HMS Erne (U03): Damaged Days Into Service, Then a U-Boat Kill at the Azores

Built on the Tees

HMS Erne was built by Furness Shipbuilding at Haverton Hill-on-Tees in County Durham, laid down on 21 September 1939 and launched on 5 August 1940, a Black Swan-class sloop, one of a class named throughout after birds, in her case the white-tailed eagle, an alternative name for which is, fittingly, the erne.

The yard is worth knowing about, because it is named here and nowhere else in this series and it was one of the more remarkable pieces of British industrial improvisation. Furness Shipbuilding did not exist until 1917. It was thrown up in the middle of the First World War on eighty-five acres at Haverton Hill, on the north bank of the Tees opposite Middlesbrough, and roughly fifty of those acres had to be reclaimed from tidal mud before anybody could build anything on them. The first keel went down in March 1918 while the yard was still being built around it, which tells you most of what you need to know about the mood of the country that spring.

What emerged was a big, modern, deliberately flexible yard: twelve building berths taking hulls of up to seven hundred feet, and a fitting-out basin a thousand feet long and two hundred and fifty wide. Through the 1920s it turned out colliers, tramps, deep-sea tankers, passenger and cargo liners and whaling ships, which is to say it would build anything anybody would pay for. Between 1939 and 1946 it launched twenty-six deep-sea tankers, sixteen of the small coastal CHANT tankers, six tramps and three whale factory ships, alongside warship work like Erne. Tankers were the yard's speciality and tankers were, by some distance, the thing the Allies could least afford to lose, so a sloop built to escort them came off the same slipways that produced them.

It did not survive its own success. Furness went into the Swan Hunter group in 1968 during the great consolidation of British shipbuilding, and Haverton Hill closed in 1979, sixty-two years after the first spadeful of Tees mud came out. There is nothing there now. A yard built in eighteen months because the country was losing ships faster than it could replace them lasted just long enough to help win a second war and then went the way of all of them.

She was commissioned on 26 April 1941, joining a class purpose-built for convoy escort and anti-submarine work, generally regarded as among the most capable escort vessels the Royal Navy fielded during the war, combining a strong anti-aircraft and anti-submarine armament with truly good sea-keeping qualities.

That reputation is not a matter of opinion; the arithmetic settles it. Between them the Black Swans and the modified Black Swans that followed sank twenty-nine U-boats, more than any other class of British escort. Six of them made up Captain Frederic Walker's 2nd Support Group, the roving hunting force that killed more submarines than any other unit in either world war, and one of those six, HMS Starling, accounted for fourteen on her own. What made them good was a combination the Royal Navy did not manage anywhere else in the same hull: a genuinely heavy high-angle gun armament with a proper director for it, a full anti-submarine outfit, the endurance to stay out for weeks, and a hull that kept working in weather that reduced a corvette to survival mode.

Damaged Within Days

HMS Erne's active career got off to a notably inauspicious start. Barely four days after commissioning, on 30 April 1941, a near miss during one of the German air raids on Belfast that spring caused heavy damage to the newly completed sloop while she was still under her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Henry Maxwell Darell-Brown, a sobering demonstration of just how dangerous the war had become for any ship, however new, operating in contested waters.

What happened to her that spring was part of something much larger than a stray bomb. Belfast in 1941 was one of the most important industrial targets in the United Kingdom, with Harland and Wolff, Short Brothers and the shipyards all in a small area, and it was also one of the worst defended: a handful of anti-aircraft guns, no barrage balloons worth the name and, at first, no night fighters at all. The Luftwaffe worked it over repeatedly in April and May 1941, and the raid on the night of 15 April killed something approaching nine hundred people, the heaviest loss of life in any single night raid outside London. The Irish government, neutral, sent fire brigades north across the border to help. Erne was four days old and sitting in the middle of it.

The damage was serious enough that HMS Erne remained under repair for well over a year, not returning to operational service until June 1942, a frustrating delay for a ship that had barely had the chance to prove herself before being taken out of the fight entirely.

The fourteen months she then spent under repair are worth thinking about in terms of what they cost. The Battle of the Atlantic in 1941 and the first half of 1942 was decided by the number of escorts available on any given night, and the difference between a convoy with four escorts and a convoy with five was frequently the difference between losing one ship and losing six. A brand-new Black Swan, the best escort type the country had, spent that entire period in a shipyard instead of at sea because of a near miss in her fitting-out port. It is the sort of loss that never appears in a tonnage table.

Sinking U-213

Once repaired, HMS Erne quickly demonstrated exactly the kind of effectiveness her class had been designed to deliver.

