HMS Holmes (K581): An American-Built Frigate at D-Day

Built in Massachusetts for the Royal Navy

HMS Holmes was built at the Bethlehem-Hingham Shipyard in Massachusetts, laid down on 27 October 1943, launched on 18 December that year and commissioned on 31 January 1944, one of dozens of American-built destroyer escorts transferred to the Royal Navy under wartime lend-lease arrangements and reclassified as Captain-class frigates in British service.

She carried the American hull designation DE 572 alongside her British pennant number K581, a small but telling reminder of her dual national origins, built in an American yard specifically for use by an allied navy.

The yard deserves rather more attention than it usually gets, because when the war began it did not exist. Within weeks of Pearl Harbor a survey party arrived at Hingham on the Weymouth Back River in Massachusetts, and crews began clearing a hundred and fifty acres of it round the clock. They put up a steel mill more than a third of a mile long, built wooden cradles to hold each hull and brought in a dozen large cranes, and then set about producing warships the way Detroit produced motor cars. Bethlehem-Hingham turned out 132 destroyer escorts before switching to tank landing ships and launching 165 of those across 1944 and 1945: 277 ships in three and a half years, six a month at its peak, and on one occasion a complete destroyer escort delivered twenty-three days after her keel was laid. Four hundred experienced men were brought in to start the thing off; within a year there were more than fifteen thousand people in the yard, and at its height over twenty-three thousand, among them some two and a half thousand women recruited as the men went away to fight. Holmes was in the water inside eight weeks of her keel going down, which was not considered remarkable.

The name she was given has a certain sting to it for a ship built in New England. The Captain class were meant to be named after captains who had served with Nelson at Trafalgar, but seventy-eight ships is a great many captains, and the Admiralty had to reach back a long way further. Holmes had last been carried by a Royal Navy vessel in 1671, and the man it honours is Sir Robert Holmes, a Restoration sea officer of such energetic belligerence that historians have credited him with personally starting two separate wars. In 1663 and 1664 he went down the Guinea coast on his own initiative seizing Dutch trading posts, which helped bring on the conflict during which an English squadron under Richard Nicolls took New Amsterdam without firing a shot and renamed it after the Duke of York. Holmes did not capture the place himself, whatever the popular version says; he merely helped start the war that produced it, which is arguably worse. In August 1666 he took a squadron into the Vlie and over two days burned something like 150 Dutch merchantmen and the town of West-Terschelling with them, an episode still cheerfully known as Holmes's Bonfire. Sending a ship of that name to Normandy in an American hull is a joke with three centuries of setup.

Her working-up period was spent well away from British waters: in April 1944 she ran trials and exercises with HMS Indomitable off Chesapeake Bay alongside the American destroyers USS Robinson and USS Buckley, before escorting the carrier back across the Atlantic to Rosyth later that month.

She was one of the forty-six turbo-electric Buckleys rather than one of the thirty-two smaller diesel-electric Evarts boats, the two American designs that between them made up the seventy-eight Captain-class frigates; the whole arrangement, and why Britain took them, is set out in the article on HMS Balfour (K464). Turbo-electric drive is worth a sentence because it is unusual and it was chosen for an unglamorous reason. The turbines do not turn the propeller shafts at all: they drive generators, and electric motors turn the screws, which gives very fine control at low speed, an immediate response astern, and a ship that will sit on a slow convoy for a fortnight and then accelerate without fuss. It also does away with the enormous double-reduction gearing that American yards simply could not cut in the quantities the escort programme demanded. The Royal Navy did not choose turbo-electric drive on its merits; it took what the Americans could build fastest, and then found it rather liked it.

There is a postscript to those Chesapeake Bay exercises that Holmes's people must have enjoyed hearing about. USS Buckley, name ship of the type Holmes belonged to and one of the two American ships working up alongside her that April, was some 390 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands within a month of it. On 6 May 1944 she forced U-66 to the surface and rammed her, and the two locked together, bow across foredeck, while German sailors came up out of the burning submarine, some surrendering and a good many not. What followed was a hand-to-hand fight on the forecastle of a destroyer escort in the middle of the twentieth century, conducted with small arms, hand grenades, fists, empty three-inch shell cases thrown by the gun crew and, by more than one account, a coffee pot. U-66 sank. It is the least modern naval action of the entire war, and it happened to a ship that had been exercising with Holmes a few weeks earlier.

Escorting the Fleet to Normandy

HMS Holmes entered active service from March 1944 under Lieutenant David Brian Gladstone Dumas, and quickly found herself engaged in properly significant fleet escort work: she escorted the aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable that April, screened a Clyde-area exercise with the battleships HMS Warspite and HMS Ramillies in late May, and then took part in the real thing when Operation Neptune, the naval component of the D-Day invasion, actually opened, escorting Bombardment Force D out of the Clyde on 2 June before taking over the close escort of the battleship HMS Nelson between Plymouth and Portsmouth on 8 June and shepherding her through the bombardment operations off the Normandy coast three days later, protecting one of the Royal Navy's most powerful capital ships as she poured heavy gunfire onto German positions supporting the invasion.

