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 on 25 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.

The Fifth Redpole, and the First One Is the Best Story

She was the fifth ship of the name, and the name goes back to 1808. A redpole, or redpoll, is a small streaky finch with a crimson forehead, and her badge showed one sitting on a branch, which is possibly the least martial coat of arms in the Royal Navy. The first Redpole was a Cherokee-class brig-sloop launched in July 1808, and she is the reason a 1943 sloop had Basque Roads 1809 painted on her battle honours board a hundred and thirty-four years later.

At Basque Roads in April 1809 the Royal Navy sent fireships and explosion vessels into a crowded anchorage of French ships of the line in the dark, and Redpole and the brig Lyra had the job of marking the channel and guiding them in. Doing that means sitting still, showing a light, in front of everything that is about to happen. She was later in among the French ships stranded in the Charente, and she had already taken the sixteen-gun privateer Grand Rodeur that December and gone to the Walcheren expedition in the autumn.

What became of her is worse than anything the 1943 ship went through. After the war she was converted for the Falmouth packet service, carrying mail and passengers, and in August 1828 she was homeward bound from Rio de Janeiro when she met an eighteen-gun privateer brig out of Buenos Aires called Congress off Cape Frio. They fought for about an hour and a quarter. Redpole went down with every man aboard her. Two of the three ships between her and the 1943 sloop are easily traced: a Redbreast-class gunboat built at Pembroke Dockyard in 1889, who spent her career on the China Station and was sold in 1906, and a destroyer of 1910 sold off in 1921.

Paid For by the Rural District of Kettering

In March 1942, two months before her keel was laid, Redpole was adopted by the civil community of the Rural District of Kettering in Northamptonshire, which is about as far from the sea as it is possible to get in England. The mechanism was Warship Week, one of the more inspired pieces of wartime administration. Between October 1941 and March 1942 the National War Savings Committee, with the Admiralty behind it, gave every town, borough and rural district in the country a fundraising target scaled to its size, and a ship to aim at. A village raised enough for a motor launch. A city went for a battleship.

The money was not a donation. It was lent, through government bonds and savings certificates, and it came back with interest, which is why so many people found they could afford it. When a district hit its target it adopted the ship and her crew, and plaques were exchanged: the ship's crest to the council, the town's arms to the ship. For the rest of the war Kettering had a sloop, and the sloop had a few thousand people in the East Midlands who followed what she did. It is difficult to think of a better piece of morale engineering, and it raised a great deal of money.

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.

The sequence was the standard one and it is worth setting down, because it is what the Navy did with every new escort. Trials in June 1943, then Tobermory in July for work-up under the school there, then Scapa Flow to practise with ships of the Home Fleet, then Greenock in August to join the group properly. In September she was detached to Gibraltar and stayed on the Mediterranean and Atlantic run to the end of the year. Another sloop of the same class had joined the same group at Greenock a few weeks before her, and her account explains what a sloop was actually for: HMS Crane (U23) sank two U-boats and very nearly a third.

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.

What that meant in practice is more interesting than the phrase suggests. She spent May 1944 rehearsing: a final rehearsal with the ships of Force G on the 3rd, Exercise Fabius off Hayling Island on the 4th, and a defence exercise off Brighton on the 18th. Then she went round to the Solent and was given her actual job, which was to escort Assault Convoy G5 to the Gold beach head, in company with the trawler Bombardier. On 5 June she took the convoy down the swept channel.

On the morning of the 6th, having delivered it to the lowering position off Gold, she was detached and sent straight back to Portsmouth. There she joined HMS Stork (L81) and the escort destroyer HMS Eglinton (L87) in the 116th Escort Group, whose job was the follow-up convoys. That is the whole of her D-Day: she saw the beach for about as long as it takes to hand something over, then turned round and went back for the next lot. Everything that landed in Normandy after the first morning came in convoys like the ones she was now guarding, and it went on for weeks.

Burma: A Battleship, a Sloop and a Legend

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.

She was in respectable company for it. The bombardment force for the Ramree landings was built around the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth, with the cruiser HMS Phoebe (43), the destroyers Pathfinder, Raider and HMS Rapid (F138), and the sloops Flamingo and the Royal Indian Navy's Kistna. The landings went in on 21 January 1945, and Queen Elizabeth had to pull out to sea and shoot from below the horizon, because at close range she could not depress her 15-inch guns far enough to hit anything. An aircraft from the escort carrier Ameer spotted for her.

