HMS Loch Lomond (K437): Carrying a Rebel Leader Into Exile

The Build: Dundee

HMS Loch Lomond was ordered on 2 February 1943 from the Caledon Shipbuilding and Engineering Company in Dundee, laid down on 7 December that year, launched on 19 June 1944 and completed on 16 November 1944, a Loch-class frigate that joined the 17th Escort Group on 11 December that year, carrying out convoy escort duties and patrols around Scotland, Northern Ireland and the English Channel through to the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. Lieutenant Commander Robert Edward Heap Partington, RD, RNR, commissioned and commanded her through this opening chapter.

A Cancelled Invasion

HMS Loch Lomond was designated for East Indies service following VE Day and departed for Ceylon on 28 June 1945, originally slated to take part in Operation Zipper, the planned Allied recapture of British Malaya from Japanese occupation.

Command changed twice in the months that followed: Lieutenant Commander Stanley Darling, DSC, RANVR, an Australian officer, took over that June, before Lieutenant Commander Kenneth James Webb, DSC, RNR, relieved him in September. The opposed invasion itself never had to happen; Japan's surrender came first, sparing everyone involved a potentially costly amphibious assault, and Operation Zipper went ahead instead as an unopposed landing. HMS Loch Lomond remained at Singapore supporting local operations, including, in February 1946, escorting the surrendered German U-boats U-181 and U-862, both of which had spent their final active months operating out of Japanese-held Penang, out into the Strait of Malacca to be scuttled, before returning home to decommission in April 1946.

Darling is worth stopping for, because "an Australian officer" undersells him considerably. He was a reservist with an interest in acoustics, picked for anti-submarine training at HMAS Rushcutter in early 1940 and lent to the Royal Navy that August, and in November 1943 he was given the frigate HMS Loch Killin in Captain Walker's 2nd Escort Group, whose methods are set out in the article on HMS Kite (U87).

He sank three U-boats in eight months, which very few escort captains of any navy managed. U-333 went down west of the Scillies on 31 July 1944, killed with Squid by Loch Killin and Starling together. U-736 fired torpedoes at him in the Bay of Biscay on 6 August, missed, was forced to the surface by Squid, and Loch Killin then ran clean over her bow section, which took some doing without wrecking his own sonar dome and propellers. U-1063 came up off Start Point on 15 April 1945 after three Squid salvoes and seventeen of her people were picked out of the water.

That earned him the DSC and two Bars to it. He commanded Loch Lomond for three months in the summer of 1945, on passage to a war that ended before she got there, and went home to Australia. He died in Sydney in November 2002, aged ninety-five.

Mediterranean and Gulf Service

HMS Loch Lomond recommissioned on 22 September 1950 under Commander H. R. Moore, RN, for Mediterranean Fleet duty based at Malta, taking on guardship duties at Aqaba and Port Said and Red Sea patrol work, before returning to Britain in October 1952.

Following modernisation between 1953 and 1955, she recommissioned again in April 1955 under Commander B. M. D. L'Anson, RN, based at Bahrain for Persian Gulf patrol work, and again in August 1956 under Commander D. G. Roome, MVO, RN, for a second Gulf commission that included dhow interception patrols and, in August 1957, landing Royal Marines ashore during local unrest. Returning home that November by way of the Cape of Good Hope, with the Suez Canal still closed, she suffered a serious boiler room fire during the Atlantic passage; Stoker Petty Officer Robert Barlow was awarded the British Empire Medal for his part in fighting it.

Exiling a Maldivian Rebel Leader

After a further refit and recommissioning under Commander C. B. Armstrong, RN, in September 1959, she recommissioned once more at Singapore in October 1962 under Commander P. D. Nicol, RN, for the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation, supporting military operations against Indonesian infiltration and, in between, standing guard ship at Gan in the Maldives, work briefly interrupted that June by an emergency dry-docking for a broken port propeller shaft. It was her presence at Gan, right on the Maldives' doorstep, that put her in position for one of the more politically unusual tasks of her career: when the British-backed United Suvadive Republic in the southern Maldives collapsed that September, HMS Loch Lomond carried its president, Abdulla Afeef Didi, along with his family, into exile in the British colony of the Seychelles, a properly striking piece of Cold War colonial administration playing out aboard a frigate more accustomed to routine patrol work.

The United Suvadive Republic deserves the whole story, because Britain more or less created it and then let it die. On 3 January 1959 a delegation from Addu Atoll came on to the airfield at Gan and declared the southern atolls independent of the Maldivian government in Male. The man they put at the head of it, Abdullah Afeef, was a Hithadhoo man who had been working as a translator for the British at the base, and he was chosen largely because London insisted on somebody it already knew and trusted as the price of any support at all.

The support never came. Afeef appealed publicly for recognition in The Times in May 1959 and got nothing, and in 1961 Britain signed a treaty with the Maldivian government without involving him at all, which settled the matter. What followed for the southern atolls was an economic embargo and gunboats out of Male. At three in the morning on 23 September 1963 the Suvadive flag was cut down at Maradhoo and the Maldivian flag went up in its place.

Loch Lomond was lying at Gan and took him off. He went to the Seychelles with his immediate family, was eventually pardoned, came back to see Addu once, and died in exile. It is a small piece of history and a fairly complete one: a country invented because it was convenient, abandoned when it stopped being, and wound up by a frigate on guardship duty who happened to be the nearest British ship.

A Quiet Retirement

Command passed one final time that December to Commander B. L. Spark, RN, who saw her through a last Far East commission of well over 40,000 miles steamed before she paid off at Portsmouth in December 1964. She was placed on the Disposal List in February 1965, taken to Chatham in 1967 for the removal of her remaining equipment, and was sold for scrap, arriving under tow at the breaker's yard in Faslane on 7 October 1968, closing out the career of a frigate whose service, defined as much by an invasion that never had to happen and a rebel leader's exile as by anything more conventionally military, made for a particularly eventful, if largely bloodless, career.