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, built by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation at Quincy, Massachusetts, 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.

Her first captain in Royal Navy service was Lieutenant Commander Henry Leslie Pryse RNR, who had her from the transfer until October 1943, when Lieutenant Charles Donovan Smith DSC RNR took over. For most of that time Fishguard was anything but glamorous work, running convoy escort with the 44th Escort Group out of Londonderry on the North Atlantic and West Africa routes, shepherding convoys such as HX 125, HX 130, OS 9 and SL 92 safely across some of the most heavily contested waters of the entire Battle of the Atlantic before her eventual transfer to the Eastern Fleet.

The class she belonged to is worth a note, because these ships were bought with something other than money. Ten United States Coast Guard cutters of the Lake class were handed over in 1941 under the same broad arrangement that produced the fifty old American destroyers, and the Royal Navy renamed them all after British coastal towns; Fishguard had been the Tahoe. They were not fast and they were not modern, but they had two qualities the Admiralty needed more than speed: enormous fuel endurance, because they had been built to patrol the American coast and the Bering Sea for weeks at a time, and a hull that behaved well in bad weather. That made them ideal for the long ocean legs, the Freetown run and the mid-Atlantic, where what matters is being able to stay out. A cutter designed in the 1920s for chasing rum-runners spent the war escorting convoys through the worst of the Battle of the Atlantic.

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 notably 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.

The detail of what Eck did needs setting out, because it is the reason there was ever a trial. Peleus was a Greek steamer in ballast, torpedoed in the South Atlantic on the night of 13 March 1944, and her crew got away on rafts. Eck then spent close to five hours in the middle of that wreckage attempting to destroy it: machine guns, the 20mm gun, hand grenades, and finally running the submarine through the rafts. His stated reasoning was that floating wreckage would betray his position to Allied aircraft. He did not succeed. A handful of men were still alive when he left, and they drifted for over a month before a Portuguese steamer, the Alexandre Silva, found them on 20 April. Had those men died, as Eck fully intended, nothing would ever have been known about it. The entire case rests on the survival of three exhausted sailors on a raft.

They should be named. Four men came through that night on the rafts. The chief officer, Antonios Liossis, and the third officer, Agis Kefalas, were both wounded by the hand grenades. The other two were not: Rocco Said, a greaser, a British subject from Aden, and Dimitrios Argiros, a Greek seaman. Between them they had a raft, no water worth the name, and the middle of the South Atlantic.

Kefalas did not last. His wounds got the better of him and he died on the twenty-fifth day, which means that of the four men Eck failed to kill in five hours of trying, one died slowly over three and a half weeks anyway. The Portuguese steamer Alexandre Silva found the other three about a month after the sinking and put them ashore a week after that. Liossis, Said and Argiros are the reason there was a case at all: everything that followed, the trial in Hamburg, the sentences, and the principle of law that came out of it and is still taught today, exists because three exhausted men on a raft would not die on schedule.

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 truly 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. Allied intelligence went on to test captured examples extensively after the war, even towing them behind jeeps to study the concept, though the rapid arrival of the helicopter soon rendered the whole idea of a disposable one man kite rather beside the point.

The device itself is worth describing, because it is one of the strangest things anybody flew in that war. The Fa 330 was a rotary kite: no engine at all, just a three-bladed rotor, a seat, a control column and a set of instruments, towed behind the surfaced submarine on a cable of about 150 metres. The airflow spun the rotor, the machine rose to something like 120 metres, and from up there the observer could see about twenty-five nautical miles instead of the five available from the conning tower, and telephone down what he saw. What he could not do was get down quickly. If the boat had to dive, the pilot pulled a lever above his seat which cast off the towline and released the rotor head; the departing rotors dragged out a parachute, at which point he undid his harness and let the rest of the aircraft fall away beneath him, leaving him in the sea in the middle of an ocean with a submarine already going under. It was used very little, for reasons that are not difficult to work out.

Eck and four of his crew stood trial before a British military court in Hamburg from 17 to 20 October 1945, in fact the very first Allied war crimes trial of the post-war period, opening a full month ahead of Nuremberg itself. Eck, gunnery officer August Hoffmann and ship's doctor Walter Weisspfennig were sentenced to death and shot on 30 November 1945, engineer officer Hans Richard Lenz received life imprisonment, and rating Wolfgang Schwender fifteen years, one of the relatively few instances of a U-boat crew 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. The case became a small but lasting landmark in international law, establishing that following orders was no defence against a command that was manifestly unlawful, a principle that echoed through war crimes law for decades afterwards.

It is worth being precise about why the case mattered, because the principle it established was not obvious at the time. Eck's defence, and that of his officers, was the one every subordinate has offered since: they were carrying out the orders of their commander, and a naval officer at sea in wartime is not in a position to hold a debate about them. The court rejected it, and it rejected it in October 1945, a month before the Nuremberg tribunal opened. The finding was that an order to kill helpless survivors is so plainly unlawful that no soldier or sailor can shelter behind having been given it, and that the man who gave the order and the men who carried it out are both answerable. That is now a settled principle of the law of armed conflict, taught in every officer training establishment in the Western world. It began with three men on a raft, a Portuguese steamer, and a beached U-boat on the Somali coast.

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.