HMS Loch Fada (F390): Four U-boat Kills, Then a Testbed for Sea Wolf

The Lead Ship of Her Class

HMS Loch Fada was laid down on 8 June 1943 by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, launched on 14 December that year and commissioned in April 1944, becoming the lead ship of the entire Loch class of anti-submarine frigates and taking her name from a loch in Scotland's Inner Hebrides, in keeping with the class's naming convention.

As lead ship, she set the pattern that dozens of sister vessels, including several already covered in this series, would go on to follow.

Four U-boats, Two Escort Groups

HMS Loch Fada commissioned in April 1944 under Lieutenant Commander Benjamin Andrew Rogers, RD, RNR, her own captain for the next sixteen months, and joined Captain Frederic John Walker's celebrated 2nd Escort Group, tasked with protecting the vital Western Approaches. Walker himself led the Group from his own sloop, HMS Starling, but Loch Fada shared fully in the extraordinary run of success his ships enjoyed together that summer.

Walker is worth a word for anyone who has not met him before. He was the most effective U-boat killer the Royal Navy produced, and the 2nd Support Group existed because he had persuaded Sir Max Horton that a hunting force with no convoy to tie it down would kill more submarines than one shackled to the speed of a merchant ship. He was right, and the group proved it repeatedly. How he did it, and what happened to him, is set out in the article on HMS Kite (U87). Loch Fada was four months old when she joined him.

During the Normandy landings in 1944 she took part in Operation Neptune's anti-submarine screen alongside Starling, HMS Wild Goose, HMS Wren, HMS Dominica, HMS Loch Killin and HMS Lochy, a hunting pack that accounted for three separate U-boat kills within just a few weeks: U-333 on 31 July, sunk by Starling and Loch Killin; U-736 on 6 August, sunk by Loch Killin alone; and U-385 on 11 August, sunk by Starling and an Australian Sunderland flying boat, an extraordinary tally for a single escort group operating together.

By this point she had moved on to the 5th Escort Group, and added a remarkable fourth chapter to her war on 27 February 1945: sinking U-1018 largely single-handed with depth charges near Penzance, after the U-boat had attacked convoy BTC 81 and sunk the Norwegian freighter SS Corvus, a sinking that killed nine men, including the footballer Charlie Sillett, who was serving as a gunner aboard defensively equipped merchant shipping. On that very same day she also helped sink a second U-boat, U-1279, alongside HMS Labuan and HMS Wild Goose, a genuine two-for-one that earned her captain the Distinguished Service Cross and the ship an inscribed silver bugle, presented by a grateful RAF.

Carrying an Archbishop Into Exile

HMS Loch Fada was placed in care and maintenance at Portsmouth in 1952, entered a modernisation programme there in October 1953 that fitted a twin 4-inch gun mounting and updated radar, and recommissioned on 21 June 1955 under Commander M. L. C. Crawford, DSC*, RN, for a busy postwar career that took her to the Persian Gulf via Gibraltar, Malta and Suez for regular patrols and port visits.

Between 12 and 14 March 1956 she carried out one of the more politically notable tasks of her career, embarking Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus at Mombasa for the voyage into exile in the Seychelles, following his deportation by the British colonial authorities amid the Cyprus Emergency, a significant piece of Cold War-era colonial history playing out aboard a frigate more accustomed to routine patrol duty. A rather more cheerful royal occasion followed the next year, when HRH Prince Michael of Kent spent five days aboard as her guest in April 1957.

The Makarios voyage deserves the whole story, because it is one of the odder errands the Navy ran in the 1950s. Cyprus was in the middle of the EOKA campaign for union with Greece, and the Governor, Field Marshal Sir John Harding, had concluded that there was no point negotiating any further with an archbishop he believed to be implicated in it. Makarios was arrested on 9 March 1956 and deported, with three other Greek Cypriots, to Mahe in the Seychelles, where he became the official guest of another colonial governor, Sir William Addis.

Loch Fada's part was the last leg, out of Mombasa and across to the islands over three days in the middle of March. It is not a duty that appears in many frigates' records: a Loch-class anti-submarine escort, built to kill U-boats in the Western Approaches, carrying the head of the Church of Cyprus into detention on a tropical island four thousand miles from his diocese.

He was held for a year. When EOKA offered a ceasefire he was let go, though not allowed back to Cyprus, and on 6 April 1957 he left Mahe for Madagascar aboard a tanker found for him by Aristotle Onassis and the Greek government, and went on to Athens. Four years after that he was President of Cyprus, and Britain was negotiating the terms of independence with the man it had deported. Loch Fada, meanwhile, was on fishery protection duty off Iceland.

Cod War Patrol and Confrontation in Borneo

HMS Loch Fada returned home for a spell of Iceland fishery protection duty in the spring of 1960, following the first Cod War, before recommissioning that June for a substantial Far East deployment between 1962 and 1967, supporting operations off Borneo and Labuan during the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, calling at Japanese ports from Moji to Yokohama along the way, and carrying out Pacific patrols and exercises, adding a further significant chapter to an already varied career.

A Final Role Testing Sea Wolf

HMS Loch Fada returned to Portsmouth on 11 October 1967 after 23 years' service and was paid off from front-line service, but found one final significant use: lent to the British Aircraft Corporation in 1968, she served as a floating testbed for firing trials of the Sea Wolf surface-to-air missile system on the MOD range at Luce Bay, a notably important contribution to a weapon that would go on to arm generations of later Royal Navy frigates. Her final active moment, fittingly, was another mishap: on 5 November 1968 she broke away from her moorings at Luce Bay and drifted off unmanned into the Irish Sea, and although she was recovered and towed into Pembroke Dock, she was subsequently declared unfit for any further trials.

She was finally scrapped in 1970, closing out the career of a ship whose achievements, from her run of U-boat kills as lead ship of her class to a major piece of Cold War colonial history and a final, characteristically eventful contribution to missile development, made her one of the more consequential frigates of the entire postwar fleet.