HMS Keppel (D84): One of the Royal Navy's Great U-Boat Killers

Constructed at Woolston

HMS Keppel was built by J.I. Thornycroft of Woolston in Hampshire, ordered in April 1918 and laid down that October, though her construction dragged on well past the end of the First World War, not launching until April 1920 and finally completing at Pembroke Dockyard in April 1925.

The long build is worth explaining, because it is not simply wartime dithering. The Admiralty had its own flotilla leader design, and Thornycroft, which had been quietly convinced for years that it could do better, put an unsolicited and considerably larger proposal to the War Emergency Programme in April 1916. The Admiralty bought it. Shakespeare and Spenser were ordered that same month, Wallace the following year, and Keppel and Rooke in April 1918, by which point the war they had been conceived for had about seven months left to run. Two further ships, Saunders and Spragge, were cancelled outright in April 1919. Work on Keppel stopped dead at the armistice and then crept forward at whatever pace the Treasury would tolerate. She was launched on 23 April 1920 and did not commission until 15 April 1925, close to seven years after she was laid down. Rooke, meanwhile, was renamed Broke in April 1921 and went on to a rather more theatrical end, described in the article on HMS Broke.

She was one of five Thornycroft-type flotilla leaders, sizeable destroyers designed to lead a flotilla into battle, displacing 1,554 tons standard and driven by two Brown-Curtiss steam turbines fed by four Yarrow boilers.

The figures behind that description are worth having. She was a little over three hundred and twenty-nine feet long on a beam of just under thirty-two, her turbines were rated at forty thousand horsepower for a designed thirty-six knots, and five hundred tons of oil gave her five thousand nautical miles at fifteen. She carried a complement of around a hundred and eighty-three. As built her armament was five 4.7 inch guns, a 3 inch high-angle gun, two 2-pounder pom-poms and six 21 inch torpedo tubes in two triple mountings, and it was those triple mountings, together with a nine-foot rangefinder and proper torpedo sights on the bridge, that made the Thornycroft leaders the most heavily armed destroyers in the world when they appeared. A leader was not merely a big destroyer. She carried the captain commanding the flotilla and his staff, with the extra accommodation, signalling and plotting space that implies, so that eight or nine ships could be handled as one instrument rather than as eight or nine opinions. The broad, slab-sided funnels were the builder's signature and the quickest way to pick a Thornycroft boat out of a line of destroyers at a distance.

From Reserve Back to War

Keppel served on various interwar stations in the Mediterranean and Far East before being placed in reserve in 1937, only to be recommissioned in August 1939 as war loomed once again, a familiar story for many of the older destroyers pressed back into frontline service in the Navy's hour of need.

The name came from Augustus Keppel, who is one of those eighteenth-century admirals whose career reads like a novel nobody would publish for being too eventful. He went to sea as a boy and was aboard the Centurion when Anson sailed in 1740 on the circumnavigation that killed roughly two thirds of the men who set out with him, an experience Anson rewarded by making him an acting lieutenant. He fought at Belle Isle and Havana in the Seven Years' War, commanded the Channel Fleet against the French in the American war, and in 1779 was court-martialled and honourably acquitted after an inconclusive action off Ushant turned into a spectacularly public quarrel with his own second-in-command. Portsmouth was illuminated when the verdict came in and a London mob dragged his accuser's furniture out of Pall Mall to burn it in St James's Square, which is not a form of appellate review the Navy has since adopted. He became First Lord of the Admiralty in March 1782 and was created Viscount Keppel a month later. That court martial is set out more fully in the article on the third ship to carry the name, HMS Keppel (F85).

Those interwar stations were more varied than the phrase suggests. She went to the Mediterranean on completion, transferred to the China Station in September 1926, came home in 1931 for a refit and went straight back out east, returned to the Mediterranean in 1935 and to home waters in 1936, and paid off into reserve in October 1937. The recall was almost indecently well timed. Recommissioned with reservists in August 1939, she was one of a hundred and thirty-three ships lying in Weymouth Bay on Wednesday 9 August for the Royal Review of the Reserve Fleet, an occasion whose stated purpose was to introduce King George VI to some sixty commanding officers and whose actual purpose everybody present understood perfectly well. She then escorted the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert to Dartmouth. Three weeks later the country was at war, and in September she was at Gibraltar as Leader of the 13th Destroyer Flotilla. On 24 October she picked up thirty-two survivors from the British merchantman Tafna, torpedoed by U-37 a hundred miles west-south-west of the Rock.

