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 that May.

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 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 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.

The younger Langsdorff had set out from Hellevoetsluis in the Netherlands on 27 December, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning from his own boat's engine, a fume build-up that the notoriously flawed Biber design could produce to lethal levels in under an hour of operation.

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.

Ready's Own Career Continues

Ready herself survived the war intact and was decommissioned in 1948, though her working life was not yet over. She was sold to Belgium in 1951, recommissioning into the Belgian Navy that July as 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.