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.

The yard is worth a paragraph, because it is one of the more likeable names on the Clyde. A. and J. Inglis opened at Pointhouse, on the spit of land where the Kelvin runs into the Clyde, in 1862, and built ships there for almost exactly a hundred years, something in the order of five hundred of them. Harland and Wolff bought a controlling share in 1917 and the whole firm in 1919, but Pointhouse went on trading under the Inglis name and doing what it had always done, which was small, fast, well-finished ships rather than liners.

Their most famous product came off the same slips three years after Helmsdale. The paddle steamer Waverley was launched at Pointhouse on 2 October 1946 and went into service on the Firth of Clyde on 16 June 1947, carrying holidaymakers down the water. She is still doing it. She is the last seagoing paddle steamer left anywhere in the world, and every summer she runs excursions off the British coast with people on her deck who have no idea that the yard which built her spent the previous war turning out convoy escorts.

Inglis stopped trading in 1962, a hundred years almost to the month after it opened, and Glasgow Corporation bought the ground. The Riverside Museum stands on it now, which means that the place where Helmsdale was laid down in August 1942 is today the city's museum of transport, with the tall ship Glenlee moored at the quay outside and Waverley herself calling in from time to time.

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.

The word frigate on her pennant is itself a piece of history. The Royal Navy had not used it for the better part of a century when it revived it in 1942 for a new type: a ship with the range and armament to escort a convoy the whole way across the Atlantic, built to merchant practice in commercial yards so that it could be produced in numbers, because the corvettes that had been holding the line since 1939 were too slow and too short-legged for the job. Where the design came from, and why the Admiralty had to reach back to the age of sail for a word to describe it, is set out in the article on HMS Halladale (K417). Helmsdale was one of well over a hundred of them, and the class did more than any other single type to win 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.

The exercises off Tobermory and Lough Foyle were where an escort crew was actually made, and they are the reason a ship like this could do what she did in September 1944. Every new escort went through the working-up base in Tobermory Bay under a commodore whose methods were legendary in the fleet, described in the article on HMS Gateshead (T288), and the practice attacks off Lough Foyle were run with real submarines. The fact that Helmsdale and Portchester Castle had exercised together nine months before they killed U-484 is not a coincidence worth smiling at. It is the whole point. Two ships that have already learned each other's habits can run a coordinated attack in the dark on a contact neither of them can see, and two ships that have not, usually cannot.

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 boat they killed had barely started. U-484 was commissioned on 19 January 1944 and did not reach the operational flotilla in Norway until the beginning of August, under Korvettenkapitan Wolf-Axel Schaefer, which means she had been at war for something like five weeks when she died. She was working the approaches north-west of Ireland, which by that stage of the war was where the U-boat campaign had retreated to: driven out of the mid-Atlantic and out of the Biscay bases, fitted with schnorkels and sent to lie in coastal water where the seabed and the tides defeated asdic, as described in the article on HMS Grenadier (T334). All fifty-two men aboard her were lost. By September 1944 a U-boat crew's life expectancy on a first patrol was measurable in weeks, and most of the men in them knew it.

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.

The re-attribution deserves more than a footnote, because it says something about how naval history actually gets written. Kills were credited during the war on the best evidence available at the time, which usually meant oil, wreckage and a plausible attack, and after 1945 the Allies had the German records to check against. Going through both sets, boat by boat and attack by attack, took decades. R.N. Coppock of the Royal Navy's historical branch was still doing it in the 1990s, and in 1997 he concluded that the Canadian ships credited with U-484 for fifty years had in fact attacked something that was not a submarine at all, and that the boat had been killed by Helmsdale and Portchester Castle. It is worth saying that the same review was not a raid on the Canadians: Coppock's work added four other U-boat kills to the Royal Canadian Navy's tally that it had never been given. Nobody was being done down. The records were simply being made to say what had happened.

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.

One of those four commanding officers had already had an extraordinary war before he ever set foot aboard her. Colin McMullen was gunnery officer of the battleship Prince of Wales in May 1941, standing in the director tower in the Denmark Strait when Hood and Prince of Wales came up on Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. Vice Admiral Holland ordered the force to shift target to the right-hand ship; Hood did not, and went on firing at Prinz Eugen. McMullen got it right and put Prince of Wales's shells onto Bismarck, one of which holed her forward fuel tanks and is the reason she had to run for France instead of into the Atlantic. Hood blew up a few minutes later; that story is told in the article on HMS Hood (51). Seven months after that McMullen survived the sinking of Prince of Wales herself off Malaya, then navigated at Dieppe, and then spent 1943 and 1944 in the North Atlantic commanding escorts. The man in command of this quiet frigate had been present at two of the most famous disasters in Royal Navy history and had personally hit the Bismarck.

It is a strange thing to hand a ship's company, though, and most of them never knew. The men who took Helmsdale into that attack in September 1944 went home believing, as everybody did, that the sinking belonged to somebody else; the correction came fifty-three years later, by which time a good many of them were dead. Meanwhile the Canadian veterans of Dunver and Hespeler had spent half a century with a kill on their record that the archives eventually took away and replaced with others. There is no villain in any of it, only the ordinary difficulty of establishing what happened underwater at night in 1944. Helmsdale herself went on escorting convoys until the war ended, was laid up, and was broken up in 1957 without anybody having told her people what they had actually done.

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.