HMS Holcombe (L56): Farnworth's Destroyer, the Salerno Carriers and a Homing Torpedo off Bougie

A Lancashire Hunt from the Clyde

HMS Holcombe was ordered from Alexander Stephen and Sons at Linthouse on the Clyde on 23 August 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, as part of the War Emergency Programme. She was one of the Type III Hunt Class escort destroyers, small, quickly built ships of about a thousand tons designed to take convoys through waters where the bomber, the E-boat and the U-boat were all a threat.

The first Hunts had carried six 4 inch guns, which could fire at aircraft as well as ships; the Type IIIs gave up one of their three twin gun mountings so that they could carry a pair of torpedo tubes as well, which made them more like proper destroyers.

She was laid down on 3 April 1941 and launched on 14 April 1942, the first ship in the Royal Navy to carry the name, which came from the Holcombe hunt in Lancashire. In March 1942, before she was even in the water, the town of Farnworth near Bolton had raised its savings in a Warship Week and adopted her.

Her badge, fittingly, was a golden hunting horn inside a wreath of red Lancashire roses. She was completed on 19 September 1942 and commissioned under Lieutenant Commander Sidney Pinchin, who had already won the Distinguished Service Cross earlier in the war.

Freetown and the Long Way South

After her trials she went north to Scapa Flow to work up with the Home Fleet, carrying out anti-submarine exercises with a training submarine and screening the battleships at their gunnery practice. She was allocated to the Mediterranean, but her first job took her somewhere else entirely.

On 30 October 1942 she sailed from the Mersey as part of the local escort for the troop convoy WS 24 with the destroyers Offa, Onslow, Oribi and Rotherham. The great convoys for the North African landings were at sea at the same moment, and to keep clear of them WS 24 was sent on an unusual route far out into the Atlantic.

Holcombe left it to fuel at Ponta Delgada in the Azores and went on alone to Bathurst in the Gambia.

She spent the winter on the West African station, based at Freetown, taking the convoys up and down the coast and practising anti-submarine work with the sloops and corvettes there.

On New Year's Day 1943 she sailed from Freetown with the destroyer Ilex and the corvette Woodruff as escort for convoy CF 10, and later in January she was one of the escorts that saw the armoured carrier Illustrious out of Freetown on her way home for refit after her time in the Indian Ocean.

Force H and the Algiers Convoys

In February she finally reached the Mediterranean, joining the 59th Destroyer Division at Gibraltar. North Africa was now in Allied hands as far as Tunisia, and the Hunts at Gibraltar spent the spring taking the military convoys along the coast to Oran, Algiers and Bone and screening the heavy ships of Force H as they moved between Gibraltar and Mers-el-Kebir.

She worked with her sisters Farndale, Haydon and Puckeridge, and on 22 April she and Atherstone joined the anti-aircraft cruiser Carlisle off Gibraltar to bring a convoy into Algiers. She was one of the escorts for the military convoys KMF 10A, UGS 8 and KMF 15, the steady flow of men and supplies that was building up for the next step, the invasion of Sicily.

Sicily

For the landings in July she was attached to Support Force East, which covered the British assault convoys. On 7 July she joined Escort Group T with the slow convoy KMS 18, moved across the next day to the fast convoy KMF 18, and then went on to Tunis to join the forces gathering for the assault.

On 10 July, the day the Eighth Army went ashore, she was off the beaches giving anti-aircraft cover, firing in support of the troops and patrolling at night against the E-boats. Later in the month she was escorting KMS 22 eastward through the Mediterranean with Atherstone, Liddesdale and a group of corvettes, and was detached off Egypt with part of the convoy to Alexandria.

Screening the Carriers at Salerno

For the landings at Salerno in September she was given one of the more unusual jobs of the campaign. The beaches were at the very limit of range for fighters from Sicily, so the Navy sent five carriers, the light fleet carrier Unicorn and the escort carriers Attacker, Battler, Hunter and Stalker, to keep Seafires over the beachhead.

They were covered by the cruisers Euryalus, Scylla and Charybdis, and their screen was made up of Hunts, Holcombe among them with Cleveland, Liddesdale, Farndale, Calpe, Haydon and the two Polish Hunts Krakowiak and Slazak. She sailed from Gibraltar on 4 September and joined the carrier force, Force V, which was in position off Salerno at dawn on 9 September as the troops went in.

The carriers were meant to stay for a day or two, but the landings went badly and the airfields ashore could not be used, so they stayed on until 11 September, their small ships flying off in light winds and their pilots landing back on in conditions that cost a great many aircraft in deck landing accidents.

After Salerno she was sent back to convoy work in the central Mediterranean, and in November she joined the Hunt flotilla based at Malta. By then Lieutenant Frank Graves had taken over command from Pinchin.

Convoy KMS 34

In December she was one of the escorts for the slow convoy KMS 34, bound eastward along the Algerian coast with the frigate Cuckmere, her sisters Calpe and Tynedale, and three American destroyers, Niblack, Benson and Wainwright. The German submarines in the western Mediterranean were few, but by now they were carrying a new weapon.

The T5 acoustic torpedo, which the Allies called the Gnat, did not need to be aimed precisely; it steered itself towards the noise of a ship's propellers, and it had been designed for use against the escorts themselves.

On 11 December U-223 torpedoed Cuckmere off Algiers. She was towed into harbour but was found to be beyond repair. On the morning of 12 December U-593, under Kapitanleutnant Gerd Kelbling, torpedoed Tynedale off Bougie and she sank.

The escorts turned on the U-boat with three Wellington bombers of 36 and 458 Squadrons, and Holcombe joined the search. At a quarter to three that afternoon a Gnat from U-593 hit her aft. The oil fuel in her after tanks caught fire and she went down by the stern in less than five minutes, north east of Bougie.

The American destroyer Niblack picked up the survivors. Of a ship's company of 164, only 80 were saved, Lieutenant Graves among them, and 84 men were lost or died later of their wounds.

The End of U-593

The hunt went on through the night and into the next day. After 32 hours U-593 was forced to the surface by depth charges from Wainwright and Calpe on 13 December, and her crew scuttled her and abandoned ship.

All 51 of them were picked up alive, a rare outcome in the U-boat war, and they went into captivity knowing that their last patrol had cost the Royal Navy two destroyers in a single day.

Holcombe was one of the shortest lived of all the Hunts. She was in commission for less than fifteen months and earned three battle honours, Mediterranean 1943, Sicily 1943 and Salerno 1943, and the name has not been used again. The other prints of her class are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.