HMS Lulworth (Y60): An American Coast Guard Cutter Sinks an Italian Submarine

From the Bering Sea to the Atlantic

HMS Lulworth began her career as USCGC Chelan, a Lake-class cutter laid down by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation at Quincy, Massachusetts, on 14 November 1927 and launched on 19 May 1928, entering United States Coast Guard service that November.

Homeported at Seattle, she spent the 1930s on annual Bering Sea patrols, earning recognition for a 1931 rescue of the crew of the wrecked motor vessel Gladiator near the Aleutian Islands, before relocating to Boston in 1937 for North Atlantic patrol and ice observation duties.

Crossing the Atlantic Under Lend-Lease

HMS Lulworth's story took a dramatic turn under the Lend-Lease Act: transferred to the Royal Navy on 2 May 1941 under the command of Lieutenant Commander Clive Gwinner RN, she sailed to the Clyde for refit before joining Western Approaches Command based at Londonderry that July, her first job escorting convoy OS 4 as far as Bathurst in Gambia, one of the many American vessels that helped bolster British convoy escort strength in the desperate early years of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Rescuing 91 Survivors in Three Months

HMS Lulworth carried out a remarkable string of rescues between August and October 1941, pulling 91 survivors from four separate merchant ships torpedoed by German U-boats: 27 from the Norwegian Segundo on 27 August, sunk by U-557 while escorting convoy OS 4; 37 from the Niceto de Larrinaga on 23 September, sunk the previous day by U-103; five from the St Clair II on 24 September, sunk by U-67; and 22 from the Dutch Bennekom on 31 October, torpedoed by U-96 while escorting convoy OS 10, nine of her crew of 56 going down with the ship.

Lulworth didn't let U-96 go quietly, chasing her down and dropping a full spread of 27 depth charges under a bright full moon; the U-boat escaped unscathed, but decades later one of the men aboard her that night, propaganda officer Lothar-Günther Buchheim, turned the experience into the basis of his 1973 novel Das Boot, meaning a Royal Navy sloop built to patrol the Bering Sea for wrecked fishing boats ended up, quite unwittingly, inspiring one of the most famous submarine films ever made.

A Wolfpack and One More Rescue

The spring of 1942 brought Lulworth's toughest single action yet. On 12 May, escorting convoy SL 109 towards Liverpool, she found herself defending against a concerted attack by three U-boats, U-126, U-161 and U-128, depth charging for hours until she had literally run out of depth charges; her American-built sister ship Mendota, escorting the same convoy, was not so fortunate, torpedoed by U-105 and lost to a magazine explosion. A month later, on 11 June, Lulworth picked up 20 survivors from the torpedoed British tanker Geo H. Jones, sunk by U-455, her fifth rescue of merchant seamen inside a single year of service.

Forcing an Italian Submarine to Scuttle

HMS Lulworth's most significant combat action came on 14 July 1942, while escorting convoy SL 115, when she depth-charged the Italian submarine Pietro Calvi and forced her to the surface, then opened fire on the damaged vessel.

Rather than risk capture, Pietro Calvi's crew scuttled their own boat and abandoned ship as Lulworth closed in and rammed the crippled submarine, sending her to the bottom with 35 of her crew surviving to be picked up, a truly decisive action that removed a significant Italian submarine from the Atlantic battle. The collision left Lulworth herself needing repairs before she could join the Operation Torch landings in North Africa that November, a small price for sinking one of Italy's large ocean-going submarines.

The Calvi action deserves the fuller version, because it was not a tidy scuttling. She had sailed from Bordeaux on 2 July under Capitano di Corvetta Primo Longobardo, one of the more respected submarine commanders in the Italian service, and Lulworth found her on the night of 14 July some five hundred and seventy-five miles west of Tenerife. The depth charges flooded her forward compartments and she came up because she had no choice, and Lulworth then held her in the beam of her guns and swept her casing.

Longobardo ordered the boat abandoned and scuttled and was killed on the casing doing it. Lulworth put a boat away with a boarding party in it, which is a considerable thing to ask of anybody at night alongside a sinking submarine, and they got aboard. Calvi went down anyway, with a British officer, Lieutenant North, still inside her. Three officers and thirty-two Italian ratings were pulled out of the water about four hours later and spent the rest of the war as prisoners.

Accounts differ on whether Lulworth rammed her as well; the Italian record of the action does not mention it. What is not in dispute is that the Royal Navy lost a man getting aboard a boat it had already beaten, which is the sort of detail that tends to fall out of a one-line summary.

The Indian Ocean and Burma

HMS Lulworth was refitted for service in the Indian Ocean in July 1943, escorting convoys between Kilindini, Aden and Durban for the Eastern Fleet, and that September depth-charged the Japanese submarine I-37, which got away: she went on operating for another fifteen months and was finally sunk off Palau in November 1944 by two American destroyer escorts, with all 113 of her crew, before transferring to Trincomalee in 1945 to take part in operations off Burma, including Operation Dracula and Operation Zipper, adding yet another theatre to an already exceptionally varied wartime career for a ship that had begun life patrolling for wrecked fishing vessels in the Bering Sea.

Back to America and a Quiet End

HMS Lulworth was returned to the United States Coast Guard on 12 February 1946, resuming her original name as USCGC Chelan, and was sold for scrap on 23 October 1947, closing out the career of a ship whose journey, from Alaskan rescue work to sinking convoys of enemy submarines in the Atlantic and fighting in Burma, stands as one of the more remarkable individual vessel histories of the entire lend-lease programme.