HMS Mendip (L60): E-Boat Alley, Omaha Beach and a Life under Four Flags

A Somerset Hunt from Wallsend

HMS Mendip belonged to the original batch of ten Hunt Class ships placed with the shipbuilders in April 1939, to give the Navy a small, fast escort with a good anti-aircraft armament that could be built quickly in large numbers. Her keel went down at Swan Hunter's Wallsend yard on 10 August 1939, the same day as that of her sister Meynell, launched on 9 April 1940 and commissioned on 12 October 1940.

Her armament, the same as every Type I, was a pair of twin 4 inch high-angle mountings, a four-barrelled pom-pom and depth charges, but no torpedo tubes. No earlier ship had been called Mendip; like every Hunt she was named after a pack of foxhounds, in her case the Mendip in Somerset, and in March 1942 the people of Shepton Mallet adopted her after their Warship Week.

Her career began badly. On 28 October 1940, during her work-up at Scapa Flow, her own depth charges exploded too soon after they were dropped and damaged her stern.

She had to be towed by the tug Champion all the way to Middlesbrough for repair at Smith's Dock, and she was not ready for service again until February 1941.

E-Boat Alley

From March 1941 she was based at Sheerness in the 21st Flotilla, alongside Holderness, Hambledon, Garth and the old V and W destroyers, taking the colliers and coasters from the Thames estuary to the Firth of Forth and back. The sailors called the southern part of the route, past Cromer, Yarmouth and Lowestoft, E-boat Alley.

By day the convoys were bombed, and by night the German E-boats, fast motor torpedo boats from the Dutch ports, came out to lie in wait on the edge of the swept channel and attack the slow merchant ships with torpedoes.

Mendip was in action again and again. She fought off bombers attacking convoy FS 449 at the end of March 1941, and in June she picked up the survivors of the Dutch merchant ship Schieland, sunk by aircraft.

On 3 October she drove off an E-boat attack on convoy FS 615, and in February 1942 she was nearly hit herself when a torpedo passed close by. That September the flotilla's commander, Captain Cecil Parry, shifted his pendant and his staff across from Meynell, making Mendip the leader.

On 9 November, escorting a convoy off Great Yarmouth with the destroyer Windsor, she fought an E-boat attack in which two merchant ships were sunk, and in December, with Meynell, she was with a convoy bound for the Forth when the German boats broke through again, and more merchant ships went down. In January 1943 she and Windsor fought them off once more.

Sicily, Salerno and the Warspite

After a refit at Chatham in the summer of 1943 she went out to the Mediterranean in the escort of a troop convoy for the invasion of Sicily. When the troops landed on 10 July she lay off the beaches at the south-eastern tip of the island, giving anti-aircraft cover to the landing ships.

In September she escorted a convoy of tank landing ships to Salerno with Brecon and Blankney, and on 11 September a near miss from a bomb damaged her port shaft. She went on giving gunfire support at reduced speed until she was sent to Malta for repair, and then to Gibraltar.

In October Captain Parry left her and Lieutenant Peter Davey took command. On 1 November she was one of the escort of the battleship Warspite, crippled by German glider bombs off Salerno, on her slow passage from Malta to Gibraltar on her way home for repair.

Later that month she bombarded German positions at the mouth of the Garigliano river with Ilex and Nubian. Through the winter she escorted convoys along the North African coast, where the U-boats were active again; Holcombe and Tynedale were sunk off Bougie in December.

On 17 March 1944, off Bougie, U-371 attacked her convoy and sank the Dutch troopship Dempo and the American freighter Maiden Creek. Mendip and Catterick hunted the U-boat without success.

Omaha Beach

In May 1944 she came home for the invasion of Normandy and joined the 111th Escort Group with the sloops Pelican and Lapwing and the frigates Narbrough and Rupert. On 5 June the group sailed from the Bristol Channel with convoy EBP 1, four personnel ships carrying American troops of the follow-up division, and brought it through the swept channels to the American beaches.

On 7 June, off Port-en-Bessin at the eastern end of Omaha Beach, one of the transports struck a mine and began to sink. Mendip went alongside and took off about four hundred soldiers, some of them wounded, and landing craft later took them all ashore.

After a refit at Liverpool she escorted the military convoys to Antwerp from the end of November 1944, when the port was at last opened, working with Garth out of the Thames. On 21 February 1945, with Garth and motor gunboats of Coastal Forces, she fought one of the last E-boat attacks on the East Coast convoys, near the Hearty Knoll light vessel.

After the German surrender she took part in Operation Deadlight, towing surrendered U-boats out to sea from the Clyde to be sunk.

Lin Fu

She was paid off in January 1946 and laid up at Harwich. In 1948 she was transferred to the Nationalist Chinese Navy and renamed Lin Fu; this photograph was taken on 4 March of that year.

The Nationalist government was by then losing the civil war, and in May 1949, as the Communist armies crossed the Yangtze, she was handed back to the Royal Navy.

She was recommissioned with the ship's company of Consort, the destroyer that had been badly knocked about going to the help of the frigate Amethyst on the Yangtze that April, and served for a few months with the Far East Fleet while Consort was under repair. According to Mason she was the only Hunt ever to be deployed with the Far East Fleet.

Egypt and Israel

She was paid off again in September 1949 and, on her way home, was sold to Egypt at Alexandria that November. She became the Mohammed Ali el Kebir, and in 1951 she was renamed Ibrahim el Awal. On the night of 30 October 1956, at the start of the Suez Crisis, she was sent to bombard Haifa.

She fired on the port, was engaged by the French destroyer Kersaint, which was guarding the harbour, and turned away, but she was chased down by the Israeli destroyers Eilat and Yaffo and attacked at dawn by Israeli Ouragan jets, which damaged her rudder and her electrical power. Two of her crew were killed, and early on 31 October she surrendered.

She was towed into Haifa, repaired and commissioned into the Israeli Navy as INS Haifa, the very port she had been sent to shell.

She was used for training and was decommissioned in 1968; by one account she ended her days as a target for Israel's new Gabriel missile. Under four flags, British, Chinese, Egyptian and Israeli, she had served for nearly thirty years.

Her British battle honours were North Sea 1941-45, English Channel 1942-43, Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943, Mediterranean 1943 and Normandy 1944.