Q-ship
[1][2] Short for Queenstown in Ireland, as Haulbowline Dockyard in Cork Harbour was responsible for the conversion of many mercantile steamers to armed decoy ships in World War One, although the majority appear to have been converted in larger navy yards such as Devonport.
Once the U-boat was vulnerable, perhaps even gulled further by pretence of some crew dressed as civilian mariners "abandoning ship" and taking to a boat, the Q-ship would drop its panels and immediately open fire with its deck guns.
The following month an even smaller converted fishing trawler renamed HM Armed Smack Inverlyon successfully destroyed UB-4 near Great Yarmouth.
The British crew fired nine rounds from their 3-pounder into UB-4 at close range, sinking her with the loss of all hands despite the attempt of Inverlyon's commander to rescue one surviving German submariner.
The commanding officer, allegedly fearing that they might scuttle her, ordered the survivors to be shot in the water and sent a boarding party to kill all who had made it aboard.
New Zealanders Lieutenant Andrew Dougall Blair and Sub-Lieutenant William Edward Sanders faced three U-boats simultaneously in Helgoland (Q.17) while becalmed and without engines or wireless.
Helgoland, while the ship sustained heavy shellfire, waited until the submarine was within 80 yards (73 m), whereupon he hoisted the White Ensign and Prize opened fire.
According to Warships of World War I by H. M. LeFleming, the Royal Navy converted 58 from merchant ships (18 were sunk by U-boats), in addition to 40 Flower-class sloops and 20 PC-boats.
The Flower-class sloops were designed on merchant ship lines thus making them easily adaptable for conversion to Q-ships, 39 being completed as such while the other was converted after being torpedoed.
[8] After the war, it was concluded that the effectiveness of the Q-ship initiative was greatly overrated, diverting skilled seamen from other duties without sinking enough U-boats to justify the strategy.
The German Atlantis, which sank a number of ships with a total tonnage of 145,960 t including the Norwegian tanker Tirranna on 10 June 1940, was more of a merchant raider.
[13] Nine Q-ships were commissioned by the Royal Navy in September and October 1939 for work in the North Atlantic:[14] Prunella and Edgehill were torpedoed and sunk on 21 and 29 June 1940 without even sighting a U-boat.
[14] By 12 January 1942, the British Admiralty's intelligence community had noted a "heavy concentration" of U-boats off the "North American seaboard from New York to Cape Race" and passed along this fact to the United States Navy.
That day, U-123 under Kapitänleutnant Reinhard Hardegen, torpedoed and sank the British steamship Cyclops, inaugurating Paukenschlag (literally, "a strike on the kettledrum" and sometimes referred to in English as "Operation Drumbeat").
King, sent a coded dispatch to Commander, Eastern Sea Frontier (CESF), requesting immediate consideration of the manning and fitting-out of "Queen" ships to be operated as an antisubmarine measure.
Five vessels were acquired and converted secretly at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Kittery, Maine:[16] The careers of all five ships were almost entirely unsuccessful and very short, with USS Atik sunk on its first patrol with all hands on 26 March 1942.
Anacapa was also withdrawn from Q-ship duty in 1943 and served out the remainder of World War II as an armed transport in the South Pacific and Aleutian Islands.
She was renamed HMS President in 1922 and served as the London Division RNR drill ship until 1988, when she was sold privately and remains moored at King's Reach on the Thames.
The Alfred Noyes poem "Kilmeny" is about a Q-ship, a British trawler equipped with two deck guns, that destroys a German submarine during World War I.
In Ernest Hemingway's novel Islands in the Stream, the main character Thomas Hudson commands a Q-ship for the US Navy around Cuba as he hunts the survivors of a sunken German U-boat.
Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano (1947) tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, on the Day of the Dead, 2 November 1938.
