HMS Holderness (L48): Five Years in E-Boat Alley, Three Mines and Eighteen Prisoners

A Yorkshire Hunt from the Tyne

HMS Holderness was ordered from Swan Hunter at Wallsend on 21 March 1939, one of the first ten Hunt Class escort destroyers ordered before the war, and was laid down on 29 June 1939. The Hunts were small ships of about a thousand tons with six 4 inch guns that could engage aircraft as well as ships, meant to escort convoys on the coast where the bomber would be the main threat.

She was launched on 8 February 1940 and completed on 10 August, two months after her sister Hambledon from the same yard, in the middle of the Battle of Britain.

She was the third ship of the name, which came from the Holderness hunt in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The first had been a cutter captured in 1779, and the second a minesweeper of the First World War which earned the Baltic battle honour in 1918 and 1919.

Her badge showed a fox's mask holding a golden hunting horn in its mouth, on a red field. In March 1942 the Amman Valley in South Wales adopted her after its Warship Week, and she kept the link for the rest of the war.

Her first captain was Lieutenant Commander Douglas Holland-Martin, who already held the Distinguished Service Cross and later rose to be an admiral. She should have worked up at Portland, but by August 1940 the Channel was too dangerous for that, and she went north to Scapa Flow instead.

The Invasion Summer

She was still finishing her work-up on 4 September when she escorted the cruisers Manchester, Birmingham and Southampton out of Rosyth on their way south to the Humber, where they were to wait for the expected German invasion; the destroyers Jupiter and Kelvin came out to meet them. On 5 September she joined the 21st Destroyer Flotilla at Sheerness, her home for most of the next five years.

Four days later she was in action. On the night of 8 September she sailed from Sheerness with the cruiser Aurora, the destroyer Venetia and Hambledon, and in the early hours of the 9th, while aircraft dropped flares overhead, they bombarded the invasion barges in Boulogne harbour.

On 16 September she set off a mine on patrol, but escaped with little damage and carried on. For the rest of the autumn the flotilla kept up the anti-invasion patrols in the Thames Estuary and the Straits of Dover.

In December she was lent to the Western Approaches for two important jobs. On 12 December she was one of the escorts that took the battleship Queen Elizabeth out of Portsmouth, where she had been rebuilt, on her way to Rosyth to complete her reconstruction, with Kipling, Jupiter, Punjabi and her sister Cleveland.

Three days later she was in the screen of Ramillies as the old battleship left the Clyde for Plymouth.

E-Boat Alley

Then she went back to the Nore and the work that filled her war. The east coast convoys, coded FN going north and FS going south, carried the coal and cargo of the whole country between the Thames and the Forth, along a narrow swept channel through the minefields.

By night the German motor torpedo boats, the E-boats, came across from Holland to attack them and to lay mines, and by day the bombers came over. The stretch off Norfolk and Suffolk was known to the sailors as E-boat Alley.

In the spring of 1941 Holderness shot down a Junkers 88 over the Thames Estuary, and a few days later she was in action with E-boats attacking a southbound convoy. In July she struck her second mine, and this time it did serious damage to her hull, keeping her in dockyard hands until August.

That October she and Quorn escorted the heavy cruiser Cumberland from Southend up to Scapa Flow after her refit, and in November she shepherded the submarine Sunfish round from Sheerness to Portsmouth under tow.

Eighteen Prisoners off Norfolk

Her best night came on 19 February 1942. The German 2nd S-boat Flotilla had come out to lay mines in the convoy route, and Holderness was on an interception patrol with her sisters Mendip and Pytchley, protecting convoy FS 29 coming down from the Forth.

Near the Hearty Knoll bank off the Norfolk coast they found the E-boats and attacked them in several runs, firing on them as they twisted away in the dark. In the confusion two of the boats, S 39 and S 53, collided. S 39 limped back to IJmuiden badly damaged, but S 53 was left stopped in the water.

Holderness closed her to try to capture her intact, which would have been a real prize, and sent a boarding party across. The German crew had already set off their demolition charges, a fire broke out and the boarders had to scramble back before she went.

S 53's commander, Oberleutnant zur See Block, and seven of his men were killed, and Holderness picked eighteen survivors out of the water and brought them in as prisoners. Less than a month later, on 14 March, she was in action with E-boats again, with Pytchley and Wallace, around the northbound convoy FN 55.

Beached at Harwich

She spent the rest of 1942 and all of 1943 on the same round of convoy escort and night patrols from Sheerness. On 5 December 1943 her luck with mines finally ran out.

She detonated one off Cromer, and the flooding was so bad that she could not be got safely into harbour; she was run ashore off Harwich, near Parkeston Quay, to stop her sinking. After three days on the beach she was patched and towed up the Thames to Millwall Docks, where the commercial firm of Green and Silley Weir repaired her through the first four months of 1944.

The repairs meant that, unlike most of her sisters, she missed the invasion of Normandy. She was back at sea with the flotilla in June, now commanded by Lieutenant Philip Cole, and the photograph above was taken from the air on 2 July 1944, a few weeks after her return.

In the last winter of the war the Germans stepped up their minelaying and their attacks on the convoys now running to the armies in Belgium, and the escorts were kept as busy as they had ever been.

Truman to Antwerp

After VE Day she joined the Nore Local Flotilla, and on 14 July 1945 she had one last distinguished passenger to see in. The American cruiser Augusta was bringing President Truman across the Atlantic on his way to the Potsdam conference, and off the North Goodwin Holderness, Hambledon and Garth took over the escort of Augusta and the cruiser Philadelphia and brought them into Antwerp on the morning of the 15th.

She stayed in commission with the local flotilla at Chatham until 1946, when she was paid off into the reserve at Harwich, and moved to Barrow in 1953. In 1956 she was placed on the disposal list and sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation, and she arrived at T W Ward's yard at Preston for breaking up on 20 November 1956.

She had spent almost her entire war on the one stretch of water, and her battle honour, North Sea 1942 to 1945, says as much. The other prints of her class are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.