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Warship Wednesday (on a Thursday) 19 February 2026: Plywood Warrior

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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 (on a Thursday) 19 February 2026: Plywood Warrior

Photo by Camera Operator JO1 Joe Gawlowicz, National Archives Identifier 6465113, Agency-Assigned Identifier DNSC9108119, Local Identifier, 330-CFD-DN-SC-91-08119

Above we see the plucky Korean War-era 173-foot Acme-class ocean-going minesweeper leader USS Adroit (MSO-509) underway during mine-clearing operations in the Gulf during Operation Desert Storm in February 1991, flag flying, with Zodiacs, Otters, and paravanes ready, as Bluejackets man the .50s.

Some 35 years ago this week, the little 34-year-old Adroit would come to the urgent assistance of the top-of-the-line Aeigis cruiser USS Princeton (CG-59), which found herself in the midst of an Iraqi minefield in the worst way imaginable.

Adroit came to work– as she always had.

The Agiles & Acmes

With the Navy’s hard-earned lessons in mine warfare in WWII (more than 70 USN ships sunk by mines) and Korea (five sunk: USS Magpie, Pirate, Pledge, Sarsi and Partridge), the brass in the early 1950s decided to design and build a new class of advanced ocean-going but shallow draft minesweepers to augment and eventually replace the flotillas of 1940s-built steel-hulled 221-foot Auk-class and 184-foot Admirable class minebusters.

The new design, a handy 850-tonner, was shorter than either previous classes, running just 172 feet overall. Beamy at 35 feet, they could operate in as little as 10 feet of seawater.

Their shallow draft (10 feet in seawater) made them ideal for getting around littorals as well as going to some out-of-the-way locales that rarely see Naval vessels. USS Leader (MSO-490) and Excel (MSO 439) became the first U.S. warships ever to visit the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh when they completed the 180-mile transit up the Mekong River on 27 August 1961, a feat not repeated until 2007. USS Vital (MSO-474) ascended the Mississippi River in May 1967 to participate in the Cotton Carnival at Memphis, Tennessee.

Whereas the Auks and Admiralbles were outfitted as PCs or DEs, complete with 3″/50s, a decent AAA battery, and lots of depth charges and even Hedgehog ASW devices, the Agiles and Acmes were almost unarmed. Their design allowed for a single 40mm L60 Bofors forward and four .50 cals with a small arms locker accessible via the captain’s stateroom. Less steel and all that. Plus, it was thought that the Navy had enough DEs and DDs to not need minesweepers to clock in to bust subs, escort convoys, and shoot down planes.

A very clean Luders-built USS Agile (MSO-421) likely soon after her 1956 commissioning. Note the black canvas-topped flying bridge, which gave it a greenhouse effect, and was soon changed to white/tan. L45-02.05.02

A close-up of the above, showing her original 40mm. Most of the MSOs landed these by the 1970s.

Plans for the USS Lucid (MSO-458), Agile class, post 1969 moderization, with a piggyback .50 cal/81mm mortar replacing the 40mm mount due to the larger size of the SQQ-14 sonar, which we’ll get into later.

As one would expect, due to their role, these new minesweepers, the Agiles, were to be wooden-hulled (not steel like Auk and Admirable), with even non-ferrous steel used in their four (often cranky) Packard 760shp V-16 ID1700 diesel engines– a type also used in the new coastal sweepers (MSCs). Some of the class were later given nonmagnetic General Motors engines to replace especially troublesome Packards. Electrical power for the ship came from a Packard V-8 240kw ship’s service generator, while the mine hammers and winches used two GM 6-71s (one 100kw, the other 60kw).

To differentiate them from the AM-hull numbered Auks and Admirable, the new class was reclassified to the new MSO (Minesweeper, Ocean, Non-Magnetic) in 1955. Bronze and stainless (non-magnetic) steel fittings, with automatic degaussing, were fitted, as well as electrical insulators in internal piping, lifelines, and stays.

Their construction at the time was novel, with 90 percent of the completed ship– including the keel, frame, decking, and rudder– being made from laminated oak and fir “sandwiches” with the biggest piece of continuous wood being 16-foot long 7/8-inch thick oak planks.

The future U.S. Navy minesweeper Agile (MSO-421) under construction at Luders Marine Construction Co., Stamford, Connecticut, on 13 September 1954. National Archives Identifier: 6932482.

From a July 1953 Popular Mechanics article on the subject:

They were very maneuverable, due to controllable pitch propellers– one of the earliest CRP installations in the Navy– and the class leader would be appropriately named USS Agile.

They were made to carry the new AN/UQS-1 mine-locating sonar, developed and evaluated in the early 1950s by the Navy’s Mine Defense Laboratory in Panama City. This 100 kHz short-range high-definition mine location sonar featured a 1.0 ms pulse and 2.0º horizontal resolution, allowing it to detect bottom mines (most of the time) at ranges up to a few hundred yards during tests. While that sounds primitive now, it was cutting-edge for the time and would be the primary sonar of these boats throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s (some for longer than that). A SPS-53 surface search radar was on her mast.

