HMS Kite (U87): Five U-boats Sunk Under Captain Walker, Then Lost in the Arctic

Birkenhead-Built

HMS Kite was ordered on 27 March 1941 and laid down on 25 September that year at Cammell Laird's shipyard in Birkenhead, launched on 13 October 1942 and commissioned on 1 March 1943, a modified Black Swan-class sloop that went on to operate out of Bootle's Gladstone Dock as part of one of the most celebrated anti-submarine escort groups of the entire war.

The class she belonged to is the reason any of the rest of it happened. The Modified Black Swans were the last and best of a line of escort sloops the Royal Navy had been refining since the mid-1930s, and they were built to do three things at once that most escorts could only do one of: shoot accurately at aircraft with six 4-inch guns on high-angle mountings and a director to lay them, hold an asdic contact through a hunt lasting hours, and then put down enough depth charges to make the hunt worth having. They were slower and dearer to build than a corvette and they were worth every extra week on the slip. The design and where it came from are set out in the articles on HMS Black Swan (U57) and HMS Alacrity (U60). Kite took eighteen months on the slip at Cammell Laird, from September 1941 to her launch in October 1942, which is to say she was building through the worst of the Atlantic war and arrived just as the tide turned. She spent March to October 1943 working up in anti-submarine exercises off Tobermory and Lough Foyle, and one man, Lieutenant Commander William Segrave, commanded her from January 1943 through every one of her five kills.

Five U-boats Under Captain Walker

HMS Kite served under Captain Frederic John Walker, the Royal Navy's foremost anti-submarine warfare specialist and by some distance the most successful U-boat hunter of the war, as one of the six sloops of his celebrated 2nd Support Group alongside HMS Starling, Wren, Woodpecker, Cygnet and Wild Goose, sharing in an extraordinary run of success against the German submarine fleet.

It is worth being clear about what a shared kill meant in the 2nd Support Group, because the phrase "helped sink" undersells rather than oversells what Kite did. Walker's method was built on the idea that a single ship attacking a U-boat gives it warning: the submarine hears the escort's engines speeding up for the run in, and turns away. His answer was the creeping attack, in which one sloop sits well back holding the contact on asdic and directs a second, moving slowly and quietly, over the top of the boat to drop a pattern it never hears coming. That takes at least two ships working as one, and it means a kill is genuinely a group achievement rather than a shared-out prize. Kite is credited with five U-boats and was never once alone for any of them, and that is the point rather than a qualification. How the tactic worked, and what it did to the U-boat arm, is described in the articles on HMS Starling (U66) and HMS Magpie (U82).

Working alongside her fellow sloops, HMS Kite helped sink U-449 near Cape Ortegal on 24 June 1943, U-462 and U-504, both destroyed in the Bay of Biscay on 30 July 1943 with the assistance of air support, U-226 east of Newfoundland on 6 November 1943, and U-238 southwest of Ireland on 9 February 1944, a tally of five confirmed U-boat kills in under a year that placed her firmly among the most effective anti-submarine vessels of the entire Battle of the Atlantic.

The first of the five is worth dating precisely. At four o'clock in the afternoon of 24 June 1943, north-west of Cape Ortegal on the Spanish coast, at 45 degrees north and 11 degrees 59 minutes west, Kite, Wren, Woodpecker and Wild Goose depth-charged U-449 until she stopped coming up. She was commanded by Oberleutnant Hermann Otto and she was on her first patrol. All forty-nine men aboard died. That last detail is worth sitting with, because it is the shape of almost every one of her kills: a successful anti-submarine action is a compartment full of men at two hundred feet, and the ships that made it happen sailed on without seeing anything but oil.

The action of 30 July 1943 was something else entirely, and it is one of the most consequential single days of the Atlantic war. Three outbound U-boats were caught on the surface in the Bay of Biscay, running together in a tight V formation for mutual anti-aircraft protection because the air over the bay had become too dangerous to cross alone. A Liberator of 53 Squadron found them, its sighting report pulled in six more aircraft, and the 2nd Support Group was ordered to the spot. A Sunderland of No. 461 Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force sank U-461, which is a coincidence of numbers no novelist would be allowed to invent. A Halifax of 502 Squadron crippled U-462. Then the sloops arrived, and Kite was among the five that finished U-462 with gunfire and among the four that put U-504 down with depth charges. Woodpecker picked up the survivors of U-461 out of the water afterwards.

