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 three Egret-class sloops were ever completed, and the class had a mixed war: the name ship, HMS Egret, was lost with 198 of her people on 27 August 1943 to a German glider bomb off Spain, the first of all 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 neither of her two sisters made 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.

Nineteenth of the Name

She was the nineteenth ship on the Navy List to carry the name, and she came into service owning a good deal of inherited property. Battle honours in the Royal Navy attach to the name rather than the hull, so this small sloop of 1939 was entitled to Kentish Knock, Portland, the Gabbard and Scheveningen from the First Dutch War, Quebec in 1759, St Lucia in 1796, Desirade in 1808, China in 1839 and 1840, and Jutland. Her motto, given the career in front of her, was almost too neat: What I have I hold.

The Jutland honour had been won only twenty-three years before she commissioned, by an M-class destroyer of the same name built by Beardmore, which spent the battle with the Thirteenth Destroyer Flotilla screening the battlecruisers and was sold for scrap in 1921. Plenty of the men who joined the sloop in 1939 would have remembered her.

The most famous ship of the name, though, was never in the Royal Navy at all. Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth in 1577 in a galleon called the Pelican, and on 20 August 1578, as he prepared to enter the Strait of Magellan, he renamed her Golden Hind. The gesture flattered Sir Christopher Hatton, one of the expedition's backers, whose crest was a golden hind. It was also an apology, of sorts. Drake had just tried and executed Thomas Doughty, who happened to have been Hatton's private secretary, and a compliment seemed advisable. The most celebrated Pelican in English history, in other words, changed her name to get out of trouble.

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.

The damage was rather more than that phrase suggests. On 22 April 1940 Pelican, then working as an anti-aircraft sloop, was carrying the naval base party for Molde up towards Romsdalsfjord when a Ju 87 found her. She was hit right aft, and the bomb set off her own depth charges. That took out her main electrical supply entirely and left her crippled.

She was towed to Lerwick and then the whole way south to Chatham, the tow taken up two days later by another sloop of the same broad family, HMS Fleetwood (F47). She did not come out of the dockyard again until December. Norway 1940 is a battle honour she earned by being very nearly sunk in the first fortnight of the campaign.

What followed was a spell of misfortune bordering on farce. Two days into the war she had already collided with a British freighter which, by a small joke of the records, was named Starling. In October she ran into floating wreckage. Within days of finally emerging from Chatham in December 1940 she was in collision with the trawler Cape Portland and went back into a London yard. Ten days after coming out of that one, on 19 February 1941, she was damaged by a mine and went straight back in again. She spent the better part of her first two years of war alongside, being mended.

It was not entirely wasted time. The long London repair brought her Type 285 fire control radar, and the Belfast repair the following year probably brought a Type 271 surface warning set with it. The ship that started hunting submarines in 1942 was considerably better equipped than the one that had been bombed off Norway, largely because she had spent so much of the interval in dockyard hands.

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.

There is an odd interlude here that her service record notes and then leaves alone. Pelican spent November and December 1942 under repair at Belfast, and during that time at least two incidents of sabotage were reported aboard her, including damage to her gun sights. She sailed for Gibraltar in January 1943, and after she arrived somebody discovered that her gyro compass had been interfered with as well. The records do not say who was suspected, and nobody appears to have been caught.

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.

It is worth being precise about how she came to be there, because Pelican's part in ONS 5 is a different story from the one usually told. The close escort, Commander Peter Gretton's Group B7, had been fighting the convoy through for days and is remembered through ships like HMS Tay (K232) and HMS Snowflake (K211). Pelican was not one of them. She belonged to the 1st Escort Group, which in March 1943 had been redeployed as a support group: a formation of escorts held free of any particular convoy so that it could be flung at whichever battle was going worst.

That arrangement was one of the handful of innovations that turned the Atlantic in 1943, and ONS 5 is where it was demonstrated. Pelican sailed from St John's in Newfoundland with Commander Godfrey Brewer aboard as senior officer of the group, in company with the cutter Sennen and the frigates Wear and Spey. They reached the battle on the morning of 6 May, picked up a submarine on radar almost at once, and sank U-438 with depth charges. All forty-eight of her crew died. As arrivals go it was emphatic.