UQS-1 mine-locating sonar panel is currently at the Museum of Man in the Sea in Panama City. Designed to locate mines, the type showed “poor resolution and could not classify mines in most waters.” Photo by Chris Eger

Thus equipped, they could mechanically sweep moored mines with Oropesa (“O” Type) gear, magnetic mines with a magnetic “Tail” supplied by three 2500 ampere mine sweeping generators, and acoustic mines by using Mk4 (V) and Mk 5 magnetic as well as Mk6 (B) acoustic hammers. Two giant new XMAP pressure sweeping caissons could be towed, a funky array that was only in use for eight years.

The 53 Agiles, at $3.5 million a pop, were built out rapidly by 1958 at 14 yards around the country (Luders, Bellingham, Boward, Burger, Martinac, Higgins, Hiltebrant, etc.) that specialized in wooden vessels– although two were built at Newport Naval Shipyard. In addition to this, 15 were built for France, four for Portugal, six for Belgium, two for Norway, one for Uruguay, four for Italy, and six for the Netherlands. The design was truly an international best-seller, and in some cases, the last hurrah for several of these small wooden boat yards.

In 1954, the U.S. still had 57 Admirables and 59 Auks on the Navy List– even after giving away dozens to allies and reclassing others to roles such as survey and torpedo research. This soon changed as the Agiles entered the fleet. By 1967, only 28 Auks and 11 Admirable remained– and they were all in the Reserve Fleet.

But what of the Acme class?

The secret to these four follow-on vessels (Acme, Adroit, Advance, and Affray) was that they were very close copies of the Agiles, listed officially as being a foot longer and 30 tons heavier. They were also fitted with (austere) flagship facilities to operate as minesweeper flotilla leaders with a commodore aboard if needed, controlling a four-ship Mine Division of 300~ men. They also had slightly longer legs, capable of carrying 50 tons of fuel rather than the 46 on the Agiles, which gave them a nominal range of 3,000nm rather than 2,400 in the earlier ships.

The four-pack was built side-by-side at Boothbay Harbor, Maine, by Frank L. Sample, Jr., Inc., between November 1954 and December 1958.

USS Affray, being built at Boothbay by Frank L. Sample, Jr., Inc. Ship was launched in 1956

The Sample yard had previously built a dozen 278-ton YMS coastal minesweepers for the Navy during WWII, as well as three 390-ton MSCs for the French in 1953, so at least they had experience.

Acme class, 1967 Janes

Furthering the wooden-hulled MSO flotilla leader concept, after the Acmes, the Navy also ordered three larger (191-foot, 963-ton) Ability class sweepers from Petersen in Wisconsin as part of the 1955 Program.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Meet Adroit

Our subject is at least the third such warship in U.S. Navy service, with the first being a 147-foot steam yacht taken up from service in 1917. Added to the Naval List as USS Adroit (SP-248), but never seeing active service as she was “found to be highly unseaworthy and of extremely short cruising range,” she was returned to her owner with a “thanks, anyway” in April 1918.

The second Adroit, and first commissioned by the Navy, was the class leader of a group of 18 173-foot PC-461-class submarine chasers that were completed, with minor modifications, as minesweepers. As such, USS Adroit (AM-82) entered service in 1942 and began operations late that year with Destroyer Squadron 12 on antisubmarine patrols off Noumea.

USS Adroit (AM-82), August 1942, at builder’s yard: Commercial Iron Works, Portland, Oregon. 19-N-36133

This WWII-era Adroit escorted convoys to Guadalcanal, Espiritu Santo and Efate, New Hebrides; Noumea, New Caledonia; Auckland, New Zealand; Tarawa, Gilbert Islands; and Manus, Admiralty Islands before her name was canceled and she was designated a sub-chaser proper, dubbed simply, PC-1586. She earned a single battle star, was decommissioned three months after VJ-Day, and was sold for scrap in 1948.

Our subject, the third USS Adroit, was laid down at Frank Sample’s on 18 November 1954, launched 20 August 1955, and commissioned 4 March 1957, one of the last of the Navy’s “plywood warriors.”

Her first skipper was LCDR Joseph G. Nemetz, USN, a WWII veteran and career officer.

18 June 1961. USS Adroit (MSO-509) underway during task force exercises. You wouldn’t know to look at her that she could only make 14 knots in a calm sea with all four diesels wide open and a clean hull! USN 1056262

Cold War service

Post shakedown and availibilty, Adroit spent nearly two decades in the active Atlantic Fleet Mine Force (MINELANT), operating in a series of excercises and training evolutions based out of Charleston while also spending stints at the disposal of the Naval School of Mine Warfare (co-located in Charleston) and the Mine Lab in Pensacola to both train eager new officers and ratings and test experimental new gear.

She likewise frequently served as the flagship for MineDiv 44 (and, after 1971, MineDiv 121) with an embarked commodore aboard.

On the small MSOs, life was different, as noted in ‘Damn the Torpedoes, Naval Mine Countermeasures, 1777-1991.”

