HMS Ulster (F83): From a Kamikaze Near-Miss at Okinawa to Training Hulk

Built for the 7th Emergency Flotilla

HMS Ulster was ordered on 12 June 1941 as part of the 7th Emergency Flotilla of U-class destroyers, completing construction and entering service in the English Channel in June 1943, just in time to join the naval build-up ahead of the Normandy landings the following year.

She was the third HMS Ulster and she carried the province on her badge: barry wavy of six white and blue, with the red dexter hand of Ulster laid across it. County Down paid for her, or notionally did, through a Warship Week savings campaign in June 1942, and plaques were exchanged in the usual way and hung in the council offices and in the ship. She commissioned on 25 June 1943 into the 25th Destroyer Flotilla, and by the middle of August she was escorting HMS Onslow with King George VI aboard, on his way to visit the Home Fleet at Scapa.

Operation Tunnel, Which Went Badly

Her first real fighting was in the Channel and it is not a chapter the Royal Navy is proud of. The Tunnel operations were sweeps sent out at night to intercept German coastal convoys running along the Brittany coast, and they were, by common consent, poorly conceived and worse executed: forces thrown together from whatever was available, no worked-up drills, no clear plan for what to do when contact was made, and a persistent tendency for British ships to shoot at one another in the dark.

On 3 October 1943 Ulster went in with HMS Grenville and three Hunt-class destroyers against a convoy defended by German destroyers. Ulster took two shell hits. Grenville was hit, set on fire, and then fired on by her own side. Three weeks later, on 23 October, the same series of operations cost the cruiser HMS Charybdis and most of her ship's company.

Mediterranean and Adriatic Service

By the end of 1943, Ulster was operating in the Mediterranean and Adriatic on anti-submarine duties, part of the steady grind of escort and patrol work that characterised so much of a wartime destroyer's service, far removed from the more famous set-piece battles that tend to dominate the history books.

Escorting the Prime Minister, and Nearly Capsizing

On 12 November 1943 she sailed from Plymouth with Rocket and Tumult as escort for the battlecruiser Renown. Renown had Winston Churchill aboard, on passage to Malta and then to the conferences at Cairo and Tehran where the shape of the rest of the war was settled. Six days later she was escorting the cruiser London out of Malta to Alexandria to collect the British Chiefs of Staff and bring them home from the same conference. For a fortnight in November 1943 this destroyer was carrying the entire senior direction of the British war effort about the Mediterranean, in relays.

Then she went to the Adriatic and nearly lost herself. On 23 November, supporting a military operation, she was hit by return fire from the shore and holed in the forward structure above the waterline. Above the waterline sounds survivable and at speed it is not: she was moving fast enough that water was being forced in through the hole faster than it could be pumped out, and it flooded every forward compartment and put an eight-degree heel on her before anybody could slow her down. It is one of the least appreciated ways a destroyer can be lost, and she was fortunate.

On 29 March 1944, north of Palermo, she was one of the destroyers in the eighteen-hour hunt that ended with U-223 forced to the surface and sunk, an action that also cost the flotilla leader Laforey and most of her people. That hunt is told in full in HMS Tumult (F121).

Off Gold Beach on the Sixth of June

Joining the build-up understates it considerably. Ulster was in Force G of the Eastern Task Force, with her sisters Ursa, Undaunted, Ulysses, Udine, Urchin and Urania, and with Grenville and HMS Jervis. On 3 June she escorted the bombarding cruisers Belfast and Diadem down from the Clyde as convoy G14. The operation was put back twenty-four hours by the weather on the 4th. She sailed from the Solent on the 5th, and on the morning of the 6th she was lying off Gold Beach putting fire onto the shore in support of the assault.

Three days later she ran out of water under her. Firing in support close inshore means working in shoal ground with your attention on the fall of shot rather than the echo sounder, and on 9 June she grounded. When Portsmouth looked at her the following day, the port propeller was simply gone and the starboard one was damaged. She went to a commercial yard in Cardiff to be put right, which is a slightly undignified end to a D-Day that had gone well.

A Kamikaze Near-Miss at Okinawa

In early 1945, Ulster transferred to the British Pacific Fleet, and during Operation Iceberg, the invasion of Okinawa, she suffered severe damage from a kamikaze near-miss combined with a 500-pound bomb, an attack that killed two of her sailors and seriously injured a third.

The Australian corvette HMAS Kalgoorlie helped bring the stricken destroyer to Leyte for temporary repairs, before she made the long voyage home to England in October 1945 for full repairs at Chatham Dockyard.

One Bomb, at Five to Eight in the Morning

What happened on 1 April 1945 is worth getting exactly right, because it is the kind of damage that does not look dramatic and very nearly finishes a ship. She was screening the fleet off the Sakishima islands, part of Task Group 57.8, when at 0755 a Japanese Zeke put a five-hundred-pound bomb into the water close alongside. It did not hit her. It did not need to.

The pressure wave came through the side and collapsed the bulkhead between the after boiler room and the engine room, and in an instant she had no propulsion at all. Two of her people were killed and one was seriously hurt. Her guns still worked and she still floated, which in the middle of the Okinawa campaign, with kamikazes arriving all day, is not much comfort to a ship that cannot move.

She was taken in tow to Leyte by the cruiser HMS Gambia, a tow of the better part of a thousand miles through water full of aircraft. At Leyte the American navy patched her hull in dry dock and her machinery was rebuilt by working parties from HMS Tyne, the destroyer depot ship, which is precisely what a depot ship exists for. She got herself to Sydney afterwards on one shaft, and could still make twenty-four knots doing it.

Rebuilt as a Type 15 Frigate

Between 1953 and 1956, Ulster underwent a complete conversion into a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate, emerging with the new pennant number F83 and joining the 8th Frigate Squadron in 1957, a transformation that gave the wartime destroyer an entirely new lease of operational life for the Cold War era.

Cruising From Bermuda

Based in Bermuda, Ulster spent time cruising the West Indies and North America, before recommissioning in 1965 with the 2nd Frigate Squadron and finally withdrawing from operational service in 1967, having given the Royal Navy a long and varied career across two very different eras of naval warfare.

A Quiet Retirement at HMS Raleigh

HMS Ulster spent her final years as a navigational training ship and training hulk at HMS Raleigh from 1974 to 1980, before being broken up by Thos. W. Ward in 1980, a fitting enough end for a ship that had already survived one of the most dangerous naval campaigns of the Second World War.

The end of her is quieter than it sounds. A training hulk at HMS Raleigh is not a ship any more: no engines, no crew, alongside for good, used to teach new entrants how to find their way about a warship in the dark. Thousands of Royal Navy ratings learned their trade aboard her between 1974 and 1980 without ever once going to sea in her, which is a curious sort of afterlife for a destroyer that was off Gold Beach on D-Day and off Okinawa a year later. She had by then been afloat for thirty-seven years.