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Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period, 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

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Warship Wednesday 17 December 2025: They Give a Good Account of Themselves

Above we see the awning-covered and white painted Insect-class gunboat HMS Ladybird (P.0A) lounging on the Yangtze River during China’s warlord period, circa the late 1920s. A globetrotter, she witnessed history around the world in two official wars and several undeclared ones.

Don’t let her innocuous profile and name fool you, Ladybird was a killer, as three Italian freighters found out some 85 years ago today.

The Insects

The dozen shallow draught river gunboats of the Insect class, some 237 feet long and 635 tons displacement, were flat-bottomed ships designed by Yarrow to operate in shallow, fast-flowing rivers, and able to float in just four feet of brown water.

They had enough muscle (2,000 ihp plant on Yarrow boilers and twin VTE engines and three rudders) to make 14 knots (designed, yet “easily made” 18 knots on trials), thus capable of going upstream against the flow as needed and could turn “almost on a six-pence.”

Get a feel for the class from this excellent model of the Insect class gunboat HMS Tarantula in the RMG collections.

While ordered as a class in February 1915 for emergency war service in Europe (e.g. to fight on the Danube against Austrian river monitors but instead against the “Johnny Turk” in the Tigris flotilla), the consensus is that they would, after the Great War had wrapped up, see China service on the Yangtze and similar large waterways to protect the Crown’s interests in the often lawless region. Thus, they were classed and described as “Large China Gunboats” during construction, which also allowed cover for their planned use in Europe and the Middle East.

They were well-armed for such endeavors, with a BL 6-inch Mk VII naval gun forward and another one in the rear to poke holes in said Austrian river monitors. An elevated central battery clustered around the single stack and mast held a group of six Maxim/Vickers water-cooled .303 machine guns and a couple of smaller QF Mk I 12-pounders. All of these guns, even the MGs, had front splinter shields. However, as the muzzles of the 12 pdrs were immediately over head of the crews working the 6-inchers, being one of these gunners was certainly hard on the hearing.

According to the excellent site on these ships, maintained by Taylor Family Collection: 

Their steel plating was thin by warship standards – only five-sixteenths of an inch amidships, tapering to about one-eighth of an inch at the ends. The decks were strengthened in the vicinity of the main armament mountings with steel doublers three-eighths of an inch thick, and a three-quarter-inch steel doubler was also fitted on the sheer strake over the mid-ship section as extra stiffening. Beyond this, they carried no armour and had no double bottoms, unlike most ships.

That their armour was so minimal is not surprising given that these were essentially “kitset” ships specially designed to be broken down and reassembled. Heavy armour plating or additional construction “stiffening” was counterproductive. Active service with the Tigris Flotilla, however, resulted in rearming – a 2-pounder pom-pom added, four of the .303–inch Maxim guns removed, and a 3–inch anti-aircraft gun installed in their place. All were fitted for towing kite balloons (to carry artillery observers). Initially, sandbags were built up around the battery deck for the protection of personnel, but later a 5–foot shield made of ¼ inch chrome steel plate was built all around this deck as can be seen in the photos.

All 12 were named for insects and acrahnids (Aphis, Bee, Cicala, Cockchafer, Cricket, Glowworm, Gnat, Mantis, Moth, Scarab, Tarantula, and our Ladybird) as befitting their role and, to speed up delivery, were ordered simultaneously from five small yards (four from Barclay, two each from Ailsa, Lobnitz, Sutherland S.B, and Wood/Skinner). No, although they were to a Yarrow design, that esteemed firm was too busy making “real” warships to deal with such bugs.

Meet Ladybird

Our subject was laid down in 1915 at Lobnitz, Renfrew, as Builder’s Hull No. 804. Her slightly older sister, HMS Gnat, No. 803, was built nearly side-by-side at the same yard. Gnat hit the water in December 1915 while Ladybird slid down the way the following April. The two would commission by May 1916.

Ladybird’s original pennant number, issued in January 1916, was P.5A. This later shifted to P.0A in January 1918.