For young officers and enlisted men in the late 1950s and early 1960s, assignment to the new MCM force provided an unusual experience in both seamanship and leadership. Command came early, and the career advancement possible with MCM ship command enticed some of the most promising graduates of the destroyer force schools into the new mine force for at least one command tour. Young lieutenants obtained command of MSCs; lieutenants and lieutenant commanders captained MSOs; ensigns served early tours as department heads; and lieutenants (junior grade) served as executive officers. Senior enlisted men who commanded MSBs and smaller vessels often advanced into the MCM officer community through such experience.

Because the establishment of minesweeping divisions, squadrons, and flotillas provided MCM billets for commanders and captains, and because of the variety of MCM vessels, shore station assignments, and missions, it was actually possible for a brief time for an officer or an enlisted man to rise within the mine force to the rank of captain.

Everything that had to be done on a big ship also had to be done on a small one, and the expanded MCM force became a hands-on training school for a whole generation of naval officers who exercised command at an early age. Officers assigned to the MSCs and MSOs from the active duty destroyer force sometimes arrived with little or no training in mine warfare and began operating immediately. Junior officers, many of them ensigns right out of school, often had good technical training from the mine warfare school but lacked basic shipboard experience. Well-trained enlisted men, both active duty and reserves, made up the core of the MCM force and usually taught their officers the essentials of minesweeping and hunting on the spot.

There were, of course, lots of exceptions to Adroit’s peacetime minework.

She made a trio of tense Sixth Fleet deployments to the Mediterranean: May-October 1958, 27 September 1961–March 1962, and 15 June–8 November 1965, often calling at some out-of-the-way ports due to her small size.

Adroit loaded ammo and helped guard ports in the Norfolk and Hampton Roads area during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

She clocked in to support the space program in 1963 (Mercury-Atlas 9 “Faith 7”) and 1972 (Apollo 17 “America/Challenger”).

Adroit’s advanced sonar proved key while searching for “lost USAF equipment” off the Bahamas in 1963, a missing general aviation aircraft off the Florida Keys in 1969, a lost LCU near Onslow Beach in 1970, a USN Kaman S2F Seasprite (BuNo. 149745) with lost aircrew aboard off Norfolk in 1975, worked with Naval Underwater Systems Command to locate and retrieve a valuable piece of underwater equipment” off the East Coast in 1976; recovered from 110 feet, a brand-new USN F-14A Tomcat (BuNo 160674) ditched off Shinnecock, New York in 1981 (without loss) and discovered thouroughly wrecked by Adroit in 160 feet, and an uncessceful search for a lost Marine CH-46 Sea Knight in the vicinity of Chesapeake Light in 1983. She made up for the latter by finding downed aircraft off the North Carolina coast in 1985. Hey, 4:5 on missing aircraft isn’t bad.

She was also involved in attempts to rescue those at peril on the sea, including roaming the Florida Strait after the mysterious disappearance of the tanker SS Marine Sulphur Queen, lost between  Beaumont, Texas, and Norfolk in 1963. That ship and the 39 souls aboard are still unaccounted for. She made a similarly fruitless search for the six men aboard the motor towing vessel Marjorie McCallister, which was lost battling heavy seas approximately off Cape Lookout in 1969.

A modernization overhaul at Detyens (14 March–26 August 1969) saw her first-generation mine sonar swapped out for the new AN/SQQ-14 variable depth sonar on a hull-retractable rod. As additional space on the foc’sle was needed for installation of the SQQ-14 cabling and the sonar lift, the WWII-era 40mm Bofors bow gun was landed for good, although a gun tub was installed, allowing a M68 20mm cannon if needed, but usually just used for an extra .50 cal.

Adroit transitioned from active duty to working naval reserve training duty in 1973, shifting homeport from Charleston to the NETC in Newport, Rhode Island, and downgrading to a half (active) crew. This brought a transfer to MineRon 121, and a five-month refit at Munro in Chelsea that added a new aqueous foam (light water) firefighting system, replaced both shafts, remodeled the mess decks, and recaulked the decks. After that, she got busy running reservists to sea for their annual active duty training and other ancillary duties alternating with assorted mine countermeasures exercises with divers and EOD dets.

Sister Affray pulled a similar downshift to become an NRF minesweeper based in Portland, Maine, at the time, leaving just Acme and Advance from the class on active duty in the Pacific.

The active ships are slightly undermanned by crews of 72 to 76 officers and enlisted men, whereas the NRF reserve training ships generally had a crew of 3 officers and 36 enlisted active Navy personnel, plus 2 officers and 29 enlisted reservists. Wartime mobilisation complement was 6 officers and 80 enlisted men for the modernized MSOs.

Acme class, 1974 Janes

Meanwhile, in the Western Pacific, 10 MSOs were part of the Seventh Fleet’s Mine Countermeasures Force (Task Force 78), led by RADM Brian McCauley, during Operation End Sweep– removing mines and airdropped Mark 36 Destructors laid by the U.S. in Haiphong Harbor in North Vietnam and other waterways in the first part of 1973. Speaking of Vietnam, Adroit’s sister Acme made three tours off Southeast Asia during the conflict, earning two battle stars while Advance earned five stars.

