HMS Undine (R42): Windermere's Destroyer, Gold Beach, the Gothic Line and 128,928 Miles to Japan

A Thornycroft Destroyer for Windermere

HMS Undine was one of the eight U Class destroyers of the 7th War Emergency Flotilla, ordered from John I. Thornycroft at Woolston, on the Itchen at Southampton, in the summer of 1941. Her keel was laid on 18 March 1942, she was launched on 1 June 1943 and she was completed on 23 December 1943.

She was the sixth Undine in the Navy; the fifth had been a submarine lost in the Heligoland Bight in January 1940. Her badge showed a mermaid diving into the waves, the undine of folklore, and in March 1942 she had been adopted by Windermere, then in Westmorland, during its Warship Week.

The U Class were part of the long run of War Emergency destroyers, simple ships with a main armament of four single 4.7 inch guns, built in numbers to replace the heavy losses of 1940 and 1941. As Captain (D) of the 25th Flotilla sailed in Grenville, Undine was a private ship, and her captain was Commander Terence Robinson, who took her through the whole war.

The photograph was taken in December 1943, the month she was completed. She lies almost stopped on flat water in a fresh Admiralty disruptive camouflage, with R42 below her bridge and her 4.7 inch guns trained fore and aft.

D-Day off Gold Beach

Her service began with a bump: on 6 January 1944, working up in the Clyde, she dragged her anchor and collided with her sister Urania. At the end of the month she sailed for the Mediterranean with the 25th Destroyer Flotilla, and spent the spring there, but in May the flotilla was called home for the invasion of Normandy.

On 3 June she sailed from the Clyde with Grenville, Ulster and Urchin as the escort of the bombarding cruisers, among them Orion, Ajax and Argonaut. After the 24 hour postponement they passed the Isle of Wight on the evening of 5 June, and on the morning of 6 June she was off Gold Beach, where the British 50th Division landed, giving gunfire support to the troops ashore. She stayed with the Eastern Task Force until 11 June.

The Adriatic and the Gothic Line

Released from Normandy, she went straight back to the Mediterranean, escorting the carriers Victorious and Indomitable and then the battleship Howe on their way out to join the Eastern Fleet. In July she covered operations off Corsica and the west coast of Italy, and in late August she went round into the Adriatic.

There she worked with Urchin, Loyal, Kimberley and the old river gunboats Aphis and Scarab, firing in support of the Eighth Army as it broke into the Gothic Line, the German defences across northern Italy. She shelled Pesaro on 30 August, the Gothic Line itself on 1 September, and the coast batteries at Rimini on 6 September.

In the middle of the month she was ordered home to Chatham to give her company leave before they went to the Far East.

Palembang

She sailed for the Indian Ocean in November 1944 and joined the new British Pacific Fleet at Trincomalee in December. In January 1945, on its way to Australia, the fleet attacked the oil refineries of Sumatra, which supplied much of Japan's aviation fuel.

Undine screened the carriers for the strike on Pangkalan Brandan on 4 January, and for the two great strikes on the refineries at Pladjoe and Soengei Gerong near Palembang on 24 and 29 January, among the biggest operations the Fleet Air Arm flew in the whole war. On 29 January she picked up the crews of two carrier aircraft that had come down in the sea.

The fleet reached Sydney in February, and Undine was given the signal letters D26 to fit the American system.

Okinawa

In March 1945 the British Pacific Fleet joined the Americans as Task Force 57 for the invasion of Okinawa, and through April and May it struck at the airfields of the Sakishima Islands to stop Japanese aircraft staging through them.

Undine screened the carriers and took her turn on radar picket duty, stationed away from the fleet to give early warning of air attack, and on 27 March she rescued the crew of another crashed aircraft.

On 4 May she was screening King George V and Howe while they bombarded the airfields on Miyako Shima when the kamikazes struck at the carriers they had left behind, and the bombardment was cut short so the battleships could return to them.

Bombarding Japan

In July the fleet sailed from Manus with Formidable and the other carriers to join the American Third Fleet off Japan, and she screened them through the strikes on Tokyo and Yokohama, northern Honshu and Hokkaido.

On the night of 29 July she went in with King George V and the destroyers Ulysses and Urania to bombard factories at Hamamatsu on the south coast of Honshu, and the next night she engaged small craft picked up on her radar. On 12 August, when the British fleet ran short of fuel, she was sent back to Australia, while ships like Tenacious stayed on with Indefatigable. She reached Sydney on 24 August, after fifty days at sea.

Her company had good reason to be tired. Since commissioning she had steamed 128,928 miles, more than five times round the world, and she had been at sea on 427 of her 664 days in service. Her battle honours were Mediterranean 1944, Adriatic 1944, Normandy 1944 and Okinawa 1945, four campaigns in less than two years.

The Type 15 Frigate

After a refit at Melbourne she went back north for the occupation of Japan, and in January 1946 she sailed from Sydney for home, calling at Melbourne, Fremantle, Colombo, Bombay and Aden before reaching Harwich on 29 March. She went into reserve until 1952, when she was chosen for conversion to a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate, the same rebuild that had been tried out on Rocket.

The work was done by a commercial yard on the Clyde and finished in 1954, and she recommissioned with the pennant F141 for service in the Mediterranean. In 1960 she was paid off into reserve again, and in 1965 she was put on the disposal list, stripped of her equipment and towed to Newport in South Wales, where she was broken up in November 1965.