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Warship Wednesday 14 October 2026: The Hard Luck Empress of the Black Sea

Posted on October 14, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies from 1833 to 1954, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life and a tale all their own, sometimes taking them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday 14 October 2026: The Hard Luck Empress of the Black Sea

Above we see the Tsar Nicholas II touring the pride of his fleet, the newly commissioned dreadnought Imperatritsa Mariya (Empress Maria), her massive Obukhovskii 12″/52 Pattern 1907 guns framing the photo.

Just 15 months after she joined the fleet, she was lost, some 110 years ago this month, in an incident that is still seen by some as controversial.

Tsarist Dreadnought efforts

The Russians lost an incredible 17 pre-dreadnoughts and coastal battleships in two squadrons against the Japanese in the inferno in and around the Tsushima Straits and Port Arthur in 1904-05. Keep in mind this is more than twice the blow that the U.S. suffered to its battle line at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Broken hell Russian Battleship Orel leading 2nd Pacific Squadron last daylight hours during battle of Tsushima Alexander Zyakin 1905

These included eight sunk for good:

Navarin
Sisoy Velikiy
Borodino
Alexander III
Suvorov
Petropavlovsk
Sevastopol
Osliabia

And nine captured after Tsushima or raised from the mud at Port Arthur, then used as trophy ships:

Nikolai I
Oshakov
Senyavin
Apraksin
Pobeda
Poltava
Orel
Peresvet
Retvizan

Sure, as some were grossly obsolete (the three Admiral Ushakov class vessels, for example) or ancient (Nikolai I had been ordered in the 1880s and could never make more than 15 knots even when new), starting with a clean slate in 1906 had a benefit to the Russian Admiralty entering the post-Dreadnought era.

Plus, they had earned reams of tactical knowledge about battleship design defects the worst way, at the cost of 6,000 sailors’ lives.

Left were the damaged French-built Tsesarevich (hit by 13 large shells and would need significant reconstruction), which was interned in China, 10 that were locked into the Black Sea by the pre-Montreux Convention Bosporus (Ekaterina II, Chesma, Sinop, Georgiy Pobedonosets, Dvenadtsat’ Apostolov, Tri Sviatitelia, Rostislav, Yevstafiy, Ioann Zlatoust, and the mutinous Potemkin), while the Baltic had three ships left that only survived because they had been incomplete when the war started (Andrei Pervozvanny, Imperator Pavel I, and Slava) and the old Alexandr II.

As the Baltic was the most battlewagon poor (the idea of a great Pacfic Fleet had been abandoned, replaced by a miserly Siberian Flotilla), the new 24,000-ton Gangut class (Sevastopol and Petropavlovsk from Baltic Works; Gangut and Poltava from the New Admiralty Yard) which carried a dozen new 12″/52 Obukhov guns in four triple turrets, could steam at 23-knots and were swathed in an 8-inch belt (earning them a battlecruiser brand in Jane’s) were ordered first in 1909 followed by the four massive 32,500-ton Borodino class battlecruisers (12 14″/45 guns, 12-inch belt, 26.5 knots) ordered in 1912.

The Imperial Russian Navy battleship Gangut on the Neva River, in June 1914, before the acceptance trials

The Ganguts were roughly equivalent to the German Helgolands, British Colossus, and American Florida-class 12-inch battleships of the era, and faster than any of the aforementioned, albeit with lighter armor.

All were to be built in yards around St. Petersburg with significant French (loans), German (Krupp armor, Siemens-Schuckert generators, and a shelved Blohm & Voss design), Italian (Vittorio Cuniberti design input) and most importantly, British assistance (machinery designed by John Brown & Company to include Parsons steam turbines and Yarrow small-tube boilers along with Barr & Stroud rangefinders and Pollen Argo range clocks, with Vickers supplying design help with main gun production) assistance with Holy Russian twists such as icebreaking bows, linear (lineinoe raspolozhenie) rather that superfiring main battery turrets, and elaborate Eastern Orthodox chapels.

As for the hate of superfiring turrets and their tall barbettes, the Russians believed that spacing the main-gun turrets and their magazines as far apart as the hull allowed would reduce the risk of a catastrophic ammunition explosion, lower the ship’s silhouette, and improve stability. Read that last sentence twice.

Via Jane’s, circa 1921 edition, you have the Ganguts followed by the Borodinos:

Meanwhile, for service in the Black Sea, the 1911 Naval Program authorized three new battlewagons constructed along its ancient shores, Imperatritsa Mariya and Imperator Alexandr III from Russud in Mykolaiv, and Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya from the Naval Yard (ONZiV) at Nikolayev. The cost was between 27.7 million gold rubles for the Russud-built ships and 29.8 million for Ekaterina. Compare this to the 37 million ruble average cost per hull of the slightly larger Ganguts.

The Imperatritsa Mariyas were slightly smaller (23,000 tons and 551 feet oal vs 24,800 tons and 594 feet) than the Ganguts, but better protected (10-inch belt rather than eight-inch), and could be seen as a modification of the general concept.

Imperatritsa Mariya. An artist’s impression of the ship, copied from the book “Rossiiski IMP. Flot” of 1913 by Jitkov, courtesy of Mr. Boris. V. Drashpil of Margate, Fla., NH 95283

Like the Ganguts and Borodinos, the Mariyas used Yarrow boilers and Parsons/Brown-Curtis turbines, though with fewer boilers, giving 26,000shp rather than the 42,000 seen in the Ganguts, and a more pokey 21 knots rather than the Ganguts‘ 24.

Of note, their Yarrow boilers were built under license in Kharkiv. Like the Ganguts, they could spray oil over the coal to superheat it, with oil supplied by nearby Maikop and Baku fields in the Caucasus.

American-style lattice masts were planned, but to speed things up, simple pole masts were used instead.

Wanting something bigger than the 12″/52 Obukhovs as ordered for the Gangut class, the 14-inch guns meant for the Borodinos were still under development, so it was decided just to settle for the dozen 12s with magazine space for 100 shells per gun. They were arranged in much the same linear, spread-out fashion as with the Ganguts, using the same Pulitov-made MK-3-12 triple turrets protected by 10 inches of armor.

Making 12-inch gun mechanisms, Nikolaevski plant, for Russian battleships to include the Imperatritsa Mariya class

Imperatritsa Mariya’s ship’s chaplain seated on deck during this ship’s brief operational career near one of her 12″/52 turrets. Courtesy of Mr. Boris V. Drashpil of Margate, Florida NH 100054

After post-war tests on captured shells, the British admitted they could fire a 1,038-pound M1911 APC shell to 22,600 yards and that it outperformed their own 12-inch Mark VIIa Greenboys. They were thought capable of defeating 13.85 inches of armor at 10,000 yards– and nothing in the Black Sea had that much armor!

The secondary battery consisted of 20 casemated 5.1″/55 M1913 B-7 Obukhov/Vickers guns on a protected gun deck, rather than the older 6″/45 Pattern 1892 Obukhov/Canet guns seen in the rest of the fleet.

Counter-boat defense was provided by four 3″/48 Canet guns and four 47mm Hotchkiss guns, while a torpedo battery of four small 17.7-inch fixed tubes existed for a dozen Model 45-12 steam torpedoes which had a 2,200-yard range at 43 knots.

To keep the four separate magazines cool, the ship installed a refrigeration plant with two large 10,500 sq. ft. Westinghouse-LeBlanc condensers designed by the G. A. Lessner firm, aiming to keep them at a crisp 59 degrees F if needed, a must in the humid subtropical Black Sea region.

With the Ottomans ordering two modern dreadnoughts (Fatih Sultan Mehmed and Reşadiye) from Vickers in 1911 and, the next year, assuming the contract for a third from Armstrong (the Brazilian Rio de Janeiro, renamed Sultan Osman I), the Russians ordered a fourth, improved Mariya from Russud in 1913. The planned Imperator Nikolay I would have exceeded 27,000 tons and carried a better armor scheme, plus the additional horsepower to manage it, but she was never completed.

As it was, the Turks never saw any of their British dreadnoughts, anyway.

This all brings us to…

Meet Imperatritsa Mariya

Our subject was at least the third warship in the Russian Imperial Navy to carry the name of Empress Mariya Feodorovna Romanov, nee Duchess Sophie Dorothee of Württemberg, who was the strong hand behind the very young Alexander I, leader of the vast Russian Empire after the death of her husband (his father), the detested Tsar Paul I, in 1801.

The first was a two-decked, 84-gun third-rate ship of the line launched in 1827 and served in the Black Sea Fleet until 1843. The second, also an 84-gun man-o-war, was key to the Russian battle line at the Battle of Sinop against the Ottomans in 1853, serving as Admiral Pavel Nakhimov’s flagship.

Nakhimov’s Imperatritsa Mariya under sail, as painted by Alexei Hanzen in 1916 on the occasion of the battleship with the same name joining the fleet. The Khrabryi-class ship of the line was the last all-sail-powered ship of the line built for the Russian Navy. At Sinop, she fired an amazing 2,128 rounds and shrugged off 60 Turkish hits. She was later scuttled during the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, her guns and sailors used to strengthen the city’s defenses.

Laid down at the Russud yard at Nikolayev on 30 October 1911 alongside sister ship Alexandr III, our Mariya took to the water two years later on 1 November 1913.

Her obvious patron was the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar), wife of the late Tsar Alexander III and mother of Nicky.

Imperatritsa Mariya in dry dock NH 84833

Changing the Marine guard detail aboard the Russian battleship Imperatritsa Mariya during World War I. Note the men apparently out of uniform in the left background; these may be civilian dockyard workers on or about the ship’s commissioning. The rifles appear to be Type 30 Arisakas, of which the Japanese sold 600,000 to the Tsar during the Great War. Courtesy of Mr. Boris V. Drapshil of Margate, Florida NH 100131

Alexandr III would follow her down the ways in April 1914.

War!

Delivered to Sevastopol on 30 June 1915, with the Turks very much in the war and the German battlecruiser Goeben running amok in the Black Sea, Mariya was rushed to sea trials, which proved the low-lying dreadnought was a bit of a hog underway, her bow more of a plow.

The battleship Empress Maria passes the Chersonesos Lighthouse 20 August 1915. Note how low to the water she is!

Also, her air-conditioned magazines would have been a welcome relief when the average summer temperature in the Crimea was in the upper 80s and humid, but they didn’t work.

To mitigate the problem, she was lightly loaded forward, trimming anchor chain and reducing No. 1 magazine stowage from 300 12-inch and 980 5.1-inch to 210 and 400, respectively, while keeping her coal and oil bunkers well under their 3,000- and 720-ton full loads.

Even with a half-bunker load, she could still make 1,500nm at 12 knots, more than enough for a short 700-mile roundtrip sortie across the Black Sea to bombard Trabzon, Samsun, or the approaches to the Bosporus.

Mariya’s first skipper was Capt. Casimir Porembski, a 43-year-old Polish-born regular who entered the Naval Academy in 1889 and served as a senior officer on the cruiser Novik during the war with Japan. He reported aboard in November 1913 while she was still under construction and remained her commander through March 1916, in charge of the Black Sea’s most powerful battleship.

By September 1915, she was operational as the flagship of the 2nd Battleship Squadron, alongside the pre-dreadnoughts Panteleimon (ex-Potempkin), Yevstafiy, and Ioann Zlatoust.

She saw her first combat in a raid with her squadron along the Turkish coast at Zonguldak (13-15 October), bombarding Varna (2-4 November) and Euxinograd (6-8 November) Bulgaria, and then provided her 12-inch guns as muscle for the Trebizond operation which saw 15,000 Russians landed at Rizem on 5 March 1916 to envelope the left flank of the 3rd Turkish Army, which at the time was fighting the invasion Russian Caucasian Army, and eventually capture Trebizond by 18 April.

Afterward, the Tsar and Tsarevitch, Empress, and three Grand Duchesses reviewed her in May 1916, leaving a large collection of images from the event.

Czar Nicholas II visiting Black Sea Fleet Dreadnought battleship Императрица Мария Imperatritsa Mariya May 1916 Maria Russian

Russian battleship Empress Maria Imperatritsa Mariya Sevastopol 14 May 1916

Imperatritsa Mariya during the Imperial review, May 12- 14, 1916.

Imperatritsa Mariya during the Imperial review, May 12- 14, 1916. Note the minesweeping bowsprit

Emperor Nicholas II’s visit to the battleship Empress Maria, Sevastopol, 1916. Note her torpedo nets are stowed.

On 8 July 1916, VADM Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak, who had made a name for himself in mine operations against the Germans in the Baltic and would later lead the Siberian theatre of the Russian Civil War, arrived at Sevastopol and assumed command of the Black Sea Fleet, making Mariya his flagship.

Russian Imperatritsa Maryia class battleship

Just days later, he was aboard Mariya off the Turkish coast when they came within 90 cables (about nine miles) of the German light cruiser Breslau (Turkish Midilli), which immediately used her better speed to avoid the Russians’ incoming 12-inch shells and make her getaway in a smoke screen. Still, it was the last Black Sea sortie by Breslau and/or Goeben in 1916, which Russian scholars generally attribute to a lack of appetite for tangling with a proper battlewagon.

It was a precursor to the reason Kolchak was sent south in the first place– the Bosforskuyu operatsiyu, or Bosporus Operation, the planned November 1916 landings to capture the Eastern straits by the newly formed Separate Black Sea Naval Infantry Division under Maj. Gen. Alexander Svechin, backed by two Russian army corps, the 29th and 40th.

In the lead-up to the operation, Kolchak ordered 17 minefields laid near the Bosphorus with 4,000 mines deployed, effectively sealing the Turks and Germans in the straits.

Kolchak’s plan hinged on two dreadnoughts, Mariya and her sister Yekaterina Velikaya (Catherine the Great), which would enter service at the end of October, with their combined 24 12-inch guns, leading his pre-dreadnoughts and four seaplane tenders (hydro-aviation transports).

However, Kolchak’s plan soon hit two major roadblocks.

First, when Romania entered the war in late August and collapsed by early December, the two army corps that were to land after his marines were rushed instead into the Danube Delta to join Sakharov’s forces propping up that weak ally.

Then Mariya exploded a half-mile from shore at the Sevastopol roadstead at 0615 on 20 October 1916. The explosion dislodged the forward turret. The conning tower, foremast, and funnel were blown into the air, and the upper deck, up to the second turret, was exposed, killing 320 of her 1,100 crew and sending a 1,000-foot column of black smoke from her bow.

Kolchak, who was ashore, rushed to the scene and was reportedly aboard her 15 minutes after, supervising the flooding of her remaining magazines and evacuation of the 85 injured. He also ordered her newly commissioned sister, Yekaterina Velikaya, and the old Yevstafiy towed to a safer location if the rest of the ship went up in flame.

Suffering from 25 subsequent explosions as the fires spread down her hull, igniting coal, fuel oil, and ammunition, she capsized keel-up at a depth of 8.5 fathoms at 0717.

Cruiser Kagul next to the capsized Russian battleship Imperatritsa Maryia Maria Mariya in Sevastopol

Her skipper at the time, Capt. Ivan Semenovich Kuznetsov, was relieved and put on trial pending an investigation into the loss of his proud ship.

Some believe the “Kontrol-K” spy ring, led by German intelligence officer Viktor Eduardovich Verman, sabotaged the Russian battlewagon. FSB archives (the successor to the KGB) state that Verman was supposedly awarded Germany’s Iron Cross 2nd Class for the deed. He was rolled up in 1932 by the OGPU and executed.

However, Mariya was most likely lost in a magazine explosion, a sadly common hazard for battleships of the era.

Similarly, the French battleships Iéna (1907) and Liberté (1911), the Japanese Kawachi (1918), British HMS Vanguard (1917), and the Italian Leonardo da Vinci (1916) all perished in magazine explosions while in friendly ports. Bagged nitrocellulose cordite, chemically sensitive to temperature, and combustible coal dust inside steel hulls proved notoriously volatile.

Epilogue

While Kolchak’s Bosphoros Operation was kicked down the road to May 1917, when it was thought Mariya’s sister, Imperator Alexandr III, would be complete, the Revolution intervened, and the admiral was instead sent on a naval mission to America on behalf of the Provisional Government to soft shoe for military aid.

By the time the Reds took over the government in the October Revolution, the effects on the fleet were quick, and Mariya’s last skipper, Kuznetsov, was led out and shot along the seawall in Sevastopol along with a group of senior officers.

Her first commander, the Pole Porembsky, was cashiered and escaped the hellfire of the Russian Civil War, given a general’s rank in the newly formed Polish Army, and later transitioned to the Polish Navy, which he led by 1925 as a vice admiral.

Porembsky died in Warsaw in 1933 and is considered a father of the modern Polish Navy.

As for the hulk of Mariya, they raised and refloated her upside down, slowly, from November 1917 to May 1918, by which time Russia had left the Great War, and the Germans were in Sevastopol on occupation duties.

Battlecruiser Yavuz in Sevastopol Bay, 1918, with the salvage operations of Russian Battleship Empress Maria to the left

April 1919 Russian battleship Black Sea Fleet Dreadnought Императрица Мария Imperatritsa Mariya upside down Sevastopol from French Danton Cl Vergniaud

The battleship Empress Maria after docking and pumping out water, 1919.

Mariya was towed to the large drydock at Sevastopol in August 1918, where she was stripped of useful material, including most of her 5.1″/55s, which were quickly used to arm river gunboats and barges during the Russian Civil War. She was eventually scrapped by 1927.

While some sources claim her 12-inch guns ended up in coastal artillery emplacements, that does not seem to hold water. All four turrets and a full dozen guns fell to the seabed after she turned turtle in 1916 and remained there until at least the mid-1930s, when the ERPRON salvage group pulled them up and likely scrapped many of them in poor condition.

Soviet myth had it that:

Shortly before the Great Patriotic War, Epronov’s crews raised these turrets, and in 1939 the battleship’s 305mm guns were mounted near Sevastopol on the renowned 30th Battery, part of the 1st Coastal Defense Artillery Division. The battery heroically defended Sevastopol; on June 17, 1942, during the final assault on the city, it fired at the Nazi hordes that had broken through into the Belbek Valley. Having expended all its shells, the battery fired blanks, holding back the enemy advance until June 25. Thus, more than a quarter of a century after firing at the Kaiser’s cruisers Goeben and Breslau, the battleship Empress Maria’s guns spoke again, raining down 305-mm shells, this time on Hitler’s troops.

However, although the four 12″/52s were of the same type as those salvaged from Mariya, they were purpose-built for the coast artillery task and shipped down to the Crimea in 1928 for the Maxim Gorky Battery 30.

They still exist, served until 1968, and are preserved in a museum.

The Soviets managed to recondition three of Mariya’s salvaged guns and returned them to service as railway guns. One even survived a stint in Finnish service.

In 1938, the Red Army built three railway guns using the 305mm (12-inch) guns from the sunken battleship “Imperatritsa Mariya”. They were used in the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish war, and in late 1941 they took part in the defense of the Soviet naval base on Finland’s Hanko peninsula. The Soviets disabled them when they evacuated the base, but Finnish specialists later restored them using guns from the withdrawn Russian battleship “Imperator Aleksandr III”. After the war, the Soviets took them over and kept them operational until 1991. On display in ‘Victory Park’, Museum of the Great Patriotic War, Poklonnaya Hill, Moscow. Via WikiCommons

As for her sisters, Yekaterina Velikaya became Svobodnaya Rossiya (Free Russia) after the Tsar fell, and the Reds towed her from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk in April 1918 to keep the functional battleship out of German hands. She was later scuttled in June, sunk by torpedoes from the Red destroyer Kerch, and later salvaged.

