HMS Fleetwood (F47): The Sloop That Sank Two U-Boats a World Apart

HMS Fleetwood (F47)

Built at Devonport

HMS Fleetwood was ordered on 1 March 1935 and built at Devonport Dockyard, laid down on 14 August 1935, launched on 24 March 1936, and completed on 19 November that year, a Grimsby-class sloop measuring 266 feet 3 inches in length and displacing 990 tons standard, rising to 1,355 tons at full load. Her geared steam turbines produced 2,000 shaft horsepower for a modest top speed of 16.5 knots, though she carried an impressive range of 6,000 nautical miles at cruising speed, exactly the kind of endurance needed for long overseas postings. Her original armament included four 4-inch guns in twin mounts, saluting guns and a machine gun, along with two depth charge throwers, two rails and 40 depth charges. Her pennant number was not actually painted on her hull until September 1939, initially recorded as U47 before later references to F47 during the war's reclassification of escort vessel pennant prefixes.

HMS Fleetwood served as trials ship for her new armament following commissioning, visiting Gibraltar, Tangier and Cartagena, before arriving at Aden on 27 March 1938 for Red Sea station duties, a fairly typical peacetime deployment pattern for a sloop of her type.

Norway and the East Coast Convoys

HMS Fleetwood was recalled following Germany's invasion of Poland, arriving at Portland on 11 October 1939 for East Coast convoy escort duty. During the Norwegian Campaign in April and May 1940, she provided anti-aircraft cover at Åndalsnes and Molde, two of the ports through which British forces attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to support Norwegian resistance to the German invasion, and towed the damaged HMS Pelican to safety at Lerwick, while also helping evacuate 340 troops during the difficult withdrawal from Norway that followed.

HMS Fleetwood underwent a significant refit at Middlesbrough in 1941, receiving radar and improved anti-aircraft armament, and by 1943 had been further upgraded with Oerlikon 20mm cannon and a Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar, upgrades that transformed her from a fairly modest interwar sloop into a genuinely capable anti-submarine escort.

Sinking U-528

HMS Fleetwood scored her first confirmed U-boat kill on 11 May 1943, while escorting Convoy OS47. A Halifax patrol aircraft had already damaged the German submarine U-528, and HMS Fleetwood was detached from the convoy to follow up the attack, carrying out a sustained series of depth charge attacks that forced the U-boat to the surface. She then shelled the crippled submarine alongside the corvette HMS Mignonette, compelling her crew to scuttle rather than continue the fight, and HMS Fleetwood went on to rescue 39 survivors from the water.

Sinking U-340

HMS Fleetwood claimed a second confirmed kill on 1 November 1943, near the Strait of Gibraltar. Following an initial attack by a Wellington bomber, the German submarine U-340 was located by HMS Fleetwood alongside the destroyers HMS Active and HMS Witherington, who together carried out a depth charge attack that forced the submarine to scuttle. Her surviving crew were taken captive by HMS Fleetwood, marking a genuinely impressive second submarine kill within the space of six months for a ship whose interwar career had given little hint of the anti-submarine effectiveness she would go on to demonstrate.

Collisions and Later Service

HMS Fleetwood's war was not entirely without mishap: she collided with the tanker Oil Reliance in June 1942 and with the American patrol boat PC-473 in November 1943, both incidents requiring repairs, an occupational hazard of years spent operating in busy, often poorly lit convoy lanes. She completed her wartime service with Portsmouth Command through to the end of the war.

A Coronation and the End

HMS Fleetwood was laid up in reserve at Hartlepool on 4 August 1945, before being refitted as a radar training ship, a role that put her wartime technical upgrades to further practical use. She took part in the Coronation Fleet Review for Queen Elizabeth II on 15 June 1953, a suitably dignified public appearance for a ship whose wartime record had proven genuinely distinguished. HMS Fleetwood was paid off in December 1958 and sold for scrap in 1959, leaving Portsmouth for breaking up at C. W. Dorkings' yard in Gateshead on 6 December that year, closing out the career of a sloop that had accounted for two U-boats and helped save hundreds of lives during the desperate Norwegian campaign of 1940.