HMS Berkeley (M40): She Cleared Gulf War Mines, Then Was Cut in Two by a Container Ship

A Modern Minehunter for a Modern Threat

HMS Berkeley was built by Vosper Thornycroft at Woolston, Southampton, ordered in June 1985, her keel laid that September, and launched on 3 December 1986 by Lady Gerken, wife of Vice Admiral Sir Robert Gerken.

She was the twelfth of the Royal Navy's thirteen Hunt-class vessels, and her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Rob Hoole, had already been quietly earmarked for the job when he attended her launch, bringing along a fellow Hunt captain, John Bailey, as his guest, since Bailey, like every Hunt CO before him, had missed the launch of his own ship while someone else was still in command of it.

Hoole commissioned Berkeley at Portsmouth's South Railway Jetty on 14 January 1988, with veterans of her wartime namesake looking on.

A Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessel built almost entirely from glass-reinforced plastic, one of the largest classes of warship in the world made that way, she displaced 685 tonnes, was powered by twin Ruston-Paxman Deltic diesels for a top speed of 17 knots, and carried a complement of around 40 officers and ratings.

The plastic is the entire point of the ship, and it is worth explaining why. A minehunter's job is to go looking for weapons that are triggered by the arrival of the thing looking for them, so every design decision aboard is aimed at making her hard to notice from the seabed. A steel hull carries a magnetic signature that will fire an influence mine at a considerable distance, and glass-reinforced plastic carries almost none, which is why the Hunts were moulded in one piece at Woolston rather than welded up from plate. GRP turned out to have a second virtue as well: it flexes. A hull that gives a little under the shock of a near-miss underwater explosion survives blasts that would open a steel one along a weld. The Hunts were the largest warships in the world built that way, and at something like thirty million pounds apiece in the money of the day they were, tonne for tonne, among the most expensive vessels the Royal Navy has ever bought.

She was fitted with Type 193M minehunting sonar, two PAP-104 remotely controlled submersibles for actually dealing with mines once found, and the full range of magnetic, acoustic and mechanical sweeping equipment, armed from new with a 30 mm BMARC cannon and two 20 mm Oerlikons on sponsons amidships, at the specific insistence of Hoole, who wanted something rather more modern than the Second World War-vintage 40 mm Bofors guns still carried by her elder sisters.

The same reasoning runs through everything else aboard. The Deltics sit on mountings that keep their noise out of the water, fittings are non-magnetic wherever a designer could contrive it, and the ship is expected to be quiet in a way no frigate ever has to be. Once the Type 193M has found something, nobody goes anywhere near it. The PAP-104 is a small French-built remotely operated submersible that runs out on a cable, is flown onto the mine by an operator watching a television picture from the comfort of the operations room, and either places a charge alongside it or identifies it closely enough for clearance divers to finish the job. It is one of the few trades in which the correct response to finding your target is to reverse away from it very slowly.

A Name With a Wartime Past

She was not the first Berkeley. The original HMS Berkeley, a Type I Hunt-class destroyer, was laid down at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead in June 1939 and launched the following January.

After joining the 1st Destroyer Flotilla at Portsmouth for Channel convoy escort and anti-shipping sweeps, her crew found the wreckage of Amy Johnson's aircraft in the Thames Estuary following the pioneering aviator's fatal crash.

Amy Johnson deserves the fuller account. She was the most famous woman flier in the country, the first to fly solo from England to Australia, and by 1941 she was ferrying aircraft for the Air Transport Auxiliary, which was unglamorous and genuinely dangerous work carried out in bad weather with no navigation aids and no radio worth the name. On 5 January 1941 she went off course in snow while taking an Airspeed Oxford south, ran out of fuel and baled out over the Thames Estuary. The crew of HMS Haslemere saw her parachute come down, and then saw her alive in the water and calling to them, in a heavy sea, a strong tide and falling snow. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Walter Fletcher, went into the water after her. He did not reach her, and he died in hospital of the cold a few days later; he was awarded the Albert Medal posthumously. Her body was never recovered. What Berkeley's people found was the aeroplane.

She was bombed while supporting the Dieppe landings on 19 August 1942 and, once her survivors had been taken off, was finished off by torpedoes from her own sister ship, HMS Albrighton, rather than be left to sink slowly or risk capture.

