HMS Urchin (R99): Anzio, Gold Beach, Okinawa, and a Stern Given Away

A Borrowed Name

HMS Urchin was ordered from Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow on 12 June 1941 and laid down there the following March. The name was available because of an act of generosity.

It had been given to one of the new U-class submarines, and in 1941 that submarine was handed over to the Polish Navy in exile before she ever served under the White Ensign, and went on to make her name as ORP Sokół, the "Terrible Twin" of the Mediterranean.

That left the Navy with a spare Urchin, and it went to a destroyer of the U class, the seventh war emergency flotilla, all of whose ships had names beginning with the same letter.

Ilford in Essex had adopted her in its Warship Week in March 1942, a year before she was launched on 8 March 1943, the fifth ship of the name. She was completed on 24 September 1943 for the 25th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet, under Lieutenant Commander J. T. B.

Birch, and two days later a Royal Navy official photographer, Lieutenant S. J. Beadell, caught her off Greenock with the sun breaking through on her bridge. That is the photograph at the top of this page.

Anzio

She worked up at Scapa Flow that autumn, screening the battleships Queen Elizabeth, Howe and Renown in exercises, and was then sent to the Mediterranean, escorting the carriers Illustrious and Unicorn out in the first week of 1944 and reaching Malta.

On 22 January 1944 she was off Anzio for the landings behind the German line south of Rome, covering the assault forces, and in February she was back off the beachhead with the cruiser Phoebe, giving gunfire support by day and returning to Naples each evening.

In March she joined the hunt south-east of Anzio for U-450, which was eventually forced to the surface and scuttled by four Hunt-class destroyers and an American destroyer, with fifty-one of her crew taken prisoner.

Gold Beach

In May she was brought home for the invasion of France and given to Force G, the naval force for Gold Beach. On the night of 5 June she escorted convoy G14, carrying the bombarding group, from the Solent across the Channel, and on D-Day she was off Gold with her sisters Ulster, Ursa, Undaunted, Ulysses, Undine and Urania.

The flotilla's work there is told in HMS Ulster (F83), and HMS Urania (R05) has another view of the same beach. She stayed on the eastern flank for patrol and escort work until 25 June.

Then she went straight back to the Mediterranean, escorting the carriers Victorious and Indomitable and then the battleship HMS Howe out to Algiers and on to Port Said, and worked in the Adriatic that summer, bombarding German positions round Rimini on 4 September as the Eighth Army pushed up the coast.

A Duke for Australia

After a refit at Leith she was assigned to the new British Pacific Fleet, and her passage out had a passenger in her care. In December 1944 she escorted the liner Rimutaka from Liverpool, through Gibraltar, Malta and the Suez Canal to Colombo, carrying the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester out to Australia, where the King's brother was to become Governor-General.

From Ceylon she went with the fleet's tankers during Operation Meridian, the carrier strikes on the Japanese-held oil refineries at Palembang in Sumatra in January 1945, which badly damaged one of Japan's most important sources of aviation fuel. Then she escorted HMS Formidable across the Indian Ocean to Fremantle and Sydney, and from Sydney up through Manus to Leyte, where she joined the fleet in April. In the Pacific she wore the pennant D28.

Okinawa and Japan

By then her captain was Lieutenant Commander A. F. Harkness, an officer of the Royal Naval Reserve rather than the regular Navy, commanding a fleet destroyer in the main battle fleet, which says a great deal about how far the wartime Navy had come to rely on its reservists.

Her war in the Pacific was carrier screening for Task Force 57, the British Pacific Fleet at sea, during Operation Iceberg, the invasion of Okinawa. The British carriers' job was to keep the airfields in the Sakishima Islands to the south-west out of action so that Japanese aircraft could not stage through them to Okinawa.

In April, when the Americans asked for the airfields on northern Formosa to be hit as well, she was one of the destroyers with the carrier Indefatigable and the cruiser Gambia covering the strikes there on 11 April. On 4 May 1945 she was in the screen when the battleships went in to bombard the airfields on Miyako, and that was the day the kamikazes came for the carriers while the battleships were away. Formidable was hit, and her article tells it.

In late June she sailed from Sydney again with the fleet, now Task Force 37, to operate with the American Third Fleet off the coast of Japan itself. HMS Ulysses (F17) has the screen leaving Sydney. Through July and into August Urchin escorted the carriers as they struck Tokyo, Yokohama and targets on Honshu and Hokkaido.

On 12 August, short of fuel, part of the fleet was withdrawn, and Urchin and Grenville took Formidable back to Sydney. Japan surrendered while they were on passage.

A Frigate, and Cadets

She came home in 1946 and spent six years in reserve, first at Harwich and then at Chatham. In 1952 she was taken up the Clyde to Barclay Curle to be rebuilt as a Type 15 anti-submarine frigate.

Like HMS Virago and many other wartime destroyers, she was stripped to the deck and given a new, enclosed superstructure and modern anti-submarine weapons, and she recommissioned on 3 June 1954 as F196.

She spent two years with the 3rd Training Squadron at Londonderry, where the Navy trained its anti-submarine ships and crews against the submarines based there, then went back into reserve. In 1959 she was refitted at Devonport as a training ship and recommissioned that August for the Dartmouth Training Squadron, taking officer cadets from Britannia Royal Naval College to sea.

The squadron was made up of rebuilt wartime destroyers like her, and later Type 12 frigates, and one photograph shows Urchin leading Wizard, Tenby and Vigilant in line ahead; its cruises took the cadets to the West Indies, Scandinavia or the Mediterranean, and for many future admirals their first real time at sea was spent in one of these ships.

One of those future admirals was already in charge. From February 1962 to February 1963 the squadron was commanded from Urchin by Captain Terence Lewin, whose order book for the ship is now in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.

Twenty years later, as Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin, he was Chief of the Defence Staff through the Falklands War. That year she was also in the waters off Iceland during the first Cod War, when British trawlers were fishing inside Iceland's new limits under Royal Navy protection.

Her Stern, Given Away

She paid off in 1964 and went on the disposal list, and she had one more thing to give. Her sister Ulster, still in service, needed a new stern, and in 1966 a section of Urchin's after hull, about thirty feet by twenty, was cut away and fitted to Ulster.

Urchin herself was towed to Troon in August 1967 and broken up.

It is an oddly fitting end for a ship that started with a borrowed name. She lent part of herself back. In between, she had covered two of the great landings of the war and watched the kamikazes come for the carriers off Okinawa, and her war ran from the Mediterranean to the Pacific in less than two years.