Her first skipper was Acting Commander Vaughan Alexander Edward Hanning-Lee, an Englishman from a long-service naval family. He had 16 years of service behind him, including command of several destroyers and the gunnery training ship HMS St. George (an old Edgar-class cruiser), as well as detached service at Salonika. Hanning-Lee would remain in command of Ladybird through the end of 1918.

War!

The Insects, with Serbia all but knocked out of the war and access to the Danube closed, were repurposed to fight in the Eastern Med and Mesopotamia, while Cricket, Cicala, Cockchafer, and Glowworm were kept in British home waters to defend against German zeppelin raids.

Gnat, Mantis, Moth and Tarantula were towed to the Persian Gulf to join the Tigris Flotilla while Bee and Scarab guarded the Suez Canal.

Ladybird and sister Aphis would be detailed to Egypt, and had a very busy 1917, giving good, if somewhat undetailed service against the Ottomans in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, notably providing fire support for Bulfin’s XXI Corps during the victorious Third Battle of Gaza in November.

CDR Hanning-Lee earned a DSO aboard Ladybird and a later OBE for his gallant conduct and services in the Mediterranean, retiring soon after.

The Armistice brought an end to the hostilities, of a sort.

Wait, another war?

While peace had officially broken out across the world, the Insects would spend the next several years, often deck-deep in combat, although not officially in war.

Cicala, Cockchafer, Cricket, and Glowworm sailed through the Barents Sea to Archangel for service as part of the Dvina River Force, supporting the White Russians, where they would remain through most of 1919, fighting the Reds.

Six went to the Far East with Mantis and Tarantula dispatched to the West River near Hong Kong, while Bee, Gnat, Moth, and Scarab were sent to the Yangtze River.

Aphis and our Ladybird, however, were shipped in February 1919 to join Capt. Vernon Haggard’s newly formed Naval Brigade on the Danube, aka the British Danube Flotilla, to enforce the naval terms of the Armistice with Austria-Hungary in conjunction with the Entente military mission in Budapest, the latter led by the unpopular French Lt.Col. Ferdinand Vix.

This small shallow water river force also included at least four new Vickers-designed Elco-built 86-foot ML.51 motor launches, ML 196, ML.210, ML.228, and ML.434. The MLs, armed with a 3pdr plus depth charges and carrying an eight-man crew, were dangerous boats as they had gasoline engines and were poorly ventilated, with the 196 and 434 boats later catching fire and sinking in the river.

The flotilla also held control, at least temporarily in conjunction with the French, of the former Austrian KuK Donau Flotilla monitors Bodrog, Czuka, Wels, Stör, Vizu, Lachs, Fogas, Barsch, and Compó, which had lost many of their officers but still had their mostly Croat crews aboard.

While based in Baja, Hungary, the Flotilla got into a hairy situation when Bela Kun’s Soviet Republic of Hungary came to power between March and August 1919, which coincided closely with the eight-month-long and almost totally forgotten in the West, Hungarian–Romanian War and Hungarian–Czechoslovak War (both of which Hungary lost). Then came reactionary Hungarian Admiral Miklós Horthy’s “White Terror” after the fall of the communist government, which lasted through 1921.

All of this was tense to say the least, with one of the Flotilla’s vessels (ML.210) being captured by Hungarian Reds at one point and the old Austrian monitors always one step away from casting their lot with one faction or another, thus requiring constant minding– with the Yugolsavs taking custody of most of them in November 1919, although the Trianon Peace Treaty of 1920 divided the old KuK Donau Flotilla between Austria and Hungary.

The British quit the Danube in January 1926, but Ladybird had left the force before then, being laid up in reserve at Malta on 17 April 1922, after all the interventions, wars, and revolutions in Hungary had passed.

While Ladybird was lucky, others of her class serving abroad in similar undeclared conflicts were not. Cicala, serving on the broad Dvina River in Northern Russia in 1919, was the host to a mutinous crew and was later mined by the Bolshevik Reds and bottomed out, but was raised and returned to service. Likewise, both Glowworm and Cockchafer were badly damaged in a munitions barge explosion at Beresnik/Bereznik in August 1919 but were similarly repaired.