Ramree is best known now for something that probably did not happen. The story is that hundreds of Japanese soldiers driven into the mangrove swamps were eaten alive by saltwater crocodiles in a single night, and it turns up in books, documentaries and at least one record book as the worst crocodile attack in history. It rests almost entirely on one paragraph in a 1962 book of wildlife sketches by a Canadian officer named Bruce Wright, who was on the island but was not there and later said he had heard it from patrol boat crews.

It does not survive being looked at. No British or Japanese official report mentions anything of the kind. The historian Frank McLynn concluded that it offends every single canon of historical verifiability, and asked the obvious ecological question: if thousands of crocodiles were involved, what had they been living on before, and what did they live on afterwards. The herpetologist Steven Platt put the likely toll at ten to fifteen men, mostly scavenging on the dead and on stragglers, and found that about half of the thousand or so Japanese in the swamps got out alive. Local accounts put most of the deaths down to thirst, disease and exposure, which is a great deal grimmer and far less quotable.

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.

The end of that deployment has a certain flatness to it. She arrived at Sydney on 17 February 1945 needing a refit before she could be any use, was sent to Auckland for it, and did not come out until the summer. She reached the forward operational base at Manus in the Admiralty Islands in August 1945, which is to say she arrived at the staging point for the invasion of Japan in the week that made the invasion unnecessary. She went to Hong Kong instead, on repatriation work, bringing prisoners of war and internees out. She came home in 1946 and paid off into reserve at Harwich.

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.

The refit for that was more thorough than it sounds. Her guns came out, a tripod mast went in, and the space was turned over to instructing junior officers in practical navigation, which in 1949 meant a compass, a log, a chronometer, a sextant, an echo sounder, whatever radar there was, a chart and a pencil, and an absolute obligation to know where several hundred tons of ship was at all times. When she was withdrawn in 1958 the job eventually passed to a converted destroyer, and what it involved is set out in the article on HMS Carron, who took over the role in 1960.

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.

The Vadne collision deserves more than a sentence, because a man died. She was a Gosport ferry, part of a service that had been running across the harbour since the 1880s, and on the evening of 12 July 1957 she was holed by Redpole with forty people aboard. She was salved and eventually repaired. One of her passengers, a man of sixty-five, died in hospital of head injuries. It was the first collision, and the first fatal accident, in the seventy-four-year history of the Portsmouth Steam Launch and Towing Company.

It reached the Commons twelve days later. On 24 July 1957 Dr Reginald Bennett, the Member for Gosport and Fareham, asked the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation what would be done to establish the cause and who was at fault. Harold Watkinson replied that a preliminary inquiry was being held under the Merchant Shipping Act 1894, and added, drily, that it would not settle the question of liability, which was a matter for the courts. Nobody in Portsmouth needed telling that a warship had run down a ferry in the harbour. They had watched it.

She was withdrawn from her training role in 1958 and sold for scrap, reaching the breakers in November 1960.

The last stage is worth spelling out for anyone who wonders how a warship is actually disposed of. She was withdrawn from training in 1958 and lay in reserve for two years. On 11 November 1960 she was sold to BISCO, the British Iron and Steel Corporation, which bought obsolete warships centrally on the government's behalf and then allocated the hulls to the yards that would break them. BISCO passed her to J. A. White, and she arrived under tow at St Davids on 20 November 1960, nine days after she stopped being a ship and became a quantity of steel.

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.

There has been one Redpole since. She was a Bird-class patrol vessel, pennant P259, and she spent much of the 1980s in the Northern Ireland Squadron watching the Ulster coast for arms coming in by sea, alongside her sisters Kingfisher and Cygnet. That job, and what it was like, is described in the article on HMS Kingfisher (P260). She had started life as the Royal Air Force long-range recovery craft Sea Otter and was a Royal Navy ship only from 1985 to 1994. In 2000 she was sold across the Atlantic into private hands in the United States and renamed Badtz Maru, after a cartoon penguin. That makes her, so far, the only one of the six to end up neither sunk nor scrapped, which after what happened to the first one off Cape Frio is not the worst way for a name to finish.