The battleship Empress Catherine the Great guarding transports, 1917

Imperator Alexandr III was never fully completed and was renamed Volia after the Revolution. Captured by the Germans in 1918, she was put in limited service to the Kaiserliche Marine as SMS Volya before passing to Allied control after the Armistice. Transferred to the White Russian fleet, she served as General Alekseyev, its flagship, then sailed into exile with Wrangel in November 1920 to Bizerte, Tunisia, where the French interned her until she was scrapped in 1936, her 12-inch guns going on to circle the globe.

General Alekseyev, photographed at Bizerte, French North Africa, where the ship was interned in 1920 as a unit of the “White Russian” Squadron that departed the Black Sea after the civil war. The ship was built as the Imperator Alexandr III, renamed Volia in 1917, and SMS Volya in 1918. Courtesy of Mr. Boris. V. Drashpil of Margate, Fla., 1983. NH 95288

Imperator Nikolai I was launched in October 1916, and the work on her was suspended the following October. Never brought into service, the Reds renamed her Demokratiya (Democracy). She fell into German hands in 1918, then the Allies destroyed her in 1919 to prevent her from falling back into the Reds’ hands, and the Soviets finally broke her up in 1927.

This left the Russians without a functional Black Sea dreadnought for over a decade until the Gangut-class Parizhskaya Kommuna (“Paris Commune,” formerly Sevastopol) was transferred from the Baltic in 1930.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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To the Frontiers of the World!

Posted on October 12, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

With today being today, you knew this was coming.

I give you the Baltimore-class heavy cruiser USS Columbus (CA-74) at New York Harbor for Columbus Day 1945.

At first, you could almost mistake her for a slimmed-down Iowa-class battleship. That was easy to do with a ship that had a full-load displacement of some 17,000 tons, ran nearly 700 feet long, had a very similar 3+3+3 main gun layout, two funnels, and up to eight inches of armor. Note her abeam name stencil, applied for the event. NH 105562

Same date/location as above. NH 81121

Too late to see combat in WWII, Columbus was still a “war baby,” commissioned on 8 June 1945.

Joining the Pacific Fleet five months after VJ Day, she reached the old German China colony of Tsingtao on 13 January 1946 for occupation duty, serving off and on as the cruiser flagship in Chinese waters through June 1947.

After transferring to the Atlantic Fleet in 1948, she often served as the 6th Fleet’s flagship, as noted above. I mean, why wouldn’t she? She was a beautiful ship worthy of an admiral’s flag.

The Navy still had 12 of her class around in the 1960s.

As detailed by the 1960-61 Janes:

After another spin in the Pacific from 1955-1959, Columbus began a three-year reconstruction conversion from an all-gun cruiser to a huge guided missile cruiser, recommissioning as CG-12 in December 1962 to serve for another 14 years as a Cold War sentinel in the Atlantic and Med.

She had a completely different profile for the final stage of her career.

USS Columbus (CG-12) Steaming off San Diego, California, 19 February 1965. NH 82722-KN

She was decommissioned on 31 January 1975, capping just under 30 years of faithful service, but never fired a shot in anger beyond her role in the Road’s End scuttling of 24 captured ex-IJN submarines on April Fool’s Day 1946 off Goto-Retto.

Sometimes all you have to do is look mean to get the word across.

Her motto, as befits the explorer whose namesake city it was, was Ad Frontes Mundi, To the Frontiers of the World.

Interdiction, one way or another

Posted on October 8, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Commissioned 110 years ago this week: the Sampson-class tin can USS Davis (DD-65).

Built in 17 months at Bath Iron Works in Maine, she was commissioned on 5 October 1916 after being christened by the granddaughter of the late Civil War-era admiral.

At just some 315 feet in length and 1,225 tons displacement, she could make 29.5 knots and carried a full dozen 21-inch torpedo tubes in four triple mounts as well as four 4″/50 guns and a 1-pounder balloon gun.

Broadside view of Davis in Hampton Roads, 10 December 1916, clearly showing her main and secondary battery, with 4-inch guns on the foc’sle deck and on the main deck aft, with 1-pounder anti-aircraft guns mounted forward of the bridge and atop the deckhouse, aft. Her port side torpedo tube mounts are in the shadows. U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships Photograph 19-N-1931

10 December 1916. Looking aft from the bow of the USS Davis (DD-65) toward the bridge area and forward guns, a 4-inch gun (closest) and a 1-pounder anti-aircraft gun, 165-WW-335E-29.

She shipped out for Europe on 24 April 1917 and was one of the first six American destroyers to arrive in the British Isles 10 days later.

Serving on convoy and anti-submarine duties, she accidentally fired on one of His Majesty’s submarines (L2, without too much damage), then later plucked 35 of the Kaiser’s U-boat men from the water, survivors of SM U-103.

“German submarine U-103 shown in sinking condition immediately after having been rammed by HMS Olympic off the south coast of Ireland, 3:50 A.M. 12 May 1918. Davis, commanded by Commander W.V. Tomb, U.S.N., rescued 35 of the crew; 9 perished. This painting was made by Pointer, Q.M. 3c of the USS Davis.” Courtesy of Naval Academy Museum. NH 49849

Laid up in 1922, Davis was transferred to the Coast Guard during Prohibition and renamed USCGC Davis (CG-21), running interdiction between Florida and the Bahamas for seven years.

1931 Jane’s showing a few “Coast Guard destroyers”

The more than two dozen Coast Guard Destroyers during Prohibition. Via Rum at War, USCG

USS Davis (DD-65) as Coast Guard Destroyer No. 21 at the Charleston (Boston) drydock, 1920s. By Leslie Jones, Boston Herald.

She returned to the Navy in 1933 and was sold for scrap the next year.

Warship Wednesday 7 October 2026: The Gunslinger of the ‘Unholy Four’

Posted on October 7, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies from 1833 to 1954, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday 7 October 2026: The Gunslinger of the ‘Unholy Four’

U.S. Navy photo via MARAD, No. 1137_051 (Declassed and in NARA’s RG-19 file).

Above we see, with 459 feet of hull being admirably pushed by a whopping 8,000shp, the attack transport USS Crescent City (APA-21), complete with a bone in her teeth.

If she looks rushed, there is a reason for that, as put the “attack” in attack transport, earning 10 battle stars and a Navy Unit Commendation for her WWII service, which took her from Guadalcanal to Okinawa– accounting for at least eight of the Emperor’s aircraft in the process while housing over 90,000 fighting men in her makeshift berths, many just prior to landing on very active enemy held beaches.

The saga of the APAs

As detailed in Troopships of World War II, written by Roland W. Charles, 76 “straight” troopships operated by the Naval Transportation Service performed the yeoman task of shuttling troops from port to port. He makes clear that these were different from the ships we will cover here.

The Navy troopships described herein are those which transported Army personnel on Army schedules. There were other Navy passenger transports for carrying Marines, Sea Bees, etc., and many attack transports (designated APA’s), but these are omitted as not being in harmony with the title.

In short, Troopships (AP) brought the men across the ocean to a safe harbor; Attack Transports (APA) landed troops directly onto the enemy’s beachhead.

With the ramp-up of the U.S. military in the late 1930s, and the obvious fact that said troops would need to be shipped and delivered overseas in great numbers, including onto remote ports and beaches with little or no local handling facilities, the Navy began rapidly acquiring and converting auxiliary transports (AP) as early as August 1940– just after the fall of France.

However, this muddies the water because the differences between what a “standard” AP would do and what an APA would do became very different in the next couple of years, a factor only more confusing as the Navy only established the APA designation on February 1, 1943, retroactively changing 58 then-APs to APAs.

APAs differed from APs in at least eight major ways:

Core Operational Differences

Feature	Standard Troopship (AP)	Attack Transport (APA)
Primary Mission	Long-distance point-to-point administrative transport	Direct tactical delivery of troops in amphibious assaults
Destination	Secure deep-water ports, piers, or controlled anchorages	Unprotected beachheads and hostile shores
Landing Craft (LCVPs/LCMs)	Minimal or none (1–4 administrative craft)	Fully equipped (typically 20–26 LCVPs and 2–4 LCMs)
Boat Handling	Standard cargo booms or stationary cranes	Heavy-duty, fast-operating gravity davits and specialized booms
Troop Capacity	High (2,000 to 10,000+ troops in up to “five-high” bunks)	Moderate (1,000 to 1,600 combat-equipped troops)
Cargo Space	Focused on personal gear and general logistics	Pre-loaded with combat cargo: combat vehicles, artillery, ammo, and rations
Debarkation Method	Gangways at piers or slow debarkation to pierside barges	Over-the-side debarkation nets (Jacobs ladders) directly into landing craft
Command & Medical	Basic shipboard sickbay and transport administrative space	Dedicated Amphibious Task Force command facilities & expanded triage surgical suites
Defensive Armament	Light (typically a few 3-inch or 5-inch guns, 20mm/40mm AA)	Heavy AA suite (5-inch/38, dual 40mm Bofors, 20mm Oerlikons for shore defense)

Bear with us as we go chronologically for a second, with the first runs of APs that would later be designated APA.

First were eight 21,000-ton, 535-foot “State”-class passenger liners built after WWI, dubbed the Harris class in service. This was quickly followed by two McCawley-class ships (the old passenger liners McCawley and Barnett), then five 14,000-ton Great War-era passenger liners (the Heywood class) in November 1940, and the old passenger liner Exochorda, which became USS Harry Lee before the year was over.

While owning zero APA types in July, by Christmas 1940 the Navy had 16.

Moving into 1941, the Navy began to take new Maritime Commission C3-style passenger-cargo hulls with seven President-class (President Jackson, President Adams, President Hayes, Thomas Stone, Thomas Jefferson, President Polk, and President Monroe) which began to enter service in November 1941; and the Crescent City class (Crescent City later joined by Charles Carroll, Monrovia, and Calvert).

The five-hold Maritime Commission C3-style passenger-cargo hulls ran 459 feet oal and had a 12,000 DWT displacement. They could make a relatively speedy 16.5 knots on either steam or diesel plants, depending on variant.

At least 465 C3s of all types were completed between 1940 and 1947, with many converted during the war to Navy use as not only APAs (President, Crescent City, Windsor, and Bayfield-class) but as Bogue-class escort carriers, Klondike-class destroyer tenders, submarine tenders, and seaplane tenders.

Crescent City and her class, which were C3-P&C type hulls, would be made to shoehorn 42 officers and 478 enlisted passengers in a modicum of style, a figure that could be pushed to as many as 1,800 if packed into all available space and little cargo was loaded. Otherwise, they had a useful cargo capacity of 2,700 tons. They could also carry a huge array of landing craft– many of which were still on the drawing board when they were built.

The profile plans for USS Bayfield (AP-78/APA-33). She was built on a Marcom Type C3-S-A2 hull and was very similar to our preceding Crescent City. She was well traveled and earned not only four battle stars for World War II service and four for Korean War service, but also two for the Vietnam War.

Berths on a Bayfield-class APA.

Boat capacity on a Bayfield-class APA. Note: This is from a 1966 sheet of plans, but it gives a pretty good idea of the space available.

The Capacity Plan for USS Cavalier (AP-82/APA-37), a Bayfield-class attack transport commissioned in 1944. She was built on a Marcom Type C3-S-A2 hull and was very similar to our preceding Crescent City.

The Ingalls-built Middleton class (MC Type C3-P&C hulled) USS Samuel Chase (APA-26) off the Southern France invasion beaches, after discharging her troops, circa August 15, 1944, during Operation Dragoon. Note boarding nets and LCVP alongside. NH 100077-KN

The Navy ended up with 238 Attack Transports (no kidding) across 17 distinct classes. APA-1 through APA-249. Of these, minus the one-offs taken up from transit, they fall into a few different types.

Those built on C3-type hulls include the 34 Bayfields (C3-S-A2), the nine Windsors (C3-S-A3), the seven President-class ships (converted C3-Ps taken up from trade), the four converted Delo/Crescent City ships, the three Middletons, and the two Funstons.
Those built on S4-SE2-BD1 hulls (the 32 Gilliam class APAs)
The 117 Haskells built on simple VC2-S-AP5 Victory ship hulls.
One-off conversions and ships taken up from trade.

This all brings us to…

Meet Crescent City

Our subject was an MC Type C3-P&C hull built as Yard No. 4338 (Order No. 239932) by the Bethlehem Steel Shipbuilding Division’s yard at Sparrows Point, Maryland.

She was sold to the Mississippi Shipping Company under the Act of 1936, which intended to operate her as the cargo and passenger liner SS Delorleans (sometimes seen as Del Orleans) for the company’s Delta Line.

She was laid down on 8 May 1939, launched on 17 February 1940 with Mrs. M. L. Pedrick as her sponsor, and delivered to the Delta Line on 23 August 1940.

Founded in 1919 and based in Seattle, the Delta Line specialized in the Gulf of Mexico-to-South America “coffee route,” hauling general cargo and passengers back and forth. The company liked “Del” names such as the above Ingalls-built “Del-Triplets” (SS Del Norte, Del Sud, and Del Mar) built, like Delorleans/Crescent City, on C-3 P&C hulls.

Delorleans’ Maritime Commission status card lists her at 8,988 DWT (7,987 gross) with a cargo capacity of 453,273 cu. ft (bale) or 495,512 if shipping grain and had eight deck cranes to handle her five cargo holds. Designed with 26 staterooms, she could accommodate 67 passengers in addition to cargo and had a small parlor, promenade deck, and dining room for their use.

A set of General Electric geared steam turbines, driven by a pair of Babcock & Wilcox header-type (450 psi, 750°) boilers that could send 8,000shp to her single prop, allowed her to make (and sustain) 17 knots with an impressive unrefueled range of 15,500nm at 15. Three turbo-drive 350 kW 120V/240V D.C. Ship’s Service Generators provided plenty of electricity.

In addition to Delorleans (our Crescent City), Bethlehem Sparrows also built her direct Delta Line Type C3 sisters SS Delbrasil and Delargentino, all delivered within six months of each other. The Navy would eventually take the latter out of service and use them as the troopships USS George F. Elliott (AP 105) and J. W. McAndrew (AP 47), respectively.

SS Delbrasil later USS George F. Elliott (AP 105) later African Endeavor

SS Deltargentino later USS J. W. McAndrew (AP 47) later African Enterprise

Speaking of which, after just a single South American voyage under the Delta house flag, Delorleans was taken over by the Navy on 9 June 1941, and, after a rushed conversion for military use at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Co. in Mobile, entered service as USS Crescent City (AP 40) on 10 October 1941.

Her first skipper was CDR Walter Carson Calhoun (USNA 1917), a surface warfare man who had witnessed the surrender of the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet from the deck of the USS Florida in the Great War and would go on to command the new cruiser Baltimore by 1943. Chester Nimitz of the Bureau of Navigation signed Calhoun’s orders to Crescent City. Of interest, all seven of Crescent City’s Navy commanders were Annapolis grads, showing how important the service took the vessel.

As noted by her 32-page War History, “The original crew was organized around a small group of ‘regulars’ supplemented by men of the Naval Reserve units in Dallas, Pittsburgh, Columbus and Miami.”

Her dry cargo storage increased t o 813,300 cu. ft. grain (736,140 bale) while her onboard usable fuel oil spaces amounted to 456,900 gallons plus another 487,000 gallons of cargo oil with fresh water storage at 107,200 gallons.

She also was given some serious boat-carrying abilities, to include large Welland davits for as many as 22 36-foot LCVP Higgins boats, and room on deck for four 50-foot LCM(3)s, although she would later add LCPLs and LCPRs to that mix as those types came online along with the longer 56-foot LCM(6)s.

Her self-defense armament, initially, was a 5″/51 gun on the stern and a few light (.30 cal Lewis) machine guns, along with some limited mechanical minesweeping gear (paravanes).

This soon increased as the war went on, and by 1945 she was carrying a 5″/38 Mk 12, four 3″/50 Mk 20 DPs, six 40mm Bofors in two twin and two single mounts, and 22 20mm Oerlikons in a variety of twin and single mounts as well as an S-series radar.

A great series of photos was captured of the newly dubbed Crescent City in November 1941 with her war paint on at Charleston Navy Yard.

All of these are from the MARAD collection:

With Crescent City on the books, in 1942, three other Delta Lines ships ordered on Type C3-P hulls at Sparrows Point, ex-Del Uruguay and the 2nd ex-Del Argentina and ex-Del Orleans, were given a very similar conversion with only minor changes in internal layout and are traditionally lumped in with our subject as the “Crescent City” class.

Those three follow-ons would become USS Charles Carroll (AP 50/APA 28), Monrovia (AP 64/APA 31) and Calvert (AP 65/APA 32).

War!

Just a week after Pearl Harbor, Crescent City left Norfolk for points West, loaded with troops and equipment of the Army’s 301st Balloon Barrage Battalion and Navy Patrol Wing Three to reinforce the Canal Zone. She then crossed into the Pacific, picked up Navy and Marine passengers in San Diego, and took them to Pearl Harbor. After carrying civilian evacuees back to San Diego, she rushed workers and equipment back to Pearl.

Running men and equipment of the 4th Marine Defense Battalion and Marine Air Group 21 to Efate, New Hebrides, to establish a base there, she returned to San Diego on 22 April 1942. There, along the California coast for the next two months, Crescent City conducted 14 practice landings and embarkations of the 2nd Marine Regiment. Those lessons learned in sweat and toil off San Diego would turn into gold at the Amphibious Training School.

From her War History:

Her boats, armament, and loading as of March 1942:

Dated March 6, 1942, this confidential US Navy document shows the Crescent City’s characteristics and capabilities. Gift in Memory of Lawrence B. Dunlap, 2018.117, via the National WWII Museum.

Then came the orders to prepare to shift some 6,200nm Southwest to a place called Guadalcanal, where the Japanese were building a seaplane base in the occupied British Solomons.

Leaving San Diego on 1 July in a 15-ship convoy screened by the carrier USS Wasp, and after joining a larger force at Tongatabu in the Tongas and following a series of disastrous practice landings at Koro Island in the Fiji chain, the Guadalcanal campaign kicked off with a bang.

Ships of the invasion force steaming out of the Guadalcanal-Tulagi area during the afternoon of 9 August 1942. Photographed from USS Chicago (CA-29), the view looks westward, with Guadalcanal Island in the background. USS Crescent City (AP-40) is on the left. A Curtiss SOC Seagull floatplane is in the foreground, on Chicago’s starboard catapult. 80-G-231855

In defending against incoming waves of Japanese torpedo bombers, Crescent City was credited with downing at least four between 7 and 9 August, between landing men of the 1st Marine Division.

Crashed Japanese bomber burns on the water near USS Crescent City (AP-40), off Guadalcanal, 7-9 August 1942 (USMC Photo 21054763854, Frederick R. Findtner Collection).

Army and Marines on KuKum Beach, Guadalcanal, circa 1942. This scene of apparent confusion was the beginning of an era of close cooperation between the Army and Marine Corps to finish the “housecleaning” job on Guadalcanal. “Again off KuKum. Transport number forty. Which I believe is the Crescent City or the Jackson maybe.” From the Thayer Soule Collection (COLL/2266) at the Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division.

In October 1942, Crescent City ran a load of drummed avgas and a Marine aviation maintenance unit to Funafuti Atoll in the Ellice chain, then returned to Guadalcanal, making six trips to the island where she brought 7,000 men of the U.S. Army’s 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division.

In was off Guadalcanal that Crescent City, with fellow C3-hulled attack transports USS President Jackson, President Adams, and President Hayes as Task Group 62.1.4, “were dubbed the ‘Unholy Four’ by fellow fleet members and ground forces. It was axiomatic that whenever the Unholy Four traveled together, there was bound to be trouble.”

