USS Thatcher (DD-162)

USS Thatcher underway, circa 1920
History
United States
Name	USS Thatcher
Namesake	Henry K. Thatcher
Builder	Fore River Shipyard, Quincy, Massachusetts
Laid down	8 June 1918
Launched	31 August 1918
Commissioned	14 January 1919
Decommissioned	7 June 1922
Recommissioned	18 December 1939
Decommissioned	24 September 1940
Stricken	8 January 1941
Identification	DD-162
Fate	Transferred to United Kingdom, 24 September 1940
Canada
Name	HMCS Niagara
Namesake	Niagara River
Acquired	24 September 1940
Decommissioned	27 May 1946
Identification	Pennant number: I57
Honours and awards	Atlantic 1940-44
Fate	Scrapped 1946
General characteristics
Class and type	Wickes-class destroyer
Displacement	1,191 tons
Length	314 ft 4+1⁄2 in (95.822 m)
Beam	30 ft 11+1⁄4 in (9.430 m)
Draft	9 ft 2 in (2.79 m)
Speed	35 kn (65 km/h; 40 mph)
Complement	122 officers and enlisted
Armament	4 × 4 in (102 mm)/50 guns 2 × 3 in (76 mm)/23 guns 12 × 21 inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes

The first USS Thatcher (DD–162) was a Wickes-class destroyer in the United States Navy, later transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy as HMCS Niagara.

Construction and career

United States Navy

Named for Admiral

assumed command.

Following shakedown, Thatcher operated with the

, Portugal.

Upon completion of this duty, the destroyer—reclassified as DD-162 on 17 July 1920—resumed her routine training operations off the eastern seaboard before heading west in the autumn of 1921 to join the

, conducting exercises and training cruises off the west coast until decommissioned at San Diego on 7 June 1922.

Thatcher remained laid-up at San Diego through the summer of 1939. War broke out in Europe on 1 September 1939, when German troops invaded Poland. Thatcher was recommissioned at San Diego on 18 December 1939 and conducted shakedown and training evolutions off the west coast until transferred to the Atlantic the following spring. Transiting the Panama Canal on 1 April 1940, a month before the situation in Europe became critical when Germany began her blitzkrieg against France and the Low Countries, Thatcher subsequently conducted neutrality patrols and training cruises off the east coast and in the Gulf of Mexico through the summer of 1940.

The European situation took a drastic turn with the fall of France in June 1940. British destroyer forces in the wake of the Norwegian campaign and the evacuation of Dunkirk found themselves thinly spread—especially after Italy entered the war on Germany's side. Prime Minister Winston Churchill appealed to the United States for help.

In response,

and her operations with Destroyer Division 69 for transfer to the Royal Canadian Navy, which had been allocated six of the "50 ships that saved the world," as these vessels came to be known.

As such, Thatcher and her five sisters arrived at

on 24 September 1940, Thatcher was struck from the Navy list on 8 January 1941.

Royal Canadian Navy

Renamed HMCS Niagara following the Canadian practice of naming destroyers after Canadian rivers (but with deference to the U.S. origin), after the

.

A Lockheed Hudson bomber, flying from Kaldaðarnes, 30 miles (48 km) southeast of Reykjavík, Iceland, located U-570 running on the surface off the Icelandic coast on 27 August 1941. The Hudson attacked the U-boat with depth charges, damaging the enemy craft so severely that she could not submerge. Soon, some of the German crew appeared on deck displaying a large white cloth — possibly a bed sheet — indicating that they had surrendered. Patently unable to capture the submarine herself, the Hudson radioed for help.

Niagara sped to the scene and arrived at 08:20 on 28 August 1941. Rough weather initially hampered the operation but eventually, by 18:00, Niagara had placed a prize crew aboard the submarine and had taken U-570 in tow. During the operation, she also took the 43-man crew of the enemy craft on board. Towed to Þorlákshöfn, Iceland, the U-boat eventually served in the Royal Navy as HMS Graph.

In January 1942, Niagara escorted the tempest-battered Danish merchantman Triton into

.

The destroyer subsequently underwent boiler repairs at

from May to August 1942 before resuming coastwise convoy operations between Halifax and New York and escort duty in the western Atlantic. Another refit at Pictou came in June and October 1943, before she continued her coastwise convoy escort missions through 1944.

Niagara became a torpedo-firing ship — first at Halifax and later at Saint John, New Brunswick — from the spring of 1945 until the end of World War II in mid-August 1945, training torpedomen. Decommissioned on 15 September 1945, Niagara was turned over to the War Assets Corporation on 27 May 1946 and broken up for scrap soon thereafter.

Notes

References

• Milner, Marc (1985). North Atlantic Run. Naval Institute Press.
  ISBN 0-87021-450-0
  .
•  This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships. The entry can be found here.

External links

• NavSource.org DD-162