Once the Danube Flotilla was disbanded, Aphis and Ladybird— the latter recommissioned at Malta on 29 January 1927– were sent to join their sisters in the Far East while Glowworm, her wounds her Russia service never truly healed, was sent to Malta where in 1928 it was decided by the Admiralty that, due to her poor condition, she should be sold for scrap in September of that year.

Interbellum

As noted by the December 1984 edition of the (Australian) Naval Historical Review: 

Typically, these gunboats…carried two officers and sometimes a doctor; six or seven petty officers and leading seamen, plus 17 able seamen. The remainder of the 50-odd souls aboard were Chinese servants, cooks, seamen, and black gang. Obviously, British ability to mount a landing force fell well below the capabilities of the ‘new six’ US gunboats, with their 4 line officers, doctor, and about 50 US enlisted. However, the British POs enjoyed more responsibility and authority than the American, as all RN officers could be off the ship at the same time.

It was during this period that, from 21 April 1932 to 30 September 1933, Ladybird was commanded by LCDR Eric Wheeler Bush, the youngest recipient of the D.S.C. in history, at not quite 17 while on HMS  Revenge at the Battle of Jutland.

The U.S. Navy’s flotilla of China Station patrol boats (ala Sand Pebbles) worked so closely with the RN’s boats that a number of excellent images of Ladybird exist in the NHHC archives from this era, many from the collections of Donald M. McPherson and Philip Yarnell.

She also frequently found herself a consort to the ill-fated American gunboat USS Panay (PR-5). She and sister HMS Bee, the river flotilla flagship at the time, were on hand for Panay’s final day during the evacuation of Nanking in December 1937.

Panay, escorting three small Standard Oil tankers, Mei Ping, Mei An, and Mei Hsia, which in turn were packed with some 800 Chinese employees of the company and their families, was attacked on 12 December by Japanese naval aircraft while some 28 miles upstream from Nanking. The force, comprised of Yokosuka B4Y Type-96 “Jean” bombers and Nakajima A4N Type-95 biplane fighters, sank all four ships.

The same Japanese bombers later struck SS Wanhsien, owned by the China Navigation Company, part of a British company, later that day with negligible damage.

Ladybird and Bee, along with the American gunboat USS Oahu (PR-6), rushed to the scene in the aftermath and took aboard survivors of the vessels. Three Americans and an Italian correspondent were killed and at least 48 were seriously wounded.

A Japanese field artillery unit near Wuhu on the Yangtze, under orders from Col. Kingoro Hashimoto, opened fire on the scene with Bee dodging a near-miss and Ladybird taking six hits, suffering several casualties. One of Ladybird’s crew, Sick Berth Attendant Terrance N Lonergan, C/MX 50739, became the first member of the Royal Navy to perish in conflict with the Japanese since 1862.

The class also thinned once again, with Bee, in poor material shape, being paid off in 1938 when the new Dragonfly-class gunboat HMS Scorpion arrived from Britain. Ex-Bee was sold in Shanghai for scrap on 22 March 1939 for just £5,225.

And another war

When Hitler sent his legions into Poland in September 1939, kicking off WWII, Ladybird was still in China, where she would remain for the rest of the year until she and sister Aphis were nominated for service in the Mediterranean. Their local Chinese crew would remain behind, transferred throughout the station.

In the meantime, both gunboats were upgraded during a refit in Singapore, landing their original 6”/45 Mk VII guns for more capable 6”/50 Mk XIII guns which had been removed from the Jutland veteran battleship HMS Agincourt in 1922 and sent East. They also picked up two Vickers 40mm/39 2pdr QF Mk VIII pom-poms in place of their old 12 pounders. The latter would become a common addition on the Insects in this period.

Other members of the class would also later be transferred to fight the Germans and Italians in the Med and Middle East, leaving just Cicala and Moth in Hong Kong while Mantis was paid off in January 1940. It was at about this time that the 10 remaining Insects shelved their P-series pennants for T-series, with Ladybird becoming T58, Aphis T57, et. al.