It was during this “Operation Shoestring” off the Solomons that Crescent City’s second skipper, Capt. Ingolf Norman Kiland (USNA 1919) often found himself as commodore of the Unholy Four as they ran around the theater.

On one such Unholy Four run to take the Americals to the Kukum Beaches on 12 November for a fast drop and run before the Japanese knew the ships were there, “Pistol Pete,” a Japanese howitzer hidden in the hills, opened fire on Crescent City close enough to observe splashes, followed by a noontime attack by enemy torpedo planes, of which two were confirmed down by our fighting transport’s gun crews.

December saw Crescent City haul the 132nd U.S. Infantry and 247th Artillery from Noumena to Guadalcanal, then take off the beleaguered 1st Marines back to Australia, ending their time in the “Green Hell.”

Marines Debarking at Brisbane, First Marine Division Leaving Guadalcanal, circa late 1942. Tired and battered but happy, battle-toughened Marines, relieved from the Solomons, disembark under full pack from a U.S. Navy transport at an allied base in the South Pacific. After a short rest, this outfit trains for another offensive aimed at the heart of Tokyo. “On the dock at Brisbane when we were disembarked from Crescent City.” USMC Archives photo

On 17 February 1943, while off Malaita, the Unholy Four were on the way to take the 8th Marines off the ‘Canal along with the tanker Tallulah and six destroyers, when they ran into a wave of Japanese torpedo bombers.

From her War History:

One plane was observed approaching astern of the Crescent City and her 5″/51 gun opened fire at point-blank range. The projectile exploded directly at the plane, blowing it in two pieces. This is one of the few times during the war that the obsolete 5″/51 was effective as an anti-aircraft gun.

Sadly, that voyage marked the end of the Unholy Four, as the now 15 ‘phibs of the South Pacific Transport Group would typically move in smaller task units, and Crescent City was transferred to Transport Division Eight.

After moving men of the Third Marine Division from Samoa to New Zealand, where our subject spent several weeks in beach-landing drills, she settled into cargo and trooping runs inside the theatre.

On 13 August 1943, while unloading cargo at Lunga Point, enemy torpedo planes swept over the anchorage and sank the ‘phib USS John Penn (APA-23), a veteran of the Torch Landings that had only recently shifted to the Pacific. Crescent City was there, and her skipper ordered his small boats to help take off survivors. Even after a years-long campaign and being officially declared “secured” six months prior, the Canal was by no means a backwater.

Landing troops on unoccupied Vella Lavella on 14 August 1943 and bypassing the Japanese garrison at Kolombangara, Crescent City completed her 14th run to Guadalcanal, landing more than 17,000 men.

November saw the Treasury Island landings, with Crescent City delivering the 9th Regiment, Third Marines, then returning to Guadalcanal to pick up the 129th Infantry and bring them to the party. In December and the New Year, she did the same for the Americal Division and the 21st Regiment, Third Marines.

Spending the first part of 1944 in a series of training evolutions in and around New Zealand, by May Crescent City was taking part in the effort to liberate Guam, which had been under Japanese occupation since just after Pearl Harbor. For the next three campaigns, Crescent City was the flagship of TransDiv 8. Our APA directly delivered the 12th Regiment, Third Marines to the beaches.

After her Marines went ashore, a key change took place: the APA sent medical parties in directly after to stand by for casevac, effectively turning Crescent City into a stopgap hospital ship.

USS Crescent City (APA-21) taking wounded Marines aboard for evacuation, likely 1944

From her War History:

September 1944 brought Peleliu, with the 1st Marine Regiment, led by Chesty Puller, embarked on Crescent City for the landings. Afterward, she received 416 casualties while, for two days, her beach party was the sole contact between the Marines ashore on White Beach and the fleet.

In October 1944, still the flag of TransDiv 8, Crescent City gathered around her at Hollandia some 60 ships of the Seventh Amphibious Force. Packed with U.S. Sixth Army personnel– with Brig. Gen. Philip Guillou Blackmore, Gen. Krueger’s Ordnance officer, aboard– the objective was Leyte Gulf to begin the liberation of the Philippines.

Landing her troops on the 22nd, she narrowly escaped the Battle of the Surigao Strait as she was speeding back to Hollandia to bring up the 127th U.S. Infantry and Maj. Gen. William Gill, commander of the 32nd Infantry Division.

Shipping to Manus in the Admiralty Islands at the end of November, Crescent City would then head to the West Coast for a refit at Bethlehem’s San Francisco yard that saw more guns added, davits strengthened, engines and boilers worked over, additional radar and radios installed, and the signal bridge retrofitted in a nine-week overhaul over the new year. Likewise, many of her “old hands” were rotated off, replaced by men fresh from boot camp and A schools.

Leaving San Francisco on 25 February 1945, Crescent City stopped at Pearl Harbor, where she was converted to a hospital evacuation ship.

Her War History notes: “An additional operating room was installed in the sick bay area, quarters for stretcher patients were arranged in the Number Five hold, and auxiliary dressing stations were established throughout the ship. Additional doctors and pharmacist mates reported aboard for duty, and on 18 March the ship was ready to sail.”

She became instrumental as an evac transport at Okinawa.

Arriving off Kerama Retto on 6 April, a landing ship in her convoy (LST-447) was hit amidships by a kamikaze bomber and lost the next day, while two Victory ships (Logan Victory and Hobbs Victory) were sunk outright and two others damaged.

Shrugging it off and getting to work, Crescent City remained on station for the next two months, settling into a nightmarish routine of fighting off infiltrators, suicide boats, and kamikazes while receiving casualties from 96 Allied ships. Her history notes she handled 2,700 wounded men, administering 500 pints of plasma and 460 pints of whole blood in the process, the latter delivered via seaplane directly from the States.

“Altogether, the job of handling the crippled bodies was a thankless job for everyone.”

Meanwhile, she also doubled as a receiving ship, with 10,500 fresh bluejackets and officers arriving from the fleet to be fed into the force to fill holes popping up off Okinawa. Her troop holds housed these newcomers until they were “called up” and sent out by small boat, with officers and enlisted men berthing side by side on the pipe bunks.

A larger ship among smaller ones, she hosted religious services on Sundays, conducting as many as five of them to handle men coming over for the occasion. She also served as a floating brig, accepting disciplinary cases from cramped DDs and DEs. For part of this time (8 July-23 August), Crescent City’s skipper was designated SOPA in charge of the Naha-Hagushi anchorage, and his staff handled everything from managing tug and salvage operations to coordinating smoke and AAA plans to supply administration. This period also included dealing with two very large typhoons.

On 15 April, her gunners downed their eighth confirmed enemy aircraft of the war and fired on Japanese aircraft at least five times while off Okinawa.

However, all around her ships were not so lucky, with her crew watching helplessly as the cruiser USS Birmingham (CL-62) was hit by a speedy bomb-carrying Hayabusa kamikaze, causing 130 casualties and tearing a hole under the ship’s waterline. Another evacuation transport at Kerama Retto, USS Pinkney (APH-2), was struck by a kamikaze on 28 April, killing 18 crew and 16 patients. Even on the night that hopeful Japanese “peace feelers” were announced over the radio, 10 August, a merchant ship was torpedoed in the anchorage just off Crescent City.

By VJ Day, her crew had been called to General Quarters 215 times off Okinawa alone. However, amazingly, she suffered no casualties or damage attributed to enemy fire or contact not just in that campaign but in the war as a whole.

After the surrender, Crescent City served as Amphibious Force Flagship for almost a month, receiving extra signalmen and staff officers to manage the task. Transferring the role to the USS Blue Ridge on 22 September, she once more hauled the First Marines of Guadalcanal fame, this time to Taku, China. She then trooped men of the 13th and then the 8th Chinese Nationalist Army from Hong Kong to Chinwangtao and Tsingtao in North China to fight the Reds.

On 1 December, her war ended; she left for Seattle, packed with officers and men bound for Home.

Her 10 battle stars earned her a Navy Unit Commendation (NUC). As far as I can tell, no APA had a better record.

Guadalcanal-Tulagi Landings, 7 to 9 August 1942
Capture and defense of Guadalcanal, 12 November 1942
Guadalcanal (Third Savo) 12 to 15 November 1942
Consolidation of Southern Solomons, 17 February and 18 May 1943 (including Action off Malaita)
Treasury Island landings, 1 and 18 November 1943
Bismarck Archipelago operation (Admiralty Island landings), 11 to 12 April 1944
Marianas, capture and occupation of Guam, 21 to 25 July 1944
Capture and occupation of southern Palau (Caroline) Islands, 8 September to 14 October 1944
Leyte landings, 16 to 27 October and 14 November 1944
Assault and occupation of Okinawa Gunto, 6 April to 30 June 1945

Her September-December 1945 crew were also eligible for the Navy Occupation Service Medal and China Service Medal (extended).

Her wartime APA sisters, Charles Carroll, Monrovia, and Calvert, all survived the war, seeing almost as much action as Crescent City, picking up a very decent 23 battle stars between them.

USS Charles Carroll (APA-28), on December 11, 1945, Norfolk, wearing camouflage 32/6T. “Lucky Chuck” earned six battle stars from Torch to Sicily to Husky, Normandy, and Okinawa 19-LCM-APA28-1

USS Charles Carroll (APA-28) December 11 1945 Norfolk wearing camouflage 32/6T 19-LCM-APA28-2

USS Charles Carroll (APA-28) December 11 1945 Norfolk wearing camouflage 32/6T 19-LCM-APA28-3

As for her two pre-war Sparrows Point Delta Line sisters, SS Delbrasil/USS George F. Elliott (AP 105) and Delargentino/USS J. W. McAndrew (AP 47), both survived the war and, as they had no extensive APA conversions done to them, were soon back in the commercial trade as SS African Endeavor and African Enterprise, operated by the U.S. based Farrell Lines during the post-war era on passenger and trade routes between New York and South/East Africa. By the 1960s, they were laid up in the Reserve Fleet, then scrapped by 1972.

Cold War

Departing Seattle on 23 January 1946, Crescent City transited back to the East Coast for the first time since 1942, arriving at Norfolk on Valentine’s Day.

The ship was detached from the amphibious forces and was operating as a unit of the Naval Transportation Service (NTS). She operated from New York and Norfolk in the Caribbean for the next 20 months, typically carrying dependents back and forth to the myriad of new U.S. bases down south.

Crescent City at Brooklyn Navy Yard,15 May 1947. Gone are the landing craft, replaced by lifeboats under her davits, although she remains a fully armed and commissioned naval vessel. Other NTS ships also wore the broad black band around the top of the stack at this time. NARA, RG-19-LCM, Photo # 19-N-142584, NY3-142G.

Outboard and inboard profiles of USS Crescent City (APA-21) as a dependents’ transport in March 1947. Drawing from “U.S. Amphibious Ships” and Craft by Norman Friedman.

10 August 1947. Panama Canal Zone. A group of Marines who have finished their tour of duty in the various guard detachments throughout the Canal Zone board the USS Crescent City for the happy voyage back to the Good Old States USMC Photo 167170 via NARA 127-GR-49-167170

Sent back to the West Coast, she arrived at San Francisco on 1 November 1947.

Crescent City was placed out of commission in reserve 30 April 1948 and transferred to the Maritime Commission 3 September 1948. Sister Charles Carroll was laid up the same year.

Two other APA sisters remained in service until 1966 (Calvert) and 1968 (Monrovia), respectively, and were scrapped by 1977.

Crescent City C3 Delta class troopships, 1960 Janes

Crescent City was permanently transferred to the Navy Department’s Reserve Fleet at Suisun Bay on 3 September 1958, where she remained at a cost of $118 per month until 9 June 1970, when she was sent to WISCO for a hull survey in hopes she could be of further use.

It turned out that she would

Training Ship

The old Crescent City, aged 30, was transferred from MARAD on loan to the California Maritime Academy on the morning of 28 August 1970.

While I’m not an expert on the CMA’s operations, suffice it to say that Crescent City, disarmed and painted in a white-and-blue livery, sailed as TS Golden Bear II from May 1971 to July 1995, conducting 28 major ocean cruises.

California Maritime Academy training ship TS Golden Bear II passing under the Golden Gate Bridge inbound at San Francisco Bay circa 1993. Vallejo Naval & Historical Museum File name: APA 21 – GBII Circa 1993, via Navsource.

Artship

With the California Maritime Academy done with the 50-year-old APA, ex-Crescent City/Golden Bear was returned to MARAD in July 1995 for layup at the National Defense Reserve Fleet, Suisun Bay.

Four years later, President Clinton signed an order donating her to the Artship Foundation in Oakland in August 1999 after a six-year quest for a vessel to serve as a floating cultural warehouse. Renamed Artship, she was moored at the city’s Ninth Avenue Terminal until a city lawsuit forced the group to renounce the title in 2004, abandoning the social program.

She was sold for $200,000 scrap value to Esco Marine Inc. in Brownsville in February 2004.

A group called the Friends of the USS Crescent City tried to save her, citing that she was the last ship afloat from Guadalcanal, but their efforts fell flat.

Epilogue

Crescent City’s war diaries and war history are digitized in the National Archives and are superb.

Her Guadalcanal commander and commodore of the Unholy Four, Ingolf Kiland, earned a DSM, Navy Cross, and two Legions of Merit during the war. As a rear admiral, Kiland and his amphibious task group took Karama Retto in early 1945, routing out the suicide boat caves scattered on the island and ensuring it could be used as a support for the ensuing assault on Okinawa.

He later commanded all amphibious forces of the Pacific Fleet during the Korean War (COMPHIBPAC)– not bad for a man who started his career as an ensign navigation officer on the four-piper tin can USS Sterett (DD-27) during the Great War. Retiring as commandant of the Fifth Naval District in 1957, capping a 40-year career, VADM Kiland, son of Norwegian immigrants, passed in the warmth of Coronado in 1992 at age 96.

VADM Kiland is buried at Arlington, Section 1, Site 808.

While the Navy has not commissioned a second Crescent City, the fifth USS New Orleans (LPD-18) is a San Antonio-class amphib that joined the fleet in 2007. She is based in Japan, which is fitting.

The U.S. Navy (Pre-Commissioned Unit) San Antonio Class Amphibious Transport Dock Ship USS New Orleans (LPD 18) sails beneath the Huey P. Long Bridge as it moves on the Mississippi River towards New Orleans, La., on March 5, 2007, in preparation for its commissioning ceremony on March 10, 2007. MCS Kurt Eischen, USN.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Warship Wednesday 30 September 2026: What Friends Are For

Posted on September 30, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Warship Wednesday 30 September 2026: What Friends Are For

NIMH photo, via the Fotoafdrukken Koninklijke Marine, No. 2158_002974

Above, we see the Free Dutch Gerard Callenburgh-class destroyer (torpedobootjager) Hr.Ms. Isaac Sweers (G 83) steaming into the Grand Harbor of Malta circa late 1942, wearing British Atlantic camo.

Some 85 years ago this week, Sweers was part of the epic Operation Halberd, a resupply operation to keep besieged Malta fed, and lent her advanced AAA guns to help swat down Axis torpedo bombers.

All in a day’s work.

Dutch destroyer primer

A fleet based on cruisers, gunboats, and torpedo boats, the Netherlands dipped their first toe in the water of destroyerdom in 1909 with a group of eight Roofdier (Wolf)-class tin cans, the first serial-built Dutch turbine-engine ships, built for service in the East Indies. Small, 510-ton, 229-foot ships with four 3-inch guns and two torpedo tubes, they could make 30 knots on their combination of Krupp-Germania steam turbines and English Yarrow boilers.

The Torpedobootjager Hr. Ms. Fret (Ferret), of the first Dutch destroyer class, was in commission from 1911 to 1922, then used as a target ship until 1930. All of her sisters were named after predators (Roofdiers). Note the canvas sea bridge and knifelike 21-foot beam. NIMH 2158_002538

With the eight obsolete Roofdiers stricken by the 1920s, they were replaced hull-for-hull with a batch of eight 30-knot Admiralen-type tin cans built on a Yarrow design starting in 1925, based on the British destroyer Ambuscade. Built in two batches, the Van Ghents and the Van Galens, they were the same general size (1,640 tons/322-feet) and batteries (4×4.7-inch guns, 6 torpedo tubes); they differed in range. Interestingly, they also had the weight and space for a seaplane.

The Dutch Admiralen types, via the 1938 Jane’s:

Then, by the mid-1930s, with both the Germans beating the war drums in Europe and the Japanese doing the same in the Pacific with an eye towards the Dutch East Indies, it was decided to replace the fleet’s 12 mis-matched and aging T-class (Thornycroft), Z-class (Schelde), and G-class (Fljenoord) torpedo boats– most dating to the Great War, armed with just a deck gun or two and a few 17.7-inch tubes and struggling to make 25 knots– with a dozen much larger and more capable destroyers, outclassing even the Admiralens.

Dutch Callenburg-class destroyers, Janes 1938

This expansion came as part of Vlootplan Deckers, the Deckers Fleet Plan, named after Minister of the Navy, Dr. L.N. Deckers. The plan was to replace aging assets with modern ones and envisioned three light cruisers, another pair of “torpedokruisers” (torpedo/scout cruisers) to serve as flotilla leaders for the 20 modern destroyers (eight Admiralen and 12 Callenburghs), and at least 26 submarines (eight in Europe and 18 in the Dutch East Indies) augmented by 90 land-based Dornier Do 24K three-engine patrol bombers of the Marine-Luchtvaartdienst (MLD). They also added new gunnery training ships and gunboats to serve ancillary wartime duties. By 1938, this ambitious plan was augmented by a new push (Project 1047) to build a trio of hulking 25,000-ton Scharnhorst-style “cruiser killers” with 11-inch guns and swathed in 9 inches of armor, envisioned to join the fleet in 1944.

Moving past the Deckers Plan, let’s just focus on the Callenburghs.

With an overall length of 349 feet and a 35-foot beam, they had a natural 1:10 ratio and could float in just over 10 feet of seawater. Light displacement was 1,628 tons, full 2,240. This made them roughly the same size as the British Tribal-class destroyers.

The Dutch machine factory Werkspoor obtained licenses for Parsons geared steam turbines and Yarrow 3-drum boilers intended to equip the newest fleet of destroyers. Using a powerplant of three oil-fired boilers and twin turbines on twin screws, they could generate 45,000 shp at 475rpm for a designed speed of 36 knots. Of note, the class leader hit 50,100 shp on speed trials at full load by superheating the boilers to 350 °C, reaching 515 rpm and 42 knots. Twin in-line fire rooms and stacks provided redundancy against damage. Range on 560 tons of oil was 5,400nm at 19 knots, which was superior to the 5,700nm @ 15 kts of Tribals.

The intended armament was to be a main battery of five 4.7″/45 Bofors-derived Wilton-Fijenoord guns in two No. 8 twin mounts (one fore, one aft) and one single No. 6 mount amidships between the two stacks.

Built under license from Bofors by the ordnance office of the Wilton-Feijenoord Dockyard in Rotterdam, the Dutch before the war produced 17 4.7″/45s for the ships in armored turrets, and another 22 to equip six coastal batteries along the coast of the Netherlands. Capable of firing 10-12 rounds per minute at 19,500m, the electrically powered turrets were armored to 60mm.

Gerard Callenburgh-class destroyer initial 1937 general plan and longitudinal section, showing the original planned stern Fokker platform. Note the gun and torpedo arrangement. Nationaal Archief

Her secondary battery included two twin 40mm/56 Bofors No. 3 AAA guns (one over each twin 4.7″/45 mount) with Hazemayer fire control systems (more on this later) and two twin water-cooled .50 cal Colt (Browning) export Model 1924 mounts (on each side of the bridge wings), the latter platform also used on Dutch Flores-class sloops, minesweepers, and the minelayer Bloemendaal. The Dutch also trialed the twin air-cooled, Swiss-made Solothurn S-14-200 .50 cals with Zeiss sights, which were installed on the one-off frigate Johan Maurits van Nassau.

