Qualla: HMS Tyler

HMS Tyler: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

She was American steel with a British crew, and on the morning of 21 January 1945 she pulled one surviving Norwegian sailor out of the cold water off Bardsey Island. The Norwegian merchant ship Galatea had been torpedoed by U-1051 hours earlier; the rest of her people had not made it. The man HMS Tyler picked up that morning was the only one of his shipmates the Irish Sea returned. Six days later, the same Tyler helped sink U-1172. The Battle of the Atlantic was being won, one ship at a time, by anonymous frigates doing exactly this kind of work.

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HMS Tyler: Made in Hingham

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bethlehem-Hingham Shipyard in Hingham, Massachusetts, sat on the south shore of Boston Harbor and produced 227 destroyer escorts during the Second World War. The shipyard had been built from nothing in 1942 on what had been a salt marsh; by 1945 it employed more than 23,000 p...

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HMS Tyler: From DE-567 to K576

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lend-Lease, the United States' programme of supplying war materiel to allied nations against deferred payment, sent 78 destroyer escorts to the Royal Navy between 1943 and 1945. In British service they became the Captain class. DE-567 was commissioned simultaneously into the RN a...

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HMS Tyler: Normandy and After

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tyler's first major operation was the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. She was one of the escort frigates that screened the seaward flank of the cross-Channel convoys feeding the beachhead — anti-submarine work in the most heavily patrolled and contested waters of the war. Thro...

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HMS Tyler: The Galatea Survivor

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 21 January 1945, U-1051 torpedoed and sank the Norwegian merchant ship Galatea off Bardsey Island. Tyler arrived at the position later that morning and recovered one man from the water — the sole survivor. His name does not appear in the Wikipedia entry for Tyler, but he was N...

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HMS Tyler: Going Home

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When the war ended Tyler was sent back. She steamed across the Atlantic — an unremarkable crossing in unremarkable weather — and arrived at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on 31 October 1945. The Royal Navy formally handed her back to the United States Navy on 12 November. She wa...

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