In January 1940, Ladybird’s new skipper was 39-year-old recalled LCDR (retired) John Fulford Blackburn, who had been on the retired list since 1934. Everyone has to do their part and all that. Her captain since March 1938, LCDR Robert Sydney Stafford, would take command Aphis.

On 3 March 1940, Ladybird and Aphis left Penang in Malaysia under escort of the cruiser HMS Durban (D 99), which later handed them over to the cruiser HMAS Hobart (D 63), to proceed to the Mediterranean via Colombo, Aden, and the Suez.

Once in the Med, she became something of a regular off the coast of the Italian Libyan port of Bardia, home to a full army corps.

In Operation MB 1, on 23 August 1940, the Australian destroyer HMAS Waterhen covered Ladybird when she boldly entered Bardia, and fired point-blank on buildings and harbor defenses. Both vessels withdrew safely after the attack. The slow-going Ladybird returned to Alexandria on the 25th, trailing Waterhen by a day.

Ladybird would repeat her punishment of the harbor on 17 December 1940. Sailing with the destroyers HMAS Voyager and HMAS Vendetta providing cover, Ladybird, sister Aphis, and the monitor HMS Terror splashed the Italian coasters Galata, Giuseppina D, and Vincenzino, shelled and sunk in the mud at Bardia.

She then spent a week off the town over the New Years, with Aphis, Terror, Gnat, and Ladybird supported by the destroyers Voyager and HMS Dainty while the carrier HMS Illustrious, two cruisers, and four destroyers poked around further offshore– wishing the Italians to sortie out– and the bruising battleships HMS Barham, Warspite and Valiant even coming in close enough to lend their big guns in two bombardment runs on 3 January 1941, landing 244 15-inch shells.

This was during Operation Compass, the strike by the British 7th Armored Division and 6th Australian Division, with Free French Colonial troops brought in by ship from Syria, to seize the Italian stronghold, wrapping up Lt. Gen Annibale Bergonzoli’s XXII Army Corps in the process and capturing 36,000 Italian troops along with 400 guns and 900 vehicles by 5 January 1941. Ladybird inherited a second-hand 20mm/65 M1939 Breda AAA gun and several crates of shells in the process.

Australian combat cameraman Damien Peter Parer was on board Ladybird when she bombarded Bardia and took dozens of snaps of the gunboat during this New Years trip, with most of them in low-rez format online at the Australian War Memorial.

He also caught numerous images of her crew snatching a bit of rest when they could between gun runs and batting away successive low-quality Italian air raids.

Over 21/22 January 1941, Ladybird, Aphis, and Terror gave the same treatment to the Italian port of Tobruk on the Libyan/Egyptian border, where another 20,000 Italians were captured.

In February 1941, Ladybird landed 24 Royal Marines as part of Operation Abstention, a failed attempt to seize the Italian island of Kastelorizo (Castellorizo) in the Aegean, about 80nm from Rhodes. Sailing from Suda Bay, Crete with the destroyers HMS Decoy and Hereward packed with 200 men of No. 50 Army Commando, Ladybird was struck by bomb dropped by an Italian SM.79, wounding three sailors just after she put her Marines ashore. Damaged and low on fuel, she was forced to reembark her Marines and head to Haifa, one of several spoilers to the mission.

Once Rommel arrived in North Africa, the British fortunes in the theatre reversed and, not only was Bardia recaptured, but the German Afrika Korps surged into Egypt.

In early April, Ladybird and a few other ships were trapped in Tobruk with 27,000 other Allied troops, mostly of the 9th Australian Division but also with smatterings of Free Czech and Polish units. Together, these “Rats of Tobruk” held out for the next seven months against all odds as Rommel tried to reduce and either capture or wreck the port.

Soon, the cargo ships SS Draco, Bankura, and Urania, along with the 3,000-ton armed boarding vessel HMS Chakla were sunk by Axis aircraft of the Luftwaffe’s 3./StG 1 and 2./StG 2, along with the Regia Aeronautica’s 96, 236, and 239 Squadriglias.