Escorting a battleship off Normandy sounds like the safe end of the invasion and it was nothing of the sort. Bombarding Force D worked the eastern flank, off Sword Beach and Le Havre, where Warspite, Ramillies and the monitor Roberts spent D-Day shelling the German batteries east of the Dives, and where the enemy still had a working naval base a few miles up the coast. German torpedo boats came out of Le Havre on the morning of 6 June, got in among the force, fired fifteen torpedoes and sank the Norwegian destroyer Svenner. After that came mines laid by aircraft night after night, E-boats from Le Havre and Cherbourg, and in due course human torpedoes and explosive motorboats. A capital ship anchored in shallow water firing sixteen-inch guns at map references is an enormous and entirely stationary target, and the frigates circling her existed to make sure nothing got close enough to matter. It was not a foolproof system. HMS Nelson, whom Holmes brought round from Plymouth on 8 June, struck two mines off the beachhead ten days later and had to cross the Atlantic to Philadelphia to be put right, not returning until January 1945; her own account is in the article on HMS Nelson (28).

One member of her ship's company survives in the photographic record, and he is a reminder of how mixed a crew a British escort could be by 1944. Sub Lieutenant Anthony Large, BEM, of Durban, serving with the South African Naval Force (Volunteers), was photographed taking a compass bearing on Holmes's bridge while she was guarding the supply route to the beachhead. He had won his British Empire Medal earlier in the war while still a rating, which in wartime practice generally meant an act of gallantry by somebody below warrant rank. South Africa had almost no navy of her own in 1939 and thousands of South African volunteers went instead into British ships, where they spent the war a very long way from home in a service that was not quite theirs. A South African officer, on an American hull, under a seventeenth-century English name, off a French beach: the ship is a fair summary of the alliance she was part of.

A Rescue in the Atlantic

HMS Holmes's crew carried out a valuable piece of humanitarian work in March 1945, picking up 48 survivors from the merchant vessel Lornaston after she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-275, a welcome success in the still-dangerous final months of the Battle of the Atlantic, when U-boats remained capable of inflicting real losses even as Germany's overall military position collapsed. The rescue itself was a joint effort with HMS Palencia, the two ships between them accounting for all 48 people aboard the Lornaston, her master, crew and gunners alike, without a single life lost; the merchantman had been torpedoed at 10.55am on 8 March while carrying a cargo of 6,002 tons of coal from Blyth to Casablanca, and her survivors were landed at Newhaven. There was a grim symmetry to what followed: U-275, the U-boat responsible, struck a British mine off that same stretch of coast just two days later and went down with the loss of all 48 of her own crew, the same number Holmes and Palencia had between them just plucked safely from the sea.

The sea she was working in by March 1945 was the strangest phase of the whole U-boat war. The mid-Atlantic had effectively been closed to the Germans, so Donitz sent his boats into the shallow water round the British coast instead. Some fifty elderly Type VIIs fitted with schnorkels sailed from Norway in January, fuelled with diesel scraped out of laid-up warships including the Admiral Scheer, and another thirty-eight followed in March. Inshore, a submarine can settle on the bottom and switch everything off, and an asdic operator hunting her has to pick a weak echo out of a seabed cluttered with wrecks, rock and the reverberation of a running tide. The Admiralty's own assessment was that an escort had something like an eight per cent chance of detecting a U-boat as it closed a convoy in coastal waters. That figure is the whole reason the Channel in the last winter of the war was busier and nastier than the tonnage tables suggest, and it is the water Holmes was patrolling when the Lornaston was hit.

Getting forty-eight people out of the sea is also a great deal harder than the sentence makes it sound. A ship carrying six thousand tons of coal goes down quickly, and the Channel in early March is somewhere around eight degrees, which gives an immersed man an hour or two before he stops being able to help himself. Boats have to go down from a ship that cannot afford to lie stopped in water where a submarine is known to be, scrambling nets have to be manned, and men who can no longer grip have to be got up the side by other men leaning over it. Holmes and Palencia between them took off every soul aboard, master, crew and DEMS gunners alike, and landed them at Newhaven. Two days later U-275 ran onto a British mine off Beachy Head and was lost with all forty-eight of her own, which is either a coincidence or the tidiest piece of arithmetic in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Lieutenant Patrick Spencer Boyle took command of HMS Holmes in September 1944, seeing her through the remainder of her wartime service, including a January-February 1945 crossing escorting Convoy CU 56 from New York to the UK, unglamorous mid-Atlantic convoy work sandwiched between the drama of Normandy and the Lornaston rescue that followed a few weeks later.

Returned to the US Navy

HMS Holmes was returned to the United States Navy on 3 December 1945, in keeping with the terms under which so many lend-lease vessels had been transferred, and was sold for scrap in October 1947, closing out a comparatively brief but truly eventful wartime career that had taken an American-built hull from a Massachusetts shipyard to the heart of the D-Day invasion fleet in barely five months.

Giving her back was always the arrangement, and it was carried out with a certain amount of ceremony and no sentiment whatever. Lend-Lease ships were lent rather than given, and as the war ended the Royal Navy returned the Captain class to the United States Navy in batches; what that actually looked like, a ship's company mustered on a jetty to hand over a vessel they had fought in, is described in the article on HMS Bayntun (K310). What happened next was rather less dignified. The United States had no conceivable use for seventy-eight escort vessels in a peacetime navy already disposing of hundreds of its own, and Holmes was sold for scrap in October 1947, less than four years after her keel was laid. The steel was worth having. The ship, apparently, was not.

It is easy to file her under ships that did nothing very much, and the record does not support it. Inside two years she worked up with a fleet carrier, escorted a battleship through the largest amphibious operation ever attempted, crossed the Atlantic on convoy escort in midwinter and pulled forty-eight men out of the Channel without losing one of them. She was launched inside eight weeks by a workforce most of whom had never built a ship before, in a yard that had been open ground two years earlier, and she was manned by British and Commonwealth sailors under a name borrowed from the 1660s. If you wanted one object to explain how the Atlantic was actually won, it would not be a battleship. It would be something very like HMS Holmes.