HMS Start Bay: Built for the Pacific, Sent to Trieste Instead

Designed for a War That Ended Before She Was Ready

HMS Start Bay was one of the Bay class frigates, a design developed specifically to meet the anticipated demands of the Pacific War, where the threat of kamikaze attacks made heavy anti-aircraft armament a priority British planners were determined to address.

She began life on the order books not as Start Bay at all but as Loch Arklet, one of the anti-submarine Loch class frigates ordered from Harland and Wolff's Belfast yard. As the Admiralty's attention swung towards the Pacific and the kamikaze threat, her order was revised part way through construction to the more heavily armed Bay class design and she was renamed to match, one of several Loch hulls given the same wartime makeover; her near sister Tremadoc Bay began life in exactly the same fashion as the ex Loch Achility.

The wholesale conversion of Loch hulls into Bay-class ships is one of the clearest surviving records of the Admiralty changing its mind about which war it was fighting, and it is set out in the article on her sister HMS St Austell Bay (K634), who was ordered as Loch Lydoch, and again in HMS St Brides Bay (F600), who was ordered as Loch Achilty. Twenty-six hulls were treated this way. Between them the three of them cover most of what the class actually ended up doing, which was nothing whatever to do with kamikazes.

Even her laid down date is disputed among serious naval historians rather than a simple case of one shaky source getting it wrong: naval-history.net and uboat.net independently agree on 31 August 1944, while naval-encyclopedia.com favours 8 February 1944, a genuine and unresolved discrepancy worth flagging honestly rather than silently picking one figure over the other.

Whichever date is correct, what is not in dispute is that she was not ready in time. HMS Start Bay was commissioned only after VJ Day in August 1945, meaning she never fired a shot in the war that had shaped her entire design and construction, arriving, in effect, to a fight that had already finished.

A Postwar Career in the Mediterranean

With the Pacific War over before she could take part in it, HMS Start Bay's actual service settled into rather different, though still significant, postwar duties.

Under her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Richard Cecil Dumas, she left Portsmouth in November 1945 as part of the 66th Escort Division, bound for Malta and a spell of patrol duty in the western Mediterranean that took in visits to Gibraltar and Catania, a rather gentler introduction to service than her Pacific war design had ever envisaged.

She served as a guardship at Trieste, the contested Adriatic port city whose disputed status between Italy and Yugoslavia made it a genuine flashpoint of early Cold War tension, and she undertook patrol duties off Palestine in 1946, at a time when the Royal Navy was heavily engaged in intercepting vessels attempting to bring Jewish immigrants into British Mandate Palestine.

Why a Frigate Sat at Trieste

Trieste is worth explaining, because in 1945 and 1946 it was as close as Europe came to a second war starting immediately after the first one finished. It is an Italian-speaking port at the head of the Adriatic with a Slovene-speaking hinterland, and at the end of the war both Italy and Yugoslavia claimed it absolutely. On 1 May 1945 Tito's Fourth Army marched in. New Zealand troops of the Eighth Army arrived the following day. For forty days two allied armies occupied the same city while their governments shouted at one another, and Churchill and Truman were both, in writing, contemplating what would happen if it came to shooting.

It did not, quite. The Yugoslavs pulled back behind a demarcation line in June 1945, the territory was split into Zone A under Anglo-American administration and Zone B under Yugoslav, and the 1947 peace treaty invented an entity called the Free Territory of Trieste that nobody could make work and that was not finally carved up between Italy and Yugoslavia until 1954. In the middle of that, a British guardship in the harbour was not decoration. She was a visible statement that the Royal Navy was present, that the port was open and that the arrangement, whatever anybody thought of it, was being enforced. HMS Enard Bay (K435) did the same duty, and it is striking how many of these ships spent 1946 sitting in somebody else's political crisis.

That September she joined the newly formed 5th Frigate Flotilla out of Malta, continuing her patrols in the eastern Mediterranean until she paid off in November 1946, having spent barely a year in full commission before slipping into the long limbo of the Reserve Fleet.

Twelve Years in Reserve

A ship that spends one year in commission and twelve laid up sounds like a failure, and it was not. The Reserve Fleet after 1945 was an enormous institution, and keeping it was a deliberate decision. Britain finished the war with far more warships than it could man, no money to run them and no idea what the next twenty years would require, so hundreds of hulls were laid up in long lines at Portsmouth, Devonport, Chatham, Harwich, Barrow and the Gareloch, dehumidified, greased, sealed and maintained by small care and maintenance parties. Whole reaches of water were full of grey ships with nobody aboard.

The point of them was time. A modern warship takes years to build; a mothballed one can, in theory, be brought forward in months. The Korean War in 1950 proved it worked, when ships came out of reserve and went east, and the Suez operation in 1956 did it again. The cost was that the ships aged anyway, quietly, at their moorings, while the technology moved past them, so that a great many of them were eventually towed from a buoy straight to a breaker's yard without ever having been reactivated at all. Start Bay is one of those. Her one outing was the Coronation Review of 1953, an occasion covered from the other side of the anchorage in HMS St Kitts, and then she went back to the buoy and stayed there until 1958.

Even in reserve she did not entirely stand still. In May 1948, along with her surviving sisters, she was reclassified from pennant number K604 to F604 as the Navy updated its wartime flag superior lettering to the peacetime scheme, the very number seen on the print above.

A Short Life and a Quiet End

HMS Start Bay's active career, like those of several of her Bay class sisters, proved relatively short. Her one notable return to the public eye came in 1953, when she was brought forward from reserve to take part in the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead for the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II, touring ports along the south coast and in Wales before slipping quietly back into reserve at Portsmouth. She was placed on the Disposal List in 1958 and sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation for breaking up by J. Cashmore, arriving in tow at Newport, Glamorgan, on 22 July 1958, little more than a decade after her delayed commissioning. Her story is ultimately less one of combat glory than of a ship built at speed for a war that outran her, finding a genuine if less celebrated purpose in the tense and complicated business of postwar peacekeeping, and one last ceremonial outing, instead.