Twin Colt Model 1924 water-cooled. 50 cal Browning on a Dutch minesweeper, 1940s 2158_015801

They had eight 21-inch torpedo tubes (lancerbuizen) in two quad turnstiles serviced by a torpedo davit on each side of the deck. Two spare torps could be carried in a magazine behind the first turnstile, giving the destroyers a total capacity of 10 fish.

Maintenance on the torpedoes aboard the destroyer Hr. Ms. Isaac Sweers, circa 1941-42. NIMH 2158_002975

Anti-submarine weapons consisted of four depth charge throwers (dieptebombenwerpers) with space for a dozen cans.

They also had space for 24 sea mines on deck in place of stern depth charge rails and mechanical minesweeping gear in the form of two paravanes and chains, stored by the ship’s boats, which included a 23-foot motor launch and a 26-foot eight-oared rowing sloop with an auxiliary motor (Sloep B IV met hulpmotor).

Like the Admiralen-class, these new destroyers could carry a crane-launched and recovered single-engine seaplane, typically a Dutch-made Fokker C.VII-W.

The plane was initially going to be stowed aft with its tail hanging over the stern 40mm mount when stowed, but this shifted amidships with the single 4.7″/45 No. 6 single mount shifted aft instead, overlooking the stern 4.7″/45 twin No. 8, in the position of the stern 40mm twin mount, which instead was moved to a bandstand between the two torpedo tube turnstiles. The two twin .50-cal water-cooled Colt-Brownings were likewise moved from the bridge wing to flank the second funnel, abeam, port and starboard.

Gerard Callenburgh-class destroyer plan, showing the planned amidships Fokker platform and the reallocated guns. Nationaal Archief NL 4.MST_1921

Gerard Callenburgh-class destroyer finalized rigging plan, showing the planned amidships Fokker platform and the reallocated guns. Nationaal Archief

A Fokker C.VII-W seaplane on the Admiralen-class destroyer Hr.Ms. Witte de With at anchor, Koepang, Timor, Dutch East Indies, September 1934. NIMH 2173-223-014

The Dutch were the only users of the Fokker C.VII-W, buying 30 of them for the MLD. Capable of a 70 kt cruising speed and 600nm range, these open-cockpit canvas beauties could carry two light bombs and a twin observer-manned Vickers gun on a ring mount.

They were designed for a peacetime complement of 158: 11 officers, 19 NCOs, and 128 enlisted, growing to over 200 in wartime.

Built for service in the Dutch East Indies, it is likely that as much as a quarter of their enlisted would be drawn from Indonesian volunteers. In 1933, the Dutch Navy had about 12,000 officers and men, including around 2,500 indigenous sailors drawn from the DEI, with efforts to train local officer candidates underway in 1940.

The first two members of the class, Callenburgh (Yard No. 208) and Tjerk Hiddes (Yard 207), were laid down six weeks apart at RDM in Rotterdam and constructed side by side.

Construction of -right- the Tjerk Hiddes and -left- the Gerard Callenburgh at the Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij, 9 June 1939. Note the RDM yard numbers on each hull. NIMH 2158_012320

Construction of -right- the Tjerk Hiddes and -left- the Gerard Callenburgh at the Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij, 13 September 1939. Note the RDM yard numbers on each hull. NIMH 2158_031833

Mrs. G. A. J. Dijxhoorn-Ybes, the wife of the Minister of Defense, christened both.

The next two of the class, our Isaac Sweers and sister Philips van Almonde, were ordered from Koninklijke Mij De Schelde, Flushing.

In Dutch fashion, all were to have name initials as pennant numbers (Gerard Callenburgh was GC, Tjerk Hiddes TH, Isaac Sweers IS, Philips van Almonde PA)

This all brings us to…

Meet Sweers

Our subject is named in honor of Isaak Sweers (also seen as Ysaack Sweerts), Vice-Admiraal van Holland en West-Friesland, a 17th-century naval hero of the Anglo-Dutch wars. Sweers was a swashbuckler who first saw combat in his 20s under Jan van Galen against the Barbary Pirates, then sailed on Michiel de Ruyter’s expedition to West Africa and America. He was killed in a North Sea naval battle by a direct hit from a British 24-pounder cannonball that saved only his torso for the coffin– but left the Dutch with a victory.

Sweers and the painting by Willem van de Velde the Younger, “Night Battle between Tromp and Spragge at Kijkduin,” August 21, 1673; the 227-ship naval battle in which Sweers was mortally wounded, at age 51. Both via the Nationaal Archief

Laid down on 26 November 1938 at Koninklijke Mij. De Schelde, Vlissingen, Zeeland, she was Yard No. 212, while her sister, the planned Philips van Almonde, was laid down four months later as Yard No. 213.

March 1939. The future Isaac Sweers on the builder’s ways on Kon. Mij. De Schelde te Vlissingen. NIMH 2158_002965

The future Isaac Sweers was christened by sponsor (doopster) Mrs. Johanna van den Arend-Keers, wife of LtZ Henry van den Arend, supervisor of the destroyers under construction at the yard. 16 March 1940

The future Torpedobootjager Hr. Ms. Isaac Sweers was launched at Vlissingen, 16 March 1940. NIMH 2158_028945

Torpedobootjager Hr.Ms. Isaac Sweers gereed voor de tewaterlating bij de Kon. Mij. De Schelde te Vlissingen, 16 March 1940. NIMH

Sliding down the ways, 16 March 1940. NIMH 2158_002967

Hr.Ms. Isaac Sweers in Schelde te Vlissingen being fitted out, between April and May 1940. NIMH 2158_028947

Same as the above. NIMH 2158_028946

30 April 1940, the submarine Hr.Ms. O 22 (K XXII) comes back home to Vlissingen following sea trials, passing the fitting out Isaac Sweers. For reference, O 22 escaped incomplete to England when the Germans occupied Holland the next month and went missing off Norway on her fifth war patrol. NIMH 2158_015482

War!

During the first eight and a half months of WWII, although the country was neutral, the Dutch merchant marine was very much at war, with 43 merchant ships lost or severely damaged due to acts of war– and that isn’t even counting the fishing fleet, which also suffered heavy losses.

When the Germans swept into the neutral Netherlands as part of their sweep through the Lowlands on 10 May 1940, the Dutch had no hope of stopping the 29 battle-hardened enemy divisions of Von Bock’s Armee Group B with their nine much lighter divisions– especially with an army that had not seen combat in Europe since 1831. Plus, the Germans had something like a 7:1 local advantage in tactical aircraft, allowing the Luftwaffe to largely control the skies on Day 1.

Most of the Dutch fleet was deployed to the Far East to oppose an increasingly warlike Japan. This included the cruisers De Ruyter, Java, and Tromp; all active Admiralen-class destroyers; 15 submarines; and a myriad of smaller craft, as well as the bulk of the MLD’s combat aircraft —including 37 new Dornier Do 24 K-1 flying boats, soon augmented by 36 PBY Catalinas. Their inferno along the Java Sea would come at the hands of the Emperor’s Combined Fleet in 1942.

Left in Europe was the old 8,000-ton cruiser Hr.Ms. Sumatra, awaiting her mid-life refit in Vlissingen; the new cruiser Jacob van Heemskerck, still fitting out; the four building Gerard Callenburgh-class destroyers; assorted auxiliaries; and 13 submarines, most of which were either under construction or in dry dock for refit. The commander of the Royal Dutch Navy, VADM Johannes Furstner, soon left the country with Queen Wilhelmina and family on Sumatra for England to continue the fight, and issued orders for the rest of the fleet to do the same.

The Admiralen-class destroyer Van Galen, in refit at Rotterdam, was bombed and damaged by Heinkel He 111 aircraft of Kampfgeschwader 4 on 10 May and sank in the Merwedehaven. The same day, the tug De Oceaan, too slow to make a getaway, was scuttled as a block ship.

The 11th saw the old gunboat Braga scuttled in the Waal, while the Luftwaffe sank the Dutch liners Statendam and Veendam, along with the steamer Stella.

The 12th saw the gunboats Bulgia and Friso and the hospital ship Luctor et Emergo sunk by German bombs, joined by the steamers Prinses Juliana and Van Rensselaer.

On the 13th, the torpedo boat Christiaan Cornelis was scuttled by her crew after sustaining crippling battle damage, while the minesweeper M 2 was sunk while doing her job.

The 14th was a day of reckoning for the Dutch Navy. Destroyed by the Germans or scuttled by their crew were the ancient and immobile 5,000-ton coastal battleship Batterijschip IJmuiden, the brave sloop/frigate Johan Maurits van Nassau, the yard-bound submarines O 8, O 11, O 12, O 25, O 26, and O 27; the minesweepers Abraham van der Hulst, M 1, M 3, M 4, and Pieter Florisz, the minelayer Hydra, the gunboats Brinio, Freyr, Hefring, and Tyr; the torpedo boats Jan Danielzoon van de Rijn, G 16, and Z 3; the tug Noordzee II, and the merchant steamers Jan Pieterszoon Coen and Naaldwijk.

Picture postcard with drawings of some of the Dutch warships lost during the May days of 1940. Top left: the gunboat Hr.Ms. Johan Maurits van Nassau (1933-1940), which was sunk by aerial bombs on May 14, 1940, between Petten and Callantsoog. Top right: the torpedo boat Hr.Ms. Z 3 (1920-1940), which was sunk by its own crew near Enkhuizen on May 14, 1940. Below that: the destroyer Hr.Ms. Van Galen (1929-1940), which was sunk by aerial bombs near Rotterdam on May 10, 1940. Below that, on the left: the minelayer Hr.Ms. Hydra (1912-1940), which was heavily damaged by German anti-tank fire in the Zijpe near St. Philipsstad on May 15, 1940, and grounded in shallow water. Next to it on the right are the minesweepers Hr. Ms. Pieter Florisz (1937-1940) and Hr. Ms. Abraham van der Hulst (1937-1940), which was sunk by its own crew near Medemblik and Enkhuizen on May 14. Below that on the left is the accommodation ship in Vlissingen, Hr.Ms. Noordbrabant (1925-1940) was set on fire by its own crew on May 17, 1940. Next to it is the gunboat Hr. Ms. Friso (1915-1940), which was heavily damaged by aircraft bombs on the IJsselmeer on May 12, 1940, and subsequently by gunfire from Hr. Ms. Pieter Florisz (1937-194) was sunk after the crew had abandoned the ship. Additionally, the gunboat Hr. Ms. Brinio (1914-1940), which was sunk by its own crew on Lake IJssel near Enkhuizen on May 14, 1940. Additionally, the minelayer Zr./Hr.Ms. Bulgia (1894-1940), which was sunk during an air raid on Vlissingen on May 12. NIMH 2061-006-001

Looking to fight another day, the cruisers Sumatra and Jacob van Heemskerck, the gunboat Gruno, the minelayers Jan van Gelder and Willem van der Zaan, and seven Dutch submarines (O 9, O 10, O 13, O 21, O 22, O 23, and O 24) escaped from the European mainland to Great Britain, most under strafing attacks by German fighters and a hail of German bombs. Heemskerck had to be towed, and the O 20-series subs were still incomplete.

They were joined by an armada of coasters and merchant vessels that also ran the gauntlet. No less than 39 Dutch coasters took part in the “Miracle from Dunkirk” and the Channel harbors of France over the next month, lifting at least 1,900 Dutch troops away from the maelstrom. In all, more than 1,200 Dutch merchant ships would serve with the Allies during WWII, with estimates hovering at about 525 of those lost.

The Dutch army units, which had not yet linked up with the Allies, laid down their arms on the morning of 15 May.

Dutch RADM Hoyte Jolles, commanding nearly 10,000 stranded sailors, marines, shipyard workers, and recalled reservists at Den Helder, which included several fortified coastal defense sites, wanted to keep fighting until the bitter end and was only narrowly convinced by CiC Gen. Henri Winkelman not to waste his men’s lives.

But what of our four building destroyers?

On the Issac Sweers, MLD LtZ Baron Hugo Anne Victor Raoul van Lawick gathered 10 naval personnel and six shipyard workers, all volunteers, and, with the blessing of KMDS personnel, cast off the incomplete destroyer on the late evening of 10 May 1940.

Using the requisitioned 850-ton L. Smit & Co tugboat Zwarte Zee (Black Sea), the shoestring operation towed the hull 80 miles from Vlissingen to The Downs in England–dodging four German magnetic mines dropped in the tug’s path– arriving late morning on the 11th. Safe, they moved to Spithead the following day.

There, Sweers was tied up, safe from the German advance. Zwarte Zee remained in English waters, joining 12 other Dutch ocean-going tugs, and, despite being sunk at least once, entered the service of the British Admiralty as a salvage vessel and tow boat. Zwarte Zee’s master throughout the war, Teun Vet, was honored with the Dutch Bronze Lion (Bronzen Leeuw).

As for the building, Tjerk Hiddes and Gerard Callenburgh, still being fitted out in Rotterdam, were both scuttled on the Nieuwe Waterweg by naval and RDM personnel, putting them out of the Germans’ hands for at least the time being.

The fourth ship of the class, the building Philips van Almonde, still in the stocks as she was just laid down in March 1939, was blown up at the shipyard in Vlissingen and scrapped by the Germans.

Completion abroad

In June, Isaac Sweers was towed to Thornycroft shipyard at Southampton, where she would be completed, a process that took nearly a year.

Torpedobootjager Hr.Ms. Isaac Sweers in drydock at John I. Thornycroft & Co. Ltd., Southampton, October 1940. Note that her screws haven’t been installed yet. NIMH 2158_002969

Isaac Sweers in drydock at John I. Thornycroft. Note that her 40mm mount is covered, and the radar and fire-control system antennas have been marked out by the censor. Nationaal Archief 934-9828

Although she had most of her intended equipment installed, including her propulsion plant, she lacked her main guns. This left her with three twin British 4″/45 QF Mk XVI mounts rather than the five 4.7″/45 Dutch guns she had planned. The incomplete cruiser Jacob van Heemskerck, likewise without guns, received five of the same mounts.

At Alexandria on the Free Dutch destroyer Issac Sweers (G 83). Dutch sailors off duty, enjoying a yarn beside depth-charges. Note the 4″/45 QF Mk XVI twin mount, 24 December 1941. By LT E.A. Zimmerman, RN. IWM (A 7263)

She also got two Vickers quad .50 cal mounts instead of the planned Colt-Browning twin .50s and British torpedo tubes, but never did get that seaplane fitted. Instead of the Dutch listening gear she had planned, she got a British Type 124 sonar.

Quad .50 cal Vickers mount on Isaac Sweers, at Alexandria, Egypt, 24 December 1941. By LT EA Zimmerman, IWM (A 7264)

Issac Sweers as completed, 1941, with British guns and radar. Dutch Nationaal Archief. 4.MST

Drawing by AD Baker III via British Destroyers from Earliest days to the Second World War by Friedman (Seaforth 2009).

Torpedobootjager Hr. Ms. Isaac Sweers, 1941, Bestanddeelnr 934-9830

The Brits were very interested in her 40mm Bofors mounts, as was her Hazemayer local fire control system, classified as the Range & Direction Finding system 289, or simply called “The Dutch Device” by ASE Plymouth. Sea trials with the primitive radar showed that a Swordfish had a continuously trackable echo out to 4,400 yards, while barrage balloons could be pinged out to 6,600.

Hr.Ms. torpedobootjager Isaac Sweers at Vosper Tornycraft soon after completion. Note the barrage balloons overhead. NIMH 2158_005293

The electric listening device (RDF 289) transmitter-receiver on Isaac Sweers with the J-scope and headphones, shown next to an image of the RDF 289 transmitter section. Sweers had one of these sets in shacks behind each of her two 40mm Bofors mounts.

The Brits elected to simplify the system for their own use and augment the Dutch ship with a range-only British UHF-band Type 282 fire control radar as well.

As noted by Friedman:

The Royal Navy was most impressed by the twin stabilized Bofors guns aboard Isaac Sweers and other Dutch warships. Both it and the U.S. Navy saw them demonstrated on board a Dutch gunboat in the West Indies. The U.S. reaction was to adopt a simplified (unstabilized) twin-powered Bofors in place of its quadruple 1.1-in anti-aircraft gun; this weapon entered widespread service from 1942 onwards. The Royal Navy was more interested in the mount, which it called a Hazemeyer, after the Dutch manufacturer (which later became Signaal), as a self-contained unit, carrying its own fire-control computer and its own range-only (Type 282) radar. A ship armed with multiple Hazemeyers could engage multiple air targets; a U.S. ship could engage only as many targets as she had off-mount directors (Mk 51 or radar-equipped successors such as Mk 57).

However, the complex mount turned out to be a manufacturing and maintenance nightmare, and the A through to I class destroyers could never be fitted with it. The promise of the Hazemeyer led the Royal Navy to develop the much heavier STAAG, with a next-generation radar (Type 262), and to project an even more elaborate Buster mounting, which would have weighed twenty tons (and was canceled).

The early 40mm Bofors Hazemeyer mount shown is aboard the destroyer Isaac Sweers, probably in mid-1941. The antennas are for the range-only British UHF-band Type 282 fire control radar. In effect, a Hazemeyer combined gun and fire control system, NIMH 2158_053881

A closer look at that Type 282. NIMH 2158_028955

With a 194-man crew drawn from across the assembled Free Dutch naval personnel in the West, Hr.Ms. Isaac Sweers, complete with the British pennant G 83 rather than her Dutch IS, entered service on 29 May 1941. Her first skipper was KtZ Jacques Houtsmuller, RNN, a regular who obtained his commission in 1916.

Hr.Ms. torpedobootjager Isaac Sweers (G 83) after completion in England. IWM (A 30815)

Finally, in the fight!

In June 1941, Sweers took part in a series of trials off Portsmouth and Plymouth, during which she achieved a top speed of 36.7 knots over a measured mile. She continued her workups and exercises at Scapa Flow through July and, on 1 August, arrived at Greenock to join the Western Approaches Command for escort duties.

She soon joined the escort for Convoy WS 10, a slow “Winston Special” headed to Africa from the Clyde.

Then came WS 11, which she took as far as Gibraltar.

Our little Dutch destroyer, sailing with the 4th Destroyer Flotilla, became part of Admiral Somerville’s Operation Halberd at “The Rock,” bound for Malta. Running two convoys totaling 12 freighters packed with supplies for the island, Sweers fell in with 18 other destroyers (including two Poles), five cruisers, the battleships HMS Nelson, Rodney, and Prince of Wales, and the carrier Ark Royal. A force of nine Allied submarines (including the Dutch O 21) patrolled ahead of the Italian fleet.

Speaking of which, the Italian RADM Angelo Iachino sortied out with two battlewagons, five cruisers, and 14 destroyers of his own, while the Italian air force had 500 assorted tactical aircraft based in Sardinia and Sicily that the Halberd force had to sail through.

When the smoke cleared, the Allied escorts and Ark Royal’s Fulmars shot down 21 attacking SM.79 and BR.20 torpedo bombers while only one Allied steamer (MV Imperial Star) was lost along the way. The Allied tin cans of Sweers‘ 4th DF, specifically HMS Gurkha and Legion, sank the Italian sub Adua. Gurkha and Sweers also unsuccessfully chased the Italian submarine Diaspro.

Sweers had at least three “narrow misses” from Italian torpedoes in as many days, two sub-launched torps traveling too deep, and an air-dropped fish missing her bow by 30 meters. She also suffered two men injured from friendly fire splinters.