By 1974, as the U.S. pulled back from Vietnam, the Navy had the four Acmes (two in NRF duty), had disposed of the larger Ability class MCM flotilla leaders as well as the older Admirables and Auks (the final 29 stricken in 1972 and quickly given away), and was down to just 40 Agiles, which were approaching mid-life. Of the surviving Agiles, 10 were in active commission (MSO 433, 437, 442, 443, 445, 446, 448, 449, 456, and 490), 14 were NRF’d  (MSO 427-431, 438-441, 455, 464, 488, 489, 492), and 16 were decommissioned to the reserve fleet. For those keeping count, that is just 12 MSOs left active, 16 NRF’d, and 16 mothballed– 44 in all. The count continued to be whittled down, with Acme and Advance disposed of in 1977.

The only other seagoing MCM assets owned by the Navy at the time were 13 138-foot wooden-hulled Bluebird-class MSCs in the NRF program, the 5,800-ton mine launch-carrying USS Ozark (MCS-2), which had been laid up in 1970, the 15,000-ton Styrofoam-filled converted Liberty ship MSS-1 (“minesweeper, special”), which was also laid up, and two Cove-class 105-foot inshore minsweepers used for research. Five WWII landing ships, the USS Osage (LSV-3),  Saugus (LSV-4), Monitor (LSV-5), Orleans Parish (LST-1069), and Epping Forest (LSD-4), which were given similar conversions as Ozark to mine countermeasures support ships and designated MCS-3 through MCS-7, respectively, were all stricken and disposed of by 1974. Plans for an improved, wooden hull MSO-523-class were shelved. MCM in the Navy once again became a backwater.

Anywho, back to our ship:

In 1980, she had a great 360-degree photoshoot, likely via helicopter off Virginia while on a summer reservist cruise.

“Atlantic Ocean…An aerial port bow quarter view of the ocean nonmagnetic minesweeper USS Adroit, MSO-509.” Note her extensive use of canvas and flash white. Photographer: PH1 T.L. Alexander, USNR-TAR. 428-GX-156-KN-29890

What a great profile! “Atlantic Ocean…A starboard side view of the ocean nonmagnetic minesweeper USS Adroit, MSO-509.” Photographer: PH1 T.L. Alexander, USNR-TAR. 428-GX-156-KN-29892

“Atlantic Ocean…A starboard stern quarter view of the ocean nonmagnetic minesweeper USS Adroit, MSO-509.” 1980. Note at least three white paravanes on her stern. Photographer: PH1 T.L. Alexander, USNR-TAR. 428-GX-156-KN-29893

21 July 1983 A port beam view of the ocean minesweeper USS Adroit (MSO 509) underway in the Anacostia River after a port visit to Washington Navy Yard. Note she has what looks like a deck gun on her fore, but it is actually the SQQ-14 sonar hoist. Don S. Montgomery, USN. DN-SC-83-11900

From the same port visit to the Washington Navy Yard, moored at Pier #3 next to the fleet tug USNS Mohawk (T-ATF-170)– just a great picture for the cars alone! Don S. Montgomery, USN (Ret.). DN-ST-83-11255

During a year-long $5.5 million overhaul at Brambleton Shipyard (21 September 1987–29 August 1988), the old Packard engines were removed and replaced with new aluminum block Waukesha diesels. New sweep gear to include a pair of PAP-104 cable-guided undersea tools was added, as was accommodation for clearance divers and two Zodiac inflatables powered by 40hp outboards. She also lost her 20mm gun tub installation. She also received a Precise Integrated Shipboard System (PINS) nav system, early GPS, and began using early remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), notably Super Sea Rover.

23 July 1988. A starboard bow view of the ocean minesweeper USS Adroit (MSO 509) undergoing overhaul at the Norfolk Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Corporation’s Brambleton branch. Don S. Montgomery, USN (Ret.) DN-ST-88-08273

By this time, the Lehman/Reagan 600 Ship Navy ™ had included two new classes of mine warfare ships, the 14 224-foot fiberglass-encased wood-laminate Avenger-class MCMs featuring the advanced third-gen AN/SQQ-32 mine sonar (tied to AN/UYK-44 computers to classify and detect mines), augmented by a dozen all-fiberglass 188-foot Osprey-class coastal mine hunters (MHCs). However, the Navy had to make do with the old MSOs for a bit longer until the new ships arrived in force.

By this time, the entire Navy MCM force only had 20 modernized Korean War-era MSOs (18 Agiles, 2 Acmes) spread across both the active and the reserve fleet, 21 RH-53D helicopters, and 7 57-foot MSBs. The first MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopters began arriving in late 1986, and USS Avenger— the first new oceangoing American minesweeper since 1958– was commissioned in 1987.

We finally got real mines to sweep (kinda)

The Gulf Tanker War between Saddam’s Iraq and fundamentalist Iran led to Operation Earnest Will, the first overseas deployment of U.S. mine countermeasures forces since the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Shipping out for the Persian Gulf MCMGRUCO between November 1987 and March 1989 were six Agiles: USS Conquest (MSO-488), Enhance (MSO-437), Esteem (MSO-438), Fearless (MSO-442), Inflict (MSO-456), and Illusive (MSO-448).

While Adroit remained stateside– still in her modernization and post-delivery workup period– she was used to train Silver and Gold Crews replacement crews for duty in the Persian Gulf. While a caretaker crew remained on board, the Silver crew departed in February 1988 to take over the forward-deployed near-sister Fortify (MSO-446), while that ship’s Blue Crew returned from their deployment on board Inflict (MSO-456). 

