HMS Lark (U11): A U-boat Kill and a Fatal Torpedo, the Same Arctic Day

The Build: Greenock

Her story properly begins not on the Clyde but in Essex: in March 1942, the town of Billericay ran a National Savings "Warship Week" campaign, raising enough to adopt a brand-new Royal Navy sloop as its own, just weeks before her keel went down at Greenock.

HMS Lark was laid down on 5 May 1942 by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Greenock, launched on 28 August 1943 and commissioned on 10 April 1944, a modified Black Swan-class sloop built specifically for the demanding, unglamorous work of convoy escort and anti-submarine warfare, exactly the kind of role that would define nearly her entire, comparatively short career.

She commissioned under Commander Henry Leslie Pryse DSC, RNR, and spent her first weeks working up with the Western Approaches command that May, unglamorous submarine-hunting drills in home waters that were, in hindsight, the gentlest posting of her entire career.

Pryse was not aboard for any of what followed. He handed over on 16 October 1944 to Commander Hedworth Lambton, a Royal Navy officer brought back off the retired list for the war, and it was Lambton who took her to Russia and Lambton who had her on the morning of 17 February 1945. She was also, in the end, paid for by other people: the Billericay Warship Week that adopted her was one of thousands of such campaigns, a scheme explained in the article on HMS Bermuda (52).

Escorting the Russian Convoys

HMS Lark escorted the battleship HMS Malaya from Plymouth to Rosyth in September 1944, before turning to the far more dangerous work of the Arctic convoys, taking part in Operation Acumen escorting convoys JW 62 and RA 62 to and from Russia that November and December, followed by JW 63 and RA 63 over the new year, and JW 64 and RA 64 in February 1945, an unrelenting schedule of some of the most physically and mentally punishing convoy work of the entire war.

A Kill and a Loss on the Same Day

HMS Lark's war reached its dramatic climax on 17 February 1945, a single day that brought both triumph and disaster in quick succession. Working together with the corvette HMS Alnwick Castle during an anti-submarine sweep, she helped sink the German submarine U-425 with depth charges, a genuine success against exactly the kind of threat her class had been built to counter.

It is worth knowing what they had killed. U-425 was a Type VIIC, commissioned on 21 April 1943 under Kapitänleutnant Heinz Bentzien, who commanded her from that day to her last. She made nine war patrols in under two years, most of them in Norwegian and Arctic water. In all that time she never sank or damaged a single ship. Lark and Alnwick Castle found her at about half past one in the morning of 17 February 1945, off the Rybachy Peninsula in the Barents Sea, and depth-charged her until she stopped. Fifty-two men went down in her. One came out.

That is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is the shape of the Arctic U-boat war by 1945 rather than the exception to it. Nine patrols, two winters under the ice edge, fifty-three men aboard, and not one torpedo that ever found anything at all. The boats were still dangerous, as Lark found out ten hours later, and they were losing.

Yet only hours later, in the middle of the forenoon, the German submarine U-968 struck back, firing a torpedo that hit HMS Lark in the stern. The damage was severe enough that she had to be towed into the Kola Inlet and deliberately beached near Rosta to prevent her sinking outright.

Being towed into the Kola Inlet and put on the beach was not the mercy it sounds like. For the Royal Navy the Kola Inlet was the least hospitable place it operated from in the entire war, and the weather was the smallest part of it. Ships' companies were largely not allowed ashore, and there was very little ashore worth going to. Boats could not be used freely, even to visit another British ship. Soviet sentries stood at every gangway. Mail was censored. Men who got into trouble ashore, usually for drink or a fight, were liable to be handed over to Soviet courts whose sentences the Navy found so excessive that British officers repeatedly refused to give them up.

The hospital facilities were worse. They were rudimentary to the point of danger, short of hygiene and short of drugs, and men brought in wounded off the convoys died there of injuries that should not have killed them. It reached the point where Churchill wrote to Stalin about it directly, asking his help in remedying the conditions under which British service personnel and seamen found themselves. That was the ally the convoys were being run for, and every man on the Murmansk run knew it.

Three of her Able Seamen, William Hardy, Ivan Warburton and Arthur Williams, were killed in the strike, a sober reminder that the same morning which delivered a rare Arctic convoy success also cost the ship three of her own.

Nor was she the worst of that day. Convoy RA 64 sailed from the Kola Inlet the same morning, lost the corvette HMS Bluebell with all but one man of her company, lost the American freighter Thomas Scott to the same U-968 that had hit Lark, and then ran into what is generally reckoned the worst weather any Arctic convoy ever met. The whole of it is set out in the article on HMS Cavalier, one of the destroyers sent out from Scapa Flow afterwards to gather the convoy up and bring it home.

A Constructive Total Loss

HMS Lark was ultimately declared a constructive total loss by the Royal Navy, her damage judged too extensive and her location too remote for economical repair, bringing her active career to an abrupt end less than a year after she had first commissioned.

What remained of the hull, stripped of most of her equipment, was handed over to the Soviet Navy in June 1945 and renamed Neptun, an odd, quiet afterlife for a ship funded by a small Essex town's war savings drive. She was eventually scrapped in 1956, having spent barely ten months of her short life actually in Royal Navy service.

It is a strange piece of arithmetic to finish on. She was in Royal Navy commission for ten months. In that time she made six Arctic convoy passages, killed a U-boat before breakfast on 17 February 1945 and lost three of her own men before lunch, and ended up as somebody else's property on a Russian foreshore, where she sat for eleven years before anybody thought her worth breaking up. Billericay had adopted her for the duration. She was gone inside a year of joining the fleet.

Her story stands as a notably sobering illustration of just how fine the margin could be between victory and disaster on the Arctic convoy routes, where a ship's crew might sink an enemy submarine and lose their own vessel within the space of a single morning.