Memorial Plaque - H.M.T.S. Alert.
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MeerRescue
N 51° 21.550 E 001° 26.719
31U E 391756 N 5690914
A Memorial Plaque at Broadstairs Harbour,Kent, in memory of the crew of H.M.T.S. Alert, a cable laying ship, torpedoed in the English Channel in 1945 with the loss of all of her 59 crew and 1 civilian.
Waymark Code: WMENRK
Location: United Kingdom
Date Posted: 06/20/2012
Views: 2
This Memorial Plaque is to the crew of H.M.T.S.
Alert, a cable laying ship, torpedoed in the English Channel in 1945 with the
loss of all of her 59 crew and 1 civilian. The memorial plaque was unveiled in a
ceremony held on February 24th 2012 at Broadstairs Harbour, Kent. The prefix of
H.M.T.S. stood for His Majesty's Telegraph Ship - This prefix was used for ships
owned by the General Post Office before it ceased to be a Government department
in 1969. The memorial plaque, which can be found attached to the former Lifeboat
Station in Harbour Street, Broadstairs, Kent, reads;
In memory of / Cable Ship Alert / and her gallant crew /
lost off this coast / 24th February 1945 / May they never be forgotten
The following is taken from the Kent
Fallen website: The entry below can be viewed
here.
Built by Swan, Hunter and Wigham Richardson of
Wallsend on the Tyne in 1918, the 941 ton vessel H.M.T.S. Alert was working off
the Dodman, North Goodwin Sands in the Straits of Dover, undertaking repairs to
the Dumpton Gap, Kent to La Panne, Belgium undersea telegraph cable, when she
was torpedoed by a German submarine and sunk with the loss of all of her 59
hands.
It was not one of the large ocean going type of
submarines which sank the Alert, but a Seehund (Seal) type. These submarines had
a displacement of 17 tons when submerged, a crew of only two and carried two
underslung G7e type torpedoes. The Seehund had the range of 300 kilometres at 7
knots, and could attack on the surface in weather up to 4 on the Beufort Scale,
but had to be almost literally stationary for undertaking submerged torpedo
attacks. About fifty Seehund submarines were built which had an additional fuel
storage that gave them a range of 300 miles at 7 knots surfaced and 63 miles at
3 knots submerged. These types of midget German submarines were involved in a
number of limited actions off Dungeness Point on the south Kent coast. On the
morning of 24 February 1945 the two man crew of the U-5330, Oberleutnant zur
See, Klaus Sparbrodt, and Masch Mt. Günter Jahnke claimed to have sunk a
corvette northeast of the South Falls. Initially it was assumed by the
Kriegsmarine that they had sunk the 1,050 ton French destroyer La Combattante,
but this ship had been mined off the Humber estuary on the night of 23/24
February, by a mine laid on 16 February 1945 by German Motor Torpedo Boats
(Schnellboots or E-boats), and the real victim of U-5330 was in fact the British
G.P.O. cable layer ‘Alert.’
Arguably one of the Post Office cable laying
ship Alert’s most important contributions to the Allied war effort took place
surrounded in secrecy in Kent during May 1942. It had been realised that with
her shallow draft and the crews’ expertise gained over many years cable laying
for the General Post Office, that the vessel would be an ideal choice to take
part in the embryonic Pipeline Under the Ocean (PLUTO) experiments. Resulting
from the decision to use the Alert, she laid a fuel pipe across the river
Medway, Kent, and fuel was pumped
successfully at a pressure of 600lbs. per square inch. From observations and
data collected the programme of experimentation and modification continued, and
by the next month the system was ready for deep water trials which were
conducted by another larger
vessel in the Clyde estuary, and of course in June 1944 PLUTO proved to be
invaluable.