Within the first 18 months of Persian Gulf minesweeping operations, the MSOs accounted for over 50 Iranian-laid Great War-designed Russian M08 moored mines, cleared three major minefields, and checked swept convoy racks throughout the Gulf. Iranian minelaying was also given a setback in the adjacent and very kinetic Operation Praying Mantis in April 1988 after the mining of the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts, paving the way for the MSOs to head back home.

War, for real

When Saddam ran over the Kuwaiti border and claimed the country as a lost province in August 1990, the resulting Desert Shield operation kicked off in overdrive, and the Navy knew it would need some serious MCM muscle.

While the Iranians had used elderly Russian contact mines during the Tanker War which were easily tracked and defeated, the Iraqis had some very modern mines including the potbellied LUGM-145 contact mine, the new Soviet-designed UDM magnetic influence mine, the Sigeel-400, the Korean War-era Soviet KMD500 magnetic influence bottom mine with its keel-breaking 700-pound warhead, and the sneaky little Italian Manta MN-103 acoustic bottom mine.

Whereas the Earnest Will MSOs had taken months to get to the theatre back in 1987-88 (three MSOs were towed 10,000 miles by the salvage ship USS Grapple for eight weeks!), the newly commissoned USS Avenger (MCM-1) and three MSOs, our Adroit along with Agile half-sisters Impervious (MSO-449), and Leader (MSO-490), were immediately sealifted to the Persian Gulf aboad the Dutch heavy lift ship SS Super Servant III.

More than 20 Navy EOD teams were also deployed along with the MH-53E Sea Dragons of Mine Countermeasures Helicopter Squadron 14, forming USMCMG, joining Allied minesweepers from Saudi Arabia, Great Britain, and Kuwait.

14 August 1990. “A tug positions the ocean minesweeper USS Adroit (MSO-509) over the submerged deck of the Dutch heavy lift ship SS Super Servant III. The SS Super Servant III will transport Adroit and other minesweepers to the Persian Gulf in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.” JO2 Oscar Sosa. DN-ST-90-11501

5 October 1990. Baharain. “The mine countermeasures ship USS Avenger (MCM-1), the ocean minesweeper USS Adroit (MSO-509), and other vessels are positioned on the partially submerged deck of the Dutch heavy lift ship SS Super Servant III before offloading in support of Operation Desert Shield.” Photo by CDR  John Charles Roach. DN-SC-91-02584

“Inflation of Zodiac. USS Adroit and USS Avenger wait on the deck of the Dutch ship Superservant to be floated off and begin minesweeping operations. The crew in the lightweight zodiac will knock out bilge blocks and props supporting the minesweepers as they are refloated.” Painting, Watercolor on Paper; by CDR John Charles Roach; 1991; Framed Dimensions 30H X 39W. NHHC Accession #: 91-049-O.

December 1990. Deployed to the Gulf. Note her Zodiac and blacked out hull numbers. “A starboard beam view of the ocean minesweeper USS Adroit (MSO-509) underway. The Adroit and three other U.S. Navy minesweepers have been deployed to the Gulf in support of Operation Desert Shield.” PH2 Burge. DN-ST-91-03129

In January 1991, Adroit’s initial Blue crew was rotated stateside, replaced by a Silver crew from the Exploit, led by LCDR William Flemming Barns (NROTC ’75).

Beginning its task of sweeping five lines of mines east of the Kuwaiti coastline– containing some 1,270 of the devices– when Desert Storm kicked off, it was slow going for all involved. Some 35 years ago this week, the USMCMG flag, the old USS Tripoli (LPH-10), struck a LUGM, blowing a 16-by-25-foot hole in her hull and losing a third of her fuel in the process. Just three hours later, the cruiser Princeton hit another mine, this time a dreaded Manta, which almost ripped her fantail from her hull.

Impervious, Leader, and Avenger searched for additional mines in the area while Adroit carefully led the salvage tug USS Beaufort (ATS-2) through the uncharted mines toward Princeton, which took her in tow, Adroit steaming at the “Point” marking mines with flares in the dark.

As detailed by Captain E. B. Hontz, Princeton’s skipper, in a July 1991 Proceedings piece:

As the day wore on, I was concerned about drifting around in the minefield. So I made the decision to have Beaufort take us in tow since our maneuverability with one shaft at three, four, five, or even six knots was not good. Once underway, we moved slowly west with Adroit leading, searching for mines.”

The crew remained at general quarters as a precaution should we take another mine strike. [The] Beaufort continued to twist and turn, pulling us around the mines located by the Naval Re­serve ship Adroit and marked by flares. Throughout the night, Adroit continued to lay flares. Near early morning, having run out of flares, she began marking the mines with chem-lights tied together. The teamwork of the Adroit and Beaufort was superb.

I felt the life of my ship and my men were in the hands of this small minesweeper’s commanding officer and his crew. I di­rected the Adroit to stay with us. I trusted him, and I didn’t want to let him go until I was clear of the danger area. [The] Princeton was … out of the war.