On 7 May, the Hunt-class minesweeper HMS Stoke (J 33) was bombed and sunk at Tobruk by Stukas of 2./StG 2, with the loss of 21 of her crew. Ladybird rushed to pick up her survivors.

Five days later, Ladybird had her turn in the barrel and was sent to the bottom after a bomb strike from II./StG 2,  settling on an even keel in ten feet of water with three men killed, all listed as “missing presumed killed”:

• George R Morley, Able Seaman, P/J 59384, MPK
• Wiliam Olley, Able Seaman, P/JX 171410, MPK
• Edward Paton, Able Seaman, P/JX 152815, MPK

By July, Ladybird’s sister HMS Cricket was similarly crippled by an Italian bomber off Mersa Matruh, Egypt while another sister, Gnat had the first 20 feet of her bow knocked off by German submarine U79 at Bardia in October and was knocked out of the war.

Even with the gunboat on the bottom and her crew dispersed through the fleet, the hulk of the old Ladybird hosted men of No. 40 Battery, 14th (“West Lothian Royal Scots” as they had converted from a Royal Scots infantry company) Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery (T.A.), who lived aboard her remaining topside, roughing it on a ghost ship with a few tricks still up her sleeve.

These marooned Army gunners hung up their tin hats and spent their downtime fishing, playing cards, swimming, and reading between air raids. An almost idyllic life whenever bombs weren’t falling.

These images captured by Thomas Fisher, in the AWM:

After the 231-day siege of Tobruk was relieved by the British Eighth Army in late November and the front soon surged West, Ladybird was abandoned for good.

Ladybird’s motto was Ne sperne Fortuna (Do not throw away your luck). She well-earned two battle honors for her WWII service: Mediterranean 1940-41 and Libya 1940-41. She was hit by Japanese, Italian, and German munitions– the Axis trifecta.

Of the rest of her sisters, Cicala and Moth, still in the Far East in December 1941, were lost at Hong Kong. Just four Insects survived the war, Aphis, Cockchafer, Scarab, and Tarantula, all disposed of by 1949.

Epilogue

Ladybird’s watch bell is in the collection of the RMG, complete with the name of a infant baptized aboard her in 1936 while on China station.

A large builder’s model of her recently sold at auction.

Of Ladybird’s 12 skippers, only one, Capt. John Fenwick Warton, who commanded her in 1920 while on the Danube, went on to become an admiral. Her 12th, CDR Blackburn, survived her sinking in 1941 and would go on to command the sloop HMS Woodcock (U 90) later in the war. Blackburn earned both a DSO and Bar during the war and rejoined the retired list afterward, passing in 1978.

The West Lothian Royal Scots, who lived aboard Ladybird in her time with the Army, remained in North Africa through the rest of the campaign then landed at Salerno under the 12th AA Brigade and fought in Italy until January 1945, when they returned to Britain and disbandment.

As for the intrepid Australian war photographer who rode Ladybird into battle off Bardia and captured the moment in celluloid, Damien Parer journeyed west to the Pacific in 1942 and filmed “Kokoda Front Line,” one of the most iconic Australian war documentaries. While covering the faces of advancing Marines on Peleliu in September 1944, Parer, walking backwards behind the cover of a tank, was killed by a burst of Japanese machine gun fire, aged 32.

Col. Kingoro Hashimoto, the Japanese officer who ordered his guns to fire on the Panay rescue party, hitting Ladybird in the process, post-war was sentenced to life imprisonment in Sugamo Prison by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. He died in 1957. The attack on Ladybird was cited both against him and Gen. Iwane Matsui, the overall Japanese commander during the Nanking campaign in 1937, during their war crimes trials. Matsui was hung for his crimes at Sugamo in 1948.

Ladybird is remembered in maritime art.

The Royal Navy recycled her name in 1950 at the outbreak of the Korean War, by purchasing the 295-foot British-owned CNCo freighter MV Wusueh, which had been requisitioned for WWII service by the MoWT and only returned to her owners a couple years prior. Renamed HMS Ladybird, she was moored at Sasebo, Japan, as the Naval Headquarters and Communications vessel for the Commonwealth Blockading forces through 1953.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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