HMS Wensleydale (L86): Three U-Boats in One Summer

Built by Yarrow

HMS Wensleydale was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun, ordered on 28 July 1940, laid down on 28 July 1941, launched on 20 June 1942 and commissioned on 30 October that year, a Hunt-class Type III escort destroyer that went straight into a busy programme of anti-submarine exercises and convoy escort duty.

Rescuing a Damaged Submarine

In October 1943, Wensleydale located and escorted the damaged Free French submarine Minerve back to port after she had suffered friendly fire damage from Allied aircraft, a reminder of just how easily confusion and tragedy could strike even among ships and submarines fighting on the same side.

The Night HMS Charybdis Was Lost

The action of 23 October 1943 has a name, the Battle of Sept-Iles, and it went as badly as any small action the Royal Navy fought in the Channel.

A force of seven British ships under the cruiser Charybdis was sent to intercept the German blockade runner Munsterland off the Brittany coast. The Germans knew they were coming. Five Elbing-class torpedo boats were waiting, they had radar detection gear that told them a British ship was sweeping them, and they fired torpedoes into the dark before the British force had even worked out what it was looking at. Charybdis was hit twice and went down in under half an hour, taking four hundred and sixty-two of her people with her. The escort destroyer Limbourne was hit forward, could not be saved, and was sunk by her own side; forty-two of her men were dead.

Wensleydale was one of the ships that spent the rest of that night picking men out of the water. What happened afterwards, when the bodies came ashore in German-occupied Guernsey and the islanders turned out in thousands for the funeral, is told in HMS Charybdis.

Action Off Brittany

On 23 October 1943, Wensleydale engaged German torpedo boats off Brittany, and was present to witness the sinking of HMS Charybdis and HMS Limbourne during the same fierce action, losses that cost more than five hundred lives in one of the most costly Channel engagements of the war.

Chasing Blockade Runners

That December, Wensleydale took part in Operation Stonewall, the pursuit of German blockade runners attempting to slip through the Bay of Biscay, before turning in 1944 to a run of remarkable success against the U-boat threat closer to home.

Operation Stonewall, two months later, was the other side of the same problem. Germany was still running fast merchant ships between occupied France and Japan, carrying rubber, tungsten and quinine one way and machinery and optical equipment the other, and every one that got through was worth a convoy. Stonewall was the combined British and American effort to close that route in the Bay of Biscay. It worked: the blockade runner Alsterufer was sunk by aircraft, and when eleven German destroyers and torpedo boats came out to meet her, two British cruisers took them on and sank three, which is described from one of those decks in HMS Enterprise (D52). After that, nothing else got through.

Three U-Boat Kills in One Summer

Through the summer of 1944, Wensleydale helped sink three German submarines in the English Channel through depth charge attacks: U-1191 in July, and both U-671 and U-413 in August, an exceptional run of anti-submarine success for a single escort destroyer in the space of a few short weeks.

The Three Boats, Named

The summer of 1944 in the Channel is worth explaining before the kills make sense. After the Normandy landings the Germans sent everything they had into the invasion area, and that included U-boats ordered into the narrowest, shallowest, most heavily patrolled water in Europe, where a submarine cannot dive deep, cannot get away, and can be held on asdic for hours against a hard bottom. It was very close to a suicide mission and the boats went anyway. The Channel became, for about three months, the best U-boat hunting ground of the war.

Wensleydale's three can be set out precisely, and the sharing matters, because these were group actions and the Admiralty's U-boat Assessment Committee went through each one afterwards and apportioned the credit.

U-1191, on 3 July 1944, south-west of Brighton. Six ships were in that hunt: the destroyers Onslaught and Oribi, the escort destroyers Brissenden, Talybont and Wensleydale, and the frigate Seymour. There is a footnote to it worth having: for decades the boat was credited to two entirely different ships, Affleck and Balfour, and the record was only put right when the wrecks and the timings were re-examined.

U-671, on 5 August, south of Brighton, with the frigate Stayner. The sequence is on record almost to the minute. Stayner hit her with a hedgehog attack at 2158 and damaged her; the boat kept going, hurt, for nearly two hours; and she bottomed shortly after Wensleydale attacked at 2355. The Committee gave the major credit to Stayner, which is fair, and Wensleydale was the ship that finished it.

U-413, on 20 August, in the same patch of water, with Forester and Vidette. Vidette's attack at 0736 probably put two charges into her at about forty feet; she was tracked until about a quarter past eight, when she went to the bottom. The depth charges credited with sinking her were Wensleydale's.

That last one had a debt attached. U-413 had torpedoed and sunk the destroyer HMS Warwick off the Cornish coast six months earlier, with heavy loss of life. Six weeks of hunting in the Channel in the summer of 1944 caught up with her in the end.

A Collision That Ended Her Career

On 21 November 1944, Wensleydale suffered heavy damage off Southend in the Thames Estuary following a collision with the British landing ship LST-367.

The damage proved severe enough that she was decommissioned to reserve on 17 December 1944 and never repaired, finally being scrapped at Blyth on 15 February 1946, an unglamorous end for a ship that had spent her final active summer as one of the Channel's most effective U-boat hunters.

The collision that finished her says something about the traffic. By November 1944 the Thames Estuary was carrying an unbroken stream of shipping supplying the armies in France, in swept channels, at night, darkened, in fog, with a landing ship every few hundred yards. LST-367 hit her hard enough that a ship less than two years old was never repaired. In a navy that in 1942 would have moved heaven and earth to get her back, the answer in December 1944 was simply that there were enough escorts now, and the dockyard time was worth more elsewhere.