Arriving back in Gibraltar on 1 October, Sweers ventured out to help escort Convoy OS 9 to Freetown, then came back north as an escort for Convoy SL 90

Back in Gibraltar for Operation Perpetual, one of the Club Run aircraft delivery missions to Malta, Sweers fell in with Force H– the carriers Argus and Ark Royal (the latter packed with Hurricane fighters and Blenheim bombers), battleship Malaya, cruiser Hermione, and six destroyers on 10 November.

Cape Bon

Ordered from Gibraltar to Alexandria via Malta with fellow destroyers HMS Sikh, Legion, and Maori to reinforce the Mediterranean Fleet in December, the four greyhounds sighted the outlines of two medium-sized ships steaming south on the early morning of 13 December near Cape Bon, Tunisia. With the force commodore on Sikh (CDR Graham Stokes) warned about two Italian cruisers (Alberico da Barbiano and Alberto di Giussano) proceeding from Palermo to Tripoli thanks to Ultra intercepts, he immediately presumed them to be these ships, and soon the surface action was afoot.

Sikh, leading the column, went in first, torpedoes and guns opening up at 1,000 yards, followed by Legion and Maori, with 12 torps wrecking the Italian cruisers. Sweers, the last in the column, got off 4-inch rounds at one of the burning cruisers (Alberto di Giussano), then switched fire to an Italian torpedo boat (Cigno) running in close, scoring several hits as the two traded missed torpedoes at close range in the dark.

Via MG Playfair’s post-war volume on North Africa

At the end of the scrap, the Allies suffered no casualties or damage, while both Italian cruisers were on the bottom, with 817 men from their crews. The damaged Cigno returned after dawn to pick up 500 waterlogged survivors.

The four Allied destroyers sailed into Alexandria with a hell of an after-action report on 19 December.

Changing skippers, loss of Gurkha

On Christmas Eve 1941, RN Photographer Lt. E.A. Zimmerman came aboard the Dutch man-of-war at Alexandria and captured her crew at work, then accompanied them for a Christmas ASW patrol.

Zimmerman’s photo essay:

CDR Houtsmuller, captain of the Isaac Sweers (left by one of the ship’s torpedo turnstiles) with RADM Irvine Gordon Glennie, Rear Admiral (Destroyers, Mediterranean Fleet). Glennie, who started the war commanding HMS Hood but had been kicked upstairs before she met Bismarck, retired as a full admiral in 1947, capping 42 years in uniform. By Zimmerman. IWM (A 7258)

At Alexandria on Issac Sweers. Dutch sailors pulling out torpedoes for cleaning, oiling, varnishing, and revision, 24 December 1941. By Zimmerman. IWM (A 7259)

At Alexandria on Issac Sweers. Dutch sailors pulling out torpedoes for cleaning, oiling, varnishing, and revision, 24 December 1941. By Zimmerman. IWM (A 7261)

At Alexandria on Issac Sweers. Members of the gun crew overhauling their pom-poms while in harbor. 24 December 1941. By Zimmerman. IWM (A 7264)

25 December 1941. ASW Patrol. Sending and receiving messages on the Dutch destroyer Isaac Sweers, while the look-out below scans the horizon. By Zimmerman IWM (A 8056)

25 December 1941. ASW Patrol, eastern Med. HMS Napier and HMS Nizam are almost hidden by bow waves from Isaac Sweers in heavy seas. By Zimmerman IWM (A 8053)

In early 1942, at a ceremony at Admiralty House, a DSO (Houtsmuller), 2 DSCs, and 3 DSMs were presented by Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, to officers of Isaac Sweers, “who participated in the night action in the Mediterranean on 13 December 1941 when two Italian cruisers and an E-boat were sunk and an Italian torpedo boat was heavily damaged.”

By this time, Houtsmuller had been replaced by KltZ Willem Harmsen, RNN, who had commanded the British-loaned destroyer HNMS Campbeltown (I 42) throughout 1941. A regular, Harmsen had earned his first stripe in July 1915.

The new year saw Sweers on cross-Med Convoy ME 8, AT 12, and MW 8A/B. It was on the latter that U-133 (Kptlt Hesse) torpedoed Gurkha off Sidi Barrani on 17 January 1942. Sweers and Maori rushed to her aid and, after towing her out of a burning oil slick, Sweers picked up 240 survivors while Maori screened the rescue and hunted the attacker. Gurkha suffered nine losses.

Royal Navy L-class destroyer HMS Gurkha (G 65), one hour after being torpedoed by U-133 off Sidi Barrani on 17 January 1942. She would be on the bottom just 30 minutes later, with Sweers saving the majority of her crew. The photo was taken by D.J.Hoefsloot, the ship’s barber on Isaac Sweers.

Spared at Java, lost at Torch

On 29 January 1942, with a brand-new war being fought in the Pacific, Sweers was released from the Mediterranean Fleet and ordered to proceed to the Dutch East Indies to reinforce the Free Dutch forces there under pressure from the Japanese.

However, upon arriving in Colombo via Port Said and Aden in late February, the situation in the Java Sea had come to a head, and there was no longer a Dutch fleet for Sweers to join in the Far East.

Falling in with the British Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean, she spent most of March and April escorting the battleship HMS Royal Sovereign, reacting to Operation C, the strong 5-carrier/4-battleship Japanese raid into the region.

Isaac Sweers in the Indian Ocean under British RN orders. Nationaal Archief NL 934-9831

Sweers, likely in a British port in 1942, looking worn. NIMH 2158 028954

After the Japanese retired back to the Pacific, Sweers was released to make her way to England via Durban, Simonstown, Freetown, and Gibraltar.

On 22 June 1942, she arrived at Thornycroft shipyard in Portsmouth for a much-needed refit after a solid year of high-tempo operations. She would remain there for three months. During the refit, Sweers landed her quad Vickers .50s in exchange for four Oerlikon singles and picked up a British Western Approaches-style camo scheme.

Hr.Ms. torpedobootjager Isaac Sweers’ post-camo scheme late in her career. NIMH 2158_005303

After working up and exercises in Scapa Flow, Sweers was attached to the escort for troop Convoy KMF 1 for the Torch Landings in North Africa, and headed back to the Med in October. There, she was detached on 5 November to join Force H, supporting the Eastern (Algiers) and Center (Oran) Task Forces.

On 11 November, Sweers and the British destroyer HMS Porcupine rescued 238 survivors from the Dutch troop transport Nieuw Zeeland, which had been torpedoed and sunk by U-380 about 80 miles east of Gibraltar.

The next day, our subject’s long streak of luck finally ran out.

At 0615 on 13 November, while northwest of Algiers, Sweers was hit by two torpedoes from U-431 (Kptlt Wilhelm Dommes) on the starboard side. One torpedo struck an oil tank, which had just been topped off by the fleet oiler HMS Dingledale, spreading burning oil over the ship and the water. The second torpedo hit the logroom and O quarters, killing all 13 officers sleeping there, with the butcher’s bill topping 108.

The British armed trawler HMS Loch Oskaig picked up the 86 survivors.

A snapshot of Hr. Ms. Isaac Sweers was found on the body of one of her crew after she was lost. The discolored spots are due to fuel oil, with which this survivor was also soaked. NIMH 2158_001537

For what it is worth, U-431 was chased to the ground the following October by RAF Wellingtons off Cartagena and sent to the bottom with all hands. Kptlt Dommes had, however, left the boat by then, sailing to the Pacific to become the Monsun Group commander at Penang, surviving the war with 11 patrols and 40,103 GRT to his credit.

Epilogue

Sweers‘ 1941 skipper of Cape Bon fame, KtZ Jacques Houtsmuller, RNN, survived the war and retired from the Navy in December 1946, capping a 30-year career, and was made an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau. He passed away in 1974, aged 80.

Kapitein ter zee Jacques Houtsmuller, DSO, et, al

Her final skipper, KltZ Willem Harmsen, would go on to command the completed Jacob van Heemskerck in the Indian Ocean in 1943 and 44. He retired in 1946 as Commanding Officer, Naval Forces Rotterdam. He passed away in 1970, aged 77.

The Dutch naval aviator who managed to save the incomplete Isaac Sweers, Baron von Lawick, was killed in a plane crash in the Dutch East Indies in 1941, aged just 31. His only son, naturalist Baron Hugo van Lawick, married Jane Goodall and won eight Emmy Awards for his documentary films.

As for Zwarte Zee, the little tug that saved Isaac Sweers from the Germans in 1940, sailing as W 163, she and 11 other Dutch tugs would take part in Operation Pluto, the breakwater for Normandy, in 1944, when her sister Roode Zee was struck by a German torpedo and sunk with her entire crew. After returning home, Zwarte Zee had a long career, chugging along for 33 years on her original pair of good old Werkspoor crosshead diesels.

On her last voyage to the scrappers in 1966, the old tug sailed slowly along the Nieuwe Maas through the port of Rotterdam, with many on the riverbank to bid farewell to the vessel.

Sleepboot Zwarte Zee waarschijnlijk in het Noordzeekanaal 1933

As for Issac Sweers’ sisters, the scuttled Gerard Callenburgh was salvaged and seized by the Germans in July 1940, then completed and served in the Kriegsmarine with a mixture of her Dutch main guns and German 20mm C/38 (16) and 37mm C/30 (4) flak guns and torpedo tubes, and as ZH1 (Zerstörer Holland 1), commissioned 11 October 1942.

Ex-Gerard Callenburgh, German ZH1, was sunk on 9 June 1944 by Allied destroyers (British HMS Tartar, Ashanti, Eskimo, and Javelin, the Canadian Haida and Huron, and the Polish Blyskawica) in the English Channel 10 miles NW of Ile de Bas by gunfire and torpedoes. NIMH 2158_035728

The scuttled Tjerk Hiddes, raised in June 1942, was planned to become ZH 2 but was never completed as such and was eventually scrapped at Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht.

An illustration of ZH 1 and 2 destroyers Source: “Die deutschen Kriegsschiffe 1815 – 1945, Band 2” book, by Erich Gröner

In a passive resistance kind of thing, the good patriotic employees of Werkspoor, under chief engineer Gerard Jan Lugt, duly disassembled and hid from the Germans eight Werkspoor-Parsons turbines meant for the Gerard Callenburgh class destroyers, along with plans and machinery for their production, through a variety of subterfuges including offsite storage (including at the company’s vast railcar plant at Utrecht), disassembly, and burying them under scrap and rubbish piles until 1945.

Post-liberation, they were coupled with new Babcock boilers and recycled into the power plants of four new, albeit smaller and more modern, Type 47A (Holland) class submarine hunter (onderzeebootjager) ASW destroyers built in the early 1950s, sailing into the mid-1970s in Dutch service, with one later serving in Peru well into the 1980s.

The Type 47A Onderzeebootjager Hr.Ms. Holland, complete with a pair of quad Bofors 375mm ASW mortars forward of the bridge. She served from 1954 to 1977 with the Dutch, then until 1986 with Peru as BAP Garcia y Garcia (DD75)– and did it all with pre-WWII engines ordered for the Gerard Callenburgh class– and Holland broke 40 knots on builder’s sea trials! NIMH 2158_002863

Speaking of carrying a legacy forward, the Dutch reused the name of VADM Sweers for an NDSM-built Van Speijk (Dutch Leander)- class frigate (F 814), commissioned in 1968. She served the Koninklijke Marine until 1990, when she was decommissioned as part of a post-Cold War drawdown. Still young and in good condition, she was sold to Indonesia, where she remains in service as the Ahmad Yani-class frigate KRI Karel Satsuitubun (F 356), now 58 years old.

HNLMS Isaac Sweers (F814) during her Cold War service in the Royal Netherlands Navy. She continues to ply the Pacific under an Indonesian flag, serving alongside four of her sisters.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Warship Wednesday 23 September 2026: With a Soaring Spirit

Posted on September 23, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Warship Wednesday 23 September 2026:

Photo by Phillip Oliver Hobson, AWM HOBJ0796

Above we see the aircraft repair ship and light aircraft carrier HMS Unicorn ( I72), or more specifically one of her four twin 4″/45 Mark XVI guns in a sponson Mark XIX mounting.

A child of WWII, it was Unicorn’s aircraft that made the Germans howl off Salerno, but in September 1951, some 75 years ago this week, her guns made naval history off the coast of Korea.

A Replenishment Carrier?

In 1938, England knew she was stumbling headlong into a war with a revitalized Germany, likely to be allied to Mussolini’s Italy, which the West had been fighting by proxy in Spain for years, while Japan, which walked out of the League of Nations in 1933 and withdrew from the London Naval Treaty the next year, was beating war drums of her own.

While the battle line, with its 15 active and five building battleships and battlecruisers, was the stuff of legends, the Royal Navy had been in the aircraft carrier business for a solid 20 years– the first fleet to field a true flattop in the form of HMS Argus in September 1918.

Going into the Czech Sudeten crisis, the Brits had four active fleet carriers (the 26,000-ton/48-aircraft HMS Courageous and Glorious, the 23,000-ton/33-aircraft Furious, and the 26,000-ton/21-aircraft Eagle), while the brand-new 27,000-ton/60-aircraft Ark Royal would commission in November 1938.

On the builders’ ways at three different yards were the 28,000-ton/33-aircraft “Lusty” sisters (Illustrious, Formidable, and Victorious) of soon-to-be-famous class armored deck carriers, followed closely by near sisters Indomitable, Indefatigable, and Implacable, although none of these six would join the fleet until well into the war (the latter two not until 1944).

With 11 large flattops built or on the schedule, the Admiralty hit on an idea for a “replenishment carrier” which could be a floating workshop capable of receiving “flying duds” in need of repair or patchwork from these other carriers, then sending a fresh model over to replace it while said dud was cycled down to the hangars for refurbishment.

Plus, as the ~~carrier~~ was actually a sort of “depot ship,” its tonnage didn’t count against naval treaty limits.

The need for a decent-length flight deck capable of takeoffs and landings, complete with six arresting wires, a crash barrier, and a BHIII hydraulic catapult, resulted in a 600 x 90-foot “roof” over a 640-foot hull on a steamer that displaced 16,794 tons (standard, 20,625 full). Under said roof was a 324 x 65-foot upper hangar and a 360 x 62-foot lower hangar, both standing 16.5 feet tall.

Fleet Air Arm Corsair and Firefly aircraft in the hangar of the maintenance carrier HMS Unicorn, circa 1945. Besides these types, Unicorn would, in the course of her career,r tote Fulmar, Seafire, Hellcat, and Martlet (Wildcat) fighters along with Swordfish, Albacore, Barracuda, and Tarpon attack aircraft– plus Dragonfly helicopters and a range of RAF types to include Gloster Meteors. Photo via Royal Navy Research Archive.

Transit between the hangar and flight deck was via a pair of 10-ton elevators aligned to starboard, fore (46 x 33 feet) and aft (46 x 24 feet) of the island. In this manner, 20 single-engine aircraft could be easily stored in the below-deck workshops and, should the flight deck be used, this could bump up to 35ish.

Further, her shops had storage for 50 aircraft engines, and she carried a self-propelled lighter for moving aircraft between herself and other carriers. Avgas storage allowed for 36,500 imp gallons, enough to fill a Swordfish from empty something like 218 times, not enough for extended operations (by comparison, Ark Royal could carry over 100,000 imp gallons) but enough to get some sorties in for sure.

She also had a large crane for both handling seaplanes and amphibians and moving aircraft to and from lighters.

Cutaway of aircraft repair ship and light aircraft carrier HMS Unicorn Illustrious class

Powered by a pair of Parsons geared steam turbines delivering 40,000 shp when all four Admiralty 3-drum boilers were lit and pushing, this floating aviation repair depot would be able to steam at a respectable 24 knots maximum, with 3,157 tons of fuel oil bunkerage giving her a worldwide deployable endurance of 7,500nm at 20 knots, or 11,000nm at a 13.5-knot pace. While not as fast as the 30-knot fleet carriers, this depot ship could still keep up with the fleet in all but racing speeds.

HMS Unicorn via Armored Carriers

She had a decent armament, easily the equivalent of a destroyer leader if not a scout cruiser. This included a main battery of eight high-angle dual-purpose 4″/45 QF Mk XVIs in four twin mounts located on sponsons, four quadruple 40mm 2pdr QF Mk VIII pom-pom AA guns sited immediately before and abaft the island, and 16 (five twin, six single) 20mm Oerlikons in sponsons below the flight deck towards the bow and stern. She also has four single 3-pounder saluting guns. Her magazines allowed for 3,816 4-inch and 19,000 40mm.

If you think this is a lot of guns, remember that the preceding RN fleet and light carriers– HMS Argus (6 x 4″/45s), Hermes (6 x 5.5″/50s), Eagle (9 x 6″/50s), Courageous/Glorious (16 x 4.7/40s), Ark Royal, Indomitable, and Illustrious/Formidable/Victorious (16 x 4.5″/45s)– all had significant batteries of medium guns while not being that much larger than Unicorn. It should also be noted that the 10 follow-on 18,000-ton Colossus-class light carriers commissioned after Unicorn never mounted anything larger than 40mm AAA guns.

The AA armament was controlled by two AR Type 285 RDF fitted HA/DCT’s and three AR Type 282-fitted barrage directors. A Type 290 radar was carried at the masthead, as was a Type 72 homing beacon.

In British fashion, Unicorn had an armored flight deck with two inches of box-shaped protection stretching to three inches over the engineering and magazine spaces, along with a 1.5-inch anti-torpedo bulkhead below decks. It should be pointed out that the similarly-sized late-war Colossuses were all but unarmored, only carrying a 10mm plate over their aviation magazines.

Able to switch hit between carrier and depot ship, Unicorn’s motto was very appropriate: In utrumque excelso animo (Ready for either duty with a soaring spirit).

Unicorn also had extensive medical facilities, including aid stations, fore and aft, and a central sick bay complete with a fully equipped surgical theatre and dental clinic.

At that, Unicorn was meant for RN use, shipping and supporting FAA aircraft and carriers either directly or in the fleet train. The vessel would be the equivalent of a deployable destroyer tender to destroyers, or a submarine tender to subs, yet also capable of performing as a carrier when needed– and sometimes she was needed.

As discussed on Unicorn at Armoured Carriers, it was thought that one such Unicorn type would deploy to support three fleet carriers, making the need for three such depot carriers to replenish the expected nine deployable fleet carriers. However, just one Unicorn would be completed, with no sisters or follow-on depot carriers ordered.

For shipping RAF aircraft in a “knocked down” condition with the wings removed, the RN in 1940 converted a pair of 10,700 ton Cameron-class twin-screw steamers, HMS Engadine (ex-Clan Buchanan) and HMS Athene (Clan Brodie), originally planned to be seaplane depot ships, for the task. Capable of 17.5 knots, they were thought too fast to be U-boat bait, especially when running with an escort. For air and surface defense, they had Type 286 radars, two QF 4-inchers, four quad 40mm pom poms, 10 Oerlikons, and two inches of armor plate on deck. They could carry up to 40 planes with the wings removed, and had bunkerage for 34,000 gallons of avgas. Planes were lifted on and off as cargo via two large cranes, fore and aft.

The air transport HMS Engadine (ex-Clan Buchanan) at anchor during WWII. IWM (FL 6024)

This all brings us to…

Meet Unicorn

Our subject is the 10th such vessel to carry the name of the mythical horned horse, going back to 1544.

The eighth was a 32-gun fifth-rate that served throughout the Napoleonic Wars, capturing over 30 vessels at sea, each including the French 44-gun frigate Tribune, the latter after a brutal ten-hour-long running fight.

