HMS Loch Insh (F433): Two U-boats Sunk in the War's Final Fortnight

Leith-Built

HMS Loch Insh was built by Henry Robb at Leith and launched on 10 May 1944, a Loch-class frigate named after the loch in the Scottish Highlands, joining the 19th Escort Group at Liverpool that November for convoy defence duty in the North-West Approaches and the Irish Sea, exactly the kind of demanding, unglamorous work that occupied so much of the class's wartime service. Temporary Acting Lieutenant Commander E. C. W. Dempster, RNVR, commissioned and commanded her through this opening chapter of her war.

A Fourteen-Hour Hunt Off Cape Wrath

HMS Loch Insh and HMS Goodall spent fourteen hours hunting the German submarine U-775 near Cape Wrath on 6 December 1944, after the U-boat had torpedoed HMS Bullen, breaking her in two and killing 71 of her crew, a truly relentless pursuit that nonetheless ended in frustration when the submarine managed to escape, a reminder that even the most persistent hunt did not always end in a kill. U-775 went on to survive the entire war intact, only to surrender at Trondheim on 9 May 1945 and be scuttled under Operation Deadlight that December, on almost the exact anniversary of the day she'd given Loch Insh the slip.

Two Kills in a Single Day

HMS Loch Insh's fortunes turned decisively in the war's final weeks.

On 29 April 1945, while escorting the Arctic convoy JW 66 in the Barents Sea, she sank the German submarine U-307 using Hedgehog-style Shark projectiles and her Squid mortar, pulling 14 survivors from the water afterwards, and on that very same day took part in sinking a second U-boat, U-286, whose entire crew of 51 went down with her, working alongside HMS Anguilla and HMS Cotton, a notably remarkable double success achieved within a matter of hours and just days before the war in Europe finally ended.

The second of those two kills has a story behind it that the bare date does not carry. U-286 had spent that same day doing something rather more successful than being sunk. At the entrance to the Kola Inlet, seven miles off Murmansk, she put an acoustic torpedo into the Captain-class frigate HMS Goodall, escorting the homeward convoy RA 66. Goodall's magazine went up and took the whole forepart of the ship with it. A hundred and twelve of her people were killed and forty-four came out.

She was the last Royal Navy ship sunk in the war in Europe, nine days before it ended, and the hulk had to be finished off with gunfire by HMS Anguilla the following day. And Loch Insh knew her: it was Goodall she had spent fourteen hours off Cape Wrath with in December, hunting U-775 and failing to catch her.

The 19th Escort Group found U-286 that night. Loch Insh, Anguilla and Cotton depth-charged her until she stopped, and all fifty-one of her crew went down with her. It is not often that the arithmetic of a convoy battle works out that neatly, and nobody in the escort group is likely to have been troubled by it.

Reserve, Reactivation and the Gulf

After a refit at Leith that May, she sailed for the East Indies Escort Force that August under a new commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander E. M. Skinner, RN, supporting military operations and the repatriation of prisoners of war across Sumatra and Java before returning to Britain in April 1946 and entering reserve at Devonport, her pennant number changing to F433.

She recommissioned on 21 September 1950 under Commander R. S. Foster-Brown, RN, and the following spring found herself drafted into another famous search, joining the hunt for the missing submarine HMS Affray between April and June 1951. That December she was chosen as the prototype ship for the entire Loch class's modernisation programme, and after an extended refit recommissioned again on 6 September 1954 under Commander A. J. T. Harris, RN, for deployment to the Persian Gulf, where she spent multiple tours between 1954 and 1962 protecting British tanker shipping.

In May 1955 she diverted to help fight a fire and salvage the Italian tanker Argea Prima alongside HMS Loch Killisport, towing the damaged vessel into Bahrain under her own power. During the 1956 Suez Crisis, Operation Musketeer, she took on the specific task of protecting the Sitra oil jetties off Bahrain, exactly the kind of vital infrastructure protection duty that Gulf-deployed frigates were so regularly called upon to perform, and in 1958 she stood guardship duty on the Shatt-el-Arab waterway following the assassination of King Faisal II of Iraq, safeguarding British tanker shipping through a genuinely tense regional moment.

The assassination that put her on the Shatt al-Arab was rather more than an assassination. On 14 July 1958 a group of Iraqi officers under Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the monarchy in a morning. The king, who was twenty-three, the Crown Prince Abd al-Ilah and members of the royal household were brought out into the courtyard of the Rihab Palace in Baghdad, turned to face a wall and machine-gunned. The prime minister, Nuri al-Said, got away in disguise and was found and killed in the street the next day.

The Hashemite monarchy Britain had installed in 1921 was gone inside twenty-four hours, and with it the Baghdad Pact and most of British policy in the region. What London worried about that afternoon was oil, and specifically Kuwait, which is why a Loch-class frigate spent the rest of that summer sitting in the Shatt al-Arab watching tankers. It is also, three years early, the reason for Operation Vantage.

She returned to the Gulf's front line one more time in August 1961, relieving HMS Loch Alvie in the British Task Force off Kuwait during Operation Vantage, before finally paying off in June 1962 after steaming well over 47,000 miles on that commission alone.

A New Life With Malaysia

HMS Loch Insh was decommissioned on 22 June 1962 and sold to the Royal Malaysian Navy the following year, commissioning as KD Hang Tuah on 2 October 1964 after a refit that added a helicopter landing platform. She went on to serve as flagship of the entire Royal Malaysian Navy until 1971 and then as a training ship for a further six years before finally being scrapped in 1977, closing out the career of a frigate whose final wartime fortnight, with two U-boats sunk in a single day, stood as one of the more remarkable individual achievements among the entire Loch class.