HMS Biter (P270): From University Training Boat to NATO's Arctic Flank

A Small Boat Built for Big Lessons

HMS Biter was built by Watercraft Ltd at Shoreham-by-Sea, launched on 17 October 1985 as one of ten vessels ordered as the P2000 class, and commissioned on 25 January 1986.

The name has come down in the world, and rather charmingly so. The previous HMS Biter was an escort carrier: an American-built merchant hull with a flight deck on it, handed over under Lend-Lease in 1942 and sent to work in the middle of the Atlantic, where her aircraft helped close the air gap that the U-boats had been exploiting. She went back to the Americans after the war and was then lent to France, serving for years as the Dixmude. From a convoy escort carrier to a twenty-metre training boat on the Mersey is quite a distance for a ship's name to travel, though both versions spent their careers doing something a good deal more useful than glamorous.

That earlier Biter deserves her record set out, because it is a good deal better than most people would guess from the phrase escort carrier. She was laid down at Chester, Pennsylvania, in December 1939 as a merchant ship called the Rio Parana, taken over incomplete, given a flight deck and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 6 May 1942. What flew off her were Fairey Swordfish of 811 Naval Air Squadron: open-cockpit biplanes with fixed undercarriages and a top speed of about a hundred and forty miles an hour, operating from a converted cargo ship in the middle of the North Atlantic in winter.

In the spring of 1943, the months in which the Battle of the Atlantic actually turned, they sank two U-boats. On 25 April a Swordfish from Biter and the destroyer HMS Pathfinder accounted for U-203 south of Cape Farewell. On 12 May, working with the destroyer Broadway and the frigate Lagan, another of her aircraft sank U-89. That is the mid-Atlantic air gap being closed in practice rather than in theory, and it was done by obsolete biplanes flying off a merchant hull, which is very nearly the whole story of how that battle was won.

There is one other episode worth having. On 17 September a Swordfish carrying a depth charge crashed into her island as it landed. It took seventy-five minutes to get the charge clear of the wreckage and over the side. Anybody who has ever wondered what a flight deck party is actually for has the answer in that sentence.

She was handed over to France in April 1945 and renamed Dixmude, and the French used her carrying aircraft out to Indochina in the war they eventually lost there. She became an accommodation hulk in 1956, a base for the amphibious corps until 1965, went back into American custody in 1966 and was sunk as a target. So both ships of this name were passed on when their owners had finished with them, one to a foreign navy and then to the bottom of the sea, and the other to a rotation of undergraduates from Manchester and Salford, who take her out most weekends. On the whole the second has had the better of it.

An Archer-class patrol vessel displacing just 54 tonnes and measuring 20.8 metres, she is powered by twin diesel engines rated at 873 brake horsepower each, giving her a top speed of a little over 20 knots. She can carry up to eighteen people when training students, squeezed down to a more comfortable twelve for straightforward operational work.

She is, by some margin, among the smallest commissioned warships in the Royal Navy, and that produces one of the more sought-after jobs in the service. A P2000 is commanded by a lieutenant, which is to say by an officer who in almost any other part of the fleet would still be standing watches under somebody else's eye. Here, in their twenties, they have a ship, a permanent crew, a programme and the full weight of responsibility that goes with the two letters in front of her name. Officers who have done it tend to describe it, years later and quite regardless of what they went on to command, as the best job they ever had.

HMS Biter initially served with the Royal Naval Reserve's Mersey Division before transferring in 1990 to the Manchester and Salford University Royal Naval Unit, the role she has performed ever since.

The University Royal Naval Unit scheme deserves explaining, because it is not what most people assume. There are fourteen units around the country, each with its own P2000, and the students who join are enrolled as officer cadets in the Royal Naval Reserve and paid for their time. They are under no obligation whatever to join the Navy afterwards, and a majority of them do not. That is not a flaw in the design; it is the design. The Navy's case is that in a country where hardly anybody now has any contact with the armed forces, spending three years taking a warship to sea at weekends produces a steady trickle of lawyers, doctors, engineers, civil servants, journalists and the occasional politician who know from experience what a ship is, what a crew is and what the Navy is actually for.