What made that day matter more than three boats on a tally board is what two of them were. U-461 and U-462 were Type XIVs, the boats the Germans called Milchkuhe and the Allies called milch cows: submarine tankers built purely to resupply the fighting boats far out in the Atlantic, carrying no torpedoes and no offensive armament at all, only anti-aircraft guns. Each held around four hundred tons of fuel oil and fifty tons of provisions, along with a workshop, a doctor and spare crewmen to replace the sick and injured. The arithmetic they bought was decisive: before the tankers, a U-boat averaged forty-one days at sea; one refuelling stretched that to sixty-two and two to as much as eighty-one. Ultra was reading their sailing orders, and the hunting groups and the aircraft went after them accordingly. Of the ten milch cows in service in the spring of 1943, one was left by the end of October. After that Donitz largely stopped trying to refuel at sea and his boats had to turn for home early. Killing a tanker did not sink a single merchant ship, and it did more damage to the U-boat campaign than sinking half a dozen combat boats would have.

The last two came in the North Atlantic proper. On 6 November 1943, east of Newfoundland, Kite worked with Starling and Woodcock to destroy U-226. On 9 February 1944, south-west of Ireland, she was one of three sloops, with Magpie and Starling, that sank U-238; that kill came in the middle of the patrol that has passed into Royal Navy legend, when the 2nd Support Group destroyed six U-boats in a single sweep between late January and late February 1944 and came home to Liverpool to a band on the quayside. That story belongs properly to Starling and is told there. What belongs here is the plainer observation that a ship commissioned in March 1943 had a hand in five U-boats before her first birthday.

Walker himself did not live to see his old ship's own end. Having driven himself for years at a pace few could sustain, he died of a cerebral thrombosis at Seaforth on 9 July 1944, worn out, by most accounts, less by any single engagement than by the sheer cumulative weight of the job. He was given a funeral procession through the streets of Liverpool watched by well over a thousand people, his body carried on a gun carriage before being taken out to sea aboard HMS Hesperus for burial. HMS Kite outlived him by exactly six weeks.

Two changes in the spring and summer of 1944 shaped her ending. In May, after fourteen months and five U-boats, Segrave handed over to Lieutenant Commander Andrew Neil Gillespie Campbell, so that the officer commanding her on her last morning was a man who had spent his own career on the other side of the problem she existed to solve. Then in July the group lost Walker himself, and while a support group is an organisation rather than a man, that particular group had been built around that particular man's ideas and drive. Six weeks after his funeral Kite was in the Arctic, on a convoy run rather than a hunting sweep, doing the escort job the group had largely been spared while it was going after U-boats on its own terms. It is not a coincidence that her one bad day came in the one role she was least practised at.

Lost Escorting the Arctic Convoys

HMS Kite was assigned to Operation Victual, escorting the 34-ship convoy JW 59 out of Loch Ewe on 15 August 1944 to northern Russia, exactly the kind of dangerous Arctic convoy work that had claimed so many Royal Navy ships over the preceding years.

JW 59 was not a routine run either, and the reason is easy to miss in a list of thirty-four merchant ships. Sailing north with the convoy was the battleship Arkhangelsk, formerly HMS Royal Sovereign, handed to the Soviet Navy under Lend-Lease and manned by a Soviet crew who had commissioned her in May; a number of smaller ex-Royal Navy ships went with her under the same arrangement. So the escort was not simply protecting cargo but delivering a capital ship to an ally, which is why the covering force was as heavy as it was: the cruiser Jamaica and the escort carriers Vindex and Striker joined the convoy on the 17th with five destroyers, on top of the close escort Kite belonged to. The Germans put the Trutz group of U-boats across the route with the new acoustic torpedoes, and the first thing they hit was not the battleship or a merchant ship but a sloop.