Capture of the French Frigate La Tribune by the Unicorn, 8th June 1796, by Nicholas Popcock. In the collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. PAI5714

The ninth Unicorn was a 46-gun Leda-class frigate that entered service in 1824, then lingered as a powder hulk and later Royal Naval Reserve drill ship until she was handed over to a preservation society in 1968 and is preserved in Dundee as a museum ship— noted to be the sixth oldest warship in the world.

The old frigate Unicorn has been around for over 200 years, including pier-side service during both World Wars. In WWII, used as a training ground for WRNS; she even accepted the surrender of the advanced German Type XXIII submarine U-2326 a week after VE-Day. Note her distinctive figurehead.

This left our Unicorn with a full dozen battle honors to inherit (Armada 1588, Cadiz 1596, Porto Farina 1655, Santa Cruz 1657, Lowestoft 1665, Orfordness 1666, Solebay 1672, Schooneveld 1673, Texel 1673, Vestale 1761, Tribune 1796, and Basque Roads 1809).

Our subject, the 10th Unicorn, was part of the 1938 Estimates and ordered from the Titanic-famous yard of Harland & Wolff at Belfast on 14 April 1939. She was laid down as Yard No. 1031 on 29th June that year, by which time Czechoslovakia had been erased from the map of Europe and tensions were at an all-time high.

Her launch on 20 November 1941, sponsored by Lady Mabel MacNaughton, was delayed as the yard was ordered to suspend work on several occasions so that workers could be diverted to complete smaller warships urgently required for convoy defense. Harland and Wolff completed no less than 20 Flower-class corvettes at Belfast between HMS Arabis, laid down in October 1939, and HMS Pimpernel, commissioned in November 1940.

Incidentally, to keep from having two Unicorns on the Admiralty’s Naval List, the old frigate HMS Unicorn in Dundee was renamed HMS Cressy in 1941, to free up the name. We’ll revisit that later.

Our carrier’s first skipper was Capt. Quintin Dick Graham, RN, a seasoned regular who had commanded the light cruiser HMS Arethusa (26) earlier in the war and had joined up in 1908 as a cadet.

Unicorn was delivered by the yard to the Admiralty on 12 March 1943, commissioned for service with the Home Fleet, and commenced acceptance trials in the Clyde area.

War!

Carrying an Admiralty standard camouflage scheme of Grey (G45) with a Blue (B20) panel, Unicorn spent April and May 1943 on a series of landing trials, aircrew training, and work-ups for operational service out of Scapa Flow.

Rather than serve her intended depot carrier role, she was needed as a training carrier, conducting operations with the Sea Hurricane IIcs of 800 Squadron, Swordfish of 818 and 824 Squadrons, and Seafire L.IIs of 887 Squadron.

HMS Unicorn (I72), seen here 24 June 1943 at Greenock, Scotland, LT S.J. Beadell IWM (A 17523)

HMS Unicorn Underway. Photograph taken by Catalina Flying Boat B120J GIB/NC/01. Map reference of photograph location: 35 degrees 40 minutes north, 12 degrees 0 minutes west. Speed 18 knots. IWM (FL 6449)

On 19 May 1943, sailing from the Clyde with Algiers-bound Convoy KMF.15, Unicorn, escorted by the cruiser HMS Suffolk, made for the Mediterranean with 18 crated RAF Beaufighters and aircraft spares bound for Gibraltars belowdecks while her Swords from 818 NAS and Seafires from 887 remained aboard to provide the convoy with a combat air patrol– one that came in handy on 24 and 25 May in chasing off big German Fw200 Condors, one of which reportedly dropped ordnance near our carrier.

After arriving at “The Rock” and unloading her Beaus, Unicorn returned to England with Convoy MKF 015, reaching Greenock on the early evening of 4 June.

She returned to training duties and suffered her first loss: Ty/Sub Lieutenant (A) James A F Lawrance, RNVR, FAA, an 818 Squadron observer who fell from his Swordfish in rough weather near Ailsa Craig on 15 July and was never heard from again. She suffered her second loss, Ty/Sub Lieutenant (A) Joseph Brooks Pilling, RNVR, FAA, also of 818 Squadron, killed in an air crash at age 20.

By this time, Unicorn was deployed with elements of the Home Fleet in a feint towards German-occupied Norway as part of Operation Governor, in an effort to entice the Tirpitz out to be destroyed– and to divert German attention from the Mediterranean where the Husky Landings were being made on Sicily.

For Governor, Unicorn carried 887, 818 and 824 NAS and sailed with Force B from Scapa, with ADM Fraiser running his flag from the battleship HMS Duke of York while the new 16-inch battlewagon USS South Dakota joined the effort. The rest of Force A was balanced by the cruiser HMS Bermuda and nine destroyers. Meanwhile, Force A, from Iceland, with the carrier HMS Illustrious, battleships HMS Anson and USS Alabama, and eight destroyers worked as a pincer while Forces C, D, and E were nimble cruiser-destroyer greyhound packs.

Late July 1943. Battleship HMS Duke of York, HMS Unicorn and battlewagon USS South Dakota steaming in line, during Operation Governor. Photo from HMS Bermuda by Harold William John Tomlin, IWM (A 18352)

Operation Governor, Unicorn from HMS Bermuda. IWM (A 18348)

Same as above; note the Swordfish on deck. IWM (A 18349)

Operation Governor. The aircraft repair ship Unicorn dwarfs the destroyer HMS Saumarez when leaving on the reconnaissance. Photo by Lt FA Davies, IWM (A 18336)

Governor proved fruitless, with Martlets from Illustrious downing two German BV.138 seaplanes and RAF Beaus out of Scotland jumping another two as the only contact.

Unicorn was then given orders to sail for the Med to take part in the Avalanche landings at Salerno in Italy proper. For this task, she would lend her air group (30 Seafires of 809, 887, and 897 Squadrons and nine Swords of 818 Squadron) as part of Force V to cover the beachheads.

Force V was balanced by four British escort carriers (HMS Attacker, Battler, Hunter and Stalker), three cruisers and 10 destroyers, the latter including two Poles. The four CVEs were packed with two Seafire squadrons each, lending some 76 aircraft to Unicorn’s 39. Two larger fleet carriers, Illustrious and Formidable, were assigned to nearby Force H with six further squadrons aboard.

A total of 265 sorties were flown by Force V over Salerno on the first day, 9 September. Unicorn lost two aviators that day, Ty/Sub Lieutenant (A) Malcolm A. McKenzie, RNVR, FAA of 809 Sqn, and Ty/Sub Lieutenant (A) Joseph J Urlich, RNZNVR of 887 Sqn.

Another 232 sorties were flown by Force V on 10 September. Unicorn lost Sub Lieutenant (A) Brian Razzall, RNVR, of 897 Sqn that day, who bailed out of his Seafire but was never found. Also, Unicorn’s Swords carried “spare” pilots in their observers’ seats to Castelvetrano, Sicily, where more Seafires were staged to fly those aircraft out to the action, while also receiving “flying duds” from Force V’s escort carriers.

While it had been planned for Montecorvino airfield to be used ashore by D+2, that fell through, and Force V made another 160 carrier-borne sorties on the 11th. Ultimately, an ersatz strip was set up ashore at Paestrum on the 12th, allowing Force V to withdraw, its Seafires flown ashore, to Tunisia on the 13th.

All in all, for Salerno, Unicorn’s Seafires flew 198 combat sorties, which was certainly near exhaustion for her limited avgas storage.

Pilots from 809 NAS onboard HMS Unicorn after the Salerno landings in 1943. The FAA Museum notes, “The 17 Fleet Air Arm squadrons involved flew 713 sorties during 42 hrs of daylight. During the battle, the Seafire experienced a high attrition rate in large part due to deck landing accidents.” Photo via FAA Museum

Sent back to Scapa to rejoin the Home Fleet, Unicorn arrived at Gibraltar on 23 September and, in company with the carriers Illustrious and Formidable and the battleship Valiant along with a cruiser-destroyer screen, made Greenock on 10 October. Flying off her Swords, Unicorn arrived back at Harland & Wolff for repairs and alterations, remaining in the yard for a month. She would spend the rest of the year in a series of gunnery and flying exercises, celebrating Christmas at home.

Headed to fight the Emperor

On 30 December 1943, Unicorn and Illustrious departed Scapa with the battleships HMS Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, the battlecruiser HMS Renown, and a force of cruisers and destroyers bound for Trincomalee, Ceylon, to join the Eastern Fleet for service against the Japanese. During the cruise, Unicorn was packed with spares and aviation material, bound for points East, which meant she could only carry four Swords of 818 Squadron– later augmented for a few weeks by 8 Barracudas of 847 Squadron.

Arriving at the Suez on 13 January 1944, on the 19th Unicorn called at Aden for fuel, made Cochin on the 27th, and Trincomalee on 2 February, wrapping up more than 8,000nm.

Spending the year shuttling between Colombo, Bombay, and Trincomalee, Unicorn’s final assigned air group was made up of Barracuda IIs of 817 Squadron, which shipped aboard in November 1944 and continued operations over the new year into January 1945. She also had regular flights of Grumman Martlets, Corsairs, and Hellcats conduct flight training from her deck from RAF China Bay outside of Trincomalee.

Battlecruiser HMS Renown, aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, and aircraft repair ship HMS Unicorn, January 1944, Trincomalee, Sri Lanka

The Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Unicorn (I72, left) and HMS Illustrious (87), probably pictured at Trincomalee, Ceylon, in 1944. NNAM photo No. 1996.488.037.044

Crossing into 1945, Unicorn was ordered to join the British Pacific Fleet, which was soon to field the largest RN carrier force ever seen before or since. When she left for Australia, she carried 82 aircraft and 120 engines with her.

2 February 1945, Unicorn was seen steaming with her deck filled with FAA Corsairs, Hellcats, and Avengers. AWM 302495

Back when Britannia had a proper fleet: Six British Pacific Fleet carriers, circa early 1945, HMS Indomitable (R92), HMS Indefatigable (R10), HMS Unicorn (I72), HMS Illustrious (R87), HMS Victorious (R38) and HMS Formidable (R67) at anchor, with other shipping. IWM MH 5309

Unicorn would serve with TF 112/113, then TF 37/57 for the rest of the Pacific campaign, arriving at Manus on 7 March and running back and forth to Sydney for replacement aircraft, engines, and parts to keep the British 1st Aircraft Carrier Squadron in combat, making a huge effort during the Iceberg landings on Okinawa.

As detailed by the Royal Navy Research Archives,

Since Unicorn left the UK in December 1943, a total of 626 aircraft passed through the hands of the Air Repair Division; these included Albacore, Avenger, Barracuda, Corsair, Firefly, Fulmar, Hellcat, Martinet, Sea Hurricane, Seafire, Swordfish, Vengeance, and Walrus aircraft. Additionally, the Department also handled 283 engines and power plants. 63 engines were installed in aircraft or power plants.

Unicorn seen with the Hecla destroyer tender HMS Tyne (F 24), circa 1945. Tyne was deployed with the BPF from January to October 1945. You get a great view of her armament scheme with four twin 4″/45s on sponsons, two quad pom-poms bracketing the island, and smaller Oerlikon sponsons and tubs.

Post VJ Day, Unicorn assisted in the evacuation of units in the Admiralty Islands and Manus, landing withdrawn personnel, cargo, and aircraft at Brisbane in at least three round-trip 3,000-mile runs by Halloween. Leaving Fremantle in late November, she arrived back home in Devonport on 16 January 1946.

By the end of January, Unicorn was paid off and de-stored before reduction to Reserve status; her war was finished.

Unicorn, in her WWII service, added two battle honors (Salerno 1943, Okinawa 1945) to the dozen she inherited.

She had proven the replenishment carrier concept so thoroughly that two similar support ships, the Colossus-class light carriers HMS Perseus (ex-Edgar) and Pioneer (ex-Mars), were converted into aircraft maintenance ships while still under construction, although they arrived too late to be of use during the war.

Cold War

In mid-1949, with the newer replenishment carrier Perseus designated the trials ship for steam catapult development, and Pioneer laid up while at the same time Red China was growling, the RN decided it was cheaper to reactivate Unicorn for use as a maintenance and ferry carrier, backing up the forward-deployed light carrier HMS Triumph out of Hong Kong, which was carrying the 13th Carrier Air Group (Seafires of 800 Squadron and Fireflies of 827 Squadron).

British carrier silhouettes, 1954 Jane’s: battleships include Vanguard, Anson, Duke of York, King George V, plus th the monitors Abercrombie and Roberts, while carriers include Perseus, Glory, and Unicorn.

Unicorn sailed from Devonport on 22 September 1949, packed with a cargo of 27 Seafires, 38 Fireflies, 6 Sea Furys, and two Sea Otters bound for the Med and Far East, arriving in late November after numerous flag-showing colonial port calls, dropping off planes at RNAS along the way.

In May 1950, while calling in Kure, Japan, Unicorn and the Australian River-class frigate HMAS Shoalhaven pulled out their glad rags and fired simultaneous 21-gun salutes to mark George VI’s 13th Coronation.

HMS Unicorn and the frigate HMAS Shoalhaven, lying alongside at Kure, Japan, dressed their ships and fired simultaneous salutes of 21 guns to mark the 13th anniversary of King George VI’s Coronation. Photo by Phillip Oliver Hobson. AWM HOBJ0791.

A view of the mast area of HMS Unicorn docked at Kure harbor, dressed, May 1950. Photo by Phillip Oliver Hobson. AWM HOBJ0793

A view of the deck of HMS Unicorn dressed with flags to mark the 13th anniversary of the King’s Coronation. Note the carrier aircraft on deck with folded wings. Photo by Phillip Oliver Hobson. AWM HOBJ0800

Same as the above, Unicorn dressed with flags to mark the 13th anniversary of the King’s Coronation at Kure in May 1950. Note the Rotol contra-rotating propellers of the Supermarine Seafire FR Mk 47, the type used operationally in Korea by the FAA’s 800 Squadron from the carrier HMS Triumph. The Mk47s were the last of the 22,000 aircraft built under the Spitfire/Seafire program, ending the 13-year production line in 1949. Photo by Phillip Oliver Hobson. AWM HOBJ0801

Korea

In drydock at Singapore when the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel in June 1950, before a planned voyage back to England, Unicorn hurriedly refloated and rearmed, headed north to back up Triumph with spare Seafires and Fireflys.

Pulling into Sasebo, Japan, she unloaded her good planes in exchange for worn-out duds from Triumph.

August 1950. The aircraft maintenance carrier HMS Unicorn is seen entering Kure Harbor, Japan. IWM (A 31695)

The destroyer HMS Comus ships a heavy sea when oiling from HMS Unicorn in Korean waters. August 1950. IWM (A 31698)

Unicorn would continue the cycle for the next three years, jogging the 2,500nm from Sasebo to Singapore, via Hong Kong, carrying good aircraft and stores to the theatre and unserviceable airframes back.

Besides supporting Triumph, she did the same for HMS Theseus, which took Triumph’s place in September; HMS Glory, which replaced Theseus; HMS Ocean, which replaced Glory; and the Australian HMAS Sydney.

Between December 1950 and January 1951, off Korea. Air Mechanics servicing planes on board HMS Unicorn, ready for flying off to HMS Theseus. IWM (A 31804)

Between December 1950 and January 1951, off Korea. Servicing an FAA Sea Fury on board HMS Unicorn IWM (A 31806)

Between December 1950 and January 1951, off Korea. An FAA Sea Fury flying off HMS Unicorn. IWM (A 31809)

HMS Unicorn. Between December 1950 and January 1951, off Korea. Petty Officer Pilot Peter Lines of London, left, and Petty Officer Pilot Raymond Grant of Eastry, Kent, in flying kit, already to fly off their aircraft. IWM (A 31798)

United Nations ships assigned to support military operations in Korea pictured at anchor in Sasebo, Japan. Pictured from front to back: HMS Unicorn (I72), the 9,000-ton anti-aircraft cruiser USS Juneau (CLAA-119), the Essex-class carriers USS Valley Forge (CV-45) and USS Leyte (CV-32), and the repair ships USS Hector (AR-7) and USS Jason (ARH-1). The photo was taken between 8 October 1950 and 7 January 1951, as this was the only time that Leyte operated off Korea. NNAM photo No. 1999.272.030

HMS Unicorn moored in a southern Japanese port, probably Sasebo) after a tour of duty in Korean waters. Photo is dated 15 March 1951. Note the Carley floats. 80-G-427411

Besides shuttle trips, Unicorn would often clock in close to the line, supporting her front-line carrier in real-time, providing a base for loaned CAP aircraft, and serving as a lily pad for U.S. Navy SAR helicopters.

The whirlybird is a Sikorsky HO3S-1 Dragonfly (S-51) UP28 of the “Fleet Angels” of Navy Helicopter Utility Squadron One (HU-1). Assigned to support the RN and Royal Australian Navy, this aircraft was nicknamed “Uncle Peter.” September 1951. IWM (A 31984)

In July 1951, an unidentified shutterbug on Unicorn captured an incoming Sea Fury in such distress that it had to ditch alongside the carrier, with its pilot being scooped out by a whirlybird and delivered on deck just 2.5 minutes after hitting the drink.

Thus:

The Sea Fury, still airborne astern of the Unicorn, is giving off black smoke, an indication of engine failure. The pilot, aware of his difficulties, is already getting his wheels up in preparation for “ditching” alongside the carrier. IWM (A 31925)

With his engine stopped, hood open and wheels up, the Sea Fury pilot brings his aircraft down to the water alongside the repair and replenishment carrier Unicorn. IWM (A 31926)

Just 2 1/2 minutes after his Sea Fury ditched, the pilot is back on the Unicorn’s flight deck, being helped out of his flying kit by the carrier’s crew. IWM (A 31930)

Unicorn also served as an intermediate hospital ship as needed and would carry troops intra-theater to Korea as well.

One of her first such missions was to carry the “Die-hards” of 1st Bn, Middlesex Regiment, from their restful and exotic garrison in Hong Kong to active combat at Pusan.

“D” Company, 1st Battalion, The Middlesex Regiment (Duke of Cambridge’s Own) joins HMS ‘Unicorn’ at Hong Kong, 25 August 1950. Photo by Lieutenant (later Major) Geoffrey Norton. NAM. 1992-08-62-1

Unicorn pulling off. Photograph by 2Lt John Mortimer Lock, 1st Battalion Middlesex Regiment, Korea, 1950. Lock (397965) was killed in action on 29 November 1950. NAM. 1992-08-61-17

August 1950. Dusk falls over Hong Kong harbor as the aircraft carrier HMS Unicorn, helped by tugs, swings round, heading northwards for Pusan, South Korea, carrying men of the Middlesex Regiment. IWM GOV 2742

Troops from 1st Battalion, The Middlesex Regiment (Duke of Cambridge’s Own), on the march in Korea, late 1950. From August 1950 to April 1951, the battalion saw action as part of the 27th British Commonwealth Brigade, being one of the first British units to be deployed there. Seeing combat along the Naktong River and Hill 282, the battalion suffered 136 casualties in its nine months in Korea and received seven honors during its campaign of assault, withdrawal, and defensive operations in support of the ROK forces. Photo by Lieutenant (later Major) Geoffrey Norton. NAM. 1992-08-61-85

On 21 September 1951, Unicorn became the first aircraft carrier to conduct a shore bombardment when she used her eight 4-inch guns to shell North Korean coast watchers at Chopekki Point. As noted by the Royal Navy Research Archive, “out of sixteen salvos, three were known to have found the target.”

HMS Unicorn, the day after her NGFS, at Sasebo, 22 September 1951.

She also provided yeoman service delivering land-based Commonwealth tactical aircraft to the front.

