HMS Grenadier (T334): The Trawler That Pulled Thirty Men From the Atlantic

Built From a Fishing Boat Design

HMS Grenadier was built by Cook, Welton & Gemmell at Beverley, ordered on 7 February 1942, laid down on 13 June 1942 and launched on 26 September that year, a 750-ton Military-class anti-submarine trawler based on prewar fishing vessel designs, the kind of quick, practical adaptation the Royal Navy relied on heavily to fill the desperate wartime shortage of escort vessels.

The logic of building warships to a fishing boat's drawings is worth setting out, because it is not obvious. A deep-sea trawler is designed to stay at sea in North Atlantic weather for weeks, to work slowly for hours at a time, to haul heavy gear over the side and to be run by a small crew in a hull that a modest yard can build quickly and cheaply. Take out the fishing gear, put a four-inch gun on the forecastle and depth charges on the quarter, and you have something close to an ideal convoy escort for everything except speed. A destroyer costs ten times as much and takes three times as long to build, and there were never going to be enough of them. Men who had spent their lives in trawlers manned these ships, in a service of their own, and their story is set out in the article on HMS Duncton (T220).

Powered by a steam reciprocating engine developing 1,000 indicated horsepower for a modest top speed of 11 knots, she carried a single four-inch gun on her forecastle, six 20mm anti-aircraft guns, two heavy machine guns and depth charge throwers and racks, a crew of 40 officers and men working a properly no-frills little warship.

She entered service on 10 February 1943 under the command of Acting Skipper Lieutenant Arthur George Day, RNR.

Convoy Escort and Anti-Submarine Patrols

HMS Grenadier spent 1943 working up with anti-submarine exercises at Tobermory that March alongside HMS Mutine, HMS Rhododendron and the Dutch submarine HrMs O 10, and off Lough Foyle that October with HMS H 33, two of the Royal Navy's principal training grounds for exactly this kind of escort work, before taking on genuine operational convoy duty that June and July, escorting convoy MKS 16 from Gibraltar as part of the wider combined SL 132/MKS 16 convoy operation, arriving Liverpool on 22 July.

Through March 1944 she conducted a further round of anti-submarine exercises off Stornoway alongside HMS United and HMS Lancer, the steady, repetitive training and patrol work that made up the bulk of a wartime trawler's life, rarely making headlines but essential to keeping the sea lanes safe.

Those exercises at Tobermory were not a formality either. HMS Western Isles, the working-up base in Tobermory Bay, put 911 ships through 1,132 courses in four and a half years under a commodore whose methods gave him the nickname the Terror of Tobermory, and no escort went to the Atlantic without passing through it; the place is described in the article on HMS Gateshead (T288). Running practice attacks on a real submarine, in this case a Dutch boat and later a British one, was the only way to teach a scratch crew what a genuine asdic contact sounds like as against a shoal of fish, a tide rip or a wreck, and getting that distinction wrong was how escorts spent whole nights depth-charging the seabed.

By March 1945 the U-boat war had moved, and where it had moved to explains why a trawler was needed in the Minch at all. The Biscay bases had gone, the new Type XXI boats were held up by design faults and bombing, and what was left of the U-boat arm was sent into British coastal waters instead: the Channel, the Irish Sea, the North Channel, the Minches. The schnorkel made it possible, because a boat could charge her batteries without surfacing and could therefore stay down for weeks. The tactics changed with it. Instead of chasing convoys across the ocean a boat would sit and wait on a known route, and when a hunting group came she would settle on the bottom among the rocks and the old wrecks and simply stop making noise. Coastal water is the worst possible place to use asdic: the seabed is cluttered, the tides run hard and the temperature layers bend the beam. Hunting one schnorkel boat in the shallows took more ships and more aircraft than defending an entire mid-ocean convoy had done in 1943.

