SAS Skilpad
South African WWII Navy Vessel
SAS Skilpad was a minelayer vessel of the South African Navy during and after the Second World War. She was launched as the German trawler Polaris and after being captured by the Allies in 1940, she was commissioned into the Royal Navy as a war prize and renamed HMS Spindrift. During the course of the war she was transferred to the South African Naval Forces, being based in Saldanha Bay and later at Durban. After being laid up for several years after the end of the war, she sank at her moorings in Durban during a gale in 1953, leading to her being decommissioned and sold for scrap in 1957.
History
Polaris was built in the Germany in 1936 as a general purpose commercial trawler and was requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine in 1939 and converted into a lookout trawler. She was then fitted with concealed torpedo tubes and the Kriegsmarine added superheaters to the boilers to improve speed for short "sprints" as may be needed. She was intended to put to sea with general trawlers in the hope of attacking any Allied shipping that came within torpedo range. She was captured by HMS Arrow off Norway on 26 April 1940 and escorted back to Scapa Flow as a war prize by HMS Griffin.
As a war prize, Polaris was taken over by the Royal Navy and commissioned as HMS Spindrift and was initially used for submarine crew training at Portland but was later converted to a
controlled minelayer, emerging from the dockyards in January 1942. She was transferred to Saldanha Bay on the Cape West Coast under command of the Royal Navy South Atlantic station in Simon's Town, being responsible for laying controlled minefield defences in the South African coastal waters.
The public source identifies “SAS Skilpad” as south African WWII Navy Vessel. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Skilpad, South and African.
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This entry incorporates text from “SAS Skilpad” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.