HMS Crane (U23): Two U-Boats, D-Day, Okinawa, Korea and an Israeli Air Attack

Laid Down at Dumbarton

HMS Crane was built by William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton, her keel laid on 13 June 1941, launched on 9 November 1942, and commissioned on 10 May 1943, a Modified Black Swan-class sloop displacing between 1,350 and 1,490 long tons, capable of 19.75 knots, and built specifically for the escort and anti-submarine role that would come to define the first half of her long and notably remarkable career.

Denny of Dumbarton are worth knowing about, and their story, including the fact that in 1883 they built the first ship model testing tank any shipbuilder in the world had ever constructed, is told in the article on HMS Jaguar (F37). There is a small coincidence in the dates worth noticing here: Crane paid off at the end of 1962, and the yard that built her went into liquidation the following year.

The word sloop is doing a lot of quiet work there. By 1943 it meant something very specific: a purpose-built ocean escort, slower than a destroyer at under twenty knots but with the size and the stability to carry a heavy anti-aircraft armament, a full asdic outfit, a great many depth charges and, crucially, the space below decks for the plotting team that turned a sonar contact into an attack. A destroyer was faster and a corvette was cheaper. A sloop could stay with a submarine all day and think about it while she did. That is why the most successful anti-submarine group of the war, Captain Walker's, was built around them, and it is why Crane sank two.

Two U-Boats in the Atlantic

HMS Crane joined the 7th Escort Group at Greenock in May 1943 and immediately went to work escorting convoys across the North Atlantic and down to Gibraltar, before taking part in Operation Husky in July 1943, escorting assault convoys to the invasion of Sicily.

Deployed off Cape Finisterre from September 1943 specifically to hunt U-boats, HMS Crane helped sink U-538 on 21 November 1943, working alongside HMS Fowey in a depth charge attack that left no survivors, and later helped sink U-962 on 8 April 1944, this time working with HMS Cygnet northwest of Cape Finisterre.

HMS Crane also came close to a third kill on 18 December 1943, subjecting U-515, commanded by the U-boat ace Werner Henke, to a ten-hour depth charge attack that badly damaged the German submarine before it managed to escape, and a month before that, on 18 November 1943, an acoustic homing torpedo fired by the same U-515 had struck and crippled her sister ship HMS Chanticleer, a reminder of just how dangerous the hunt could be even for the hunters themselves.

Chanticleer never came home. The T-5 took her stern off and killed twenty-nine of her people, and she was towed into Horta in the Azores by the salvage vessel Salveda and written off where she lay. Rather than scrap her the Navy turned her into a pontoon and used her as a base ship for the men working the Azores air and sea bases for the rest of the war. She is the reason it is worth remembering that Crane's ten hours over U-515 were not an abstract exercise: her own sister was already sitting in a harbour a thousand miles away with her back broken, and everybody in Crane knew it.

What happened to the man Crane failed to kill is one of the stranger endings of the war. Werner Henke took U-515 home from that attack, and four months later, on 9 April 1944, an American hunter-killer group under Captain Daniel Gallery caught him off Madeira and sank him; Henke and about forty of his crew were pulled out of the water. He had already been named in an American propaganda broadcast as the man who machine-gunned survivors of the liner Ceramic, which he had not done. He believed the British intended to hang him for it. His interrogators at a secret centre in Virginia, knowing perfectly well what he believed, held the threat of extradition over him to make him talk. On 15 June 1944 he walked out into the compound, climbed the perimeter fence, kept climbing when the guards shouted, and was shot. Nobody has ever seriously suggested he was trying to escape.

D-Day and a Collision

HMS Crane transferred to the English Channel in May 1944 and, on 6 June 1944, escorted an assault convoy to Gold Beach as part of the Normandy landings, direct participation in the largest amphibious invasion in history.

That August, while heading to Hull for a refit, HMS Crane collided with the merchant steamer Tilapia, damage that extended her repair period through to November 1944, and in April 1946 she was involved in a further collision, this time with the destroyer HMS Cockade, giving HMS Crane a somewhat eventful relationship with the art of ship-handling even outside of actual combat.

Tokyo Bay and the Japanese Surrender

HMS Crane arrived in Sydney on 17 February 1945 and joined the British Pacific Fleet on 4 March that year, going on to escort fleet replenishment ships during the Battle of Okinawa between March and May 1945.

On 2 September 1945, HMS Crane was present in Tokyo Bay for the formal signing of Japan's surrender aboard USS Missouri, a historic moment for any ship to have witnessed firsthand, closing out her Second World War service in about as significant a location as any warship of her size could hope to occupy.