The evening before, HMS Keppel had picked up a sonar contact on the German submarine U-344, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Ulrich Pietsch on her third patrol, and Kite joined the hunt alongside a Swordfish flown off the escort carrier HMS Vindex, both ships streaming their foxers through a night of depth charges and hedgehog attacks that ultimately found nothing. At 6:30 the next morning, 21 August, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Andrew Neil Gillespie Campbell, a submariner by background, Kite slowed to just six knots to untangle her fouled foxers rather than simply cut them loose, a routine but necessarily vulnerable manoeuvre that left her dangerously exposed at exactly the worst possible moment.

Pietsch, who had misidentified her as a much larger Dido-class light cruiser, fired a spread of three torpedoes; two struck home, and HMS Kite sank rapidly in the icy waters off Norway, at a position of roughly 73 degrees North. Of her complement of 10 officers and 207 ratings, only around 60 made it into the water alive, and of those just 14 were rescued, five of whom later died from their exposure to the freezing Arctic sea, leaving only around nine survivors from her entire crew.

One detail deserves not to be passed over, because it is the whole tragedy in miniature. The foxer was a noisemaker towed astern to decoy the German acoustic torpedo, which homed on propeller noise; it worked, and it was also heavy, awkward and prone to fouling. Kite's had tangled, and Campbell slowed to six knots to clear it rather than cut it away and lose it. Six knots is not enough to manoeuvre and it is barely enough to steer, and a sloop doing six knots in a convoy screen is a stationary target. Pietsch, looking at her through a periscope, took her for a Dido-class cruiser and fired at what he thought was a far more valuable ship. So a device fitted to protect her from exactly that weapon put her in the position where it could not miss, and the man who fired did so believing he was shooting at something else entirely. There is no lesson in it. It is simply what the Arctic in 1944 was like.

She was picked up in part by HMS Keppel, whose crew, like so many others engaged in Arctic convoy rescue work, faced the grim task of pulling desperately few survivors from waters cold enough to kill within minutes. U-344 did not get to celebrate her success for long: the very next day, 22 August, a Swordfish of 825 Naval Air Squadron flying from HMS Vindex found and depth-charged her, sinking the submarine with the loss of all fifty of her crew.

The rescue itself is worth setting out because the numbers are so brutal. Around sixty men got clear of a ship that broke in two and was gone inside a minute. HMS Keppel stopped at half past seven, half an hour after the torpedoes hit, with Peacock and Mermaid circling her as a screen, and lifted fourteen of them out. Five of the fourteen died aboard Keppel and were buried from her. That leaves nine alive out of a ship's company of two hundred and seventeen, and it means that of the sixty men who survived the sinking itself, fifty-one died of the water. Arctic sea in August is not survivable for long, and stopping a ship to pick men out of it in submarine water is a decision somebody has to make knowing exactly what it exposes his own crew to. That side of the morning is told in the article on HMS Keppel (D84).

U-344 did not have long to enjoy it, and the wider operation around JW 59 went badly for both sides. A Swordfish of 825 Naval Air Squadron flying from Vindex caught her the following day, 22 August, and sank her with the loss of every man aboard, so the exchange was fifty German lives for two hundred and eight British ones inside thirty-six hours. In the same week, and in the same stretch of sea, U-354 torpedoed the escort carrier Nabob and sank the frigate Bickerton while the Home Fleet was mounting yet another attempt on the Tirpitz; U-354 herself was hunted down and destroyed on the 24th. Convoys and carrier strikes and submarine hunts were all going on at once in a few hundred square miles of the Barents Sea, and the ledger for that August reads like a series of trades rather than a battle. Kite is on the wrong side of one of them.

A Sobering Postscript

HMS Kite's loss stands as a stark reminder of just how unforgiving the Arctic convoy routes were, even for a ship that had proven herself one of the most successful U-boat hunters of the war.

A vessel that had helped destroy five enemy submarines and saved countless Allied lives in the process was ultimately claimed by the very kind of attack she had spent so much of her career defending against, a properly sobering conclusion to what had, until that final August morning, been an outstandingly successful career.