On 31 July 1942, working alongside the sloops HMS Rochester and HMS Sandwich, HMS Erne, under her own commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander E.D.J. Abbot, took part in the sinking of the German submarine U-213 in the North Atlantic east of the Azores, at coordinates 36°45'N, 22°50'W. The three British sloops, respectively commanded by Abbot, Commander C.B. Allen of Rochester and Lieutenant Commander H. Hill of Sandwich, combined their depth charge attacks to destroy the U-boat, which went down with her entire crew, a particularly satisfying vindication for a ship whose career had begun with over a year spent under repair rather than on active operations.

The boat they killed was an unusual one. U-213 was a Type VIID, a mine-laying variant of the standard Atlantic U-boat with an extra section built in abaft the conning tower carrying vertical shafts through which mines could be dropped into shallow water off an enemy coast. Only six were built. They were slower and clumsier than the standard boat and, once the Germans concluded that laying mines by submarine was not worth the losses, they ended up doing ordinary patrols in a hull compromised for a job they were no longer doing. Three sloops caught her east of the Azores and depth-charged her until she came apart. All fifty of her crew died.

HMS Erne saw further action barely a month later. At 17:13 on 28 August 1942, U-566 fired a spread of torpedoes into Convoy SL-119 west-northwest of Lisbon, damaging both the British steamer City of Cardiff and the Dutch cargo liner Zuiderkerk. Nobody was lost in the attack itself; Zuiderkerk's 56 crew and 12 passengers were taken off by HMS Leith, and only when the crippled ship proved impossible to save the following day did HMS Erne finish her off with depth charges, a grim but necessary piece of work, denying any lingering hazard to other shipping in the area.

That decision, incidentally, was a routine and thoroughly unpleasant part of an escort's duties, and it deserves saying out loud. A merchant ship torpedoed and abandoned but still afloat was a triple problem: an unlit obstruction in a shipping lane, a marker showing exactly where the convoy had passed, and, if the U-boat came back, a free second torpedo hit for the propaganda bulletin. So when a ship could not be saved, another ship of the convoy sank her, usually with depth charges set shallow or with gunfire. Merchant crews watched their own ships being destroyed by the navy that had come to protect them, and the escort crews doing it did not enjoy it either. Zuiderkerk's people were all safely aboard HMS Leith by then, which is the only part of it that reads well.

Her war did not end at Lisbon. Between 24 June and 10 July 1943, HMS Erne escorted Convoy KMS 18B to Sicily in support of the Allied invasion, Operation Husky, before turning to anti-submarine hunting operations of her own in the Mediterranean after U-boats attacked merchant ships under her charge, followed by two more years of the same steady round of convoy escort and anti-submarine exercises through to the war's end.

A Second Life as a Drill Ship

HMS Erne's postwar career took her into a considerably quieter role.

On 4 June 1952, she was converted into a drill ship and renamed Wessex, serving in that training capacity for over a decade, a notably useful if unglamorous second act for a sloop whose active wartime service, though delayed at the outset, had ultimately produced a confirmed U-boat kill and a share in preventing further loss of life from an already doomed merchant ship.

The drill ship years deserve more than a clause, not least because the name outlived the ship by nearly thirty years. Wessex was the Royal Naval Reserve unit at Southampton, set up in 1946 in the docks, and from June 1952 the old sloop lay alongside there as its drill ship, which meant she was the place where the reserve came aboard on drill nights: seamanship, gunnery, damage control, signals, all the things a part-time sailor has to be taught somewhere and cannot be taught in a lecture room.

She was not alone at it. HMS Brave (J305), an Algerine minesweeper who had cleared the way into Anzio and southern France, had gone round to the Tyne the year before to do exactly the same job for the Tyne Division and been renamed HMS Satellite. It was a common enough fate for a good ship with no war left to fight, and a sensible one: a real hull with real machinery, real magazines and a real quarterdeck teaches things that no building ashore can.

The world changed underneath her while she sat there. In 1958 the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, the wartime Wavy Navy of civilian volunteers, was amalgamated with the older Royal Naval Reserve of professional merchant seamen into the single Royal Naval Reserve that exists today, so the men coming down Erne's gangway in 1959 belonged to a different organisation from the ones who had come down it in 1953, without anybody having to move. She was sold in 1965 and the unit carried on without her, in buildings, keeping her name. HMS Wessex finally closed in 1994, in the round of defence cuts that followed the end of the Cold War, and there is an association of her old ship's company still going.

The End

The former HMS Erne was sold for scrap in 1965, arriving at Antwerp on 27 October that year to be broken up, closing out the career of a sloop whose war, once she finally got underway, had proven remarkably effective, even if her first taste of action had very nearly been her last.