HMS Stork (L81): Captain Walker's First Command, and Four U-Boats Sunk

Built as a Survey Ship

HMS Stork was laid down on 19 June 1935 by William Denny and Brothers of Dumbarton, launched on 21 April 1936 and commissioned that September, initially serving as an unarmed survey ship in Chinese and Malayan waters until the approach of war brought her back to Devonport for a proper refit and weapon installation.

Rescue at Narvik

Completing trials in November 1939, Stork settled into North Sea convoy escort duties before taking part in the Norwegian Campaign of April 1940, including rescue operations off Narvik during the chaotic fighting that followed the German invasion.

Captain Walker Takes Command

In September 1941, Commander Frederic John Walker took command of Stork and the 36th Escort Group, two sloops and six corvettes largely named, rather sweetly, after garden flowers, the posting that would launch his legendary career as the Royal Navy's most successful U-boat hunter, a career he would later continue aboard HMS Starling. It was a remarkable second act: an anti-submarine specialist between the wars, Walker had been passed over for promotion and was heading for early retirement by the time war broke out, only finally landing his first wartime command in 1941, well over a year after hostilities began.

Escorting convoys to and from Gibraltar, Walker developed and refined the aggressive group tactics that would eventually make his name synonymous with anti-submarine warfare.

The Specialism Nobody Wanted

Walker being passed over is the most instructive thing in his early record, and the reason is not personal. Between the wars the Royal Navy convinced itself that the submarine problem had been solved. Asdic, the echo-ranging set developed at the end of the First World War, worked well in the calm, shallow, carefully prepared conditions of a peacetime exercise, and the conclusion drawn from that was that a submarine could now be found whenever it was looked for. If the problem was solved there was no need to think hard about it, and an officer who chose to specialise in anti-submarine work was choosing a technical backwater with no path to a battleship command. Walker chose it anyway, was a specialist by the early 1930s, and by 1937 was being told he would not be promoted further.

What the war then demonstrated, within weeks, was that asdic did not work at all against a U-boat on the surface at night, which is precisely how the U-boats were attacking. The Navy therefore found itself in 1941 needing exactly the kind of officer it had spent fifteen years declining to promote, and Walker got Stork and the 36th Escort Group at the age of forty-five with, by his own reckoning, a career already over. Almost everything he is remembered for was done in the following three years.

What Operation Buttercup Actually Was

Buttercup was Walker's own invention and it inverted everything escorts had been taught. The standing doctrine when a convoy was attacked at night was to stay close, protect the merchant ships and hunt cautiously. Walker's order was the opposite: the moment a ship was torpedoed, every escort in the screen turned outward, away from the convoy, without waiting to be told, and fired star shell, the parachute flares the Navy called snowflakes, away from the convoy for a solid twenty minutes.

The geometry is the clever part. A U-boat attacking on the surface at night sits low and dark; light coming from behind the escorts is useless, because it lights the escorts. Firing the star shell outward puts the light beyond the U-boat, so that anything on the surface between the flare and the escort is silhouetted against the glare, and anything nearer the light is lit directly. Twenty minutes of that turns a black sea into a lit stage, and a submarine on the surface has two choices, both of them bad: stay up and be shot at, or dive and be tracked by asdic in the one condition where asdic did work, with several ships co-ordinating by radio. That is what happened to U-574, and the article on HMS Convolvulus (K45) describes it from a corvette in the same group.

The Battle for Convoy HG 76

Stork's defining moment came during the fiercely contested Convoy HG 76, which sailed from Gibraltar on 14 December 1941 escorting 32 merchant ships towards Liverpool, shadowed by the German wolfpack Seeräuber. Over the days that followed, five U-boats were destroyed in the wider battle, though the true scale of the victory was not confirmed to the British until well after the war, four of them credited to ships of Walker's own escort force.

On 17 December, U-131 was spotted on the surface by a Martlet fighter from the escort carrier HMS Audacity and forced under by combined gunfire from several of the group's own ships, Stork among them. The following day, HMS Blankney and HMS Stanley depth-charged U-434 to the surface and finished her off with gunfire.