Her first serious damage of the war was self-inflicted, in the way that station-keeping in the dark with no lights tends to be. On 17 January 1940, having just detached from a homeward Gibraltar convoy, she was in collision with the French Jaguar, a Chacal class contre-torpilleur rather larger than most British destroyers, and came off badly enough to need temporary repairs at Lisbon on the 20th before limping back to Gibraltar Dockyard on the 25th. Jaguar herself was patched up in time to be torpedoed off Dunkirk by German motor torpedo boats that May. It was not to be Keppel's last such misfortune, and there is a certain grim comedy in a ship that would eventually sink a U-boat by ramming spending her early war demonstrating the technique on friendly vessels.

A Formidable U-Boat Killer

Keppel went on to become one of the most effective convoy escorts of the Battle of the Atlantic, credited with the destruction of five U-boats and escorting more than thirty North Atlantic convoys alongside a dozen Gibraltar convoys, helping ensure the safe passage of over a thousand merchant ships, a formidable record for a single destroyer.

She assisted French evacuation efforts in June 1940 and took part in Operation Catapult at Mers el Kebir the following month, before joining the Western Approaches Escort Force in February 1941.

The French collapse produced two very different jobs in a fortnight. On 20 June 1940 she was sent to the Gulf of Lions, and over the 22nd and 23rd she embarked British civilians together with Czech and Polish troops at Port Vendres and Sète and carried them back to Gibraltar. On 1 July she sailed again in an altogether grimmer capacity, as part of the screen for Force H, with HMS Hood, the battleships Valiant and Resolution and the carrier HMS Ark Royal, bound for Oran. She was back at Gibraltar on the 6th, out again on the 8th with Ark Royal for a strike on Cagliari that was abandoned after the force was found from the air, and on the 11th hunting the Italian submarine Marconi after it torpedoed HMS Escort, coming under air attack herself without damage. Six months earlier she had been a reserve ship with a caretaker crew.

By 7 August 1940 she was at Greenock and working for Western Approaches Command, which for the next eighteen months meant convoy escort punctuated by the Home Fleet borrowing her whenever something large and German was thought to be loose. On 16 September she picked up survivors from the steamer Trevisa, torpedoed by U-124. In November she sailed from the Faeroes with HMS Beagle to sweep the North Atlantic for the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer after the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay had been destroyed defending her convoy, and found, as everyone always did, a great deal of empty ocean. Later that month and on into January she was escorting the 1st Minelaying Squadron as it built the Northern Barrage, work that put her in company with Hood and the battlecruiser Repulse, and on 26 January 1941 she was screening HMS Nelson during an unsuccessful sweep for Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The move to the Western Approaches in February 1941 took her to Londonderry and the 12th Escort Group, and in August to the 1st British Escort Group.

On 11 November 1941 she managed it again, colliding with the destroyer HMS Venomous and sustaining serious structural damage with flooding in several compartments. She went to Newport in the Bristol Channel to be put right, and the yard did rather more than weld plate. It fitted her with a Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar and a high-frequency direction-finding receiver, and that second item quietly changed what she was. Huff-Duff turned a U-boat's own radio report into a bearing, which turned an escort from a sentry waiting to be attacked into a hunter with somewhere to go. The Hedgehog made its impression rather sooner. On 18 March 1942 the mortar misfired and one of its contact-fuzed bombs landed on the forward structure without going off, which is the sort of thing that concentrates a forecastle party wonderfully. What such a bomb did when it was less obliging is set out in the article on HMS Escapade (H17), and how the weapon was meant to work in the article on HMS Enchantress (L56). Nine days after the misfire, escorting the troop convoy WS 17, she ran down a radio intercept and attacked U-587; her own attacks were assessed as probable damage, and the boat was finished later that day by Volunteer, Leamington, Grove and Aldenham. The apparatus worked. The credit went elsewhere, which would become a theme.

Leading the Escort for PQ 17

In July 1942, Keppel served as flagship of Commander Jack Broome, senior officer of the close escort for convoy PQ 17, the First Escort Group, made up of six destroyers alongside eleven corvettes, minesweepers and armed trawlers and two anti-aircraft ships. Fearing an imminent attack by the German battleship Tirpitz, the Admiralty in London ordered the convoy to scatter and the escorting destroyers to withdraw and join the covering cruiser force, leaving the merchant ships to make their own way to Russia individually. Of the thirty-five merchant ships that had set out, twenty-four were sunk and only eleven reached Arkhangelsk, one of the most infamous and costly episodes of the entire war. Broome himself, who had merely carried out orders issued from London, spent years afterwards unfairly shouldering much of the blame for a decision that had never actually been his to make.

