HMS Ulysses (F17): Arctic Convoys, D-Day Gunfire, and a Front Row Seat to a Nuclear Test

Built by Cammell Laird

HMS Ulysses was laid down by Cammell Laird on 14 March 1942, launched on 22 April 1943 and commissioned on 23 December 1943 as a U-class destroyer, joining the 25th Destroyer Flotilla and the Home Fleet, which included a spell supporting the demanding Arctic convoy route to northern Russia.

A Ram, a Burning Stake and Three Old Honours

Her badge is the best joke in the flotilla and almost nobody gets it. On a field of white and blue waves, a black ram's head, and behind it an upright stake on fire. That is the whole of the ninth book of the Odyssey in one small device: Odysseus trapped in the Cyclops's cave, blinding Polyphemus with a sharpened olive stake heated in the fire, and then getting his men out under the bellies of the giant's rams. A destroyer named for the cleverest man in Greek literature was given a badge commemorating the moment he thought his way out of a cave.

The name had been in the Navy List since 1779 and had collected three battle honours before this ship existed: Martinique in 1794, Egypt in 1801 and Martinique again in 1809. There is a less cheerful piece of continuity too. The previous HMS Ulysses was a destroyer of 1917, and she was lost in October 1918 after a collision. This one would have a collision of her own forty years later, and come off rather better.

Leigh, in Lancashire, adopted her after a Warship Week savings campaign in March 1942, which is how a cotton and coal town of some forty thousand people ended up with a fleet destroyer and a set of plaques in the town hall.

What the Arctic Spell Actually Was

A spell supporting the Arctic route covers one specific and rather remarkable passage. In April 1944 Ulysses went to the Kola Inlet with the cruiser Diadem, the escort carriers Activity and Fencer, and sixteen destroyers including Keppel, Matchless, Milne, Musketeer and Verulam. They arrived on 23 April, and on the 28th they turned round and took convoy RA 59 home.

RA 59 was forty-three merchant ships and twenty-three escorts, and it was carrying about two thousand three hundred passengers. Most of them were merchant seamen going home from ships that had been sunk or laid up in Russia. One of them was Admiral Levchenko of the Soviet navy, travelling in Fencer with his staff on his way to Britain to take over a battleship: the Royal Sovereign, handed to the Soviet Union as their share of the surrendered Italian fleet and renamed Archangelsk. A parallel case, an American cruiser going the other way for the same reason, is in HMS Tracker (D24).

The Donner group of U-boats found them on 30 April, fifty miles south of Bear Island, and at eight in the evening the American Liberty ship William S Thayer was torpedoed. She had a hundred and sixty-four Russian and American personnel aboard. HMS Walker got forty-nine out of the water, HMS Whitehall six, and the rescue ship Robert Eden thirty-four. That was the only ship lost from the convoy, which by the standards of the Arctic in 1943 would have counted as a miracle and by the standards of 1944 counted as a bad night.

Gunfire Support at Normandy

Ulysses played her part in the Normandy invasion in June 1944, providing gunfire support to the landings, before being refitted later that year for deployment to the Far East, departing for service with the British Pacific Fleet in March 1945 as the war against Japan entered its final, brutal phase.

Convoy G9, and the Morning of the Sixth

Playing her part in the Normandy invasion is accurate and thin. Ulysses was in Force G, the force for Gold Beach, along with her sisters and with HMS Jervis and the Polish ORP Krakowiak. She was at Spithead on 3 June. The operation was put back twenty-four hours on the 4th because of the weather. On the 5th she sailed as one of three escorts for convoy G9, and it is worth knowing what was in that convoy: the headquarters ship Bulolo, which was the flagship of the entire Gold Beach force, the frigate Nith as headquarters ship of the first assault group, four landing ships full of infantry, two landing craft infantry and half a dozen small craft, threading down a channel that had been swept a few hours earlier.

If a mine or a torpedo had got Bulolo in that channel, the command of one of the five invasion beaches would have gone with her. Nothing did. On the morning of the 6th Ulysses took station off Gold and spent it firing at the shore, and from the 7th she was out on patrol in the Eastern Task Force area hunting for the E-boats and midget submarines the Germans were sending against the anchorage. Her sister HMS Ulster was doing the same job a few cables away.

Off Japan With the Fuel Running Out

The Pacific gets one clause and deserves more. She sailed from Sydney on 28 June 1945 with Grenville, Undine, Urania, Ursa, Urchin, Undaunted and four Australian destroyers, as the screen for Task Force 37: the battleship King George V, the carriers Formidable, Victorious and Implacable, and six cruisers. Her pennant number had been changed to D24 so American signalmen could read her, and the British fleet had adopted American signalling and manoeuvring procedures wholesale, which is a considerable thing for a navy to swallow.

From 17 July she was screening the fleet while British and American aircraft attacked Tokyo and Yokohama. The British share of those strikes was deliberately restricted by the United States Navy to secondary targets, a piece of politics that rankled at the time and rankles still in the accounts written afterwards.

The real problem was less glamorous. The British Pacific Fleet had crossed an ocean and could just about fight, but it could barely feed itself with oil: the tanker force was too small and too slow, and by 23 July the destroyers were topping up their tanks from the battleships to stay in the operational area at all. That, more than anything the Japanese did, is what limited what the Royal Navy could contribute off Japan in the summer of 1945.

Reserve and Recommission

Returning to Britain in 1946, Ulysses entered reserve at Devonport, before a brief recommission in December 1951 for Plymouth's local flotilla, only to return to reserve again in 1953, part of the frequent in-and-out rhythm of postwar naval life as the Admiralty balanced budgets against operational need.

Rebuilt as a Type 15 Frigate

Between 1954 and 1955, Ulysses underwent conversion to a Type 15 anti-submarine frigate at Devonport Dockyard, emerging with the new pennant number F17 and recommissioning on 18 October 1955 to join the 6th Frigate Squadron for operations across the Mediterranean and Home Fleet, including the 1956 Suez Operation.

Witness to a Nuclear Test

In 1958, Ulysses witnessed British nuclear weapons tests during Operation Grapple off Christmas Island, a striking assignment for a ship originally built to fight U-boats and kamikazes, and that same year she was involved in a collision with HMS Undine near Ushant on 27 October.

The Ushant collision is usually recorded as something that happened to both ships, and it is worth being specific about the order of events. HMS Undine lost power. A warship without power in a formation at night off Ushant is a large stationary object that nobody has time to avoid, and she went into Ulysses. The damage was to Ulysses's bow, and Devonport put it right. Undine was her own sister, converted at the same time to the same design, and both were in the 6th Frigate Squadron: the class had a habit of running into things, and forty years earlier the first HMS Ulysses had been sunk by exactly this kind of accident.

Scrapped at Plymouth

Decommissioned in 1963, HMS Ulysses spent several years providing accommodation space during the construction of HMS Danae before finally being scrapped at Plymouth in 1970, bringing to a close a career that had spanned Arctic convoys, the Normandy beaches, the Suez Crisis and the dawn of Britain's nuclear age.

The last job is a curious one and worth explaining. When a new frigate is being built, the men who will eventually take her over have to live somewhere near the yard, and dockyards have never had enough beds. So an old hull with intact accommodation gets moored alongside and filled with the new ship's company, and Ulysses spent her final years doing that for HMS Danae (F47). A destroyer that had fired on Gold Beach and screened the fleet off Tokyo finished as a boarding house for the crew of a ship that had not been launched yet.