Fifty-three years later, marine archaeologist Innes McCartney found, identified and filmed her hulk as part of the Deep Wreck Mysteries television series.
I’m surprised that I haven’t told you the story of the Second World War Flower-class corvette HMCS Alberni before now.
Not only was she named for the Vancouver Island port city but she was built at Yarrows Shipyard in Esquimalt, which makes her a local girl, so to speak.
And, thanks to the efforts of determined volunteers, she’s never been allowed to fade into history, the sad case of so many other great ships and their crews. So, today, the story of one of Canada’s fighting Flowers…
As many readers will know, the Royal Canadian Navy played a key role during the last world war, in six years blossoming from a handful of destroyers to the third largest naval fighting force in the world. Many (122) of those ships were corvettes, the hastily-conceived and built escort vessels whose basic design was that of a North Sea whaler.
But these were no fishing vessels!
Rather, they were bantam-sized destroyers and they served Canada well, primarily as convoy escorts in the stormy mid-North Atlantic.
K103 was just over 200 feet long, steam-driven and capable of a sluggardly 16 knots (less than half that of a destroyer) with a crew of 85. Laid down at Esquimalt on April 29, 1940, she was launched a week less than four months later and commissioned into the RCN in February of the following year. Two months later, she was in Halifax (via the Panama Canal) and assigned to the Newfoundland Escort Force, a mid-ocean convoy escort in the western North Atlantic.
Among Alberni’s duties was participating in Convoy SC42 which had an appalling 20 of its ships sunk by U-boats; a role she continued to perform until May 1942 when, with the destroyer HMCS Assiniboine, she helped rescue 47 survivors of a torpedoed British tanker.
By then her boilers needed replacing; that done, she was assigned to escort duty in the Mediterranean Sea as part of Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa, then to further escort duties between Gibraltar and the United Kingdom.
After rescuing 12 survivors from a torpedoed American tanker in late October, she and HMCS Ville de Quebec saved another 81 torpedo victims from a British whaler before returning to Operation Torch in March 1943.
By the time she returned to convoy duties with the Western Local Escort Force, escorting Quebec-Labrador convoys, she was up for another refit, this one in Liverpool, N.S. After a well-earned respite — work-ups in Bermuda — it was back to work with the Royal Navy’s escort group EG 4. The approach of D-Day brought yet another reassignment, this one to Western Approaches Command as part of Operation Neptune.
A website (HMCS I Will Remember — the Alberni Project) dedicated to her memory tells us so much more: “On July 26, 1944 she shot down a German Junkers 88 that had attacked her at almost sea level. Alberni opened fire with her starboard Oerlikons and the after pom-pom as the plane tore toward her. The Junkers climbed and banked to clear Alberni and her port Oerlikons scored direct hits at close range. The enemy burst into flames and exploded in the sea 1000 yards off Alberni’s port bow with no survivors. On 28 July she narrowly missed an aircraft-laid mine, then a depth charge laid over an Asdic contact set off another mine 200 yards off Alberni’s starboard beam without significant damage.”
It was, to quote this source, “an exciting time”.
To say the least, it had been a busy three and a half years. After a quick refit at Southampton she was off to relieve HMCS Drumheller, patrolling for U-boats eastward of the Normandy invasion beaches.
On Aug. 21, 1944, in the English Channel off the isle of Wight, she was “steaming south at 14 knots in fair weather with a NNE wind of five knots…for the rendezvous, sweeping by Asdic 80-degrees on either bow, radar operating. ‘Hands to Dinner’ had just been piped. Four minutes later, with no Asdic warning whatsoever, she was hit by a torpedo fired from U-480 on her port side just aft of the engine room. In less than 10 seconds she was awash from the funnel aft, listing to port and sinking fast. In another 20 seconds she was gone, sinking stern-first. Most of the off-watch hands were trapped in their mess decks, and only one stoker escaped from the engine and boiler rooms.”
The single torpedo had been fired by veteran U-boat commander Oberleutnant zur See Hans-Joachim Forster in the U-480. HMCS Alberni, the indefatigable escort of so many convoys on both sides of the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean, went down in less than a minute, taking most of her crew with her.
The Alberni Project continues: (Acting) Lt./Cdr. Ian H. Bell, RCNVR, her 26-year-old commander, “leaped out of his cabin at the explosion, planning to dash to the bridge. He was washed over the side as the ship foundered rapidly by the stern, with no time for orders or damage control. There was not even time to release Carley floats, and men, many without time to put on lifebelts as the ship foundered had to cling to odd pieces of debris.
“Fortunately the depth charges did not explode, although there was a muffled boiler explosion which did not seem to cause much harm… One rating in boots and trousers, struggling in the sea, cast off his boots and then pushed down his trousers to be able to swim more easily. He suddenly recalled that his dentures were in the trouser pockets, so pulled them back up again. As an intelligence officer commented later after questioning the survivors, ‘He seemed to have all his teeth when I spoke to him.'”
(Acting) Lt. Frank Williams, a former football player and strong swimmer, was credited with saving several lives “including those of Donald Wood, the ship’s writer, and Ian Bell who was dazed by the suddenness of his ship’s destruction…
“For 45 minutes the dazed survivors struggled to keep from drowning or giving up in heavy seas. Providentially HM motor Torpedo boats 469 and 470, returning from duties off Normandy and having seen an explosion and the startling disappearance of the corvette on their horizon, altered course to investigate. They came across the survivors and rescued three officers and 28 men of the ship’s company of 90. They were taken to Portsmouth, where two moderately injured were admitted to hospital…”
Almost three-quarters of her crew went down with the Alberni. You can bet that (A)Lt. Frank Williams wasn’t the only hero in the immediate aftermath of the sinking. But he’s the one who was awarded a bronze medal by the Royal Humane Society for his efforts to save fellow crewmembers.
Fifty-three years later, marine archaeologist Innes McCartney found, identified and filmed her hulk as part of the Deep Wreck Mysteries television series.
There’s another intriguing footnote to HMCS Alberni’s story. In 1997 divers accidentally found the wreck of a submarine less than 200 feet down off the Isle of Wight. A year later, the mystery craft was identified as the U-480 which had struck a mine during its last patrol in January or February 1945, some five or six months after sinking the Alberni. Forster and all of his 47-man crew were lost with her.
Ironically, these are the same waters in which the Alberni takes her final rest.
According to Wikipedia, The Alberni Project is a privately funded memorial program founded in 2000 “to honour all the crew who served on Alberni from the time she was commissioned in 1941 at Esquimalt until her sinking in 1944. With the help from relatives of HMCS Alberni crewmen, private and public contributions, and community volunteers, TAP became TAPS (The Alberni Project Society) to serve a growing dedication to preserving the times of the Battle of the Atlantic through the stories of the Canadian forces and civilians involved in the Battle of the Atlantic. A traveling exhibit and memorial was developed in 2005 and continues to make appearances on Vancouver Island and the lower British Columbia mainland.”
In September 2013 the permanent HMCS Alberni Museum (HAMM) was opened at the Comox Centre Mall in Comox. It was moved in November 2016 to Courtenay to what’s described as an expanded facility incorporating Canadian Forces from the Great War to the present day.
HMCS Alberni’s brief but busy career earned her three Battle honours: Atlantic 1941-44, Normandy 1944, North Sea 1944.
