HMS Dominica (K507): An American-Built Frigate on Lend-Lease Loan

Built in Rhode Island

HMS Dominica was built by the Walsh-Kaiser Company of Providence, Rhode Island, laid down on 27 July 1943 and launched on 14 September that same year, one of the many American-built frigates transferred to the Royal Navy under the Lend-Lease agreement and reclassified in British service as the Colony class, named collectively after British colonial territories.

She had already lived two other lives before that. Laid down as the American gunboat USS Harman (PG-187), she was reclassified as the patrol frigate PF-79 before she was even launched, and only picked up her final name on transfer to the Royal Navy, three identities inside barely six months. There was a pleasing irony buried in the arrangement too: the American Tacoma-class design she and her twenty sister ships were built to had itself been adapted from the Royal Navy's own River-class frigate, simplified for construction with materials more readily available in the United States, so Britain was effectively borrowing back a design of her own, built faster and further away than she could manage herself.

The yard that built her is a story in itself, and not one that started well. The Walsh-Kaiser plant at Providence was thrown up by the US Maritime Commission as an emergency yard in early 1942 and handed to the Rheem Company to run, which managed one Liberty ship and part of a second before the Commission's inspectors concluded, in the flat language of official reports, that the pace was slow and the efficiency unsatisfactory. In February 1943 Henry J. Kaiser was asked to take it over, bought Rheem out, and did to Providence what he had already done at Richmond and Portland: six building ways, a workforce approaching twenty-one thousand, and shifts round the clock. Every one of the twenty-one frigates the yard produced went to Britain. The entire Colony class came out of a single American shipyard that had been failing eighteen months earlier.

The effect on Dominica herself is easy to miss in a list of dates. She was laid down on 27 July 1943 and launched on 14 September: forty-nine days on the slipway. Six months after that she was in commission under the White Ensign on the far side of the Atlantic. It is worth setting that against what was happening to the same design elsewhere, because the Tacomas were not universally a triumph. The Great Lakes yards were given prefabricated sections designed for Kaiser's cranes and did not have cranes big enough to lift them, so the pieces had to be reworked; and since ice shut the Soo Locks through the winter and spring, finished Great Lakes hulls were floated down the Mississippi on pontoons to New Orleans or Houston to be fitted out, which could double the time it took to build them. Providence simply built them and sent them to sea.

She entered Royal Navy service on 25 January 1944 as HMS Dominica, armed with 3-inch and 40mm anti-aircraft guns, 20mm cannon, a Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar and depth charge equipment, a solidly equipped convoy escort typical of her class. Colony-class frigates carried a distinctive American fingerprint even after entering British service, with welded rather than riveted hulls and lighter pole foremasts, and, most usefully for anyone trying to identify one at a glance, no portholes anywhere along the hull, a simple wartime economy that doubled as the class's own unofficial recognition feature.

A Brief Wartime Career

HMS Dominica was commissioned under Commander Norman Winder Duck, DSC, RD, RNR, who commanded her from January 1944 until 8 July that year, when he was relieved by Lieutenant Commander Hamish Napier Lawson, RD, RNR, who remained in command into mid-1945.

Look again at those two names and the letters after them. Duck was DSC, RD, RNR. Lawson was RD, RNR. Neither of them was a regular naval officer, and that is not an accident of this particular ship; it is the single most representative fact about the whole escort war and it is almost never explained.

The Royal Naval Reserve was not the Wavy Navy. That was the RNVR, the volunteers, the bank clerks and solicitors who learned it from scratch. The RNR was something else entirely: a standing reserve of professional seamen drawn from the Merchant Navy and the deep-sea fishing fleets, men who had been at sea for a living all their working lives and had certificates of competency to prove it. Merchant officers serving in armed merchant cruisers, hospital ships, fleet auxiliaries and troopships were entered into it for the duration on special agreements. The RD after a name is the Reserve Decoration, given for long service in it, and it means the man had been doing this since well before the war started.

What that produced was a navy in which a very large proportion of the ships actually escorting convoys were commanded by men who had spent fifteen years in tramp steamers and tankers, which turned out to be exactly the right background. They knew what a merchant ship could and could not do, they knew the weather on the routes, and they were not inclined to be impatient with a convoy making six knots because they had spent their careers in one. RNR officers commanded destroyers, frigates, sloops, landing craft and submarines, and the convoy commodore, the man in the merchant ship at the head of the columns, was very often one too. The RNR finished the war about a third the size of the RNVR and its members had been awarded twelve Victoria Crosses.

