HMS Undaunted (F53): She Carried Eisenhower Home, Then Ended Life as a Target

Built at Birkenhead

HMS Undaunted was laid down by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead on 8 September 1942, launched on 19 July 1943 and completed on 3 March 1944 as a U-class destroyer, working up at Scapa Flow before her first taste of action against the German battleship Tirpitz in Norway's Altenfjord, escorting a succession of aircraft carriers.

She was the eighth HMS Undaunted. The name came into the Navy in 1794 off a captured French ship, which is how a good many British warship names were acquired in that period, and by 1944 it had collected battle honours for China in 1900, the Dogger Bank in 1915 and the Belgian coast in 1916. Her badge was a white falcon, hooded and belled, on blue. Barking, in what is now east London, adopted her after a Warship Week savings campaign in March 1942.

Operation Tungsten

Her first taste of action has a name and a scale. On 3 April 1944 she was part of the screen for Operation Tungsten, the carrier strike that finally hurt the Tirpitz where she lay in Altenfjord. The force she was covering was very large: the battleship Anson, the carrier Furious, the escort carriers Searcher, Emperor, Pursuer and Fencer, and the cruisers Royalist, Jamaica, Belfast and Sheffield, with about sixteen destroyers including two Canadians and the Polish Piorun. It was one of the largest carrier operations the Royal Navy mounted in European waters, and the strike aircraft put fourteen bomb hits into the battleship inside an hour.

Carrying Eisenhower Home

Undaunted took part in the D-Day landings as part of Force G, the Gold Beach assault force, and earned a notably remarkable footnote in naval history when she carried General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Admiral Ramsay back to Portsmouth after their own transport ran aground.

Convoy G10, and the Afternoon of the Seventh

She went in with convoy G10 on 5 June, escorting it through the swept channel with her sister Ursa. The convoy was the headquarters ship of the second Gold assault group, the frigate Kingsmill, together with four landing ships full of infantry, two motor launches and four rescue craft. On the morning of the 6th she was off the beach firing in support of the landings, and her sisters Ulysses and Ulster were doing the same thing along the same stretch of sand.

The transport that ran aground has a name and it is worth knowing: HMS Apollo, a fast minelayer, chosen because Eisenhower had asked for the fastest ship available and then encouraged her captain to prove it. Undaunted was her escort that day, which is how the destroyer came to be alongside when Apollo put herself on a sandbar off the beachhead and bent both propellers. Eisenhower and Ramsay were transferred at sea to Undaunted and she ran them back to Portsmouth. Apollo's side of an extremely awkward afternoon is told in HMS Apollo (M01).

Ramsay, incidentally, was the more remarkable of the two passengers. He had run the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940 and had then planned and commanded the naval side of the largest amphibious operation in history, and he was dead within seven months, killed in an air crash on his way to a conference.

Eisenhower reportedly signed his flag aboard the ship using an indelible pencil dipped in whisky, an item that now resides at Culzean Castle in Scotland.

The flag and the whisky are a good story and the castle needs explaining. Culzean is a Robert Adam house on a cliff in Ayrshire, given to the National Trust for Scotland in 1945 on one condition: that the top floor be given to General Eisenhower for his lifetime, in thanks for the American part in the war. He used it four times, including once as President. So a flag signed on a destroyer's bridge with a whisky-soaked pencil, on the day after the invasion of France, ended up in a Scottish castle flat belonging to a man who would run the United States, which is a chain of events nobody could have predicted from Undaunted's bridge on 7 June 1944.

Mediterranean and Pacific Service

After Normandy, Undaunted saw extensive Mediterranean service including bombardment operations, before escorting convoys through the Suez Canal to India and finally joining the British Pacific Fleet in the war's closing months, a long and varied wartime record for a single destroyer.

Task Force 63 and the Sumatran Refineries

She joined the British Pacific Fleet on the day it was formed, 22 November 1944, and her first real operation with it was not in the Pacific at all. On 4 January 1945 she was part of the screen for Task Force 63: the carriers Indomitable, Victorious and Indefatigable, and the cruisers Suffolk, Ceylon, Argonaut and Black Prince, on Operation Lentil, a strike against the oil refineries at Pangkalan Brandan in northern Sumatra.

The point of those raids is not usually explained. Japan had gone to war largely to secure oil, and the refineries of Sumatra were the biggest single source of it left inside her perimeter. Wrecking them from carriers on the way east was both a useful blow and a rehearsal: the British fleet had never operated on that scale at that distance, and it needed to find out whether it could before it arrived off Japan and had to do it in company with the Americans.

Rebuilt as a Type 15 Frigate

Between 1953 and 1954, Undaunted was converted into a Type 15 anti-submarine frigate at J. Samuel White's Cowes shipyard, emerging with the new pennant number F53, fitted with Limbo mortars and modern sonar, and going on in 1959 to become the first small naval vessel to trial an anti-submarine helicopter.

The Small Deck That Changed Every Frigate

The one-clause mention of the helicopter trial understates what is probably the most consequential thing this ship ever did. In 1959 a flight deck was built onto her quarterdeck, and the aircraft that flew off it was the Saunders-Roe P.531, a small, light, ugly machine with a skid undercarriage that nobody outside the trade has ever heard of.

The problem it was built to solve was this. By the late 1950s submarines were faster and could dive deeper than the weapons a frigate could throw at them; a Limbo mortar had a range measured in hundreds of yards, and a submarine detected at ten thousand yards could simply leave. What a frigate needed was something that could carry a torpedo to a contact several miles away in a few minutes. A helicopter could do it, but the helicopters of the day were too big to live on anything smaller than a carrier.

So the trials ran on Undaunted between 1959 and 1961, including experiments with suction cups on the aircraft's undercarriage legs to hold it to a deck that was pitching. The P.531 became the Westland Wasp, the Wasp went into the Tribals, the Leanders and the Type 12s, and the small ship helicopter became a permanent feature of every frigate the Royal Navy has built since. A converted 1943 destroyer, tied up at Portland with a bolted-on platform, is where that started.

Sunk as a Target

In November 1974, HMS Undaunted served as the target for a live Exocet missile test fired by HMS Norfolk, and after further weapons trials involving Exocet, Seaslug and Seacat missiles in November 1978, the submarine HMS Swiftsure finally sank the veteran frigate with a torpedo, sending the ship that once carried Eisenhower to the bottom of the Atlantic in the service of testing the weapons of a new generation.

Shot At for Four Years

The Exocet trial of November 1974 was not a demonstration, it was research: Britain was buying the missile and needed to know what it actually did to a warship. Fired from HMS Norfolk, it struck Undaunted on the foredeck between the anchor windlass and the bridge and made a substantial mess of her. She was towed stern-first to Gibraltar so that people could go over what it had done, and photographs of her lying there in 1977 with a hole in her bow are not hard to find.

The findings from that trial, and from the ones that followed with Seaslug and Seacat in 1978, went into a body of knowledge about anti-ship missile damage that the Royal Navy would need very badly eight years later in the South Atlantic. She was finally sunk by a torpedo from the submarine Swiftsure in the Atlantic off Casablanca, at the age of thirty-four, having spent her last four years being deliberately hit by the weapons the fleet was about to face.