HMS Loch Eck (K422): Three U-boats Sunk, Then New Zealand's First Shot Fired in Anger

Built by Smiths Dock

HMS Loch Eck was laid down by Smiths Dock on 25 October 1943, launched on 25 April 1944 and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 7 November that year, one of the Loch-class frigates displacing 1,435 tons standard and equipped with reciprocating engines producing 5,500 indicated horsepower, a remarkably capable submarine hunter that would go on to enjoy a remarkably successful, if brief, run against the German U-boat fleet.

Three U-boats in a Fortnight

HMS Loch Eck joined anti-submarine operations with the 10th Escort Group on commissioning, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Ronald Clifford Freaker, DSO, DSC, RD, RNR, already a highly decorated officer before he'd even taken up this posting, and achieved an exceptional run of success in a very short space of time.

It is worth saying what Freaker was decorated for, because the three kills in a fortnight were not a beginner's run of luck. He was a Royal Naval Reserve officer, a merchant service man in uniform, and before Loch Eck he had the River-class frigate HMS Jed. In June 1943, working with the sloop HMS Pelican, Jed sank U-334 in the North Atlantic south-west of Iceland. He came to Loch Eck with a DSO and Bar and a DSC already on his chest and a U-boat already to his name, and then killed three more in seventeen days.

On 3 February 1945, working alongside HMS Bayntun and HMS Braithwaite, she sank the German submarine U-327 in the Norwegian Sea using her Squid mortar. She then helped finish off two more inside a fortnight: U-989 on 14 February, north of Shetland alongside Bayntun, Braithwaite and HMS Loch Dunvegan, and U-1278 on 17 February, northwest of Bergen alongside Bayntun alone, three confirmed U-boat kills in seventeen days, a tally that placed her firmly among the most successful individual anti-submarine escorts of the entire war's final phase.

That run of success came with one less impressive footnote: redeploying to Portsmouth for Channel and South-West Approaches duty that March, she ran aground and damaged her Asdic dome, a timely reminder that even the fleet's most successful submarine hunter wasn't above the occasional bit of bad luck close to home.

Norway and the Japanese Surrender

HMS Loch Eck joined Rosyth Command that May in support of Operation Doomsday, the British airborne operation that policed Norway's reoccupation following Germany's surrender. In early June she took on rather more ceremonial duties in the same week: escorting the surrendered German submarine U-2529, and providing the escort for King Haakon VII's own voyage home to Oslo after five years of exile, a fittingly regal coda to a commission that had spent its first months hunting the very navy the king was now sailing past.

The date of that voyage was not an accident. Haakon came home on 7 June 1945 because it was five years to the day since he had been taken out of Norway, and the ship that had carried him out in 1940 was the cruiser HMS Devonshire. The story of those weeks, of the King refusing to appoint Quisling and of the birch tree at Nybergsund that became one of the central images of the Norwegian resistance, is set out in the article on HMS Glasgow (C21).

The homecoming itself was staged with the same deliberation. The cruiser HMS Norfolk sailed from Edinburgh on 5 June with the King aboard, and with Crown Princess Martha and Crown Prince Olav's children, who had spent the war in the United States. She raised the Norwegian coast on the morning of the 7th, and as she came up the Oslofjord Crown Prince Olav came out and joined his family on her quarterdeck, so that the whole royal house went into Oslo together.

Loch Eck was one of the ships around them. Five months earlier she had been north of Shetland killing U-boats in the dark; now she was escorting a king back into a country that had spent five years being told he was finished. It is not a bad fortnight's work for a frigate that had been in commission for seven months.

After a refit in Bristol she deployed to the Indian Ocean that August, joining the East Indies Escort Force for guardship and repatriation duties before hosting the formal Japanese surrender ceremony on her own quarterdeck at Bali in February 1946, followed by further surrender duties at Lombok the following month, a fitting final wartime chapter for a ship that had already proven so effective in the Atlantic. A rather less fitting one followed that May, when she collided with the cutter HM Landguard at Colombo, before finally decommissioning at Devonport on 13 August 1946.

Becoming HMNZS Hawea

HMS Loch Eck was acquired by New Zealand on 7 September 1948 and commissioned into the Royal New Zealand Navy as HMNZS Hawea on 1 October that year, renamed after a glacial lake in New Zealand's South Island, in keeping with the Admiralty's practice of naming the class after Scottish lochs and, in her new service, a New Zealand equivalent.

New Zealand's First Shot Fired in Anger

HMNZS Hawea deployed to Korea in February 1951, reaching the forward Allied base at Sasebo, Japan that May, and on the 18th of that month shelled an enemy gun position on the coast, an action recorded as the first time a Royal New Zealand Navy ship had ever fired on the enemy, a historic moment for the young navy. That September she pushed up the Han River to support operations ashore, a mission that cost her one of her own motorboats to the river's treacherous tidal channels.

She returned for a second Korean deployment from October 1952, providing naval gunfire support through further heavy bombardments of enemy positions, and was busy evacuating South Korean partisans from islands north of the 38th parallel at the very moment the armistice was signed that July. Across both deployments she accumulated 272 days at sea and fired some 21,000 rounds in total, before returning to Auckland in August 1953.

A Long Retirement

HMNZS Hawea was decommissioned on 15 February 1957, and went on to serve as a harbour training ship in Auckland for a further eight years before finally being sold for breaking up in September 1965, towed to Hong Kong for scrapping that November, closing out the career of a frigate whose achievements spanned two navies and two wars, sinking three U-boats under one flag and firing the first shots of an entire nation's naval combat history under another.