for the following two years.

A Remarkable Run of U-Boat Kills

Bayntun proved to be a genuinely lethal submarine hunter. On 6 January 1944 she sank U-757 jointly with the Canadian corvette HMCS Camrose, and over a year later, on 3 February 1945, she helped sink U-327 alongside the frigates HMS Braithwaite and HMS Loch Eck. Just under two weeks after that, between 14 and 17 February, she took part in the sinking of U-989 with three other frigates, rescuing six survivors from the water, and on 17 February alone she also helped destroy U-1278 alongside HMS Loch Eck, an extraordinary run of four confirmed U-boat kills credited to her within barely thirteen months, a tally that few individual escort ships anywhere in the Atlantic could match.

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 as USS Bayntun. She was formally decommissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 19 October 1945 and sold for scrapping on 17 June 1947, her brief but genuinely 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.