“Adroit Marks the Way for Princeton,” With the use of hand flares, USS Adroit (MSO-509) marks possible mines in an effort to extract the already damaged USS Princeton (GG-59) from a minefield.  USS Beaufort (ATS-2) stands by to assist. Painting, Oil on Canvas Board; by CDR John Charles Roach; 1991; Framed Dimensions 26H X 34W NHHC Accession #: 92-007-X

“The Little Heroes. The mine sweepers Impervious (MSO-449) and Adroit (MSO-509) make all preparations for getting underway.  Shortly, these little ships will play a very important role in the northern Gulf by leading out Princeton (CG-59) and Tripoli (LPH-10), badly damaged by exploding mines.” Painting, Watercolor on Paper; by CDR John Charles Roach; 1991; Framed Dimensions 30H X 39W. NHHC Accession #: 92-007-S.

1 April 1991. Crewmen on the deck of the ocean minesweeper USS Adroit (MSO-509) stand by during mine-clearing operations following the cease-fire that ended Operation Desert Storm. Note the extensive mine stencils around her pilot house. and .50 cals at the ready. PH2 Rudy D. Pahoyo. DN-SN-93-01468

1 April 1991. A port view of the ocean minesweeper USS Adroit (MSO-509) conducting mine-clearing operations following the cease-fire that ended Operation Desert Storm. The USS Leader (MSO-490) and an MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopter are in the background. PH2 Rudy D. Pahoyo. DN-SN-93-01466

The Americans, joined by allies from around the world, continued to sweep mines and UXO across the Gulf and five Kuwaiti ports through the end of May 1991.

Their mission accomplished, Adroit, Impervious, and Leader returned on board SS Super Servant IV to Norfolk on 14 November 1991.

14 November 1991. Norfolk. The ocean minesweepers USS Impervious (MSO-449), foreground, and USS Adroit (MSO-509) and USS Leader (MSO-490), right, sit aboard the Dutch heavy lift ship SS Super Servant IV as its deck is submerged to permit minesweepers to be unloaded. The minesweepers have returned to Norfolk after being deployed for 14 months in the Persian Gulf region in support of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. PHAN Christopher L. Ryan. DN-ST-92-04869

14 November 1991. Norfolk. The ocean minesweeper USS Adroit (MSO-509) ties up at the pier after being unloaded from the Dutch heavy lift Super Servant 4, which carried the Adroit and two other ocean minesweepers, the USS Impervious (MSO-449) and USS Leader (MSO-490), to Norfolk from the Persian Gulf region, where the minesweepers were deployed for 14 months in support of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Note the more than 50 mine stencils on her wheelhouse, a Manta ray mine stencil further aft, and at least three visible machine gun mounts and shields (sans guns). PHAN Christopher L. Ryan. DN-ST-92-04871

Decommissioned 12 December 1991– just months after guiding Princeton— Adroit was laid up at Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility, Portsmouth, and struck from the Navy Register on 8 May 1992. Affray held on for another year. The last four Agiles in U.S. service were decommissioned three years later.

Sold for scrap on 15 August 1994 by DRMO to Wilmington Resources, Inc. of Wilmington, North Carolina, for $44,950, she was removed from the Reserve Fleet three days later, and her scrapping was completed by the following May. By 2000, her last remaining sister, Affray, had been scrapped as well.

Adroit had an amazing 26 skippers during her storied 34 years on active duty.

Epilogue

Adroit’s deck logs from the 1950s-70s are largely digitized and available online via the NARA. 

The Navy MSO Association (“Wooden Ships, Iron Men”) was once very vibrant, but it seems their website went offline circa 2020. The Association of Minemen (AOM) is likewise dormant. The Mine Warfare Association (MINWARA), formed in 1995, continues its legacy. albeit with fewer and fewer MSO-era mine warriors these days.

The only MSO preserved in the U.S., the Agile-class USS Lucid (MSO-458) at the Stockton Maritime Museum, also has parts salvaged from ex-USS Implicit, and ex-Pluck (MSO-464). Please visit her if you get the chance.

Lucid today

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Warship Wednesday (on a Friday) 13 February 2026: The Russian Cruiser that Accounted for Three German ones

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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 (on a Friday) 13 February 2026: The Russian Cruiser that Accounted for Three German ones

(Sorry for the two-day delay, boys. This was a long one!)

Above we see the fine 1st rank protected cruiser Bogatyr of the Imperial Russian Navy, in her circa 1904-05 dark green war paint, as she rests in Zolotoy Rog (Golden Horn Bay) with a burgeoning young Vladivostok sprawling in the distance.

Constructed and later dismantled in Germany, she made the Japanese admiralty howl (briefly) in 1904, then, somehow, survived that maelstrom to exact three pounds of flesh from the Kaiserliche Marine in the Great War.

