HMS Ready (J223): The Minesweeper That Found a Captain's Son Adrift Off Kent

A Minesweeper Built for Ordinary Work

HMS Ready was an Algerine-class minesweeper, built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, ordered in November 1940, laid down in April 1942, launched in January 1943 and commissioned on 21 May 1943 under her first captain, Commander Arthur Valentine Walker. She displaced 850 tons standard, ran to 225 feet in length, and could make 16.5 knots with a complement of 85 officers and ratings.

She was designed for exactly the kind of steady, dangerous, unglamorous work minesweepers existed for, clearing safe channels through waters seeded with explosives by an enemy determined to make every stretch of coastal sea as costly as possible to use.

A Front-Row Seat at the Battle of the North Cape

Her first real test came far from Kent, on the Arctic convoy run. In December 1943 she escorted the eastbound convoys JW55A and JW55B and the homebound RA55A and RA55B as part of Operation FV, service that put her in company with the very ships hunting down the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst, sunk at the Battle of the North Cape on 26 December 1943. She was back on the same run in January and February 1944, escorting JW56A, JW56B and RA56 through a passage made especially dangerous by U-boats firing acoustic torpedoes at the escorts themselves rather than the merchant ships they were guarding.

The Scharnhorst action has its own account here, from the deck of one of the cruisers that finished her: HMS Jamaica (44). Ready was not in the gun line. She was doing what minesweepers do, which is being somewhere else, keeping a channel open so that the ships that were could get through it.

A Strange Sight Off North Foreland

On 29 December 1944, while investigating what appeared to be a misplaced marker buoy off North Foreland on the Kent coast, Ready's crew found something rather stranger than they can have expected: a small, grey-painted German submarine, slowly sinking, waves lapping against its steel hull. It was one of three of these craft that had set out together from Hellevoetsluis in the Netherlands two days earlier, evidently faring no better than its companions.

It was a Biber, one of Germany's one-man midget submarines, a class of vessel built in some desperation as the war turned against Germany, powered by a converted Opel car engine that, as it turned out, was every bit as dangerous to its own pilot as to any enemy.

The Pilot Was a Captain's Son

The submarine's sole crewman, found dead at the controls, was Joachim Langsdorff, son of Captain Hans Langsdorff, the German officer who had commanded the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee before her scuttling off Montevideo in 1939 and who had taken his own life shortly afterwards.

That connection deserves to be drawn out, because the coincidence is almost unbearable. On 13 December 1939, three British cruisers found the Admiral Graf Spee off the River Plate and fought her until she ran for Montevideo: HMS Exeter (68), who was very nearly destroyed doing it, HMS Ajax (22) and HMS Achilles (C70). Hans Langsdorff scuttled his ship on 17 December rather than fight his way out and lose his crew, and shot himself three days later in a Buenos Aires hotel room, lying on the ship's battle ensign.

Five years and a week after the father died, a British minesweeper off the Kent coast opened the hatch of a sinking one-man submarine and found the son inside it. There is no moral to be drawn from that. It is simply what happened.

The younger Langsdorff had set out from Hellevoetsluis in the Netherlands on 27 December, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning after his boat's engine exhaust failed to seal properly, a fume build-up that the notoriously flawed Biber design could produce to lethal levels in under an hour of operation. It was a cruel design flaw made crueller still by the fact that the early symptoms felt much like seasickness, meaning a pilot could be quietly poisoned without ever realising what was actually happening to him.

Adding a truly mysterious note to the whole episode, a bottle was later found hidden under the pilot's seat containing a document written in English, its exact significance never fully explained, fuelling speculation ever since about the true circumstances of his death.

A Prize Towed Home

Ready took the submarine under tow, hauling her some fifty miles back to Dover Harbour, where the Biber subsequently sank again near the harbour entrance before being raised by the Royal Navy.

The captured vessel, designated Biber 90, was then subjected to extensive trials and technical examination, giving British naval intelligence a valuable, close-up look at the strengths and considerable weaknesses of Germany's midget submarine programme.

A Museum Piece Today

Biber 90's afterlife has been considerably quieter than her capture. Her hull was transferred to the Imperial War Museum in London by April 1946, with her periscope assembly following that September, and she remains on public display there today, a tangible, if slightly haunting, relic of a particularly strange encounter off the Kent coast in the last winter of the war.

It is worth knowing what the thing he died in was actually for, because the arithmetic is brutal. Three hundred and twenty-four Bibers were built, more than half of them in the three months of September, October and November 1944, and they were driven by a thirty-two horsepower Opel petrol engine that the design office adopted knowing perfectly well what carbon monoxide does in an enclosed space. They were sent out from Rotterdam and its forward bases in ones and twos and dozens.

On one operation eighteen sailed and one came back: four were sunk by British motor torpedo boats, one hit a mine, and twelve simply never appeared again. Between January and April 1945 the Bibers and their cousins the Molch boats flew a hundred and two sorties, lost seventy of their own and sank seven small vessels between them. In the whole life of the programme, three hundred and twenty-four boats sank exactly one Allied merchant ship, the Alan A Dale, on 23 December 1944, four days before Joachim Langsdorff put to sea.

Ready's Own Career Continues

Ready herself survived the war intact and was decommissioned in 1948, briefly reclassified as M223 under a fleet-wide 1949 renumbering while she sat awaiting disposal, though her working life was not yet over. She was sold to the Belgian Navy on 4 July 1951, recommissioning as J.E. van Haverbeke with the pennant M902, and served there for almost a decade before being decommissioned in June 1960 and sold for scrap to a Bruges metal dealer the following March.

A Small Ship's Unusual Footnote

HMS Ready spent most of her working life doing the routine, essential business of minesweeping, and there is no reason to think her crew expected anything more eventful than a misidentified buoy on the day in question.

Instead, they found themselves at the centre of one of the more poignant and mysterious small episodes of the entire naval war, one that connected, however briefly, to one of the most famous names in German naval history.