minesweeper-trawler

Diary of the Second World War – August 1943

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HMS/HMT Red Gauntlet

It is my pleasure to introduce for the first time my new colleague Cal Pols, Maritime Archaeologist at Historic England, and in his inaugural article for Historic England, Cal covers the loss of HM Trawler Red Gauntlet in August 1943. We have previously looked on several occasions at the work of the minesweeper-trawlers of the First World War, and Cal now turns to covering the minesweeper-trawler service during the Second World War.

He writes:

Fighting to keep British waters safe . . . .

Historic black & white photo from the railings of a ship at sea which blur the bottom foreground, looking towards five minesweepers at work on the horizon
The sweep begins: trailing long steel wires, the little trawlers spread out across the Channel to start their search for enemy mines, November 1941. Copyright: © IWM A 6300 Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205140435

HMT Red Gauntlet was a steam powered fishing trawler built in 1930 by Smith’s Dock Co. Ltd, at South Bank, Middlesborough, on the River Tees in north-east England. [1] Pre-war images of Red Gauntlet with her London fishing number of LO33 can be explored on Tees Built Ships (hover to expand images).

On August 29th 1939, less than a week before the declaration of war on Germany (September 3rd 1939), Red Gauntlet was requisitioned by the Royal Navy to operate as a minesweeper. [2]

A short film issued by Gaumont British News on October 30th, 1939, entitled Britain’s Minesweepers at Work, provides a glimpse of the important role minesweepers like Red Gauntlet played in the war. Flotillas (groups) of minesweeper-trawlers would be put to work clearing important shipping routes around Britain of contact mines – a dangerous job that involved dragging a weighted line under water to pull enemy mines away from their positions.

Four years later, on August 5th 1943, Red Gauntlet sank after being torpedoed by a German E-Boat (S-86) in the North Sea off Harwich. [3] The E-boat was the Allies’ name for the German fast attack craft, the S-Boot or Schnellboot (literally, ‘fast boat’), that often operated as either patrol or torpedo vessels during the war. (See previous articles on E-boat attacks in English waters: e.g. Convoy Battle! October 1942).

Author Nick Stanley provides an excellent overview of the important role undertaken by British minesweepers during the war, with a parallel day-by-day account of Royal Navy minesweeping, which highlights the staggering undertaking of the men aboard these vessels, who often gave their lives trying to keep Britain’s waters clear. During Operation Overlord, the massive Allied invasion of Europe in summer 1944, minesweepers played a crucial role in securing a successful amphibious assault. Mines posed a serious threat to the invasion and even with the efforts of the Allied minesweepers, mines were the single greatest cause of loss of Allied vessels before and after the D-Day invasion on June 6th 1944. [4]

By the end of the war in August 1945, RN minesweepers had cleared over 20,000 mines and the original fleet of minesweepers from September 1939 had risen from just 36 fleet sweepers and 40 trawlers (like HMT Red Gauntlet) to 250 fleet sweepers and nearly 250 trawlers as well as 307 motor minesweepers (MMS), 136 British ‘Yard’ Minesweepers (BYMS), and many motor launches and drifters. Over a million tons of British shipping were lost to mines and, at times, Britain was in serious danger of being starved of necessary resources coming in from her allies due to Axis blockade efforts. However, in part due to the efforts of the minesweeper crews, crucial access to British ports and shipping was never fully stopped.

Minesweeper vessel losses and casualties were heavy; 45 fleet sweepers, 10 paddle sweepers, 3 mine destructor dhips, 34 MMS, 6 BYMS, and at least 223 trawlers, plus 22 auxiliary vessels, were lost over the course of the war. All the men on board HMT Red Gauntlet, 21 in total, sadly lost their lives when she sank. Most of them are commemorated on the Grade-II listed Lowestoft Naval Memorial, alongside nearly 2400 other sailors.

Modern colour photo of circular base of memorial, the text flanked on either side by the badge of the Royal Naval Patrol Service, an anchor in a shield encircled by laurel and oak leaves
Base of the Lowestoft Naval Memorial, whose inscription reads:
These officers and men of the Royal Naval Patrol Service died in the defence of their country and have no grave but the sea 1939 – 1945
© Adrian Pye, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED original source

Footnotes

[1] Requisitioned trawlers were given the prefix HMT (His Majesty’s Trawler) but are often referred to by the standard naval prefix HMS in contemporary and later records; Appropriation Books and Mercantile Navy List, 1940, placed online by the Crew List Index Project; Tees Built Ships, entry for Red Gauntlet

[2] Colledge, J.J,, 1987. Ships of Royal Navy (Vol. 2): navy-built trawlers, drifters, tugs and requisitioned ships from the fifteenth century to the present, Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press.

