HMS Loch More (F639): A Late-War Frigate With a Thin Paper Trail

Dundee-Built

HMS Loch More was built by the Caledon Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Dundee and launched on 3 October 1944, a Loch-class frigate named after the loch in Caithness in Scotland's far north, joining a large class of anti-submarine frigates that had, by the time of her launch, already proven themselves highly effective against the German U-boat fleet.

She was fitted with the class's standard armament of a 4-inch gun, 2-pounder and Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns, and depth charge equipment, powered by twin-shaft triple expansion steam engines producing 5,500 indicated horsepower.

Not Quite as Thin as the Title Suggests

HMS Loch More commissioned on 24 February 1945 under Lieutenant Commander R. A. D. Cambridge, DSC, RD, RNR, and joined the 8th Escort Group at Greenock that April after working up at Tobermory. Her wartime record has something of a reputation, not entirely deserved as it turns out, for being thinner than most of her sisters'; dig a little further and a genuinely eventful career emerges.

On 12 April 1945, in company with HMS Loch Glendhu and HMS Loch Achray, she took part in forcing the German submarine U-1024 to the surface in the Irish Sea. Once the crew abandoned ship, Loch More put a boarding party aboard and took the empty submarine under tow, only for the tow line to part in deteriorating weather; U-1024 sank the following day before reaching port.

Operation Pledge, Then On to Malaya

Convoy escort duty in the Irish Sea and South-West Approaches followed, based at Milford Haven, before she sailed for Scapa Flow on 28 May to help escort a batch of surrendered German U-boats into captivity under Operation Pledge, not, whatever some accounts suggest, Operation Deadlight itself, the separate scuttling operation that came later that year. A refit on the Clyde that June was followed by passage to Alexandria in July and on to the East Indies, reaching Colombo on 12 August and Trincomalee a week later to escort convoys for Operation Zipper, the landings in Malaya.

She spent the rest of 1945 on escort duty through the Malayan landings, supporting the recovery of Allied prisoners of war and civilian internees from Singapore under the RAPWI programme, and later served as guardship at Sourabaya in the Dutch East Indies, before a busy 1946 that took her to Bangkok, Saigon, Bombay, Karachi and Rangoon under a new commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander J. Raban-Williams, RN, who took over that February.

RAPWI is worth spelling out, because the initials hide one of the largest relief operations Britain ever mounted and one of the least remembered. It stood for the Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees, and Mountbatten set it up at South East Asia Command early in 1945 to find, get out and treat the people the Japanese had been holding. The first working estimate was a hundred and thirty-five thousand prisoners in the command area. The real figure, once anybody could count, was very much larger.

The problem was that the war ended two years earlier than the planners had allowed for. When Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945 there were forty RAPWI teams available for about a hundred and fifty known camps, spread across Malaya, Sumatra, Java, Borneo and beyond, and no Allied troops on the ground in most of it. Relief could not even start until the 28th, when local Japanese commanders confirmed they would obey the surrender order, and the first teams did not get on to Java until 8 September. British and Indian soldiers did not land there until the 28th.

People were dying in the camps throughout. One team reached a camp of five thousand on Sumatra where twelve were dying every day; a fortnight of food and treatment took that to none. That is the work Loch More was escorting ships for out of Singapore in the autumn of 1945, and it is why the Royal Navy stayed in the East Indies long after the shooting was supposed to have stopped.

Guardship at Sourabaya was not a quiet billet either. By the time she was there the Dutch East Indies had become a war of its own, between an Indonesian republic that had declared independence in August 1945 and a British and Indian force sent to disarm the Japanese and get the internees out, and the fighting in the town that November was severe. What that looked like from a destroyer offshore is described in the article on HMS Cavalier.

Reserve, Recommission and a Mediterranean Interlude

HMS Loch More returned to Britain that June, paid off at Chatham in July and was reduced to Reserve by August, remaining laid up at Sheerness until 1950, when she recommissioned for the 5th Frigate Flotilla, her pennant number changing to F639, and served in the Mediterranean through 1951 and 1952.

A Quiet End at Inverkeithing

She paid off again at Chatham in February 1953, and after a brief recommission following a refit in 1956 returned to Reserve for good. HMS Loch More was finally broken up on 27 August 1963 at Inverkeithing, closing out just under two decades of service.

For a ship whose story once looked like it might be lost to the archives, hers turned out to be a properly eventful one, from an Irish Sea U-boat capture to convoy duty through the Malayan landings and a Mediterranean commission besides, a solid and dependable example of a class that, collectively, made an enormous contribution to Britain's naval strength across the middle decades of the twentieth century.