HMS Rinaldo (J225): Eighteen Years of Quiet, Essential Minesweeping

Constructed at Harland and Wolff for a Fleet in Need

HMS Rinaldo was an Algerine-class minesweeper built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, ordered in November 1940, laid down in September 1942, launched in March 1943 and commissioned that June.

She was one of a very large class of minesweepers built to meet the Royal Navy's urgent wartime need for ships capable of clearing safe channels through waters seeded with mines by an enemy determined to make every stretch of coastline as dangerous as possible to approach.

Very large is an understatement. A hundred and ten Algerines were launched between 1942 and 1944, which makes them the largest class of ocean-going minesweeper Britain ever built, and more than half of them came out of Canadian yards at Port Arthur, Toronto and Redfern. Fifty-two were built for the Royal Canadian Navy and another twelve in Canada for the Royal Navy. There is a detail in that programme which says a good deal about 1943: twelve of the Canadian ships never had their minesweeping gear fitted at all, because the Battle of the Atlantic needed escorts more than it needed sweepers, and a ship with a good hull and a decent range is a convoy escort whatever it says on the drawings.

Five of her sisters have accounts here. HMS Brave (J305) was doing very nearly the same work in the same water at the same time, HMS Acute (J106) swept ahead of four separate invasions, HMS Mutine (J227) cleared the Dardanelles so that Churchill and Roosevelt could get to Yalta, HMS Onyx (J221) worked the Arctic route, and HMS Albacore (J101) spent five years sweeping and fifteen more in reserve.

Three Commanders Through the War Years

Rinaldo's wartime service was overseen by three successive commanding officers, beginning with Commander David Lampen from May to August 1943, followed by Commander Colin Henry Corbet-Singleton from August 1943 through to February 1945, and finally Commander Frederick Stanley Walford, who took her through to the middle of 1946.

That succession of commanders across barely three years reflects the routine rotation of wartime naval postings, each one taking responsibility for a ship whose daily work, though rarely making headlines, carried genuine and constant risk.

Working Up at Tobermory, Then South to Malta

Rinaldo commissioned into the 19th Minesweeping Flotilla and worked up at Tobermory, the famously demanding Scottish base where new ships and their crews were drilled into fighting shape, before further training in the Firth of Forth and the Kyle of Lochalsh. That November she escorted convoy KX12 from Milford Haven to Gibraltar, then carried on to Malta that December, exchanging home waters for the Mediterranean for the remainder of the war.

Tobermory has its own reputation and its own article here, in HMS Bern (T294), which describes what Commodore Gilbert Stephenson did to ships that arrived there thinking they were ready. The short version is that he was called the Terror of Tobermory and that he earned it, and that ships which went through his hands sank a great many more submarines than ships which did not.

Clearing a Path for the Landings at Anzio

Rinaldo spent January and February 1944 on minesweeping and escort duties out of Malta before moving up to Naples, and between 21 and 26 January she helped clear the passage for landing craft going ashore at Anzio as part of Operation Shingle, the Allied attempt to outflank the German defences south of Rome, a first taste of the amphibious support work that would define the rest of her war.

Anzio deserves a sentence of honesty. The landing itself went almost unopposed, and then the whole thing stopped: the beachhead was contained within days and the Allies spent four months penned into a strip of coast under observed artillery fire before they broke out. Churchill, who had pushed hardest for it, wrote afterwards that he had hoped they were hurling a wild cat onto the shore, and all they got was a stranded whale. None of which alters what the sweepers did. Whatever happened afterwards on the beach, the landing craft that took the first troops in went through water that Rinaldo and ships like her had been over first.

Forty Mines Off Elba, Then Civitavecchia

May and June found her sweeping the Straits of Bonifacio, clearing forty mines in support of Operation Brassard, the landings on Elba, before a July spell of joint clearance work off Civitavecchia during Operation Lobster, the methodical business of making Italian harbours safe to use following each successive advance up the peninsula.

Sweeping the Way Into Southern France

That August and September, Rinaldo took part in Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, sweeping the assault area itself before moving on to clear the ports of Toulon and Marseilles, two of the largest harbours on the French Mediterranean coast, for the Allied shipping that would soon need to use them.

Two Hundred and Fourteen Mines in the Adriatic

The rest of 1944 took her into the Adriatic, where nine weeks of clearance work between October and December accounted for 214 mines, work that continued into 1945 with a further 77 mines swept as channels were opened to Trieste and Genoa by May, before a final spell in the central Mediterranean saw out the war. It is, by any measure, a rather more eventful record than her class's usual reputation for quiet, unglamorous service would suggest.

What Sweeping Two Hundred Mines Actually Involved

Those numbers deserve unpacking, because two hundred and fourteen mines in nine weeks is not a statistic, it is nine weeks of a particular kind of afternoon repeated over and over. The method was the Oropesa sweep, named after the minesweeper that worked it out in 1919 while clearing the enormous Northern Barrage left over from the First World War. A single wire is streamed astern and out to one side of the ship, held down at depth by a kite and held out to the flank by a float, with cutters set along its length. The wire finds a moored mine's cable, runs down it to a cutter, and severs it. The mine, which is buoyant, comes to the surface, where somebody shoots it.

The part that does not appear in the diagram is that the ship doing the sweeping is steaming through water that has not been swept. That is the whole logical difficulty of the trade: somebody has to go first. Sweepers worked in echelon so that each ship after the leader was in water the one ahead had cleared, which is a considerable comfort unless you happen to be the leader. Add to that the fact that a mine cut loose and bobbing on the surface in a swell is a good deal harder to hit with a Bofors than it sounds, and that the Germans laid delayed-arming mines, ship-counting mines and mines with anti-sweep devices specifically to kill the men doing this, and the figures start to look less like housekeeping.

Rinaldo accounted for something close to three hundred and thirty mines between Elba, the Adriatic and the run up to Trieste and Genoa. Every one of those was laid with the specific intention of tearing the bottom out of a ship, and every one of them was found by a small vessel out of Belfast towing a wire through it on purpose.

A Long Post-War Career

Rinaldo returned to Britain in June 1946 and was paid off at Portsmouth, but her career was far from over. She recommissioned in May 1951 with the 4th Minesweeping Squadron at Harwich, a reminder that the Algerine design remained useful enough to be worth bringing back rather than scrapping outright as Cold War tensions gave minesweeping a fresh sense of urgency.

She took part in the Coronation Review at Spithead in June 1953, a rare moment of ceremony for a ship built for altogether more workmanlike purposes, before finally being paid off in 1955. Placed on the disposal list in 1961, she was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation for scrap and arrived at C.W. Dorkin's yard in Sunderland on 12 August that year, closing out eighteen years of service in a role that asked for patience and steady nerve rather than glory, whatever the record of Anzio, Elba and the south of France might suggest to the contrary.

A Ship Worth Remembering All the Same

HMS Rinaldo's story is, in many ways, the story of the entire Algerine class: essential, unglamorous, and easily overlooked next to the destroyers and battleships that dominate popular memory of the Royal Navy at war.

Ships like her made it possible for everything else, from merchant convoys to amphibious landings, to reach the water they needed to reach, a contribution worth remembering precisely because it so rarely announced itself.