[3] Tees Built Ships, entry for Red Gauntlet; Colledge 1987

[4] Stanley, N 2020 “Minesweeping in the Second World War”, The Vernon Link, published online

Diary of the War: May 1917

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The Gena

In the second instalment of our double bill covering 30 April and 1 May 1917 we take a look at the Gena, sunk on 1 May. On the face of it, Gena was fairly typical in both vessel type and location of loss, a collier sunk in the North Sea while steaming south with her cargo from Tyneside.

Yet there are two things which are very unusual about this particular wreck site. The first is that the position of loss is very precisely specified in relation to a relatively small and impermanent seamark.

She sank “¾ mile S by W ½W of ‘A’ War Channel Buoy, Southwold”. (1)

Unsurprisingly, with this level of detail, the wreck site has a secure history of recording that goes back to the date of loss. (2) It also gives some clue to the location of one of the buoys marking out the East Coast War Channels, or safe swept channels, that kept the shipping lanes open and (relatively) free of mines, swept largely by minesweeper-trawlers such as the Arfon whose loss on 30 April 1917 was commemorated in yesterday’s post.

These War Channels have been the subject of recent investigations on behalf of Historic England  (2014) by Antony Firth (Fjordr), illustrated with maps and charts showing the extent of the War Channels. One unofficial chart marking the buoys further north up the East Coast is known to have been used by an airman providing cover for North Sea shipping (Fig. 7 in report).

If aircraft could provide cover for shipping, tracking U-boats and indeed collaborating with patrol vessels to destroy enemy craft, it followed that ships were also vulnerable to attack from the air. The Gena was the first ship within English territorial waters to be sunk by aircraft, torpedoed from the air by two Hansa-Brandenburg GW seaplanes of Torpedostaffel II, operating out of Zeebrugge. This was not the first aerial attack on merchant shipping by aircraft, but it was one of the first to successfully sink a ship.

So unusual was it that Lloyd’s struggled to fit it into an appropriate category in their ‘ledger’ of war losses. In the “How Sunk” column, the standard abbreviations S (sunk by submarine) and M (mine) were clearly inappropriate, and even this distinction was outdated, since ships had been sunk by mines laid by U-boats since 1915, so arguably fitted both categories (see earlier post on minelaying submarines, introduced in 1915). The only other category available was C (cruiser or raider), which was still inadequate, but it seems that a new category was not considered necessary, and ‘raider’ was at least appropriate in intent, if not in ‘vessel type’ as such. A marginal annotation clarified matters: “German seaplane”. (3)

The Gena was an armed merchant, however, and her attackers did not have it all their own way. Sunk by the planes, her gunner nevertheless managed to down Hansa-Brandenburg 703, whose two crew were rescued to become prisoners of war. (4) An interesting photo gallery of the Hansa-Brandenburg GW can be found here, including stablemate 700, a view of the torpedo loading bay, and film stills of the aircraft landing on the water.

The course of the war at sea was changing: terror could strike from above as well as below, and aircraft though slow, unreliable, and terrifying to fly by modern standards, were proving to be amphibious and adaptable. Finally, the increasing presence of aircraft at sea meant that wrecks at sea were no longer necessarily ‘shipwrecks’, although, on this occasion, the aircraft was also picked up for examination: (see previous double bill on Zeppelin wrecks from February 1916 and March 1916).

The whole incident was recognised at the time as ‘a new phase of warfare’  and a ‘noteworthy development of aerial craft’ (5) so that, unusually for the time, the Admiralty released details of the ‘duel’, in part because there was some propaganda value in demonstrating that the Gena had not gone down without a fight.

(1) Lloyd’s War Losses: The First World War: Casualties to Shipping through Enemy Causes 1914-18, facsimile reprint, Lloyd’s of London Press, 1990, p127

(2) United Kingdom Hydrographic Office record no. 10320

(3) Lloyd’s War Losses: The First World War: Casualties to Shipping through Enemy Causes 1914-18, facsimile reprint, Lloyd’s of London Press, 1990, p127

(4) for example: http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/index.php?/topic/241938-naval-historynet-bvlas-errata/

(5) Yarmouth Independent, Saturday 5 May 1917, No.4,529, p1