A Rescue in the War's Final Weeks

HMS Grenadier's most dramatic moment came on 16 March 1945, with the war in Europe entering its final weeks, when she rescued 30 survivors some three nautical miles off Neist Point on the Isle of Skye from the merchant vessel Inger Toft after she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-722, a notably welcome piece of good news amid the last, still dangerous phase of the Battle of the Atlantic, when U-boats remained capable of inflicting real losses right up to the German surrender. U-722 herself did not get to enjoy her success for long, sunk just eleven days later, on 27 March, by depth charges from the frigates HMS Fitzroy, HMS Redmill and HMS Byron, a piece of rough justice Grenadier's rescued survivors would surely have appreciated.

The three ships that killed U-722 are worth a note as well, because of what happened to one of them. Fitzroy, Redmill and Byron were Captain-class frigates: American-built Buckley-class destroyer escorts handed to the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease, fast, well-equipped and, in the last two years of the war, among the most effective submarine killers the Navy had. They were also not safe, right to the end. On 27 April 1945, twenty-five miles west of County Mayo and eleven days before the German surrender, U-1105 fired two acoustic torpedoes at a group of three of these frigates and hit Redmill with both. They took roughly sixty feet off her stern. She stayed afloat, was towed into Lisahally in Northern Ireland and was written off as a total loss.

The boat that did it is worth knowing about too. U-1105 was one of a very small number fitted with Alberich, a rubber coating bonded to the hull and designed to absorb an asdic pulse rather than bounce it back, which is the direct ancestor of the anechoic tiles on a modern submarine; her crew called her the Black Panther. She came through the war, was surrendered, and was handed to the Americans, who eventually expended her in explosive trials in 1949. She is still on the bottom where they left her, and the wreck is now a protected historic site with a dive trail laid out on it.

Put the whole sequence together and it makes a fair summary of the last spring of the Battle of the Atlantic. A U-boat torpedoes a Danish steamer carrying herring meal and cod liver oil home from Iceland, three miles off the Isle of Skye. A Yorkshire-built trawler manned largely by fishermen pulls every one of her thirty people out of the water. Three American-built frigates sink the submarine eleven days later. Six weeks after that, another submarine blows the stern off one of those frigates, and that submarine survives the war and ends up as an American dive site. Every link in that chain is a real ship, and all of it happened inside seven weeks.

The ship she saved deserves her own note, because the details are unusually complete. Inger Toft was a 2,190-ton steamer built in 1920 as the Norwegian Langfond, renamed several times and Danish-owned since 1936, and on that morning she was in convoy RU-156, bound from Reykjavik by way of Loch Ewe for London with 885 tons of herring meal and cod liver oil in drums. U-722, under Hans Reimers, torpedoed her at twenty past nine in the morning, three miles off Neist Point. She sank. And every single person aboard her, the master and twenty-nine crew, came out of it: Grenadier picked up all thirty and landed them at Loch Ewe. Not one man was lost. In a campaign that had spent five and a half years counting the dead, that is a rare thing to be able to write down.

A Postwar Career at Sea

HMS Grenadier concluded her active naval service in late 1945 and was sold to mercantile owners on 10 April 1946, continuing to work at sea under civilian ownership as the renamed trawler Thuringia (GY 321) for another two decades, before finally being scrapped at Dunston-on-Tyne on 30 October 1966, closing out the career of a small, purpose-built wartime trawler that had spent her active years doing the patient, unglamorous work of convoy escort, and, when it mattered most, pulling drowning sailors out of the Atlantic.

There is a neatness to what happened to her afterwards that is worth pointing out. The last thing she did of any consequence in the Royal Navy was to pull thirty men out of the sea off Skye from a ship carrying herring meal and cod liver oil home from Iceland. Within a year she had been sold out of the service, renamed Thuringia and registered at Grimsby as GY 321, and she spent the next twenty years going to Iceland herself, for fish, in the same waters, in the same weather, under the same weather forecasts. She was still doing it while the Royal Navy and Iceland were beginning to fall out over precisely those fishing grounds, a quarrel described in the article on HMS Eastbourne (F73). She was broken up in 1966, twenty-four years old, having been drawn as a fishing boat, built as a warship and finished as a fishing boat after all.