HMS Starling (U66): The Most Successful U-Boat Killer in Royal Navy History

HMS Starling (U66)

Built at Govan

HMS Starling was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, laid down on 21 October 1941, launched on 14 October 1942 and commissioned on 1 April 1943, a Modified Black Swan-class sloop that would go on to become, by a considerable margin, the most successful anti-submarine warship the Royal Navy ever operated.

Captain Walker Takes Command

Joining Western Approaches Command in April 1943 under the legendary Captain Frederic John Walker, who led the 2nd Support Group from her decks, Starling embarked on a run of anti-submarine successes that has never been matched by any other Royal Navy ship. Over the course of less than two years she was credited with the destruction of fourteen U-boats, an extraordinary tally that made her, and Walker, the single most feared adversary any U-boat captain could encounter in the North Atlantic.

Fourteen Kills in Under Two Years

Starling's confirmed kills read like a roll call of the Battle of the Atlantic's turning point: U-202 on 1 June 1943, U-119 later that month, U-226 and U-842 in November 1943, then U-592, U-734, U-238 and U-264 across January and February 1944, U-653 and U-961 that March, U-473 in May, and U-333, U-736 and U-385 in August 1944. A further credited sinking of U-482 in January 1945 was later withdrawn following postwar reassessment of the evidence, but even without it her record stands unrivalled among Royal Navy escorts of the war.

A Coronation, and a Quiet Retirement

Starling was paid off in September 1945 as the war ended, but returned to service the following year as a navigation training ship attached to HMS Dryad, and in 1953 took her place in the Coronation Fleet Review for Queen Elizabeth II, a fitting public honour for a ship whose wartime record had done so much, quietly and relentlessly, to win the Battle of the Atlantic. She was finally paid off at Portsmouth in 1956, closing out a career that remains, to this day, the benchmark against which every other Royal Navy anti-submarine ship is measured.