HMS Pelican (F86): The Sloop That Made a Habit of Sinking U-boats

A Sloop for the Fisheries, Built for Something Bigger

HMS Pelican was one of the Royal Navy's Egret-class sloops, laid down at J. I. Thornycroft's yard at Woolston, Hampshire, on 7 September 1937, launched a year later, and commissioned on 2 March 1939, just months before the outbreak of the Second World War made her design's real purpose suddenly, urgently obvious. The Egret class had been conceived primarily as convoy escorts and fishery protection vessels, well armed for their size and, crucially, fitted with the sonar and depth-charge capability needed to make life difficult for submarines. Pelican began her career doing exactly the sort of quiet fishery protection work her class was partly built for, before the coming of war put those particular skills to a far more demanding test.

Only eight Egret-class sloops were ever completed, and the class had a mixed war: the name ship, HMS Egret, was lost with heavy casualties in August 1943 to a German glider bomb off Spain, one of the first Allied warships sunk by a guided weapon. Pelican's own survival through six years of some of the most dangerous convoy work of the war, while several of her sisters did not make it home, is itself a small measure of how much skill, discipline and plain luck went into keeping an anti-submarine sloop alive long enough to rack up a record like hers.

A Rough Start off Norway

Pelican's war began badly. During the Norwegian Campaign of April 1940, a chaotic, costly episode for the Royal Navy as it tried and largely failed to prevent the German occupation of Norway, she sustained damage that earned her the first of what would become an impressive tally of battle honours. It was an inauspicious beginning for a ship that would go on to become one of the more effective, if under-celebrated, submarine hunters of the entire Battle of the Atlantic.

Four U-boats, One Sloop

What followed over the next two years was a run of anti-submarine successes that few individual escorts of any navy could match. On 11 July 1942, while escorting convoy OS 33 west of Madeira, Pelican combined with the Free French destroyer Leopard and the frigate HMS Spey to sink U-136. That October she escorted the invasion forces for Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa, before returning to the mid-Atlantic convoy routes that were, by 1943, the decisive battleground of the war at sea.

It was there that Pelican truly made her name. On 6 May 1943, during the brutal, closely fought defence of convoy ONS 5, she depth-charged and sank U-438 north-east of Newfoundland under the command of Commander G. N. Brewer. The battle around ONS 5 is remembered by naval historians as one of the true turning points of the Battle of the Atlantic: a slow eastbound convoy attacked by more than thirty U-boats over several days, in which the escort groups nonetheless came out on top, sinking several submarines for the loss of a dozen merchantmen, and effectively demonstrating that the Allies now had the measure of the U-boat packs. Pelican's kill was one of the actions that made that verdict possible.

Just over five weeks later, on 14 June 1943, she was in action again south-west of Iceland, working alongside the frigate HMS Jed to destroy U-334. Then, in April 1944, with D-Day only weeks away, she teamed up with the Canadian frigate HMCS Swansea to sink U-448 north-east of the Azores. Four confirmed U-boat kills across less than two years is a formidable record for any single escort, and it placed Pelican among the most consistently successful anti-submarine ships the Royal Navy fielded during the entire war.

From the Atlantic to the Beaches of Normandy

Pelican's war did not end with the last of her U-boat kills. That June, she took part in Operation Neptune, the naval component of the Normandy landings, helping to screen the invasion fleet from the submarine and E-boat attacks the Allies had every reason to fear. By the time Germany surrendered, she had earned battle honours for Norway 1940, the Atlantic 1942 to 1944, North Africa 1942, Normandy 1944 and the English Channel 1944, a spread of honours that traces almost the entire arc of the naval war in the West, from its most dispiriting early defeats to its climactic final victories.

A Long Peacetime Coda

Unlike many of her wartime contemporaries, Pelican did not go straight into reserve once the fighting stopped. She remained in commission, reclassified along the way with the frigate pennant F86, and served with the Mediterranean Fleet's 2nd Frigate Flotilla out of Malta, including a spell on the sort of immigration patrol work that would have felt very familiar to a ship that had started her career on fishery protection. She was finally paid off in 1951, recommissioned in 1954 for a further stint of South Atlantic service, and decommissioned for the last time in 1956, before being scrapped in 1958, nearly two decades after she first slid down the slipway at Woolston.

An Under-Sung Hunter

HMS Pelican never had the fame of the Royal Navy's most celebrated escort groups, yet her record of four confirmed U-boat kills stands comparison with almost any ship in the fleet. She is a useful reminder that the Battle of the Atlantic was won not by a handful of famous names but by dozens of workmanlike sloops and frigates like Pelican, doing the same grinding, dangerous convoy work voyage after voyage until, gradually and unglamorously, they turned the tide.