HMS Woodcock (U90): The U-Boat Hunter of the Bay of Biscay

Govan-Built

HMS Woodcock was built by Fairfield at Govan, laid down on 21 October 1941 and completed in 1942, a Modified Black Swan-class sloop and the fifth Royal Navy ship to carry the name, joining the celebrated 2nd Escort Group for anti-submarine operations in the Bay of Biscay.

One small thing before the U-boats. Woodcock was adopted by Cuckfield in West Sussex, a village of a few thousand people on the Weald, which raised the money for her in Warship Week and then had a ship of its own for the rest of the war. That is worth a sentence because it was the point of the scheme: not the cash, which the Treasury could have found anyway, but the fact that a place inland with no coast and no dockyard suddenly had a name to follow in the newspapers, letters going both ways, and a reason to care about the Bay of Biscay.

A Fierce Day of Action

As part of Operation Musketry, Woodcock took part in a major action on 30 July 1943 in the Bay of Biscay, where a group of U-boats travelling together had been sighted. Woodcock was among the sloops, backed by an RAF Halifax bomber, that engaged and so badly damaged U-462 that her crew scuttled her, a remarkably significant success against an enemy submarine caught while operating in company with others in the area.

What Operation Musketry Was

The operation is named and left unexplained, and it is one of the more interesting ideas of the Atlantic war, because it was an attempt to solve the U-boat problem with geography.

Almost every U-boat in the Atlantic came from a base on the French coast: Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice, Bordeaux. Whatever a boat did afterwards, and however far she ranged, she had to cross the Bay of Biscay at the start and the end of every patrol. That is a funnel, and in 1943 Coastal Command and the Royal Navy set out to close it.

Musketry, from July 1943, was the sea and air offensive in that funnel: patrol boxes flown round the clock by Liberators, Sunderlands, Halifaxes and Wellingtons, with support groups of sloops and frigates stationed in the same water to finish what the aircraft found. The Germans responded by ordering boats to cross on the surface in groups, guns manned, and fight it out with the aircraft rather than dive, which worked for a few weeks and then became suicidal. The whole point of Musketry was that a U-boat sunk in the Bay of Biscay is a U-boat that never reaches a convoy at all.

What happened on 30 July 1943, and why two of the three boats caught that day mattered far more than their tonnage suggests, is set out in HMS Kite (U87), who was in the same line of sloops. The method the group used, and the man who invented it, are in HMS Starling (U66).

A Creeping Attack That Sank U-226

On 6 November 1943, operating with the escort carrier HMS Tracker east-southeast of Newfoundland, Woodcock carried out a creeping attack, a slow, methodical depth-charge technique designed to catch a submarine that had gone silent, successfully sinking U-226 with all fifty-one men aboard.

The Repairs Were Not Battle Damage

Extensive repairs through 1944 covers most of a year out of the war, and the reason is not one that ever made a headline.

On 27 May 1944 she was in collision with the destroyer HMS Venus and was seriously damaged. She was patched up, sent to Hull on 6 June for proper repair, and was still not right when she went to Liverpool in September for more work, which was combined with the modifications a ship needed before she could be sent to the Pacific: extra ventilation, more fresh water, additional close-range anti-aircraft armament and refrigerated storage.

Collisions at sea in wartime were far commoner than anybody likes to record. Ships worked in company, in the dark, without lights, in convoy, at speed, zigzagging, in weather, with tired officers of the watch, and the ordinary safeguards of peacetime navigation had all been thrown away deliberately. A collision cost the Royal Navy more ships than is comfortable to think about, and it took one of the most effective U-boat hunters in the fleet out of the Atlantic for the whole of the summer of 1944.

From Repairs to the Pacific

After extensive repairs through 1944, Woodcock transferred to the Pacific Fleet, arriving at Manus Island in March 1945 and going on to escort replenishment ships during the Okinawa invasion and subsequent operations, and remaining with the Logistics Support Group after the Japanese surrender in September 1945.

Guarding the Fleet Train

What she went out to do in 1945 sounds unglamorous and was the thing on which the entire British Pacific Fleet depended.

The Royal Navy had spent its war fighting within a few days of a dockyard. In the Pacific the nearest British base was Sydney, several thousand miles from the operating area, and the Americans had made it politely clear that the British were not to be a drain on their own supply system. The answer was the Fleet Train: a collection of tankers, store ships, ammunition ships, repair ships and escort carriers that followed the fleet about and kept it fed, fuelled and armed at sea. It was scraped together out of merchantmen and borrowed hulls, it was permanently short of everything, and without it Task Force 57 could not have stayed off Okinawa for a week.

Woodcock's job was to stop the Japanese sinking it. She provided anti-aircraft cover for the replenishment groups through the Okinawa operations in May and June 1945, including the escort carriers HMS Ruler and HMS Speaker. A tanker full of furnace oil, stopped, connected by hose to a carrier, is the most vulnerable object in any ocean, and a kamikaze pilot who found one would have done more damage in a minute than a week of attacks on the fleet itself.

She was still doing it after VJ Day, with the Logistics Support Group and then Task Group 38.5, because a fleet does not stop needing fuel when the shooting stops. She came home in 1946.

Scrapped at Rosyth

HMS Woodcock was towed to Rosyth by the tug Superman to be scrapped on 28 November 1955, bringing to a close the career of a sloop that had been among the most consistently successful U-boat hunters of the entire Battle of the Atlantic.

Her ending has a small grace note in it. The tug that took her to the breakers, Superman, was one of a famous line of Admiralty rescue tugs, ships built to go out into the Atlantic in any weather and bring home torpedoed merchantmen that everybody else had given up on. There is a certain fitness in a sloop that spent 1943 saving convoys being taken on her last passage by a ship built to save the ones that got hit.