HMS Loch Shin (K421): From Sinking U-boats to Shelling Korea as HMNZS Taupo

Into the Western Approaches

HMS Loch Shin was ordered from Swan Hunter on the Tyne, laid down on 6 September 1943, launched on 23 February 1944 and commissioned that October under Lieutenant Commander A. L. Turner, RNR, a Loch-class frigate named after the loch in Sutherland, and was allocated for service in the Western Approaches, joining the ongoing Royal Navy effort to keep the vital convoy routes into Britain clear of German submarines during the war's final, still-dangerous months.

Sinking U-1014

On 4 February 1945, working alongside HMS Loch Scavaig, HMS Papua and HMS Nyasaland east of Malin Head, HMS Loch Shin took part in sinking the German submarine U-1014 with depth charges, all 48 of her crew lost, a particularly significant success that added her to the substantial list of Loch-class frigates that accounted for confirmed U-boat kills in the war's closing stages.

From March 1945 she escorted the Russian convoys, some of the most demanding and dangerous convoy work of the entire war, taking convoy JW 66 out to Murmansk that April and laying mines off the Kola Inlet under Operation Trammel along the way. Unlike most of her sister ships, which only helped escort Germany's surrendered U-boat fleet into captivity that May, Loch Shin went on to take an active hand in destroying it: between November 1945 and February 1946, as part of the real Operation Deadlight, she sank U-2328, after an earlier tow line parted, followed by U-1010, U-901 and U-975, a genuinely rare distinction for a Loch-class frigate to have helped collect the surrendered fleet and then helped send part of it to the bottom.

It is worth knowing the scale of what she was helping to finish. A hundred and fifty-six U-boats surrendered, and a hundred and sixteen of them were condemned: thirty lying at Lisahally in Northern Ireland and eighty-six at Loch Ryan in Scotland, all to be taken out into deep water off the north Irish coast and destroyed. The plan was tidy. Charges in the pressure hulls, a few kept back for aircraft and gunnery practice, all done by Christmas.

The Atlantic in December had other ideas. Fifty-six of the boats never reached the disposal area at all; they filled and went down under tow, which is what happened to U-2328 when Loch Shin's line parted. Most of those that did arrive were shot rather than scuttled, because getting a demolition party aboard a wallowing hull in a winter gale was not worth anybody's life. The whole business ran on into February, and the last boat, U-3514, went down at four minutes past ten in the morning on the 12th. The full story is in the article on HMS Hardy (R08).

Loch Shin accounted for four of them, U-2328, U-1010, U-901 and U-975. Six months earlier she had been depth-charging one of their sisters off Malin Head with forty-eight men inside it. There is something bleak about the second job that the first one did not have: no one aboard, no one shooting back, just a wet grey morning and a queue.

Becoming HMNZS Taupo

HMS Loch Shin's sale to New Zealand was arranged in early 1948 for £228,350, including the cost of her refit, and after that refit at Chatham Dockyard she was renamed Taupo on 3 September 1948 by Lady Burrough, wife of the Commander-in-Chief, The Nore, taking her new name from the largest lake in New Zealand, in keeping with the practice of giving transferred Loch-class frigates New Zealand lake names to replace their original Scottish loch names. Commander L. P. Bourke, DSC*, RNZN, took command that August and would return to lead her again, as Senior Officer of the 11th Frigate Flotilla, in January 1951.

Shelling Korea

HMNZS Taupo left New Zealand on 29 August 1951 for Korean War operations under United Nations command, relieving her sister ship HMNZS Rotoiti at Sasebo that October and settling into a steady routine of shore bombardment. Her sharpest moment came on 20 February 1952, when she joined the American destroyers USS Endicott and USS Sheldon in defending Yang-Do Island against an attempted North Korean landing, sinking ten sampans carrying troops ashore and taking a little damage of her own near the waterline from retaliatory shore fire, adding a second war and a second hemisphere to a career that had already included U-boat kills in the Atlantic and convoy escort to Russia.

The Yang-Do action deserves unpacking. The islands off the North Korean coast were held by United Nations forces and South Korean partisans, and they mattered out of all proportion to their size: they gave radar cover, they gave somewhere to put agents ashore and take them off, and they sat astride the coastal supply route. The North Koreans wanted them back, and on 20 February 1952 they tried to take Yang-Do by landing troops from sampans in the dark.

Taupo and the two American destroyers caught them on the water. Ten of the sampans were sunk with the soldiers still in them, and the shore batteries answered, putting a hit into Taupo near the waterline. It is the kind of engagement that does not get a name and does not appear in the histories, and it is what the Korean war at sea actually consisted of for three years: small ships, small islands, and a coast that shot back.

She returned to Auckland on 21 October 1952, paid off that December, and spent her final decade as an engineering training ship before departing Auckland for Hong Kong on 18 October 1961 to be broken up, closing out the career of a frigate whose service, spanning two navies and two entirely different wars fought on opposite sides of the world, embodied the remarkable versatility and longevity of the Loch class as a whole.