HMS Totland (Y88): The Coast Guard Cutter That Sank a U-Boat Off West Africa

One of Ten Cutters Sent to Britain

HMS Totland began life as USCGC Cayuga, a Lake-class cutter built for the United States Coast Guard, launched in October 1931 and commissioned the following March.

Following President Roosevelt's authorisation on 5 April 1941 to transfer ten 250-foot cutters to Britain under Lend-Lease, Cayuga was handed over and commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS Totland, a Banff-class sloop, on 12 May 1941, sailing to England as part of Convoy HX 128.

Why Britain Wanted Coast Guard Cutters

The transfer is worth explaining, because on the face of it these were poor warships. A Lake-class cutter was built in 1931 for policing fisheries, chasing rum-runners and rescuing people, she made about sixteen knots on a good day, and she was ten years old and unarmed when Roosevelt signed her away. The Royal Navy of 1941 was desperate for escorts, but not so desperate that it took anything offered without a reason.

The reason was range. A cutter designed to patrol the North Atlantic weather stations and go out to disabled ships hundreds of miles offshore has enormous fuel capacity for her size, a hull built for heavy weather, and, unusually for a warship of that era, decent accommodation, because the Coast Guard expected her to be at sea for weeks with the same people. That is precisely the profile the long southern convoy routes needed. The runs the article lists, OS and SL, are the Britain to Freetown convoys, seven or eight thousand miles round trip through the tropics, and they were exactly what a corvette could not do and a cutter could. All ten were renamed after British coastal places and became the Banff class, and they spent the war on the routes nothing else could cover.

A Punishing Schedule of Convoys

After refitting on the Thames, Totland joined the 42nd Escort Group and took on a properly punishing schedule of convoy protection duties, escorting a long list of Atlantic and West African convoys including OS 4, SL 89, OS 12, SL 95, OS 17, SL 100, OS 22, SL 106, OS 28, SL 112, OS 40 and SL 124, the kind of relentless, repetitive work that formed the backbone of the entire Battle of the Atlantic.

Escorting the North African Landings

Totland took part in Operation Torch, escorting the invasion convoys bound for North Africa, including KMF 3, MKF 3, KMF 5, MKF 5, KMF 7 and MKF 7, substantial and dangerous work supporting one of the largest amphibious operations the Allies had yet attempted.

Sinking U-522

Totland's defining moment came on 23 February 1943, while protecting the tanker convoys UC 1 and CU 1, when she sank the German submarine U-522, a remarkably significant success given how vital these tanker convoys were to keeping Allied forces fuelled across multiple theatres of war.

The Convoy That Was Only Attacked Once

The UC convoys were a specific answer to a specific problem. By 1943 the Allies were moving enormous quantities of oil, and a tanker is worth several ordinary freighters to an enemy, so the Admiralty and the United States Navy set up a dedicated cycle: tankers in ballast out from Britain to the Caribbean, and full ones back. UC 1 was the first of them, seventeen empty tankers and fifteen fast freighters out of Liverpool on 15 February 1943, escorted by four modern American destroyers and the British 42nd Escort Group, which is where Totland comes in.

It is the only UC convoy the U-boats ever successfully attacked, and on 23 February they made it count: the tanker Athelprincess torpedoed and sunk, Esso Baton Rouge sunk, three more tankers damaged and one of those finished off later. In among that, Totland got a sonar contact at two thousand yards and ran in. Her report describes what followed with the flatness these accounts always have: a depth charge pattern, and then a distinct bubbling and foaming disturbance within the pattern area, slightly left of centre. No wreckage came up. Nothing was certain at the time.

It was U-522, and all fifty-one men aboard her died in that patch of foam. The uncertainty is the thing worth noticing. An escort captain in 1943 almost never knew whether he had killed anybody; the assessment was made months or years later in London by men reading intercepts and comparing timings, and a great many attacks recorded as probable turned out to be nothing while others recorded as nothing turned out to be kills. HMS Launceston Castle (F397) is the same story with the opposite ending.

West Africa and the Indian Ocean

Totland went on to escort vessels between Freetown and Lagos via Sekondi-Takoradi until July 1944, before transferring to the Kilindini Escort Force operating out of East Africa. Following an extensive refit that October, she was retired from Royal Navy service in May 1945 and returned to United States Coast Guard custody the following year, closing out a truly productive wartime career under a borrowed flag.

Kilindini deserves a word too, because the name records a humiliation. In April 1942 a Japanese carrier force came into the Indian Ocean, sank two British cruisers and a carrier in a week and made Ceylon untenable as a fleet base; the Eastern Fleet withdrew to Kilindini, the harbour at Mombasa in Kenya, some two and a half thousand miles further west, and worked from there for the better part of two years. Ships like Totland ran the East African convoy routes out of it. It was, in every sense, the far edge of the war, and it is where a 1931 American revenue cutter finished her service under a British flag.