Forty-three British sailors were killed in the small hours of 26 January 1945, when an acoustic torpedo blew the stern off a frigate twenty miles from the Skerries. Four were officers. Thirty-nine were ratings - the petty officers and seamen who keep a warship running, men in their teens and twenties whose names did not make the obituary pages. Their ship had been built in Boston, named for a Royal Navy captain, and sailed under two flags in eighteen months. She did not survive her first winter in the Irish Sea.
HMS Manners began life on 14 August 1943 as an unnamed United States Navy destroyer escort, DE-523, laid down at the Boston Navy Yard. She was an Evarts-class hull, one of dozens built fast and cheap to fight a war that needed more escorts than the Atlantic could hold. Sara Fischer - wife of the yard's superintendent Captain Hugo Fischer - smashed a bottle of champagne against her bow on 24 September 1943. Three months later the United States handed her to the United Kingdom under Lend-Lease and the Royal Navy commissioned her as HMS Manners (K568) on the same day. She crossed the Atlantic into a war she would fight under British command, with British officers and a mostly British crew, for the time she had left.
Manners spent 1944 doing the unglamorous, exhausting work that won the Battle of the Atlantic: convoy escort and antisubmarine patrol in the North Atlantic. Captain-class frigates - the British name for the Evarts and similar American hulls - were not glamorous ships, but they were good ones, with stable platforms for Hedgehog and depth charges and the new acoustic gear that finally let escorts find U-boats reliably. On 26 October 1944 Manners accidentally rammed and sank the Royal Norwegian Navy corvette HNoMS Rose in poor visibility in the North Atlantic, a reminder that the sea kills its own no matter whose flag flies on which mast. The crew carried that knowledge into the new year.
On the night of 26 January 1945, Manners was operating with three sister frigates - Aylmer, Bentinck, and Calder of the 4th and 5th Escort Groups - hunting a U-boat about twenty nautical miles from the Skerries, off the Isle of Man. The contact was U-1051, a Type VIIC commanded by twenty-four-year-old Oberleutnant Heinrich von Holleben on his first war patrol. The British attacked with depth charges. The U-boat fired back. A T5 acoustic torpedo - homing on the noise of Manners' propellers - exploded against her stern and broke the frigate in two. The aft section sank in minutes. Four officers and thirty-nine ratings died in the water or with the ship; fifteen more ratings were wounded. The forward section stayed afloat, listing and broken-backed, and somehow survived the rest of the night.
Aylmer, Bentinck, and Calder counterattacked the U-boat, forced her to the surface with more depth charges, and sank her by ramming. All forty-seven of von Holleben's men were lost. The surviving forward half of HMS Manners was taken under tow and brought into Barrow-in-Furness on 27 January 1945 - the great shipbuilding port at the mouth of the Walney Channel, just visible from cruising altitude on any modern Liverpool-to-Belfast flight path. She was declared beyond economical repair, a constructive total loss. The Royal Navy decommissioned her and returned what remained to the U.S. Navy on 8 November 1945. The Americans struck her from the register in December and sold her for scrap a year later, to a Greek electricity company. She was broken up at Piraeus in 1947 - a long way from the Boston yard where she had been built four years earlier, and a long way from the Irish Sea where her stern still rests.
HMS Manners' last engagement and the loss of her stern section occurred at approximately 53°39'N, 5°23'W, about 20 nautical miles from the Skerries off the northern tip of Anglesey. The position is in the busy Irish Sea air corridor between Dublin and Liverpool. Best viewing altitudes 3,000-10,000 ft on clear days; the Skerries themselves are a useful visual landmark, a cluster of low islets with a white lighthouse just off the Anglesey coast. Nearby aerodromes: Anglesey/Valley (EGOV) 25 nm south, Isle of Man Ronaldsway (EGNS) 30 nm north, Liverpool (EGGP) 60 nm east, Barrow Walney Island (EGNL) 70 nm east-northeast.