It is periodically attacked as an expensive sailing club for undergraduates, and the argument gets a fresh airing every time the defence budget is squeezed. The counter-argument is that the whole scheme costs a rounding error by naval standards, that it is the single most productive source of officer recruits the Navy has, and that the influence it buys among people who will spend the next forty years making decisions about defence without ever wearing a uniform is worth a great deal more than fourteen small boats. Both sides have a point. The boats keep going out.

Teaching Students to Sail

HMS Biter's primary purpose is providing naval training to university students most weekends, along with more extended Easter and summer deployments to ports around the United Kingdom and northern Europe, giving undergraduates a genuine taste of naval discipline, seamanship and leadership alongside their academic studies.

She took part in the Battle of the Atlantic 50th Anniversary Fleet Review in May 1993, helped launch the Round the World Clipper Race in Liverpool in December 2005, and attended the launching of the submarine HMS Astute at Barrow-in-Furness in July 2007, giving her student crews a memorable front-row seat to a significant piece of modern naval history.

There is a neatness to her home port that is easy to miss. Western Approaches Command, which fought and eventually won the Battle of the Atlantic, moved from Plymouth to Liverpool in February 1941 and ran the whole campaign from a bunker under Derby House, a few hundred yards from where Biter now lies. Every convoy route, every escort group and every U-boat plot was worked out in that building. A Liverpool-based boat attending the fiftieth anniversary review of that battle in 1993 was not a visitor to somebody else's commemoration. She was at home.

An Unexpected Trip to the Arctic

In early 2024, HMS Biter took part in NATO's major Steadfast Defender exercise, sailing in company with three sister Archer-class boats, HMS Blazer, HMS Exploit and HMS Trumpeter, on a month-long, roughly 2,200-mile passage from Portsmouth that hopped up the North Sea and Norwegian coasts through Ramsgate, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and a long string of Norwegian ports before pushing north of Tromsø and above the 70th parallel, further north than any boat of the class had gone in 35 years of service, in support of NATO raiding forces during the exercise's climax in Norway's Finnmark and Troms districts. It was a considerable undertaking for small training vessels more usually found teaching students the basics around Liverpool and the northwest coast, and Biter was subsequently lifted back to the UK aboard the sealift vessel MV Hartland Point rather than making the long voyage home under her own power.

The scale of what she was taking part in is worth registering. Steadfast Defender 2024 was the largest exercise NATO has run since the end of the Cold War: roughly ninety thousand personnel from all thirty-one allies plus Sweden, some fifty ships, more than eighty aircraft and over a thousand armoured vehicles, spread from the eastern Atlantic to the Arctic and running from January to May. Somewhere in the middle of that, four training boats from the north-west of England worked their way up two thousand two hundred miles of coastline to a point above the seventieth parallel.

And there is a serious reason for small boats being there rather than a novelty one. Norway's Finnmark shares a border with Russia, and immediately behind that border sits the Kola Peninsula, home of the Russian Northern Fleet and of its ballistic missile submarines, which makes it about the most strategically loaded stretch of coastline in Europe. The coast itself is a maze of islands, fjords and narrow leads where a frigate has very little room and a twenty-metre boat with a shallow draught has a great deal. Putting raiding parties ashore among those islands is precisely what the Royal Marines have trained for in Norway every winter for half a century, and it needs small craft to do it. A boat built to teach students seamanship on the Mersey turns out to be a rather good fit.

She remains in active service today, based at HMS Eaglet in Liverpool under the command of a lieutenant with a permanent crew of four Royal Navy personnel, still doing the essential, unglamorous work of turning students into sailors, one weekend deployment at a time.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.