Sean

The Royal Navy's most underrated ship of WW2 might be HMS Starling. A small, unglamorous sloop that became one of the deadliest U-boat hunters of the entire war. No big guns. No famous battles. Starling was a Black Swan-class sloop, a modest escort ship built to protect convoys. The kind of ship the public never heard about. But she had a captain who changed the Battle of the Atlantic: Frederic John Walker, known to his men as Johnnie. Before the war, Walker's career was going nowhere. He had specialized in anti-submarine warfare, a field the Royal Navy considered a dead end. Battleships were where promotions came from. Walker was passed over and nearly pushed into retirement. Then the U-boats nearly strangled Britain, and suddenly the man nobody wanted was the man the Navy needed. In 1943, Walker took command of Starling and the 2nd Support Group, a squadron of sloops. Their job wasn't just to escort convoys and drive U-boats away. It was to hunt them. Find them, chase them, and stay on them until they were dead, no matter how long it took. Walker developed a tactic that U-boat crews came to dread. When a U-boat dove deep, the attacking ship's sonar lost contact as it passed overhead, giving the sub a chance to slip away. So Walker used two ships. One stayed back and tracked the U-boat with sonar. It guided the second ship, which crept in slowly and quietly above the sub and dropped depth charges without the U-boat realizing it was there. They called it the "creeping attack." Walker was relentless. He'd hunt a single U-boat for hours. Once, for more than half a day. When his group closed in for the kill, Starling would play "A-Hunting We Will Go" over her loudspeakers. In February 1944, on a single patrol, Walker's group sank six U-boats. When they sailed back into Liverpool, crowds lined the docks, and the head of the Admiralty was there to greet them. Starling herself took part in the destruction of more than a dozen U-boats during the war, making her one of the most successful anti-submarine ships the Allies had. But Walker drove himself as hard as his ships. He barely slept. He stayed on the bridge for days at a time during hunts. In July 1944, just weeks after D-Day, he collapsed. He died of a stroke, worn out by the strain of the war. He was 48. Thousands came to his funeral in Liverpool. His body was carried out to sea aboard a destroyer and buried in the waters he had fought to protect. Starling kept serving long after the war and wasn't scrapped until the 1960s. Everyone remembers Hood, Warspite, and Ark Royal. But the Battle of the Atlantic was won by small ships like Starling, and men like Walker, who refused to let a U-boat get away.