The Great 1900s Russian Cruiser Rush

After that fearsome bear Tsar Alexander III passed unexpectedly in 1894 and left his woefully unprepared son, Nicky, with the autocratic throne of Holy Mother Russia, things got a bit weird. While both Alexander (who had successfully commanded a 70,000-strong force in the combat against the Ottomans in 1877-78) and his son (who had risen to the rank of colonel and commanded a cavalry squadron on summer maneuvers) were trained army officers, as Tsar, Nicky pursued a curious naval policy, one that aimed to make Russia a great power on the sea rather than a regional power capable of besting, say, the Turks or Sweden, the country’s traditional foes. The weak new Tsar was muscled into this way of thinking by a trio of professional naval officers in his family, his older uncles Alexei and Sergei Alexandrovich, and cousin “Sandro” Mikhailovich, all “big fleet” advocates.

This was abetted in no small part by Nicky’s cousin, Willy, the German Kaiser, who not only whispered about great naval power but also pointed the young Tsar’s eye away from Europe and to the Pacific, where a British-allied Japan was growing ever more powerful.

Not able to weaken its fleets in the Black Sea (against the Turks), or the Baltic (against Sweden, or, say, maybe, Germany as Russia was officially an ally of France after 1892), this required a whole new force for the Pacific. The distinct possibility of having to defend Russian overseas shipping from the British while also dispatching raiders to disrupt Britannia’s own merchant traffic was also a problem that needed solving, at least until the two countries buried the hatchet in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.

All this meant modern new battleships and cruisers, destroyers and gunboats. And lots of them.

The first modern protected cruiser in Russian service was the circa 1895 French (FCM)-built Svetlana (3,682t, 331 ft oal, 21 kts, 6 x 6″/45 guns, up to 4″ of armor), followed by the three larger domestically-built Pallada/Diana- class ships (6,687t, 416 ft oal, 19 kts, 8 x 6″/45 guns, up to 6″ of armor), and two very similar ships: the American (Cramp)-built Varyag (6,500t, 425 ft oal, 23 kts, 12 x 6″/45 guns, up to 6″ of armor), and the German (Germaniawerft)-built Askold (5,900t, 434 ft oal, 23.8 kts, 12 x 6″/45 guns, up to 6″ of armor), which were built abroad simoultanously.

Russian cruiser Askold in Vladivostok

Our subject was originally a stand-alone design similar in size but slightly larger (6,645 tons, 439 feet oal) than the Varyag and Askold, while being roughly the same speed and still carrying a similar armament and armor scheme. This made her a rough equivalent to the British cruiser HMS Highflyer and the French Chateaureneau.

Meet Bogatyr

Our subject is at least the third such warship in service to the Tsar, going back to the first steam frigate built in the Russian Empire in 1836, to carry the name “Bogatyr,” which roughly translates to “hero,” common to early Russian epics.

1898 oil painting titled Bogatyrs by Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov

Steam frigate Bogatyr by Russian maritime artist Vladimir Emyshev

The second Bogatyr was a circa 1860 spar frigate and class leader of three sisters (Varyag, Vityaz, and Askold— these names seem to keep repeating themselves!) that was key in early Russian power projection outside of Europe

Russian warships at Norfolk, Virginia, in 1877. On the left is the frigate Svetlana (launched 1858), on the right is the steam frigate Bogatyr (launched 1860). NH 60753

Our third Bogatyr, like Askold, was ordered on 5 August 1898 from Germany, but this time not from Germaniawerft. Instead, she was ordered to a design from Vulcan Stettin and laid down as Yard No. 427 on 22 December 1899.

Whereas Askold ran a very distinctive five, thin funnels, and Varyag had four, Bogatyr emulated the Pallada and Svetlana classes with three thick pipes.

Her thickest armor, some 5.5 inches, was protecting her casemate, while she still had 5 inches over her main battery turrets, as well as 3 inches in her casemates and deck. Her shell hoists and other vital systems recived at least two inches.

She shipped 765 tons of armor and had 16 watertight bulkheads. A total of 1.83 million steel rivets were used in her construction. Four Siemens dynamos provided electrical power.

She carried 16 triangular three-drum Bellville-type Normand-Sigaudy boilers in three boiler rooms in a 4-6-6 layout, pushing two VTE engines, which gave Bogatyr 19,500 shp- enough for 23 knots.

Her two VTE engines were aligned one per shaft, each ending in a 15-foot, 3-bladed prop. Carrying 1,220 tons of coal, she could steam 4,900 miles at 10 knots on a clean hull with good pipes.

Her main battery was a dozen 6″/45 Pattern 1892 French Canet guns (made under license by Obukhov and installed in Russia), with four in two twin turrets, one fore and one aft, and the other eight in broadside casemates or shielded single mounts. Her magazines carried 2,160 6-inch shells.

The Russians loved these guns and built over 500 of them, putting them on just about every cruiser and battleship they built between 1897 and 1917, then continuing to use them in coastal defense as late as the 1960s.

Bogatyr’s secondary battery was a dozen 3″/50 Pattern 1892 Canet/Obukhov deck guns with 3,600 shells to feed them, while a tertiary battery of eight QF 3-pounder (47mm) Hotchkiss and two 1-pounder 5-barreled Hotchkiss Gatling guns provided torpedo boat defense.

Note her deck structure and staggered guns

This plan shows her gun firing arcs and 16-boom torpedo net arrangement

Speaking of torpedoes, Bogatyr had five small 15-inch tubes (1 bow, 2 beam, 2 stern) and carried 12 fish in her magazines. She also had storage below deck for 35 small defensive mines.

