HMS Fame (H78): Wrecked on the Durham Coast, Reborn as a U-Boat Killer

Built on the Tyne

HMS Fame was one of the nine F Class destroyers of the 1932 programme, ordered from the Parsons Marine Turbine Company on 17 March 1933 and built by Vickers-Armstrongs on the Tyne alongside her sister Firedrake. She was laid down on 5 July 1933, launched on 28 July 1934 and completed on 30 May 1935, the thirteenth ship of a name that went back to 1655.

She served in the Mediterranean during the Abyssinian crisis and off Spain during the Civil War, and in 1939 was with the 8th Destroyer Flotilla in the Home Fleet, under the leadership of Faulknor.

Norway

In January 1940 she helped escort the battleship Nelson, damaged by a magnetic mine in Loch Ewe, round to Portsmouth. She reached Norway in April, was hit by fire from the shore at Narvik on the 13th, and spent the next seven weeks in the fjords with her engines at constant notice for steam.

She escorted the French Chasseurs Alpins to Namsos, supported the French landing at Bjerkvik on 12 May and smaller landings at Lilleberg and across the Rombaksfjord, and on 30 May, with Firedrake, took the Irish Guards and the Independent Companies out of Bodø. In June she escorted one of the convoys bringing the army home from Narvik.

In July she was damaged by bomb splinters while searching for the submarine Shark, lost off Norway.

Ashore at Whitburn

On 16 October 1940 Fame and the destroyer Ashanti were escorting the brand new battleship King George V from the Tyne, where she had been completed, north to Rosyth. Off the Durham coast the two destroyers collided.

Fame was badly damaged, caught fire and ran aground near Whitburn, between Sunderland and South Shields. Some accounts say the ships had been steaming at high speed to set off mines thought to have been laid in the area.

She was refloated on 1 November and taken into Sunderland, and in February 1941 she was towed to Chatham.

Rebuilt for the Atlantic

She was in Chatham Dockyard for almost two years, from March 1941 to the autumn of 1942. The opportunity was taken to rebuild her for the battle that now mattered most, against the U-boats.

Her forward gun was replaced by a Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar, she was given Type 271 radar, whose lantern can be seen above her bridge in the photograph at the top of this page, taken on 5 September 1942, and her close-range armament was strengthened. She recommissioned that month, worked up at Tobermory and joined the 6th Escort Group.

U-353

She was in action almost at once. In October 1942 the group escorted the slow convoy SC 104 eastward across the Atlantic, with the destroyer Viscount and Norwegian corvettes, and it was found by the U-boats of the Wotan group. Eight merchant ships were lost. On 15 October Viscount rammed and sank U-661.

On 16 October Fame picked up a contact on her radar, attacked with depth charges and forced U-353 to the surface. She then rammed her. Her boarding party got aboard, but the crew had already begun to scuttle the boat and nothing of value could be recovered before she sank.

Thirty nine of the U-boat's crew were picked up and six were lost. U-353, commanded by Oberleutnant Wolfgang Römer, was on her first patrol and had sunk nothing. The ramming had done Fame serious structural damage, and she had to go home for repairs.

ONS 154 and ONS 165

She was back with the group by December. At the end of the month she was sent to reinforce the Canadian escort of convoy ONS 154, which was being torn apart by the Spitz group, and on arrival took over as senior officer of the escort; fourteen ships of that convoy were lost, one of the worst convoy disasters of the winter.

In February 1943 she sailed with ONS 165, and on 17 February, after the escorts had picked up the U-boats' radio signals, Fame and Viscount went after them. Between them they sank two, U-69 and U-201, both with all hands.

For many years the records gave U-201 to Fame and U-69 to Viscount, but post-war research reversed them, and U-69 is now credited to Fame.

She was a famous boat: under her first captain, Jost Metzler, she had carried a laughing cow painted on her conning tower and sunk more than a dozen ships, and in October 1942, under Ulrich Gräf, she had sunk the Newfoundland ferry Caribou in the Cabot Strait, with the loss of 137 lives, many of them women and children. Forty six men went down with her.

She escorted convoy after convoy through 1943, most of them without loss as the escorts gained the upper hand: SC 125, ONS 6, SC 131, ON 206, and SC 145 with the escort carrier Fencer. In April 1944 she moved to the 14th Escort Group with Inconstant and three other destroyers.

U-767

For the invasion of Normandy she was attached to Plymouth Command, to keep the U-boats out of the western Channel. On 18 June 1944, south west of Guernsey, the group picked up a U-boat's radio transmissions.

Fame made contact on her ASDIC and attacked with Hedgehog and depth charges, coming under fire from the German shore batteries on the islands as she did so, and with Inconstant and Havelock she sank U-767. Three days earlier the U-boat had torpedoed and sunk the frigate Mourne off Land's End.

Forty nine of her crew were lost; there was a single survivor.

The Dominican Republic

After a refit at Leith in 1945 she served as senior officer's ship of the 3rd Training Flotilla at Londonderry, training the post-war Navy in anti-submarine work, and in 1947 she was reduced to reserve. In February 1949 she was sold to the Dominican Republic and renamed Generalísimo, after the dictator Rafael Trujillo.

After his assassination she was renamed Sánchez in 1962, and she was scrapped in 1968. Her sisters Foxhound, Firedrake and Faulknor are in the F Class destroyers collection.