In November 1944 she took part in exercises off Larne as part of the 6th Escort Group, working alongside HMS Wild Goose, HMS Labuan, HMS Loch Fada and HMS Loch Ruthven. In February 1945 she joined Force 33 as a temporary reinforcement for the combined convoy ON 283/OS 109/KMS 83, arriving at around 9.30am on 7 February and departing again that same evening, and by April she was back at anti-submarine exercises off Loch Alsh with the 2nd Escort Group alongside HMS Wild Goose and her own sister frigates HMS Labuan and HMS Tobago, work that contributed to the vast and largely unglamorous convoy protection effort that kept Britain supplied through the war's final stretch.

The company she was keeping in those exercises deserves a note. Wild Goose was not an ordinary sloop. She had been one of the six ships of Captain Frederic John Walker's 2nd Support Group, the roving hunting group Walker had talked Sir Max Horton into forming on the argument that a force with no convoy to protect would kill more U-boats than one tied to a merchant ship's speed. He was right: fifteen U-boats went down to the group under his command, six of them on a single patrol that sailed on 29 January 1944, and three of those inside fifteen hours on 8 and 9 February. Wild Goose made the first contact on four of the six, and Walker said afterwards that the chief credit for the sock on the nose for Admiral Doenitz must unquestionably go to her. Walker himself was dead by the following July, worn out at forty-eight. A brand-new American-built frigate learning her trade off Larne and Loch Alsh in 1944 and 1945 was being taught by the best in the business.

The other names on that list are worth a glance too. HMS Loch Fada and HMS Loch Ruthven were the British answer to the same problem the Americans had solved with the Tacomas: a frigate designed from the keel up for prefabricated section-built construction in yards that had never built a warship, so that firms making bridges and boilers could turn out anti-submarine escorts. Loch Fada accounted for four U-boats and went on to a second life as the trials ship for Sea Wolf, and her story is told in the article on HMS Loch Fada. Dominica spent her working life among ships built on exactly the same principle, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Returned to the United States

HMS Dominica was decommissioned sometime in 1945, no longer appearing on the Royal Navy's active list by October that year, and Britain formally returned her to American custody on 23 April 1946, consistent with the terms under which so many Lend-Lease vessels had originally been transferred.

That return was not a formality, and it was not generosity being withdrawn either. Lend-Lease was a loan in the literal sense, and the terms said the ships came back when the emergency ended. What Britain had been given was time, not property: twenty-one convoy escorts, complete with guns and Hedgehog and radar, appearing in 1944 from a country whose shipbuilding capacity Britain could not remotely match, at the exact point in the war when every escort in the Atlantic was already spoken for. The bill, when it came, ran to a great deal more than twenty-one frigates, and Britain finished paying it in 2006.

The Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company of Chester, Pennsylvania, acquired her for scrapping on 27 March 1947, closing out a remarkably brief but useful career: an American-built ship that spent barely two years under the White Ensign before returning home to be broken up, a small but real part of the vast material support the United States extended to Britain during the war's final years.

The whole class went the same way, and quickly. One frigate went back in 1945 and the remaining twenty during 1946; eighteen of them were scrapped almost at once, which is what happened to Dominica. Only three found anything else to do. Two were sold locally into Egyptian merchant service and were still afloat in 1956, and Caicos went to Argentina in 1947 and served in the Argentine Navy until 1969, outliving the Royal Navy careers of all twenty of her sisters by more than twenty years. It is a curious epitaph for a class of ships: borrowed from an ally, worked hard for two years, handed straight back, and cut up by the people who had built them.

The design itself went in an entirely different direction, and it is worth setting the two records side by side. Ninety-six Tacomas were built. The ones the United States Navy kept were manned not by the Navy at all but by the United States Coast Guard. Twenty-eight went to the Soviet Union, handed over at Cold Bay in Alaska in the last months of the war at a transfer base whose existence was not advertised, and all but one of those came back at Yokosuka in 1949, by which point the two countries had rather different views about most things.

Thirteen of the returned Soviet ships were recommissioned for the Korean War. After that the whole class scattered: eighteen to the new Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, five to the Republic of Korea Navy, and the rest to Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru and Thailand. The Colombian ship served until 1963. The Cuban one, renamed José Martí, was still on the list in 1976, which means that a frigate built in an American emergency yard to a British design was flying Fidel Castro's flag thirty years after the war it was built for.

So the same hull, in thirteen other navies, was still working into the 1970s, while the twenty-one that came to Britain were handed back within a year of the war ending and eighteen of them were cut up immediately. It is not that the ships were worn out. It is that Britain did not own them and could not afford to buy them, and the United States had more escorts than it knew what to do with. Dominica was seized on in January 1944 because there was nothing else, and disposed of in 1947 because by then there was everything else.