HMS Redpole (U69): From Normandy Support to a Collision With Danish Royalty

A Sloop Built for Convoy Work

HMS Redpole was a Modified Black Swan-class sloop, built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun, laid down on 18 May 1942, launched in February 1943 and commissioned that June, joining a class purpose-built for the unglamorous, essential work of keeping convoys safe from submarine attack across the Atlantic, Mediterranean and beyond. She displaced 1,350 tons, ran to 283 feet, could make 20 knots, and carried a crew of 192 (plus, by tradition, a ship's cat), armed with six 4-inch and a dozen 20mm anti-aircraft guns.

Under her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Ian Montague Carss, she joined the 7th Escort Group at Greenock, escorting convoys through some of the most heavily contested waters of the war.

Escorting Convoys From Freetown to Gibraltar

Redpole's convoy work took her widely across the war's Atlantic and Mediterranean theatres, escorting combined convoy OS 53 and KMS 23 to Freetown and the Mediterranean in August 1943, shepherding convoy MKS 25G from Gibraltar to the United Kingdom the following month, and covering the large troop convoy MKF 29 from Port Said in March 1944.

Though no U-boat sinkings are credited to her, that lack of a dramatic kill reflects the true nature of most escort work: convoys that arrived safely because a U-boat never got the chance to attack were themselves a form of success, simply one that leaves no wreck to point to afterwards.

Supporting the Normandy Landings

In May and June 1944, under new commanding officer Lieutenant Commander Edward John Lee, Redpole joined Support Force G during the assault phase of the Normandy landings, part of the vast array of escort and support vessels that protected the invasion fleet from submarine and E-boat attack during the most consequential amphibious operation of the war.

By January 1945 her war had taken her to the opposite side of the globe, providing fire support for the assault on Ramree Island in Burma as part of Task Force 64, a striking illustration of how far a single small sloop could be expected to serve within a matter of months.

Pacific Service and a Quiet Return Home

After repairs at Auckland between February and July 1945, Redpole deployed with the British Pacific Fleet before returning to the United Kingdom in 1946, her active wartime service at an end.

Three years later she was reactivated in a very different role, becoming a navigation training vessel attached to HMS Dryad at Portsmouth, her armament stripped out and replaced with training facilities for a new generation of officers learning their trade in peacetime.

A Training Ship With a Habit of Collisions

Redpole's later training career produced two collisions memorable enough to outlast almost anything from her wartime service. On 7 July 1956 she collided with the Danish royal yacht Dannebrog, breaking the yacht's bowsprit in an encounter that gave a ship built for hunting submarines a rather more comic kind of notoriety around Portsmouth harbour. The second collision, on 12 July 1957 with the Gosport Ferry Vadne, was no laughing matter: the ferry was holed and one of her forty passengers was killed, the first fatal accident in the seventy-four-year history of the Portsmouth Steam Launch and Towing Company.

She was withdrawn from her training role in 1958 and sold for scrap, broken up in November 1960.

A Career of Quiet Competence

HMS Redpole's war was one of consistent, unspectacular convoy protection across three oceans, work that carried real risk without ever producing the kind of single dramatic action that makes for an easy headline. It is perhaps fitting, if slightly comic, that the encounter most remembered from her career was not a wartime engagement at all, but a peacetime bump with a Danish king's yacht in home waters.