It was also the only one of Pelican's four kills for which she took sole credit, and it came within hours of her joining. She left the convoy again on 8 May. Her celebrated part in the most important convoy battle of the war lasted rather less than two days, which is exactly what a support group was for.

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.

The four were not four versions of the same event. U-136 went down west of Madeira in July 1942, U-438 north-east of Newfoundland in May 1943 and U-334 south-west of Iceland in June 1943 while Pelican and Jed were covering convoy ONS 10, and between them those three submarines went down with every man aboard: nobody at all was picked up from any of them.

U-448 was the exception. On 14 April 1944, north-east of the Azores, she was located by direction-finding equipment taking a bearing on her own wireless traffic, and then hunted by aircraft from the escort carrier HMS Biter and by ships of the 7th Escort Group as well as the Canadians. The first attacks achieved nothing. A creeping attack, of the kind Walker's groups had made famous, damaged her badly enough to force her to the surface and her crew abandoned ship. Nine men died and forty-two were pulled out of the water, which after the previous three was something of a novelty.

The kills also came under three different commanding officers. Commander Gerald Gladstone had her for U-136, Commander Godfrey Brewer for both U-438 and U-334, and Commander John Dalison for U-448. Whatever Pelican was doing right survived two complete changes of command, which says rather more about her ship's company than about any one man in the chair.

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.

What the honours board does not show is how she spent the last nine months of the war. In August 1944 Pelican was ordered out to the Eastern Fleet, and on 2 September, entering Aden, she ran aground and opened up her bottom. The damage was taken in hand at Bombay, where in November it was found to be beyond the yard's resources, so she was sent on to Taranto, and from Taranto to Malta. She was still in dockyard hands in Grand Harbour when Japan surrendered. A ship that had sunk four U-boats finished the war being repaired, having run herself ashore on the way to a theatre she never reached.

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.

That patrol had a name and a purpose worth stating plainly. It was the Palestine Patrol, the interception of ships carrying Jewish immigrants towards a mandate whose gates Britain had closed, and it was work a great many of the sailors who did it disliked intensely. By one official count some forty ships were intercepted over the course of it and only four got through. Pelican also took her turns as guardship at Trieste, Alexandria and Aqaba, three postings that between them sketch what was left of British power in the region.

She was finally paid off in 1951, recommissioned in 1954 for a further stint of South Atlantic service, and came home to pay off for the last time at Chatham on 13 February 1957.

Simon's Town, and a Falklands Scare in 1955

The 1954 recommissioning sent her out to Simon's Town in September of that year to join the South Atlantic squadron, and the two and a half years that followed could hardly have been less like the North Atlantic. She worked the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, exercised with the South African Navy and ran the endless programme of port visits that made up most of what a small warship on a distant station actually did, ranging as far north as West Africa and round as far as Mozambique.

She was on the station for two things worth remembering. The first was the beginning of the end of a very old arrangement: the Simonstown Agreement was signed on 30 June 1955, and under it the naval base the Royal Navy had used since the Napoleonic wars would pass to South Africa. The formal transfer took place on 1 April 1957, a few weeks after Pelican had sailed for home.

The second was a scare over the Falkland Islands. Her service record notes, without elaboration, that a threat of Argentine interference with the islands required special precautions during 1955. That was also the year Britain took the argument to the International Court of Justice, filing on 4 May over sovereignty in the Falkland Islands Dependencies; Argentina declined to accept the court's jurisdiction and the case was struck off the list the following March. Nobody involved in 1955 appears to have imagined how the question would eventually be settled, or that it would take another twenty-seven years to come to a head.

She went into reserve at Chatham, was placed on the disposal list under the 1957 defence review, and arrived in tow at Thomas Ward's breaking yard at Preston on 29 November 1958, twenty years and two months 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.