HMT La Nantaise – FY360 (1945)

HMT La Nantaise began life as the British steam trawler St. Arcadius, built in 1933 by Cook, Welton & Gemmell Ltd of Beverley for T. Hamling & Co. Ltd of Hull. She was a steel screw trawler of 403 gross tons, measuring about 46.2 metres long, with a 7.8 metre beam and 4.1 metre depth, driven by a triple-expansion engine by C. D. Holmes & Co. Ltd. Requisitioned by the Admiralty in 1939 as FY135, she was later sold or transferred to the French Navy as La Nantaise, then seized by Britain at Plymouth on 3 July 1940 and recommissioned into the Royal Navy as FY360. Because wartime ownership was apparently a game of pass-the-parcel, only with depth charges.

By 1945 she was serving as an anti-submarine trawler under Skipper Lieutenant Sidney John Cory, DSC, RNR. On 8 July 1945, two months after VE Day, La Nantaise sank in The Downs, near the Goodwin Sands Lightship, after a collision with the SS Helen Crest. Records list 11 lost from a crew of 25, with survivors rescued by the tug Empire Henchman. For divers, this is a compact but poignant Channel wreck: a fishing trawler turned patrol vessel, French in name, British in service, lost after the war in Europe had supposedly finished. The sea, naturally, did not read the memo.