PQ 17 was not the whole of her 1942, and the rest of it explains an otherwise puzzling entry on her battle honours board. In August she was back at Gibraltar, and on the 11th she was one of the ships covering HMS Furious as the carrier flew off thirty-eight Spitfires for Malta in Operation Bellows, the aviation half of the Pedestal convoy; thirty-seven of them reached the island, the odd one out landing back aboard Indomitable with a defect. She screened Furious again for a repeat performance, Operation Baritone, on 17 August. That is why a ship whose war was otherwise fought in the North Atlantic and the Barents Sea carries a Malta Convoys 1942 honour. By September she was at Akureyri in Iceland with the Home Fleet, in the screen for the battleships Anson and Duke of York as they covered PQ 18 out and QP 14 home.

Then she went away for six months and came back a different ship. From October 1942 until March 1943 she lay in a London yard being converted into a dedicated escort. Out went the torpedo tubes and three of the five 4.7 inch guns, weight and topside space being worth more than a torpedo salvo she was never going to fire. In came depth charge rails and four throwers, the Hedgehog, Type 271 and Type 286M radar, and both high and medium frequency direction finding. She emerged in April 1943 as Leader of Escort Group B3 at Greenock, a properly cosmopolitan outfit: HMS Escapade, the Polish destroyer ORP Burza, the frigate Towy, the corvettes Narcissus and Orchis, and the Free French Lobelia, Renoncule, Aconit and Roselys. Her first convoy with them, the inbound HX 239 in May, was threatened first by the Mosel group and then by the Donau group, and was reinforced by the 4th Support Group and by aircraft from the escort carrier HMS Archer. On 23 May a Swordfish of 819 Squadron sank U-752 with rockets, one of the earliest kills of its kind. Keppel's direction-finding had helped put the aircraft over the boat.

Ramming a U-Boat

Keppel's most dramatic kill came on 22 September 1943, during the running battle around convoys ONS 18 and ON 202 south-east of Cape Farewell, when she despatched U-229 with a combination of depth charges, gunfire and, for good measure, a ramming, sinking the submarine with the loss of all fifty of her crew.

That kill was the direction-finding set earning its keep in the most emphatic way available. Escort Group B3, with Lieutenant Commander John Byron in command of Keppel and Commander M.J. Evans as the group's senior officer, had taken ONS 18 out of Liverpool on 12 September and merged with the Canadian-escorted ON 202 on the 21st. On the 22nd Keppel intercepted U-229's own transmissions, ran down the bearing, found her and finished her at 54 degrees 36 minutes north, 36 degrees 25 minutes west. She was commanded by Oberleutnant Robert Schetelig and was on her third patrol. The wider battle was expensive for both sides, and expensive in a new way: the frigate HMS Lagan was damaged beyond repair, the corvette Polyanthus and the Canadian destroyer St Croix were sunk, and the frigate Itchen was lost with survivors of both already aboard her. What the Germans were using to do it, and why the escorts suddenly found themselves the targets rather than the shield, is set out in the article on HMS Escapade (H17).

After another refit she went north, and the Arctic took up most of the rest of her war. Convoy JW 57 left Loch Ewe on 20 February 1944 with forty-five merchant ships, the close escort led by Commander I.J. Tyson in Keppel and the fighting escort by Vice-Admiral Glennie in the cruiser HMS Black Prince with the escort carrier Chaser. Fourteen U-boats were waiting in two patrol lines, Werwolf and Hartmut. On 24 February Keppel was credited with destroying U-713 north-west of Narvik. The following evening the destroyer HMS Mahratta, some two hundred miles off Nordkapp, was hit by two acoustic torpedoes from U-990, rolled to port and sank by the stern; eleven officers and two hundred and ten ratings were lost and only sixteen of her company of two hundred and thirty-six came home. Every one of the forty-five merchant ships reached the Kola Inlet, which was the point of the exercise and was, on that particular night, very cold comfort indeed.

She added a second confirmed kill on 2 April 1944, sinking U-360 with depth charges south-west of Bear Island while escorting convoy JW 58, one of the most successful Arctic convoys of the entire war, in which all forty-seven merchant ships arrived safely and four U-boats and six shadowing aircraft were accounted for without the loss of a single convoy ship.

That convoy was escorted by about as much anti-submarine talent as the Royal Navy could put in one place. Captain F.J. Walker brought his 2nd Support Group across, the sloops Starling, Magpie, Wild Goose, Wren and Whimbrel, and the Home Fleet added the cruiser Diadem and the escort carriers Tracker and Activity. The Germans put sixteen boats across the route in three groups, Blitz, Hammer and Thor, with orders to go in together. It did not go well for them. Starling sank U-961 on 29 March, Beagle and Tracker's aircraft accounted for U-355 on 1 April, Keppel took U-360 on the 2nd, and on the 3rd a Swordfish found U-288 on the surface and, with help from an Avenger and a Wildcat, sank her too. Four boats and six shadowing aircraft, and not one merchant ship touched.