Dieppe deserves more than a clause too. The raid of 19 August 1942 put around six thousand men ashore, the great majority of them Canadian, against a defended French port in broad daylight, and it went catastrophically wrong: well over half the landing force were killed, wounded or taken prisoner inside a few hours. Berkeley was lying off the beaches when a Focke-Wulf 190 put a bomb into her that broke her back. Her people were taken off and HMS Albrighton was ordered to sink her with torpedoes, which is not an instruction any captain wants for a ship he has been in company with all morning. The argument made afterwards, that Dieppe taught the lessons that made Normandy work two years later, is true, and it was paid for at a rate nobody would have agreed to in advance.

Veterans of both ships attended the new Berkeley's commissioning in 1988, and the ship kept up affiliations of her own throughout her career, with the town of Berkeley in Gloucestershire, the Berkeley family of neighbouring Berkeley Castle (whose family hunt gave the ship her name), Berkeley Power Station, and the Forest of Dean Sea Cadets unit at Lydney.

Into the Gulf: Operation Cimnel

Assigned to the 1st Mine Countermeasures Squadron at Rosyth, Berkeley's own Gulf War came within months of commissioning.

In September 1988, with the Iran-Iraq Tanker War still spluttering towards its ceasefire, she deployed to the Persian Gulf for Operation Armilla Accomplice, soon renamed Cimnel, rafting up alongside fellow British minehunters HMS Chiddingfold and HMS Cottesmore, the survey ship HMS Herald, and the Belgian and Dutch minehunters BNS Crocus and HNLMS Urk, part of a genuinely international effort to keep the Strait of Hormuz clear of mines.

The Gulf she sailed for in September 1988 had spent four years being mined by both sides, and the incident that concentrated everybody's mind had happened that April. The American frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts blundered into an Iranian minefield laid across the main eastbound shipping channel and, while backing carefully out of it, struck an M-08 contact mine, a Russian design dating from before the First World War. It broke her keel, opened her hull below the waterline and very nearly finished her. The American reply, Operation Praying Mantis, became the largest surface action fought by any navy since 1945. A moored weapon of 1908 vintage, costing a few thousand pounds, had done all of that to a modern guided missile frigate, which is the argument for spending thirty million on a minehunter put rather more forcefully than any staff paper could manage.

Her ship's company were photographed together at Jebel Ali in the UAE in 1989, before she returned home that April, when Hoole handed command to fellow minewarfare officer Keith Riches. She also carried out routine UK fishery protection duties during her Royal Navy career.

Two Decades as HS Kallisto

Berkeley was sold to the Hellenic Navy and commissioned as HS Kallisto on 28 February 2001, at a handover ceremony back at South Railway Jetty in Portsmouth so thoroughly Greek Orthodox that her sailors were sprinkled with holy water and swatted with palm fronds by attending priests, while Hoole, present as her first CO, was handed a paperweight as a keepsake by her new commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Reymondos Salvetas.

She went on to serve Greece for nearly two decades, still recognisably herself when photographed at Patras in 2016.

Her career came to a particularly dramatic and violent end at around 7.30am on 27 October 2020, when the Madeira-flagged container ship Maersk Launceston, a 4,500 TEU boxship outbound from Piraeus for Çanakkale in Turkey, collided with her in the Saronic Gulf as she made her own way out of Salamis Naval Base, a collision severe enough to cut her clean in two.

Her stern section broke away and sank, the surviving forward half left listing heavily until tugs got a line on her and towed the wreck back to Salamis, and two injured crew were taken to the Athens Naval Hospital.

There is a bleak technical footnote to the way she ended. The hull that made her what she was, a plastic moulding designed to flex under the shock of an explosion and to give a magnetic mine nothing whatever to detect, offers precisely no protection against the stem of a laden container ship. A 4,500-container vessel under way weighs tens of thousands of tonnes and does not register six hundred and eighty-five of them at all. Thirty-two years of being built to survive the sea's worst intentions, undone by an ordinary morning in a busy shipping lane.

The Maersk Launceston's Polish master was detained and charged with negligence and breaching international collision regulations, hardly the outcome either captain had planned for a Tuesday morning commute out of Piraeus.

It was a startling and sobering conclusion for a ship that had spent much of her working life safely clearing other vessels' paths of exactly the kind of danger that, in the end, never touched her, only for the ordinary business of getting two ships past each other in a crowded shipping lane to finish what mines in the Gulf never managed.