At least 18 new Gloster Meteor jets for the Korean theatre lined up on the flight deck of Unicorn at Singapore. The aircraft were flown from England. At least 58 Meteor F.8s were flown by No. 77 Squadron, RAAF, during the war, with no less than 35 lost. (RAAF 393, AWM 042801)

Iwakuni, Japan. 1952. Gloster Meteor jets for No. 77 Squadron, RAAF in Korea are unloaded from the flight deck of HMS Unicorn to lighters in Southern Japan. By the end of the conflict, 77 Squadron had flown 4,836 missions, destroying six MiG-15s, over 3,500 structures and some 1,500 vehicles. AWM JK0388

Unicorn’s work involved supporting evolving aircraft types, and she took on board SMEs to help accomplish that.

For instance, in October 1950, when Theseus relieved Triumph, the new carrier’s wing was made up of 807 Sqn’s Hawker Sea Fury FB.11s and newly-built Firefly FR.5s of 810 Squadron. The changeover between the two flattops resulted in Triumph’s 827 Squadron paying off its older Fairey Firefly Mk.1s and the unit’s skipper, LCDR (A) Bernard Campbell “Ben” Lyons, cross-decking over to Unicorn to help provide the crucial support to keep the Fireflies serviceable for Theseus’s tour.

Of note, Lyons had flown the Fleet Air Arm’s very first strike in the Korean War, leading his 827 Sqn Fireflies on a rocket attack from Triumph against the hangars of Haeju airfield in North Korea on the morning of 3 July 1950. Lyons had also flown some of the last RN sorties against Japan in 1945, at the controls of a 1771 Sqn Firefly from HMS Implacable.

Briefly, in October 1952, Unicorn served as flag for the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Roderick McGrigor, joined by ADM Sir Guy Russell, head of the Far East Fleet, for their visit to Japan.

Vice Admiral Sohn, CinC Republic of Korea Navy, inspecting a pith-helmeted Royal Marine Guard of Honour during a visit to HMS Unicorn, Pusan, 26-29 November 1952. IWM (A 32445).

With the outbreak of the ceasefire, Unicorn was released on 15 October 1953 and sailed home from Singapore, arriving at Devonport on 17 November.

Her decorations list for her four Korean War tours:

Clifford Frank Dubber, RAN, Mention in Despatches
Chief Petty Officer, Eugene Elderfield Fernandez, RAN, Mention in Despatches
Chief Airman, William Daniel Gardner, RAN, Mention in Despatches
Chief Electrical Artificer, James Patrick Whelan, RAN, Mention in Despatches
Chief Air Fitter (E) Arthur Winstanley, RAN, Mention in Despatches

HMS Unicorn (I72) Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong 1953

During her four years’ service in the Far East, Unicorn steamed 130,000 miles and spent over 500 days at sea, carrying over 6,000 troops intra-theatre, and handled some 600 FAA, RAF, RAAF, and RAN aircraft.

During the war, British carrier aircraft dropped 15,200 bombs of various sizes, fired 57,600 rockets, and 3,300,000 rounds of 20mm cannon ammunition in around 23,000 operational sorties.

Redesignated as a ferry carrier (pennant A195) with a skeleton crew, Unicorn remained in reserve until March 1957.

Unicorn, 1954 Janes

Unicorn, post-war

HMS Unicorn seen with a King George V-class battleship behind her, likely post-Korea mothballs

Battleships HMS Vanguard and HMS Howe lying in reserve at Devonport, 1956. HMS Unicorn and Euryalus behind

Placed on the disposal list in 1958, ex-Unicorn was sold for scrap in June 1959 and arrived at Dalmuir on 15 June 1959 for breaking.

Epilogue

The old frigate HMS Unicorn, still in Dundee, has our carrier’s 1942-marked bell on display. She had her original name restored from HMS Cressy in 1959 during a ceremony by Mrs. Keay, widow of the late Captain William Foggie Keay, RNVR, who had commanded the frigate throughout the war.

Ship bell from aircraft carrier HMS Unicorn (1942) on HMS Unicorn, which is on display in Dundee, Scotland, by Hynek Moravec via Wiki Commons.

She is remembered in maritime art.

HMS Aircraft carrier Unicorn from destroyer HMAS Nepal (G25/D14) in Sydney Harbour, 1945, by John Goodchild, AWM ART25541

Further, several aircraft tied to her are preserved in museums, including Hawker Sea Fury FB.11 WJ231/O-115 at the Fleet Air Arm Museum, RNAS Yeovilton, and Gloster Meteor F.3 A77-867 – NZ6001 at the Ashburton Aviation Museum in New Zealand. The first, preserved in Korean War “invasion stripes,” was shifted from Unicorn to Ocean during Korea, while the second shipped aboard Unicorn to Korea in August 1952, where it served with 77 Squadron, RAAF, based out of Kimpo.

Unicorn’s plank owner skipper, Capt. Quintin Dick Graham DSO with Bar, RN, remained aboard through Op Governor and the Salerno Landings, then commanded the big deck carrier HMS Indefatigable during the Pacific. Passing to the reserve list in July 1946 after 38 years of service, he passed the bar in 1968, aged 73. His replacement, Henry Lockhart St. John Fancourt DSO, RN, who commanded Unicorn in the Pacific in 1945, retired in 1950 and passed in 2004, aged a distinguished 103.

As for the RN, the Admiralty commissioned an 11th Unicorn, S 43, an Upholder-class SSK, in 1993 after the name became available when the 9th Unicorn, the old frigate, finally passed out of naval service in 1968.

HMS Unicorn (S 43) was one of the RN’s last “smoke boats” and was sold to Canada in 2001, where she continues to serve as HMCS Windsor.

Finally, perhaps the last naval gunfire support via an aircraft carrier was also done by the British. It occurred during the Aden Emergency when 145 Battery, 29 Commando Regiment, Royal Artillery, fired 105mm pack howitzers directly from the flight deck of the Centaur-class commando carrier HMS Albion off the coast of Aden in November 1967.

But that’s another story.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Nothing like that Northern Wedding

Posted on September 17, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland 2 comments

Some 40 years ago, in the darkest stretch of the Cold War, Exercise Northern Wedding ’86 was a massive, three-week NATO maritime and amphibious exercise conducted from late August to mid-September 1986, involving 150 ships, 35,000 troops, and 500 aircraft from 10 Western nations.

The NARA has hundreds of pics from the exercise, and they really show off the might of the Western fleets at the time, including at least three carriers (Nimitz, America, and Ark Royal), the newly recommissioned battlewagon Iowa, and ‘phibs a-plenty, including LHA’s with their original 5-inch guns intact, LSTs, and LPHs.

There were FFGs. Remember how nice it was to have those?

Heck, there were even hydrofoils, with the PHMs out of Key West seen in a rare overseas deployment.

A port bow view of the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) underway during NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86, DN-ST-87-00986

A port bow view of the guided missile frigate USS Doyle (FFG-39) participating in an underway replenishment with the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61). The ships are participating in NATO exercise Northern Wedding 86, DN-ST-87-00322

Crew members aboard the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) secure a Helicopter Light Anti-Submarine Squadron 32 (HSL-32) SH-2F Seasprite helicopter on the ship’s fantail during NATO exercise Northern Wedding 86. Of note, BuNo 161642 was a brand-new airframe, having just entered service in 1985. Rebuilt as a SH-2G by Kaman, she was stricken off charge in 2003 and is in the National Naval Aviation Museum’s collection today. DN-ST-87-00325

The No. 1 Mark 7 16-inch/50-cal. gun turret aboard the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) is fired during a main battery firing exercise. The ship is participating in NATO exercise Northern Wedding 86, DN-ST-87-00324

An aerial port quarter view of the battleship USS Iowa (BB 61) firing her No. 3 Mark 7 16-inch/50-cal. guns during NATO exercise North Wedding 86. DN-ST-87-03747

Officers on the bridge of the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) observe the ship’s Mark 28 5-inch/38-cal. guns during a firing exercise. The ship is participating in NATO exercise North Wedding 86. DN-ST-87-00321

A port view of the patrol combatant missile hydrofoil USS Hercules (PHM-2) underway alongside the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) during NATO exercise Northern Wedding ’86, DN-ST-87-00316.

That’s a lot of Harpoons for a 133-foot PHM! Sadly, the 48-knot (not a misprint) USS Hercules (PHM-2) was retired after not quite 11 years of active service. DN-ST-87-00313.

A port quarter view of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN-68) underway off the coast of Norway during NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86. At the time, she shipped out with CVW-8 (AJ tail code), including two F-14A Tomcat squadrons, two of A-7E Corsairs, one of A-6E Intruders, one of S-3A Vikings, plus Sea Kings, Prowlers, and Hawkeyes. DN-SC-87-02785

A starboard view of the amphibious assault ship USS Saipan (LHA 2) underway during NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86, note her bow 5-inch Mk45. DN-ST-87-01034

An aerial starboard beam view of the amphibious assault ship USS Nassau (LHA 4) being escorted by four CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters flying in formation over the ship. Note her bow 5-inch Mk45. The ship is participating in NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86, DN-SC-88-00894

A port bow view of the amphibious assault ship USS Inchon (LPH 12) underway during NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86. Note the little 19,000-ton helio carrier has at least seven CH-46 Sea Knights, four CH-53 Sea Stallions, and two UH-1Ns on her diminutive 592×104-foot flight deck. DN-ST-87-00975

A crew member mans an observation post aboard the tank landing ship USS Spartanburg County (LST 1192) above a Mark 32 3-inch/50-caliber twin gun mount during NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86, DN-ST-87-00947

A port quarter view of the British light aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal (R-09) underway during NATO exercise Northern Wedding ’86. Note the two Sea Harriers and at least five British Westland-built Sea Kings on her deck. DN-ST-87-00308

A port bow view of the British Type 42 (Sheffield) class destroyer HMS Liverpool (D 92) underway during NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86, DN-ST-87-01008

A bow view of the West German Type 101 (Hamburg) class destroyer FGS Schleswig-Holstein (D 182) underway during NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86. Schleswig-Holstein was an old girl even at the time, having been ordered in 1958 and just eight years away from disposal. DN-ST-87-00960.

A port bow view of the West German Type 101 (Hamburg) class FGS Hessen (D 184) underway during NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86. Note her French armament, including DCN 100 mm/L55 guns and MM38 Exocets. DN-ST-87-01016

When it comes to Marines, you have battleship MarDets pulling shot correction, and M60A1s hitting the beach with snorks, both long-extinct things.

Members of the Marine detachment from the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) act as naval gunfire spotters during NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86. You have to love the M81 BDUs, M65 jackets, ALICE gear, M1 helmets with cat eyes, double canteens, and the ciggy, DN-SC-87-04734

Shells fired from the battleship USS Iowa (BB 61) land near the shoreline during live-fire gunnery practice for NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86. DN-ST-87-03458

A Marine M-60 main battle tank is driven ashore from Utility Landing Craft 1660 (LCU-1660) during the NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86. A folding snorkel is attached to the tank. DN-ST-85-00687

And you know, in a big NATO exercise conducted in Russia’s front yard, you had plenty of party crashers show up to observe, giving the Blue Team a good look at (and listen to) real-world Red Team assets.

You know the Leicas, Nikons, and Hasselblads were just clicking away.

A starboard bow view of the Soviet Sovremenny-class destroyer Bezuprechny observing NATO ships during Exercise Northern Wedding ’86, DN-SC-87-04745

An elevated port beam view of the Soviet Krivak I-class frigate Druzhny underway. The ship is observing NATO ships participating in Exercise Northern Wedding ’86, DN-SC-87-04469

A starboard bow view of the Soviet Krivak I-class frigate Zharky underway. The ship is following U.S. ships en route to exercise Northern Wedding ’86, DN-SN-87-04476

A Soviet Tu-20/Tu-95 Bear aircraft is escorted by a U.S. Navy F-14A Tomcat aircraft during NATO Exercise Northern Wedding ’86, DN-ST-87-01015

Good times.

Warship Wednesday 16 September 2026: The Submarine Altered across my Bows and I Rammed her

Posted on September 16, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland 2 comments

Warship Wednesday 16 September 2026: The Submarine Altered Across My Bows and I Rammed Her

Department of National Defense / National Archives of Canada, PA-105829.

Above we see the mighty Flower (Trillium) class corvette HMCS Moose Jaw (K 164) steaming with a bone in her teeth off Halifax, Nova Scotia, in June 1942. The 205-foot brawler, along with her sister HMCS Chambly, sank the German Type IXC U-501 via ramming and depth charges off Greenland some 85 years ago this week.

The U-boat was the first of 30 German subs busted by the RCN during WWII.

The Flowers

A handy little sub-buster that could be cranked out in record time but was still very capable of escorting slow-moving merchantmen from the Americas to Europe during the Battle of the Atlantic, the Admiralty would order more than 300 Gladiolus/Flower-class corvettes from 1939 onward.

Essentially a stretched version of the Smith’s Dock’s 582 GRT, 160-foot steam-powered whaler design built in 1936 for the Southern Whaling & Sealing Co. Ltd (SWSC), they were single-screw vessels powered by a pair of cylindrical Scotch marine boilers feeding a single VTE engine that could, when turning at maximum RPMs, generate a theoretical 2,750 h.p., enough to push the little tub 16 ish knots while an economical load of 230 tons of fuel oil would get them 3,500nm at 12 knots, enough to make it across the Atlantic on the 2,700-mile Halifax to Liverpool route with some fuel left for maneuvering.

The Flowers were based on the SWSC’s Southern Pride, shown here in her pre-war whaler service. The vessel would be requisitioned by the RN (K 249) in 1940 and lost in 1944 off Freetown.

Using the simpler boiler pattern and including enough space for a crew of 80 officers and men (later to swell to as much as 110), the dimensions shifted from a 160-foot whaler to a 205-foot corvette. With a correspondingly wide 33-foot beam, they had a stubby 1:6 length-beam ratio.

Armament was slight: a single 4″/45 BL Mk IX forward, a 40mm/39 2pdr QF Mk VIII pom-pom on a “bandstand” platform aft, a couple of depth charge throwers and two depth charge racks over the stern, with provision for up to 40 ash cans. They also had a perfectly adequate Type 123 or Type 128 sonar and (eventually) a Type 271 or Type 286 radar.

Of course, there were extensive modifications to this and tweaks across the massive production line, but you get the idea. Late-war fits included as many as 70 depth charges, a Hedgehog ASW device, and a half-dozen 20mm Oerlikons.

Drawing of a Flower Class Corvette showing the ship’s layout by John W. McKay – 1992. Source: “Corvettes of the Royal Canadian Navy 1939-1945” by Ken MacPherson and Marc Milner

Flower-class HMCS Timmins (K 223) plans

Built to merchant (Lloyds) standards rather than to those of the Admiralty, they could be churned out rapidly at about any small coastwise commercial shipyard, and several dozen shipyards participated in the program in the UK and Canada.

Some 13 Canadian yards alone (Burrard, Canadian Vickers, Collingwood, Davie & Sons, Davie SB, Kingston SB, Marine Industries, Midland SY, Morton Eng. & D.D. Co, Port Arthur SB, Victoria Machinery, and Yarrows Esquimalt) made a whopping 122 Flowers during the conflict.

The average construction time was 6-8 months, a process often sped up by the fact that the armament and sensors would be installed post-delivery at a nearby naval yard, sometimes in stages, a problem that meant some Flowers had to deploy for months before they received all their gear.

No less than 111 Flowers were assigned to the RCN at one point or another, of which seven were canceled while still under construction, 80 were built from the start for the Canadians, and 24 RN corvettes (many of which were built in Canadian yards) were transferred on loan.

RCN corvette in drydock. Library and Archives Canada Photo, MIKAN No. 4950910

Three Flower-class corvettes tied up at St. John’s.

This all brings us to…

Meet Moose Jaw

Our subject is the only Canadian warship named for the town of Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan, which has the nickname of “Canada’s Most Notorious City” due to its Prohibition-era rum-running history.

Moose Jaw, Sask. Circa 1909, by Sidney Turk. Library and Archives Canada, 3315697

The future HMCS Moose Jaw (K 164) was one of 28 corvettes (19 Flowers/modified Flowers and nine Castles) ordered from the Great Lakes firm of Collingwood Shipyards Ltd, in Collingwood, Ontario.

Laid down 12 August 1940 as Yard No. 94, she was constructed directly alongside her sisters HMCS Galt (K 163) and Battleford (K 165).

Moose Jaw side-launched into Lake Ontario on 9 April 1941, the first anniversary of the invasion of Norway and Denmark. She was christened by Miss Jane Cory, daughter of Lt.Col. Robert Young Cory, V.D., 48th Highlanders of Canada.

Shipyard workers drive in wedges preparatory to the launch of HMCS Moose Jaw at Collingwood Shipyards, Ltd., Collingwood, Ontario. (NAC, PA 204282)

The launch of HMCS Moose Jaw at Collingwood Shipyards Ltd., Collingwood, Ontario – 9 April 1941.

Moose Jaw in the water, 9 April 1941. (NAC, PA 204283)

She was commissioned on 19 June 1941 at Montreal.

Moose Jaw’s first skipper was LT Frederick Ernest Grubb, RCN, a regular who shipped out on the monitor HMS Erebus as a cadet in 1927, followed by tours on the battleships HMS Revenge and Warspite. His first RCN ship was the destroyer HMCS Vancouver in 1934 as a sub-lou, before serving as a full lou on HMCS Skeena and St Laurent, the latter of which had badly damaged the German submarine U-52 on a three-hour pursuit and depth charging while defending the Halifax-to-UK Convoy HX 60 in August 1940– almost the first Canadian sub kill of the war.

Her namesake city passed the hat and sent a box of radios to be installed for the morale of the crew, as noted by the May 1941 Moose Jaw Times Herald: “The radios, one each for the forward and after crews and the officers, have been shipped to Halifax with the compliments and good wishes of the city of Moose Jaw.”

Part of the RCN’s 72 1939-40 Programme Flowers, Moose Jaw had the earlier fit of armament for the class: a single shielded 4″/45 BL Mk IX forward, two twin Vickers .50 cals, two twin .303-caliber Vickers machine guns, two depth charge throwers, and two depth charge racks with total capacity of 40 “ash cans.”

The only image I can find of her during the war that shows her foremast has the RCN’s REL-made, manually rotated 1.5m SW1C (Surface Warning, 1st Canadian) radar array installed, which was likely added at Saint John, NB, in June 1942.

War!

Arriving at Halifax in late June 1941, Moose Jaw spent six weeks working up in the waters off Nova Scotia, then tagged along with Flower-class sisters HMCS Prescott and Kenogami on Convoy HX 146 for three days out of Halifax to transfer to the Newfoundland Escort Force at St. John’s.

Once there, under CDR “Chummy” Prentice’s local control as Senior Officer, Canadian Corvettes, Moose Jaw and sisters had a hill to climb in training and meeting Chummy’s exercise program.

As noted by No Higher Purpose: The Official Operational History of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War:

Although Moose Jaw was one of the very few corvettes commanded by a regular force officer, Lieutenant F.E. Grubb, RCN, most of his inexperienced crew, missing several key specialist personnel, “was seasick for the first four days at sea, some of them being quite incapable of carrying out their duties.”

Then came an emergency call to go to the rescue of the struggling Convoy SC 42, which had left Sydney, Nova Scotia on 30 August with 64 slow (7-knot convoy speed) merchant ships bound for Liverpool under the protection of four escorts. The lumbering flotilla was discovered by the 14 U-boats of Wolfpack Gruppe Markgraf off Southeast Greenland on 9 September, with U-81 sinking the straggling Empire Springbuck (5,591 GRT) that morning. While depth-charge-carrying PBY Catalina flying boats from Iceland kept the wolves away during the day, night proved a horror story. By the end of the 10th, the Markgraf wolves claimed another eight steamers.

