HMS Fishguard (Y59): The Sloop That Captured a War Criminal's U-Boat Crew

Built as an American Coast Guard Cutter

HMS Fishguard began her career as USCGC Tahoe, a Lake-class cutter of the United States Coast Guard, launched on 12 June 1928 and commissioned on 8 November that year. She was a modest vessel by wartime warship standards, capable of a cruising speed of 14.8 knots and a maximum of 17.5 knots, armed with a 5-inch gun, a 3-inch gun and two 6-pounder guns, built originally for the peacetime duties of coastal patrol and law enforcement rather than anti-submarine warfare.

Under the lend-lease arrangement between the United States and Britain, Tahoe was transferred to the Royal Navy and renamed HMS Fishguard, commissioning into British service on 12 May 1941, one of a class of former American cutters that gave the hard-pressed Royal Navy a useful, if unglamorous, boost in escort and patrol capacity at a moment when Britain's own shipyards simply could not build enough new escort vessels quickly enough.

The Hunt for U-852

HMS Fishguard's most historically significant moment came in May 1944, in the waters off Somalia, connected to the destruction of the German submarine U-852, a vessel whose story had already taken a genuinely dark turn weeks earlier. On 14 March 1944, U-852's commander, Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, had ordered the machine-gunning of survivors and wreckage from the Greek steamer Peleus, sunk by his own submarine, an atrocity that would make Eck the only U-boat commander of the entire war formally indicted and tried for war crimes.

U-852 was finally caught on 2 May 1944, badly damaged in the Arabian Sea east of Ras Hafun, Somalia, by depth charges from a British Wellington bomber of 621 Squadron RAF, with five further Wellingtons joining the attack on the crippled submarine. Unable to escape, U-852 was deliberately beached and blown up on 3 May 1944 north of Bandar Beyla, Somalia, in a desperate bid by her crew to avoid capture at sea. Seven of her crew died in the action, while 59 survived.

Boarding the Wreck

HMS Fishguard's crew took part in the operation to secure the beached wreck and capture her surviving crew, boarding the stricken U-boat in the aftermath of the attack, an action that ultimately delivered Heinz-Wilhelm Eck and his surviving men into Allied custody. The wreck itself yielded a further notable prize: an intact Fa330 Bachstelze autogyro, a small, unpowered rotary-wing reconnaissance device that German U-boats occasionally carried to extend their surface visual range, and this capture marked the Allies' first encounter with the device, a genuinely useful piece of technical intelligence gathered directly from the wreckage of a submarine that would otherwise be remembered chiefly for the crime committed under her previous captain's orders.

Eck and two of his crew were tried after the war for the Peleus killings and executed, one of the relatively few instances of a U-boat commander facing formal justice for actions taken during the naval war, and the capture in which HMS Fishguard took part played a direct part in ensuring that accountability could follow.

Return to American Service

HMS Fishguard was returned to the United States Coast Guard in March 1946 as the lend-lease arrangement wound down, her planned recommissioning back into American service ultimately cancelled, and she was sold in October 1947, closing out a career that had begun in peacetime coastal patrol duty and ended with a direct role in bringing a genuine war criminal to justice.