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

Constructed 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. Walker had persuaded his own commander-in-chief to let him form the Group in the first place, a roving hunting force of sloops answerable to no convoy and free to go looking for trouble rather than wait for it to arrive, and it was here that he perfected the "creeping attack": two or three ships stealing up on a submerged U-boat in line ahead, one holding sonar contact while the others crept in from behind to drop their depth charges blind, denying the U-boat's own captain any final warning to dodge.

Starling never hunted alone, and the group matters as much as the ship. Walker sailed with six sloops: Starling as his flagship, with Cygnet, Kite, Wild Goose, Woodpecker and Wren, all of them Black Swans or modified Black Swans, all of them slow by warship standards and all of them designed to do exactly one thing extremely well. The creeping attack only works with several ships in company, because it requires one to sit off holding the contact and talking while the others come in silently from a direction the submarine cannot hear them from. A single ship, however good, cannot do it. Several of the sloops that served in the group or alongside it are here: HMS Kite (U87) accounted for five on her own, HMS Woodcock (U90) worked the Biscay approaches, and HMS Convolvulus (K45) was the corvette Walker relied on before any of these ships existed.

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. Four of those January and February kills came during the single most celebrated patrol of Walker's whole career, a three-week sweep of the North Atlantic between 26 January and 25 February 1944 in which the 2nd Support Group accounted for six U-boats in all, a feat the wartime press struggled to describe as anything other than extraordinary.

Fifteen Hours in February

The famous patrol is worth taking apart, because the pace of it is difficult to credit. The group sailed at the end of January 1944 and by the evening of 8 February was in contact off the Irish approaches. In a single fifteen-hour period spanning that night and the following day it destroyed three U-boats. Three. A convoy escort might go a whole war without a confirmed kill; here was one group accounting for three between one evening and the next afternoon, and then going on to sink another on the 11th and another on the 19th, six in all before it turned for home.

There was a price, and it is rarely mentioned. On 20 February the sloop Woodpecker was torpedoed. She did not sink at once; she was taken in tow for home and stayed afloat for seven more days before going down within reach of the English coast, and every one of her crew was taken off. That is the only reason the patrol is remembered as an unqualified triumph rather than as a costly one, and it was close.

The homecoming on 25 February 1944 was a set piece and it was meant to be. The First Lord of the Admiralty, A V Alexander, came to Liverpool to meet the ships on the quay in person, the press photographers were waiting, and the Royal Navy, which had spent four years being extremely careful about what it said publicly regarding the Atlantic, let this one run. It had good reason. Six U-boats in a month, by one group, at a moment when the invasion of France was four months away and the whole enterprise depended on the Atlantic staying open, was not merely a good week's work. It was the proof that the corner had been turned.

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.

The Death of Her Captain

Walker's own health finally gave out on 7 July 1944, when he suffered a cerebral thrombosis brought on, by every account, by sheer exhaustion; he died two days later at the Royal Naval Hospital, Seaforth, aged just 48. Command of Starling passed the very next day to Commander Norman Winder Duck, and it was under new captains that she claimed her final three U-boats that August, a quiet testament to a fighting method and a crew that had outlasted the man who built them.

Walker was given a funeral at Liverpool Cathedral on 11 July 1944, attended by around a thousand mourners, his coffin carried by gun carriage through the city to the Pier Head before being taken out into Liverpool Bay aboard HMS Hesperus and committed to the sea he had spent the war defending. Admiral Sir Max Horton, Commander-in-Chief Western Approaches, delivered his epitaph in person: "Victory has been won, and should be won, by such as he."

Two footnotes to the funeral are worth having. The destroyer that carried his coffin out into Liverpool Bay was HMS Hesperus (H57), herself one of the great U-boat killers of the war and a ship that had twice rammed one, which is about as fitting an escort as could have been arranged. And Liverpool has not let go of him: there is a statue of Walker at the Pier Head looking out down the Mersey, and the underground headquarters at Derby House from which the Battle of the Atlantic was run is now a museum, so the man, the command and the war he fought are all still in the same square mile of the city.

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.

One of her own contemporaries is still afloat, which is worth knowing about. HMS Whimbrel (U29), a modified Black Swan of exactly Starling's type, was sold to Egypt after the war and is the last surviving Royal Navy warship to have fought in the Battle of the Atlantic. There has been a campaign for years to bring her back to Liverpool as a memorial to Walker and to the Atlantic escorts, Starling among them, and it has not happened yet. Starling herself was paid off in 1956 and broken up, and there is no ship of hers left to stand for what she did, which is the usual fate and in her case a particularly unfair one. HMS Magpie (U82) went the same way.