HMS Regulus (J327): A Minesweeper Built in Toronto and Lost Clearing the Corfu Channel

Longbranch Becomes Regulus

HMS Regulus was one of the Algerine Class fleet minesweepers, the largest fleet minesweepers the Royal Navy built in the Second World War. They were sturdy ships of about a thousand tons, with a 4 inch gun forward, anti-aircraft guns and the long wire sweeps worked from the quarterdeck, and many of them were built in Canadian yards.

Regulus was ordered in July 1942 from the Toronto Dry Dock Company for the Royal Canadian Navy, as HMCS Longbranch, one of the class fitted with reciprocating steam engines rather than turbines. Before she was finished she was handed over to the Royal Navy, and she was launched at Toronto on 18 September 1943 as Regulus, the fourth British ship of the name.

The first had been a 5th Rate of 1785, and the last a submarine that was lost in the Adriatic in December 1940. Her badge showed a gold lion holding a silver star, the star Regulus being the brightest in the constellation of Leo. She was completed on 30 May 1944.

The photograph shows her alongside at the builder's yard in Canada, fitting out, with J327 painted large on her side, her pale camouflage broken by dark diagonal bands at bow and stern, and a long industrial building with a raised conveyor gantry behind her.

The 8th Minesweeping Flotilla

After her trials she left Toronto in July 1944 with her sister Providence and crossed the Atlantic. She was to be the senior officer's ship of a new flotilla, the 8th Minesweeping Flotilla, made up of Coquette, Thisbe, Mary Rose, Moon, Providence, Seabear and Rowena, all built in Canada except Rowena, which came from the Clyde.

The flotilla worked up its minesweeping from Port Edgar on the Firth of Forth, and in September Regulus and Providence sailed for Gibraltar, where they swept the local waters with Skipjack and Truelove of the 5th Flotilla. In October she went on to Malta, and the flotilla gathered there in November as the last of its ships arrived from home.

By the end of 1944 the war in the Mediterranean had moved north, but the seas behind it were full of mines, laid by both sides over four years, and every harbour the Allies wanted to use had to be cleared. In December the flotilla went to Taranto to begin sweeping the approaches to the Adriatic, and on its first day there it swept thirty-six mines.

Corfu

The Germans had left Greece in the autumn of 1944, but they had sown the waters round Corfu thickly with mines. On 4 January 1945 Regulus sailed from Taranto for Corfu with Thisbe, Rowena and Mary Rose, and with the trawler Fluellen to lay the dan buoys that marked the swept channels.

On 5 January they began clearing the entrance to Corfu harbour, and in three days they dealt with some thirty mines. Bad weather held them up on the 10th, and on the 12th they were out again, sweeping the German minefield in the southern part of the Corfu Channel, off the south-east of the island. By midday some twenty mines had been cut.

Then a mine exploded under Regulus's stern. The blast tore open her after part, wrecked her propellers and shafts and let the sea flood in, and she took a heavy list as her stern settled under water.

Shipwright 3rd Class Robert Smith, who was working in the tiller flat right aft, was killed, and several other men were hurt. The ship was abandoned and the survivors were picked up by the American-built motor minesweepers and motor launches working with the flotilla.

An attempt was made to tow her, but the water kept coming in, and she sank forty-six minutes after the explosion. Robert Smith was twenty-seven, and the only man she lost.

The Corfu Channel kept its danger. Less than two years later, in October 1946, the destroyers Saumarez and Volage were badly damaged by mines further north in the Corfu Channel, with the loss of forty-four lives, in what became known as the Corfu Channel Incident.

The Wreck

Regulus lies where she sank, upright on a sandy bottom between fifty and sixty-three metres down, off the south-east of Corfu. A local fisherman led a Greek team under Vassilis Mentogiannis to her in August 2002, and divers have been back several times since, among them a team led by Antonis Grafas in January 2019.

They found her in one piece apart from the mine damage at her stern, her 4 inch gun still on the forecastle, her twin Oerlikons with their magazines in place, and her minesweeping winch and cutter still rigged on the quarterdeck. Her bridge and upperworks are shrouded in a fishing net, and she has become a home for the marine life of the channel.

The divers who went down in 2019 said they approached her with respect, remembering the young shipwright who died aboard her.