She was also credited with assisting in the destruction of several further U-boats over the course of the war, before transferring to the Channel that summer to support Operation Neptune, the naval component of the Normandy landings.

The figure of five U-boats is the traditional one and it repays a little unpicking, because the record is untidier than a plaque allows. Two are hers outright and beyond argument: U-229 and U-360. A third, U-394, was a genuinely shared kill on 2 September 1944 south-east of Jan Mayen, sunk by rockets and depth charges from a Swordfish of 825 Squadron flying from HMS Vindex working with Keppel, Whitehall, Mermaid and Peacock. U-354, sunk in the Barents Sea on 24 August 1944, appears in some accounts of Keppel's career but uboat.net now credits the sloop Mermaid and the frigate Loch Dunvegan alone. And U-713, her Arctic kill of February 1944, has since been reclassified: uboat.net carries her as missing on that date with no explanation for her loss, having withdrawn the attribution its own earlier record gave to Keppel's depth charges. None of this makes her a less effective ship. It is simply what happens when claims made in the dark, on sonar traces and oil slicks and judgement, are checked against German records forty years later.

The Normandy work was unglamorous and mattered enormously. Nominated for Operation Neptune in May 1944, she joined Escort Group 136 at Milford Haven alongside the Free French corvette Roselys and the trawlers Grimsby Town and Cambridgeshire, and on 3 June she took convoy EBC 1, twenty-three coasters and an ammunition ship, round the coast to the Solent. The landings were then put back twenty-four hours, which is a long time to sit on an ammunition ship. On 6 June she escorted EWC 1A down the swept channel into the Western Task Force area, and for the rest of the month she shuttled beachhead convoys out of Milford Haven until Neptune was formally terminated on the 24th. An invasion is fed by coasters, and coasters need somebody to walk in front of them.

Then, on 21 August 1944, came one of the bleakest mornings of her war. Convoy JW 59 was six days out of Loch Ewe when, at about twenty to seven, the sloop HMS Kite slowed to six knots to untangle the foxer gear she towed astern to decoy acoustic torpedoes. U-344 fired three; two hit. Kite's stern broke off and floated for a few seconds, the bow hung on for about a minute, and then there was nothing but oil and men. Keppel stopped at half past seven to pick them up while Peacock and Mermaid circled her, a thoroughly unpleasant thing to do in submarine water. Around sixty men had got clear of the ship. Fourteen were lifted out of the sea alive, and five of those died aboard Keppel and were buried from her. Of a ship's company of two hundred and seventeen, nine survived.

A Fitting Record of Service

Between September 1944 and January 1945 she made three more round trips to Russia, JW 60 and RA 60, JW 62 and RA 62, JW 63 and RA 63, by now with the 20th Escort Group. RA 62 was the hard one: on 11 December 1944 the destroyer HMS Cassandra was hit by U-365 and badly damaged, and two days later a Swordfish from Vindex sank U-365 in reply. RA 63 was scattered by a gale severe enough to drive the convoy into the Faeroes for shelter. She spent the spring under repair on the Clyde, worked up at Tobermory once more, and joined the Greenock Local Escort Force on 15 May 1945, in time to see the surrendered U-boats brought in to Lisahally and Stranraer under escort, the great sad assembly that became Operation Deadlight. It was a quiet enough note to finish on for a ship that had spent five and a half years being shot at, rammed into things and sent after battleships.

HMS Keppel earned battle honours for the Atlantic, the Malta convoys, the Arctic, Normandy and the English Channel, a comprehensive record for a single ship. She was decommissioned in June 1945 as the war in Europe drew to its close, and sold for scrap the following month, bringing to an end the career of one of the Royal Navy's quietly outstanding U-boat hunters.

The details of that ending are worth recording. She paid off and was de-stored at Barrow on 24 June 1945, went onto the sales list within days, was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation on 25 July and was broken up where she lay by Thos W Ward. She had been ordered as a weapon of the First World War and spent the Second doing a job nobody had designed her for, and doing it about as well as it could be done. The name went back to sea in 1954 in a Blackwood class frigate launched by Yarrow, the HMS Keppel (F85) that served into the 1970s and, in her own quieter way, kept up the family habit of being asked to come back and do one more job.