HMS Loch Killisport (F628): First Through Suez After It Reopened

Built and Commissioned Just After the War

HMS Loch Killisport was launched in 1944 but not commissioned until July 1945, following sea trials, a Loch-class frigate named after the sea loch on Scotland's west coast, carrying the pennant number K628 before it was changed to F628 in 1948. Her late commissioning meant she arrived just too late to take part in the anti-submarine warfare that had defined so much of her sister ships' wartime careers.

Repatriation Duty in the East Indies

HMS Loch Killisport commissioned under Lieutenant Commander G. Butcher, DSC, RNVR, and sailed to the Far East in August 1945 with the Eastern Fleet, reaching Singapore that October for repatriation operations across Java and Sumatra.

The ship escorted vessels carrying former prisoners of war and civilian internees home, important humanitarian work carried out in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese surrender, including the rescue of a Dutch family from unrest at Grissee that January, before returning to Britain in April 1946 and being laid up in reserve at Plymouth.

The Java work was a good deal less quiet than repatriation duty sounds. The Japanese surrender did not hand the Dutch East Indies back to the Dutch; it handed them to an Indonesian republic that had declared independence in August 1945 and had no intention of giving it up, and British and Indian troops found themselves fighting a war nobody at home had heard of while trying to get prisoners and internees out. Rescuing a Dutch family from unrest at Grissee is one line in a ship's record and a very large amount of history.

The Search for HMS Affray

HMS Loch Killisport recommissioned in November 1950 under Commander W. J. R. Campbell, RN, and, following modernisation, served with the Home Fleet. Between April and May 1951 she took part in the search for the submarine HMS Affray, lost with all hands in the English Channel, one of many Royal Navy vessels, including her own sister ship HMS Loch Insh, drawn into that anxious and ultimately tragic operation.

First Through the Reopened Suez Canal

HMS Loch Killisport underwent extensive modernisation for tropical service between 1953 and 1954, recommissioning again in February 1955 under Commander E. N. Forbes, DSC, RN, for deployment to the Persian Gulf and Far East.

In August 1957 she achieved a truly notable historical distinction, becoming the first Royal Navy ship to transit the Suez Canal after it reopened following the 1956 Suez Crisis, a symbolically significant moment for a waterway whose closure and reopening had so dramatically shaped British and international politics in the intervening months.

It is worth knowing what had been done to the canal, because the blocking of it was thorough and deliberate. As the Anglo-French landings went in at the end of 1956, Egyptian forces sank forty-seven vessels in the waterway, a frigate among them, along with dredgers, tugs, floating cranes and docks, hoppers and salvage craft, and destroyed two bridges for good measure. The most important shipping route in the world was shut, from Port Said at one end to Suez at the other, by the deliberate scuttling of anything to hand.

Clearing it was given to the United Nations, and the United Nations gave it to a seventy-one-year-old retired American army engineer, Lieutenant General Raymond A. Wheeler, who had spent the Second World War opening harbours and who set up at Ismailia in late November 1956 with Danish and Dutch salvage firms working under him. British and French salvage teams were given their own share of the wrecks and finished it on 21 January 1957: thirteen ships, close to seventeen thousand tons, including the Paul Solente, the largest blockship in the canal.

The canal reopened to traffic on 24 April 1957, with the last of the clearance not finished until 7 May. Which is what makes a small frigate steaming quietly through in August a political act rather than a passage. Britain had invaded to keep the canal open, had caused it to be closed, had been made to leave, and had then helped clear its own mess under the direction of the organisation that told it to go. Loch Killisport going through was Britain being allowed back in.

Salvage Missions and Borneo

HMS Loch Killisport carried out a series of salvage missions during her Gulf and Far East service, assisting the distressed Italian tanker Argea Prima in May 1955, a multi-national effort that also drew in her sister ship HMS Loch Insh and the US Navy's USS Valcour, and helping refloat the American tanker Olympic Games, aground off Bahrain, that December, alongside the British tanker Athel Monarch. She went on to assist the French tanker Fernand Gilabert in 1958, actions for which two of her officers received the Queen's Commendation for brave conduct.

Recommissioned in September 1961 under Captain M. F. Fell, DSC, RN, she relieved HMS Cardigan Bay at Singapore and, between 1962 and 1964, supported military operations during the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, operating from bases at Tawau, Labuan and Sandakan in Borneo. A grounding on entering Kuching in September 1963 did nothing to slow her down, and in September 1964 she sent divers and a portable pump across to help recover the Panamanian vessel Chopin, adding a substantial Cold War-era combat support role to an already varied career.

A Quiet End

HMS Loch Killisport was decommissioned on 4 August 1965 and laid up at Portsmouth, before being sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation on 20 February 1970 for demolition by Hughes Bolckow, arriving at the breaker's yard in Blyth on 18 March that year, closing out the career of a frigate whose remarkably diverse service, from repatriation duty in the aftermath of one war to a Cold War posting supporting another, and leading the way back through Suez in between, made her one of the more historically interesting ships of her class.