HMS Loch Achray (K426): Forcing a U-boat to the Surface Days Before Victory

The Build: South Bank-on-Tees

HMS Loch Achray was built by Smith's Dock Company at South Bank-on-Tees and launched on 7 July 1944, one of the Loch-class frigates specifically designed as dedicated convoy escorts and submarine hunters, incorporating the hard-won anti-submarine warfare lessons of the earlier years of the Battle of the Atlantic into a properly refined and effective design.

The seven months fitting out is worth a note, because the whole point of the Loch class was that they were not supposed to take seven months. They were designed to be thrown together: hulls prefabricated in sections by structural engineering firms well inland, bridge builders and boilermakers who had never laid down a ship in their lives, and then bolted up on the slipway by yards that could concentrate on assembly. How that worked, and what happened to the programme when the war ended sooner than the planners had allowed for, is set out in the article on HMS Bigbury Bay (K606).

Ordered on 19 January 1943, she was laid down that December and took seven months after her July 1944 launch to complete fitting out, finally entering service on 1 February 1945, a comparatively unhurried pace that said more about the ebbing U-boat threat by early 1945 than about any lack of urgency at the yard.

Forcing U-1024 to the Surface

Under the command of Temporary Acting Lieutenant Commander Leslie Hugh Stammers, RNVR, HMS Loch Achray joined the 8th Escort Group in March 1945 for Western Approaches duty. On 7 April that year the German submarine U-1024 attacked convoy HX 346, and the 8th Escort Group set off after her, running her down in the Irish Sea five days later.

On 12 April, HMS Loch Glendhu located U-1024 and forced her to the surface with a Squid attack. Loch Achray then went to work with her own depth charges, hammering away until the U-boat's crew abandoned ship, while HMS Loch More sent across a boarding party who recovered a haul of documents before taking the empty submarine under tow.

It was as close as the Royal Navy came to bringing a U-boat home intact that spring; instead, U-1024 foundered under tow the following day, 13 April 1945, sinking in the Irish Sea south of the Isle of Man. Her commander, Kapitänleutnant Hans-Joachim Gutteck, had already been wounded by gunfire during the action and took his own life rather than face capture, a grim postscript to nine of his crew's deaths against 37 survivors pulled from the water.

Escorting the Defeated U-boat Fleet

Following the German surrender on 8 May 1945, HMS Loch Achray took part in Operation Pledge, the fortnight-long scramble to bring in over 150 surrendered U-boats before anyone had second thoughts about the ceasefire. Her own leg of it ran from the collection anchorage at Scapa Flow down to the holding port at Loch Ryan, one of three routes into captivity that spring alongside the run via Loch Eriboll and Loch Alsh, and the boats that sailed straight in from Norwegian and German ports; a notably striking role reversal for a ship that had so recently been actively hunting the very submarines she was now shepherding home.

Operation Pledge, Not Deadlight

Operation Deadlight itself, the business of actually sinking the surrendered fleet, didn't begin until that November and ran on into February 1946. Loch Achray's own contribution came earlier and was rather more custodial than destructive, delivering U-boats into safekeeping rather than scuttling them, a distinction any pub quiz on the subject is fairly likely to catch someone out on.

The Indian Ocean and a New Flag

HMS Loch Achray served with the East Indies Escort Force in the Indian Ocean from September 1945, supporting military operations and assisting with the repatriation of liberated prisoners of war to Singapore, before returning to Portsmouth in July 1946 and entering reserve.

Command changed twice during this final Royal Navy commission: Lieutenant Commander Cecil John Alldridge, RNR took over from Stammers in June 1945, before Acting Lieutenant Commander Harold Geeves Chesterman, DSC, RNR relieved him that September and saw her through the rest of the Indian Ocean deployment.

Chesterman deserves a good deal more than a name in a list. By the time he walked aboard in September 1945 he had commanded five ships in five years, and had been in the water twice for his trouble. He started the war in an anti-submarine trawler, Kingston Turquoise, went to the corvette Burdock in March 1941, and in October that year was given the corvette Snowflake at the age of twenty-five, which is generally reckoned to have made him the youngest man commanding a major warship in the Royal Navy.

He had Snowflake for the best part of two years, which means he had her for the worst of it. On 5 April 1943 he stopped and picked sixty-two men out of the sea from the British tanker British Ardour after U-706 torpedoed her. A month later he was in the middle of the ten-day running battle around convoy ONS 5, the fight that broke the U-boat campaign, and Commander Peter Gretton, who ran that escort group, put him up for the Distinguished Service Cross. It was gazetted on 2 June 1943 and he had a Bar to it by October.

Then the corvette Hurst Castle, and on 1 September 1944, north-west of Ireland with convoy CU 36, U-482 put an acoustic torpedo into her. Sixteen of her people were killed, the youngest of them a sixteen-year-old called Donald Bennett. A hundred and seven survivors were pulled out, Chesterman among them, by the destroyer HMS Ambuscade.

Five months later he was given command of Ambuscade. There cannot be many officers who have been rescued by a ship and then handed the same ship to drive, and it is a fair measure of how thin the Royal Naval Reserve was stretched by 1945 that the man who had just been blown out of one command was in another inside half a year. He took Loch Achray out to the Indian Ocean, brought prisoners of war home to Singapore, and went back to the merchant service. He was still collecting decorations in 1978.

She was transferred to the Royal New Zealand Navy on 7 September 1948, refitted at Portsmouth at a cost of £232,750, and formally commissioned as HMNZS Kaniere three weeks later, taking her new name from Lake Kaniere on New Zealand's South Island, a spot early Māori settlers reportedly knew for its flocks of kākāpō. After working up in the Mediterranean, she sailed for New Zealand and arrived in Auckland in January 1949, joining the 11th Frigate Flotilla at Devonport to begin a new career under a new flag.

A Long Career With New Zealand

Kaniere was recommissioned in November 1952 for Korean War service, sailing from Auckland on 3 March 1953 to relieve her sister ship HMNZS Rotoiti and reaching the United Nations naval base at Sasebo, Japan, on 23 April. From May she ran patrols along the Korean west coast, providing naval gunfire support that covered minesweeping operations and casualty evacuations off Chodo Island, and came under fire from North Korean shore batteries for her trouble. As armistice talks dragged on into July she also helped evacuate South Korean partisans, remaining on patrol after the ceasefire finally took hold on 28 July 1953 before sailing home to Auckland, where she arrived back in March 1954.

A Far Eastern Fleet deployment followed in 1954 and 1955, after which Kaniere settled into a quieter final decade: made a seagoing training frigate in 1958, paid off from that role in 1960, then kept on for a further five years as an alongside training ship before finally being sold in 1966 and towed to Hong Kong for breaking up, closing out the career of a frigate whose most dramatic wartime moment, the attempted capture of a surfaced U-boat, came with the war in Europe already almost won.