HMS Helmsdale (F253): The Frigate That Teamed Up to Sink a U-boat

Built on the Clyde

HMS Helmsdale was ordered on 1 January 1942 and built by A. and J. Inglis Ltd at Glasgow with Parsons turbines, laid down on 13 August that year, launched on 5 June 1943 and commissioned on 15 October 1943, originally carrying the pennant number K253 before the Royal Navy's frigate designations were revised after the war to F253.

A River-class frigate, she was purpose-built for the demanding, unglamorous but notably vital work of long-range convoy escort during the Battle of the Atlantic.

Convoy Escort Duty

HMS Helmsdale spent 1943 and 1944 engaged in a steady stream of convoy escort operations, including the combined convoys OS 64 and KMS 38, MKS 45, MKS 49(G), OS 80 and KMS 54, and SL 166 and MKS 57(G), shepherding merchant shipping through waters that remained remarkably dangerous right up until the final months of the war.

She also carried out regular anti-submarine exercises off Tobermory and Lough Foyle, the standard training grounds that turned newly commissioned escort crews into a properly effective fighting force, working alongside HMS Snowflake, HMS Windrush, HMS Pimpernel and HMS Burdock that November and December, exercises that, quite by coincidence, also included HMS Portchester Castle, the very ship she would team up with nine months later to sink a U-boat.

Sinking U-484

HMS Helmsdale's most significant action came on 9 September 1944, when she combined with HMS Portchester Castle to hunt down and sink the German submarine U-484 northwest of Ireland, at position 55 degrees 45 minutes North, 11 degrees 41 minutes West, using depth charges in a well coordinated joint attack.

It was exactly the kind of cooperative, methodical anti-submarine work that had, by that late stage of the war, become the Royal Navy's stock in trade, two escort vessels working together to hunt down and destroy a genuine threat to Allied shipping.

The credit for that sinking actually took decades to properly settle. An RCAF Sunderland flying boat had spotted a suspicious wake in the same general waters that day and called in the Canadian warships HMCS Dunver and HMCS Hespeler, who were credited with the kill for more than fifty years, complete with oil and wreckage recovered from the sea. It was not until 1997 that the Royal Navy historian R.N. Coppock, working back through the archives, established that the Canadian ships had actually attacked an entirely different U-boat, U-743, whose own fate remains unknown to this day, and that it was Helmsdale and Portchester Castle who could genuinely claim U-484 all along.

HMS Helmsdale served under four different commanding officers during the war: Lieutenant Commander Logie James Simpson from September to December 1943, Commander Colin William McMullen from December 1943 to September 1944, Commander Philip Whitworth Burnett, DSC and Bar, from September 1944 to April 1945, and finally Commander Hugh William Falcon-Steward through to the middle of 1945.

HMS Helmsdale spent her final months of the war with the 10th Escort Group, exercising off Larne alongside fellow frigates HMS Bayntun, HMS Braithwaite, HMS Foley and HMS Loch Dunvegan, steady work that continued right through to the war's end.

The End

HMS Helmsdale survived the war and remained in existence for over a decade afterward, before finally being scrapped on 14 November 1957, closing out the career of a frigate whose steady convoy escort work, punctuated by a truly significant U-boat kill, had made a real contribution to keeping the Atlantic lifeline open in the war's final, still dangerous years.