The slaughter led C-in-C Western Approaches to sortie reinforcements from Iceland (36 hours away) and even strip escorts from the safely steaming HX 147 and ON 13 Convoys to sail to SC 42’s aid.

From off St. John, Chummy was ordered to rush his proven HMCS Chambly (K 116) and his new Moose Jaw, which were at sea on exercises, at best possible speed to the battle. Arriving just 24 hours after they left Newfoundland, the two Flowers saw the signal rockets shooting up from the struggling merchant vessels under attack around 2100 on the 10th in the Denmark Strait south of Angmagsalik, Greenland.

Soon, Chambly had an ASDIC contact 700 yards off and was turning to drop charges, which had an immediate effect.

As detailed in the RN interrogation report of U-501’s crew:

“U 501” was at a depth of 40 meters (131 ft), and the explosion of the depth charges caused considerable damage inside the U-Boat, a number of instruments being smashed and the after hydroplane being put out of action; both the ordinary and the emergency lighting systems ceased to function.

Prisoners claim to have heard two more crashes in the control room, followed by a smell of gas given off by the action of water on potassium cartridges. The valves of the U-Boat were said to have been damaged, and the depth gauge was put out of action.

While Chambly turned to make another depth-charge attack, the damaged U-boat, U-501 (KrvKpt. Hugo Forster), surfaced near Moose Jaw. The banged-up submarine attempted a hasty withdrawal, and Moose Jaw opened fire, but an overexcited sailor in the 4-inch gun’s crew jammed its mechanism.

Then came something really special.

As described by Grubb in his report from Moose Jaw:

The next few minutes was spent in chase … At one time four of the submarine’s crew made a determined move to the after gun. As our own gun was still jammed, no action could be taken except to increase speed and try to ram before they could fire. This I did, although the chance was small; fortunately, someone on the conning tower ordered them back. The .5-inch machine guns were bearing at the time, but when the trigger was pressed, they failed to fire. A subsequent check showed no defects, so I assume that in the excitement the crew failed to cock them.

I managed to go alongside the submarine, starboard side to, and called on her to surrender. To my surprise, I saw a man make a magnificent leap from the submarine’s deck into our waist [the mid-part of the corvette], and the remainder of her crew move to do likewise. Not being prepared to repel boarders at that moment, I sheered off. The submarine altered across my bows and I rammed her [a glancing blow that, fortunately, did not seriously damage the corvette] …

After the impact she moved across my bows at reduced speed. The gun being cleared by that time, I opened fire again. The crew jumped into the sea as soon as the first round went, and I ordered fire to be stopped. I subsequently learned that the shell had passed low enough over the conning tower to knock down the men who were standing thereon.

The man who I had seen jump on board turned out to be the submarine’s commanding officer. He was badly shaken, and when he was brought to me on the bridge appeared to be worried at the amount of light we were showing in order to pick up survivors.

While Chambly put a nine-man boarding team aboard U-501 under Lt. Ted Simmons looking for code books, it was reported by the boarding party that a large hole was seen, about four feet in diameter, where the U-Boat’s casing joined the hull on the port quarter. It appeared that the U-Boat’s port after hydroplane had been shorn off.

The boat sank before they could get very far, losing a man in the process, Stoker William Irvin Brown, RCNVR, while Simmons, sucked out of the conning tower, almost perished.

In all, U-501 lost 10 men.

On both the skipper’s and the boat’s first patrol, U-501’s commander had only one vessel to their credit, a 2,000-ton Norwegian steamer which required six torpedoes and 40 shells from the boat’s deck gun, before being sent to the bottom by Moose Jaw and Chambly 35 days after leaving Trondheim. A regular who had joined the Reichsmarine in 1923 and served aboard surface ships– he was on the cruiser Blücher when she was sunk in a cold Norwegian fjord in 1941– Förster was nonetheless a very green 37-year-old submarine commander.

From the RN crew interrogation:

He was transferred fairly recently to U-Boats and took a shortened U-Boat course. He refused to go into any details of his recent career, but it was established that the first and last cruise of “U 501” was also his first and last cruise as Captain of a U-Boat, although he may have been on a war cruise in another U-Boat under instruction as a prospective Captain. His lack of experience, his cowardice, and other defects were bitterly criticized by his officers and men, some of whom went so far as to threaten to take vengeance into their own hands should Förster not be adequately punished by Court Martial after the war. According to his crew, Förster not only surrendered without a fight, but subsequently thought solely of his own skin, and not of the fate of his ship, nor of the lives of his men, eleven of whom were drowned. He was the first to desert his U-Boat and the only man to jump from her to the British corvette [Moose Jaw] without even getting wet, let alone having to swim for some time before being rescued. Later, when visiting his men, he offered his hand to his Chief Quartermaster, a man of fourteen years’ service in the German Navy, who refused to shake hands with him.

The captain of “U 501” explained his precipitate leap from his U-Boat by stating that he felt impelled to get aboard “Moosejaw” at once in order to insist on the British rescuing his men; otherwise, he added, the German crew might have been left to drown. His explanation, while failing to convince the British, succeeded in infuriating his own men into a state of high blood pressure.

Moose Jaw and Chambly, having completed the rescue of U-501’s survivors, joined the convoy at 2315, with the former soon stopping to pick up survivors from the lost British steamer Berury. Moose Jaw and sister HMCS Kenogami (K 125) rescued Berury’s master, 36 crew members and four gunners, only losing one to the sea. Berury’s captain informed Grubb that he had been unable to remove the confidential books from the bridge of his ship and, with seas too high to board the vessel, Moose Jaw riddled the hull with 66 shells from her 4-inch gun (33 HE, 33 SAP) to help speed the sinking along.

The two Flowers would spend the next week riding shotgun towards the British Isles. SC 42 made it to Liverpool on 20 September, after losing 16 ships totaling 68,259 GRT.

Besides U-501, U-207 was sent to the bottom with all hands by the destroyers HMS Leamington and Veteran of the 2nd Escort Group out of Iceland, while HMCS Skeena and Kenogami had severely damaged U-85.

Moose Jaw had 29 prisoners (three commissioned officers, two midshipmen, and 24 ratings) along with 35 merchant seamen from torpedoed ships on board when she made port.

In the aftermath of the SC 42 convoy fight, the Admiralty’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Division classed the defense of SC 42 as “valiant” and praised the destruction of U-501 by Chambly and Moose Jaw. Chummy Prentice and Ted Simmons earned a DSO and DSC, respectively, while our LT Grubb was Mentioned in Dispatches.

With her ASDIC and bow busted because of ramming U-501, she was put in for 10 days of patchwork at Greenock for repairs.

The corvette operated on ASW patrols between St. John’s and Iceland for the rest of 1941 and into 1942, operating with sisters HMCS Chicoutimi, Sherbrooke, Berne, Brandon, Rosthern, and Morden. During this time, she clocked in briefly on other eastbound SC convoys, including SC 58 and SC 64, as well as westbound Liverpool-to-Halifax Convoys ON 29, ON 36, ON 48, and ON 60.

On 9 February 1942, while escorting convoy ON-60, the Free French Flower-class sister FS Alysse (K 100) was torpedoed by the German submarine U-654 and eventually sank. The Moose Jaw and HMCS Hepatica took 34 men as survivors, including the wounded skipper, LdV Jacques Pépin Lehalleur, while 36 men were lost to the sea.

Free French Corvette Alysse (K-100), torpedoed in the North Atlantic by U-654, 9 February 1942. HMCS Hepatica visible in the distance. Photo taken from HMCS Moose Jaw by L/S Ian Butters, RCNVR.

Moose Jaw then ran aground on the south entrance to St. John’s harbor on 19 February while en route to join convoy HX.176, and required repairs to fix busted seams at Saint John, New Brunswick until 25 June. This resulted in the reassignment of her skipper at the time, T/Lt. Henry Drummond Campsie, RCNR, who had taken over from Grubb the previous December.

Her third skipper, arriving on Valentine’s Day 1942, was T/Lt. Lewis Dennis Quick, RCNR, who would remain in command into early 1944.

The ship’s company of Moose Jaw in Saint John, New Brunswick, 19 March 1942, likely with skipper T/Lt. Lewis Dennis Quick, RCNR, forward. (NAC, PA 204274)

Dispatched to join the Western Local Escort Force, Moose Jaw was once again on North Atlantic Convoy duty, clocking in on westbound ON 109, ON 116, ON 123, ON 129, and ON 133, as well as eastbound SC 93, SC 97, SC 100, SC 103, and SC 107.

On 3 November 1942, while escorting Convoy SC 107, sisters Moose Jaw and Algoma (K 127) engaged the marauding U-704 and U-89 of Wolfpack Gruppe Veilchen with star shells and depth charges, forcing both sharks to break contact. Still, SC 107 was a rough convoy fight, losing 15 of 42 merchant ships to Donitz’s raiders, some 82,817 tons of shipping, while the Germans only lost two subs, both to RCAF patrol bombers.

Then came the Torch landings in North Africa, with Moose Jaw joining sisters Algoma and Regina, actively escorting convoys to and from England to Gibraltar and Tunisia between November 1942 and March 1943. These included Med-bound KMS 5G, KMS 6G, KMS 8G, and UGS 5 as well as Liverpool-bound MKS 4 and MKS 9. Regina bagged the Italian coastal submarine Avorio north-west of Philippeville, Algeria during this period.

After this, Moose Jaw was sent back home to join Quebec Force/Gaspe Force for escort duties in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

During a December 1943 to March 1944 refit at Liverpool, NS, she was modernized, and her forecastle was extended along with a sheet of over 30 modifications and additions, including increased accommodations, watertight lockers for the fighting equipment, and additional voice pipes and electric buzzers for communication within the ship.

By this stage of the war, Moose Jaw carried her 4-incher, a 40mm 2-pounder QF Mk VIII, four 20mm Oerlikons, a 24-rocket Hedgehog ASW spigot mortar system, and room for as many as 72 depth charges. She also sported a more advanced Type 271 radar and a Type 123 sonar.

A Hedgehog ASWRL on board HMCS Moose Jaw, Halifax, May 1st, 1944. While 294 Flowers were completed, the Hedgehog was far from standard kit across the class. Department of National Defense / National Archives of Canada, PA-112918.

Two ratings in front of Moose Jaw’s 4inch gun. FPS MJW0004

Moose Jaw had legendary gun shield art

By May 1944, Moose Jaw was sent to the British Isles as part of the buildup for the Normandy invasion, one of 62 documented RCN warships involved in D-Day.

Assigned to the escort force as one of the 70-odd corvettes under Western Forces Command out of Milford Haven and Portsmouth, Moose Jaw was soon running small convoys from Barry on the Bristol Channel across the English Channel to the Seine Bay in France, a sector still very hot with German S-boots, U-boats, human torpedoes, and aircraft.

These EBC/FBC convoys were small and lightly escorted, for instance, with EBC 43 seeing Moose Jaw depart Barry with 19 merchants on 17 July 1944 with only the old (circa 1916) destroyer HMS Walker to help shepherd the group. They were short, 200-mile/three-day runs, but they were always a pucker factor. By September, Moose Jaw had run 10 convoys across the Channel in such fashion and lived to tell the tale.

Shifting to Escort Group 41 out of Plymouth in December 1944, Moose Jaw escorted coastal BTC (Milford Haven – Southend/Thames Estuary) and TBC (Southend/Thames Estuary – Milford Haven) convoys until the end of the war, logging 15 of each. These coastwise four-day/450nm milk runs were very small indeed, typically just a few merchant vessels hugging the 10-fathom line with Moose Jaw seaward as the sole escort.

Don’t think this work was low risk, as even in this late stage of the war, “Jerry” was still about. On 28 February 1945, Moose Jaw rescued six survivors from the British merchant ship Norfolk Coast, which had been torpedoed and sunk by U-1302 south-west of Strumble Head.

By the end of the war, the little corvette had logged no less than 66 convoys of all sorts. She earned battle honors for Atlantic 1941-1943, Normandy 1944, and English Channel 1944-1945.

Not all her sisters were that fortunate. No less than seven were lost during the war, including Levis, Charlottetown, and Shawinigan to U-boats; Albernie, Weyburn, and Regina to mines; and Louisburg to air attack.

Moose Jaw was paid off from the RCN on 8 July 1945 at Sorel, Quebec, then sold for scrapping in September 1949 and broken up at Hamilton, Ontario.

Epilogue

A For Posterity’s Sake page exists to carry forward the memory of the lost corvette.

Moose Jaw’s plank owner skipper, who commanded her during the U-501 attack, went on to command the HMCS Charny (Z 26) through November 1942 and ended the war at the Toronto shore establishment HMCS York, a site that trained 14,000 RCN members during the conflict. Post-war, he shifted to the HMCS Naden shore establishment at Esquimalt, BC, and went on to pen several scholarly works, including Naval Customs and Social Practices. He retired as a captain in 1954 and passed in 1985 at Victoria, aged 74.

Grubb, looking very much like Brendan Fraser’s uncle

Captain James Douglas “Chummy” Prentice, RCN, DSO, DSC, was on the scene for the sinking of at least three more U-boats and retired in 1946 as ADC to the Governor General of Canada. He passed in Saanichton, BC, in 1979.

As for the man who jumped from his U-boat to Moose Jaw’s deck during the fight for Convoy SC-42, KvtKpn. Hugo Förster of U-501 spent the following three years in Canadian POW camps, then was repatriated in January 1945 in poor health as part of a prisoner exchange. He committed suicide just weeks after returning to war-ravaged Germany.

Of Moose Jaw’s classmates, the last of her Collingwood-built sisters, HMCS Barrie (K 138), survived until 1972, serving with the Argentine Navy as the survey ship Capitan Canepa.

The final Canadian Flower afloat, HMCS Sackville, remained in service first as a controlled minelayer, then as a survey ship with the RCN into the 1980s, and is a fixture on the Halifax waterfront, complete in WWII livery.

Sackville via Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, please, if you are ever in Halifax, pay her a visit.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Not war, but you can see it from here

Posted on September 11, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Some 85 years ago this week. Somewhere in the U-boat-filled North Atlantic.

Convoy to Iceland, September 1941: the New Orleans-class heavy cruiser USS Tuscaloosa (CA 37) hoists in a Curtiss SOC scout-observation plane after a patrol. View looks aft on the cruiser’s starboard side, with midships’ 5″/25 guns in the foreground. Another SOC is resting on the starboard catapult.

U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph – NH 47007

Tuscaloosa at the time was part of RADM William R. Munroe’s TF 15 during Operation Indigo III, the passage of 5,000 men of the U.S. Army 10th Infantry Regiment, 5th Engineers, 46th Field Artillery Battalion, and various service units to Iceland. There, the Joes would replace the men of the First Marine Brigade (Provisional), which had started arriving the previous July.

While the U.S. was not “officially” in the war, by relieving the British in Iceland, which had been there since May 1940 after Denmark and Norway had been occupied by the Germans.

The 9,950-ton Tuscaloosa, a “peace” cruiser that had been constructed during the period that the U.S. was handcuffed by the London and Washington Naval Treaties, had entered service in 1934.

The Indigo force included the battleship USS Idaho, heavy cruisers Tuscaloosa and Vincennes, and destroyers Winslow, Anderson, Mustin, O’Brien, Sampson, Benson, Hilary P. Jones, and Niblack, escorting the transports Heywood, William P. Biddle, Harry L. Lee, and Republic, leaving the New York Port of Embarkation on the morning of 5 September– the same day the new broke of U-652 trading torpedoes for depth charges with the destroyer USS Greer off Newfoundland.

Purposely avoiding Halifax-to-Scotland convoy routes, they nonetheless had a scare, with sonarmen monitoring numerous underwater contacts.

Then FDR threw down the gauntlet in his fireside chat.

As noted by the CMH:

On the evening of 11 September, they were ploughing through the North Atlantic somewhere south of Greenland when the voice of President Roosevelt came over the radio announcing an attack on the USS Greer--he called it piracy–and declaring that German or Italian vessels of war would henceforth “at their own peril” enter waters essential to the defense of the United States.

With TF 15 arriving at Hvalfjörður near Reykjavík on 16 September 1941, Tuscaloosa would soon be made ready for war as much as possible.

Her earliest “dapple” slotch camo scheme was soon applied and, while she later carried the more purposeful Measures 33/ Design 13d, 31a/13d, and 12 later during the war, that first freestyle paint job was perhaps the most fetching.

USS Tuscaloosa (CA 37) at Hvalfjord, Iceland in April 1942. IWM A 7486.

Port quarter view of the USS Tuscaloosa (CA 37) at Hvalfjord, Iceland in April 1942. IWM A 8960

Midship close-up of the USS Tuscaloosa (CA 37) passing the HMS Wheatland (L 122) in May 1942 at Hvalfjord, Iceland. A good detail shot of plane handling facilities, SOC floatplanes, and searchlights. IWM A 8957.

USS Tuscaloosa (CA 37) moored at Scapa Flow, April 1942, while operating with the British Home Fleet. The British heavy cruiser London is in the background. 80-G-12018

Tuscaloosa would earn seven battle stars for her WWII service.

Of canvas, ramps, and brass balls

Posted on September 10, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Following in the heels of yesterday’s Warship Wednesday of the hardworking 9th HMS Aurora during WWII (“We were in action a Tremendous Amount of Times”), how about this great circa 1915 photo essay on the 8th HMS Aurora, a light cruiser (C1), complete with a Deperdussin Monoplane (No.1378) on her deck during early flight trials from a 38-foot (!) ramp.

Her aircraft trials came when she was the leader of the 10th Destroyer Flotilla of the Harwich Force, with the thought that the aeros could be used to ward off German naval Zeppelins that were harassing the tin cans.

HMS Aurora, Deperdussin Monoplane at the ready. Note the platform is on her No. 1 BL 6″/45 Mk XII gunhouse. Naval History and Heritage Command, NH 112869

Same as above, NH 112871

As noted by the RMG, “The Deperdussin was successfully flown from Aurora on 4 November 1915 by Flight Lieutenant R J J Hope-Vere. According to her ship’s log, Aurora carried out aeroplane experiments in the morning of 4 November 1915.”

Flight Sub. Lieut. Ralph James Hope-Vere, R.N.A.S

However, it was found the aircraft were too underpowered to be of use against the roaming Teutonic dirigibles and the flying platform was removed.

Commissioned in September 1914, Aurora was a “war baby” and was the leader of the 1st Destroyer Flotilla at the Dogger Bank in early 1915, earning a battle honor for the engagement that left the cruiser SMS Blücher on the bottom. She later helped catch the German commerce raider SMS Meteor, captured two of the Kaiser’s naval trawlers, and sowed nearly 300 mines in Jerry’s waters. She was on hand at the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet in November 1918.

The 3,600-ton German Hilfskreuzer SMS Meteor on fire, shortly before she sank on her second raiding voyage, 9 August 1915, by Surgeon Oscar Parkes, IWM SP 1087

Paid off by the RN in 1920, Aurora was transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy and was eventually scrapped in 1927.

HMCS Aurora, Courtesy of the CFB Esquimalt Naval and Military Museum CTB043473

As for the aviator who flew that tiny plane off that ridiculously small platform, Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Jean James Hope-Vere, O.B.E., A.F.C., Royal Air Force, late Royal Naval Air Service, Royal Aero Pilot Certificate No. 900, ended the war flying seaplanes in No. 66 Wing, Adriatic Group, against the Austrians, then moved to the retired list in the RAF in 1934. After Home Guard service in WWII, as one would expect, he passed in 1959, aged 71.

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