Korea and a North Korean Shell

HMS Crane returned to active duty in August 1951 as leader of the 3rd Frigate Squadron, taking up blockade and bombardment duties off Korea's west coast during the Korean War and firing some 1,756 rounds of 4-inch ammunition over the course of her deployment.

On 27 March 1952, HMS Crane was struck by a shell from a North Korean shore battery off He Do Island, though fortunately without any casualties resulting from the hit, a reminder that shore bombardment duty carried real risks of its own even against an enemy without a functioning navy of its own to speak of.

Attacked by Israeli Aircraft at Suez

HMS Crane's most bizarre wartime encounter came on 3 November 1956, during the Suez Crisis, when she was on patrol near the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba and was attacked by five jet aircraft, later widely identified as Israeli Air Force Dassault Mystère IVs, after apparently being mistaken for an Egyptian warship, an extraordinary case of mistaken identity between two nominally allied forces operating in the same crowded and chaotic theatre. The jets had first been seen bombing a target ashore before turning on Crane in close formation; her own gunners held their fire until the leading aircraft committed to its diving attack, then opened up in earnest. The Ministry of Defence's own account to Parliament a few weeks later was more cautious than the popular version of the story, noting that the attacking aircraft had not in fact been positively identified at the time.

The attack penetrated her hull, destroyed two of her anti-aircraft guns and her depth charge thrower, and wounded three of her crew, though her operational efficiency was officially judged not to have been impaired. In return, according to the same parliamentary account, one of the attacking aircraft was "almost certainly destroyed", a dramatic and unusual episode for a ship by then well into the second decade of her active service.

HMS Crane was refitted and modernised at Singapore following the Suez attack, returning to service in January 1958, and went on to serve during the Malayan Emergency, shelling Malayan National Liberation Army targets and carrying out fishery protection patrols and training duties.

The Last of Her Class

HMS Crane became the last Modified Black Swan-class sloop still in active Royal Navy service, finally paying off at Portsmouth at the end of 1962, and was scrapped at Lacmots Ltd in Queenborough, Kent, in March 1965, after transfer to the British Iron and Steel Corporation for disposal.

Her ship's bell survives today on display in the foyer of Tower Hamlets Town Hall, a lasting link to her wartime adoption by the Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green, a fitting small memorial for a ship whose two decades of service had carried her from the Battle of the Atlantic to Tokyo Bay, Korea, and a truly bizarre air attack off the Gulf of Aqaba.

Bethnal Green deserves the last word, because of what that borough had just been through. On the evening of 3 March 1943, ten weeks before Crane commissioned, the sirens went at seventeen minutes past eight and people started down the stairs into the unfinished tube station, which was being used as a public shelter. A new anti-aircraft rocket battery in Victoria Park fired for the first time. Nobody in the crowd had ever heard the noise before and they took it for a new German weapon, and pressed forward.

A woman carrying a baby fell near the bottom of the wet stairway and pulled an elderly man down with her. Others fell on top of them. The people above could not see what had happened in the dark and kept coming. A hundred and seventy-three people were crushed to death on that staircase: twenty-seven men, eighty-four women and sixty-two children. It is the worst civilian disaster of the British home front and the greatest single loss of life in the history of the London Underground, and no bomb was involved in it at any point.

There was no central handrail on the stairs, no proper lighting and no marking on the steps. Bethnal Green council had asked the Home Office three times for permission to put a handrail in and improve the entrance, and had been refused three times. The inquiry found the council blameless and the government then suppressed the report until after the war, threatening council officers with the Official Secrets Act when they asked for the findings that cleared them to be made public. A memorial, an inverted staircase carrying all one hundred and seventy-three names, was finally raised over the entrance by a trust set up in 2006.

So the bell of a sloop that killed two U-boats in the Atlantic, escorted the invasion fleet to Gold Beach, watched the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay, took a North Korean shell and fought off five jets in the Gulf of Aqaba now hangs in the town hall of a borough whose own worst day of the war was a set of stairs with no handrail.

The Bethnal Green connection deserves a line of its own. Warship Weeks were National Savings campaigns in which a town raised the notional cost of a ship and was granted a formal adoption in return, and the borough of Bethnal Green took Crane. It is worth knowing what that borough had just been through. On the evening of 3 March 1943, two months before Crane commissioned, an air raid warning sent people down the stairs into the unfinished tube station at Bethnal Green; somebody fell near the bottom, and in the crush that followed 173 people were killed, sixty-two of them children. It remains the worst single loss of civilian life in Britain in the whole war, and it was kept quiet at the time. Ten weeks later, the same borough put its name to a sloop.