The night of 19 December was the battle's most violent. HMS Stanley, an American-built destroyer serving with the Royal Navy under Lend-Lease, was torpedoed and sunk by U-574 with heavy loss of life among her crew. Barely fifteen minutes later, Stork hunted the same U-boat down using Walker's own newly devised Operation Buttercup, starshells turning night into day and forcing U-574 back under the surface into a barrage of depth charges, before Stork herself rammed and sank her, taking sixteen German survivors prisoner. That same night, HMS Deptford and HMS Samphire sank U-567, killing the U-boat ace Engelbert Endrass, one of Germany's most decorated submarine commanders.

The ramming deserves its detail, because it was not a straight run. Once U-574 was forced up, Walker went for her, and her captain did the only thing available to a small, agile boat being charged by a bigger ship: he turned. Stork turned after her, and the two of them went round in a series of tightening concentric circles, each trying to get inside the other, for long enough that Stork's own gunners could not depress far enough to bear. Walker eventually got the angle, rode over her and dropped depth charges set shallow as he went. It cost him: the impact damaged Stork's bow and tore away the dome that housed and protected her asdic, so the ship that had just demonstrated the new tactic went on with the convoy half blind. Sixteen Germans were taken out of the water. Another of the group's corvettes that night, HMS Samphire (K128), shared in the kill that finished Engelbert Endrass.

Audacity herself, a captured German blockade runner rebuilt as an escort carrier at Blyth, had been indispensable throughout, her handful of Martlet fighters shooting down the long-range Focke-Wulf Condor aircraft that otherwise shadowed convoys and radioed their positions ahead to the wolfpacks; Sub-Lieutenant Eric 'Winkle' Brown, who went on to become Britain's most celebrated postwar test pilot, personally destroyed two of them. Audacity herself was lost on 21 December, torpedoed by U-751 with 73 of her ship's company, a stark reminder that even a lopsided victory came at a genuine cost.

Even so, HG 76 stands as a landmark: only two of the convoy's 32 merchant ships were lost, a remarkably low toll for the period, and the battle vindicated Walker's aggressive tactics so thoroughly that the Admiralty adopted them fleet-wide, while the value Audacity had demonstrated helped drive the mass production of escort carriers for the rest of the war.

Two More Kills, and a Torpedo Strike

Stork went on to sink U-252, jointly with HMS Vetch, during Convoy OG 82 in April 1942, still under Walker's command, and later sank U-634 during Convoy SL 135 in August 1943, by which time Walker himself had long since moved on to greater fame elsewhere, bringing her confirmed tally to four U-boats across two different captains.

In between, while supporting Operation Torch with the 20th Escort Group, she was herself torpedoed by U-77 in November 1942, requiring repairs at Gibraltar and Falmouth before she could return to service, a reminder that even the most successful hunters were never far from becoming the hunted.

From D-Day to the Fishery Protection Squadron

Stork rejoined the 37th Escort Group in June 1943 and took part in Operation Neptune, the naval component of the D-Day landings, in 1944.

Planned for service with the British Pacific Fleet in 1945, her repairs were not complete before the war ended, and she instead spent 1946 to 1948 with the Fishery Protection Squadron before finally being decommissioned and broken up in 1958, closing out the career of one of the ships that helped forge the tactics which would go on to win the Battle of the Atlantic.

Walker himself left Stork in August 1942 for the newly formed Second Support Group, a dedicated hunter-killer force built around HMS Starling that refined his tactics into something close to a science, groups of sloops working together like an artillery battery to box in a submerged U-boat rather than simply depth-charging it and hoping. He went on to sink far more U-boats than any other Allied commander of the war, a tally made all the more driven after his own son Timothy was killed serving aboard a British submarine in August 1943. Walker never lived to see the war's end: worn down by years at sea with barely a proper rest between patrols, he collapsed and died from overwork and exhaustion on 9 July 1944, aged just 48, having done as much as any single officer to win the Battle of the Atlantic, a legacy that began, in earnest, aboard this ship.