When they arrived at the Naval Yard, the vessels' commanders were ordered to warn their crews to observe strict silence about their movements and were told that the three ships had been picked for a "special purpose".

[2] Hitra and her sister vessels superseded the famous fleet of civilian fishing boats that had formerly run naval operations between Shetland and Norway.

During the final two years of World War II the three ships performed a total of 114 missions to occupied Norway, and apart from one incident when a Canadian aircraft fired on Hessa, the voyages were uneventful and there were no casualties.

[citation needed] Late in the war an observer from Admiral Stark's office wrote:[5] It would be difficult to sum up the value of these three craft in their contribution to the [Allies].

It was not until 1981, when the Soviet submarine U 137 (Whiskey on the rocks) ran aground, that S. Moen, the director of the Royal Norwegian Navy Museum in Horten saw the abandoned Hitra in a newspaper image.

[6] Today, while still under naval command, Hitra is a museum ship home ported at Haakonsvern in Bergen, touring the Norwegian coast in the summer months.