HMS Liddesdale (L100): The Odd Hunt, Salerno's Carriers and the End of U-453

One of Three

HMS Liddesdale was one of the eighteen Hunt Class escort destroyers ordered on 4 September 1939, the day after war was declared, and she was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Newcastle upon Tyne, laid down in November 1939 and launched on 19 August 1940. She was commissioned at the end of February 1941.

She was the first ship of the name, which she took, like all the Hunts, from a fox hunt; the Liddesdale hunt is in the Scottish Borders.

The first Hunts had turned out top heavy. The design had promised three twin 4 inch mountings on a small, fast hull, and when the first ship was finished it was found that one mounting had to come off to keep her stable.

For the second group, the Type IIs, the hull was widened by two and a half feet so that all three mountings could be carried. Liddesdale, though, was one of three early ships, with Blencathra and Brocklesby, that were built with the broader Type II hull but completed with only the two mountings of the Type I.

Reference books have never quite agreed whether to list the three as Type Is or Type IIs.

In March 1942 the cotton town of Nelson in Lancashire adopted her after its Warship Week. Her first captain was Commander Arthur West.

The Rosyth Convoys

She joined the Rosyth Escort Force in April 1941, escorting the coastal convoys between the Forth and the Thames and up to the north of Scotland. The East Coast convoys were the lifeline of London's coal and much of its trade, and they ran every day through a narrow swept channel along the edge of the minefields, open to bombers by day and to German E-boats by night.

Liddesdale was given Type 285 radar to direct her guns, and early in 1942 she was fitted, like many of the East Coast escorts, with a 2 pounder pom-pom right in her bows, the bow chaser, for close range fights with E-boats in the dark.

In April 1942 she helped to escort the troop convoy WS 18 out of the Clyde through the North Western Approaches, bound for Egypt and India, and in October she escorted one of the convoys that carried the stores for the North African landings to Gibraltar. This photograph was taken from the air in August 1942, in the middle of her East Coast service.

Her new captain since May was Lieutenant Commander Angus Mackenzie of the Royal Naval Reserve.

Sicily and the Salerno Carriers

In April 1943 she sailed for the Mediterranean in the escort of the troop convoy WS 29, with the cruiser Newcastle, two destroyers, sloops, frigates and two former American coastguard cutters, and parted from it off Gibraltar to join the escort destroyers based there.

For the next two months she escorted the convoys running between Gibraltar and the newly won ports of Algeria and Tunisia, where the big build-up for the next invasion was gathering. For the invasion of Sicily she sailed from Bizerta on 7 July with the assault convoy KMS 18, part of Support Force East, and gave gunfire support and patrolled off the beaches after the landings on 10 July.

At Salerno in September she was one of the Hunts of the screen for Task Force 88, the escort carriers Battler, Attacker, Hunter and Stalker and the light fleet carrier Unicorn, whose Seafires flew cover over the beaches before an airfield could be taken ashore. Her companions on the screen included Holcombe, Cleveland, Farndale, Calpe and the Polish Hunts Krakowiak and Ślązak.

In November she moved to Malta and for the next six months escorted the convoys along the coasts of North Africa and Italy and around Sicily.

U-453

On 20 May 1944 a U-boat attacked convoy HA 43, which was being escorted by three ships of the Italian navy, now fighting on the Allied side, off the toe of Italy. Liddesdale was sent with the fleet destroyers Tenacious and Termagant to hunt for it north-east of Cape Spartivento.

They found it, and attacked with depth charges through the evening and on into the night, holding contact after dark. In the early hours of 21 May the U-boat came to the surface and was sunk by the gunfire of the three ships.

She was U-453, a boat with a long record in the Mediterranean; her mines had sunk the destroyer Quail and the minesweeper Hebe off Italy, and she had damaged the hospital ship Somersetshire. Only one of her crew was killed, and fifty one were picked up. Liddesdale took thirty four of the prisoners to Palermo.

The South of France and the Aegean

In August 1944 she sailed from Naples with the convoys for Operation Dragoon, the invasion of the south of France, under American command, escorting the headquarters ship USS Biscayne, tank landing ships and a tanker to the assault area. In September she moved east to join the force that was harrying the German garrisons in the Aegean as they tried to withdraw from the islands and Greece.

On 28 September she, Brecon and Zetland went in to attack shipping at Scarpanto, the island between Crete and Rhodes now called Karpathos. In Pegadia Bay the shore batteries hit her three times, and she had to go to Malta for repairs.

She was back in the eastern Mediterranean by the middle of October, in time to support Operation Manna, the British return to Greece, as the German army withdrew northwards. Through November she patrolled the Greek coast and the islands, intercepting the small craft that were trying to carry the last German troops away, while British forces landed at Piraeus and went on to Athens.

In December she joined the 22nd Destroyer Flotilla at Malta with Exmoor, Tetcott, Wheatland and others, and on 2 March 1945 she supported the landing on the island of Piskopi, now Tilos, in the Dodecanese.

After the War

After VE Day she stayed in the Mediterranean, supporting the Allied forces in Trieste and patrolling the approaches to Palestine to stop the ships carrying Jewish refugees who were trying to land in defiance of the British immigration quota. She came home late in 1945 and entered the Reserve Fleet at Chatham on 11 December.

Her hull was found to be in poor condition, and in 1948 she was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation and broken up by J J King at Gateshead, a few miles up the Tyne from the yard where she had been built.

Her eight battle honours, North Sea 1941-43, North Africa 1942, Atlantic 1943, Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943, South France 1944, Aegean 1944 and Mediterranean 1944, show how far a ship designed for the East Coast convoys could travel in four years.