Her complement of 17 officers, 6 officials (medical, JAG, etc.), and 551 enlisted men could provide a company-sized landing force for duty ashore, for which she carried enough Mosin rifles and marching gear to outfit, as well as two Maxim heavy machine guns and two light 37mm Baranovsky landing guns on wheeled carriages.

She carried 10 boats, including two 40-foot steam pinnacles that could carry a 37mm landing gun if needed, a 20-oared longboat, a 14-oared workboat, two 6-oared boats, and four whaleboats.

Launches on Bogatyr while ship seen arriving at Sevastopol on 18 February 1909. Also note one of her shielded 6″/45 guns on a sponson forward, with another casemated aft. 

Bogatyr launched on 17 January 1901 and spent the next 18 months fitting out.

Note her ram bow, forward torpedo tube, and Orthodox priest ready to bless the new cruiser

Bogatyr launched, clean

Bogatyr installing 6-inch turret house shields

Her first skipper, appointed 15 February 1899, was Capt. 1st Rank Alexander Fedorovich Stemman, a career officer who joined the Naval cadet corps in 1871, sailed the world on the old frigate Svetlana, fought against the Turks in 1877 on the Danube, sailed the Pacific on the spar frigate Duke of Edinburgh, commanded the destroyer Krechet, the mine cruiser Gaydamak, and the coastal defense battleship (monitor) Lava before heading to Germany to join Bogatyr’s plankowners.

In June 1902, on speed trials in the Gulf of Danzig, Bogatyr touched 23.9 knots, and at the end of July was toured at Stettin by the Kaiser himself.

Delivered to the Russian Navy in August 1902, she was immediately dispatched to the Pacific Squadron.

Bogatyr early in her career in white colonial livery. Note her ornate Tsarist eagle figurehead. NH 60718

She looked very similar in profile to the Vulcan-built Japanese armored cruiser Yakumo, which also had three funnels and two masts, and a gun arrangement of two two-gun turrets and the rest in broadside. Yakumo was gently larger, at 9,000 tons, and carried a mix of 16 8- and 6-inch guns compared to Bogatyr’s 12 6-inchers, but you get the idea.

It could be argued that the Japanese Yakumo, built 1897-1900, seen above, was the design prototype of the Bogatyr. Both ships were built in the same German yard, with Yakumo beginning construction a little over a year before the Russian ship. 

The Russian Admiralty was so taken with the design that it ordered four more or less exact copies of Bogatyr in 1900-02 from four domestic yards, two in the Baltic and two in the Black Sea: Vityaz from Galernyy Is, St. Petersburg; Oleg from the New Admiralty Yard, St. Petersburg; Kagul from the Admiralty Yard in Nikolayev (Mykolaiv) Ukraine; and Ochakov from the Lazarev Admiralty Yard in Sevastopol.

Of these, Vityaz was destroyed by fire on the stocks by fire in June 1901, but the other three started arriving in the fleet in the 1904-05 time frame.

The hull of the unfinished cruiser Vityaz after a fire. June 1901. St Petersburg

Bogatyr’s page in the 1904 Janes, with her three finished sisters. 

A “rocky” war with Japan

Units of the Russian fleet at Anchor at Vladivostok, September 1903. From left to right: Sevastopol (front, battleship, 1895-1904); Gromoboi (rear, armored cruiser, 1899-1917); Rossia (armored cruiser, 1899-1922); Persviet (battleship, 1898-1922); Bogatyr (protected cruiser, 1901-1922); Boyarin (cruiser, 1901-1904), center; Angara (transport, 1898-1923, 3 funnels, black hull); (Polotava (battleship; 1894-1923); Petropavlovsk (Russian battleship, 1894-1904); the small one-funnel black-hulled vessel in the center foreground is unidentified. Original print with McCully report MSS.-AR branch. NH 91178

Assigned to the RADM Karl Petrovich Jessen’s Vladivostok-based Separate Cruiser Detachment along with the larger armored cruisers Rossia, Gromoboi, and Rurik, and the auxiliary cruiser Lena, Bogatyr avoided the slow death of the bulk of the Russian Pacific Squadron trapped in Port Arthur when the Japanese attacked without warning in February 1904.

Vladivostok Independent Cruiser Squadron moored together at Vladivostok, 1903: Lena, Gromboi, Rurik, Bogatyr, and Rossia

In this, she earned her dark green war paint.

Russian cruiser Bogatyr Bain News Service LOC LC-B2-3196-9

Jessen’s roaming cruisers went to work haunting the Korean Strait and the waters around Japan over the next several months, sinking 10 transports and 12 schooners, as well as capturing five other merchants. This effort diverted six Japanese armored cruisers to chase them down, weakening Adm. Togo’s force off Port Arthur.

Bogatyr was with the squadron for their first kill, on 12 February, sinking the 1,800-ton merchant ship Nakanoura Maru just off the Tsugaru Strait.

1904 Japanese illustration “Sinking of the Nakanoura Maru.”

She was also there when the 220-ton Japanese coaster Haginoura Maru was sunk in the Sea of Japan off Korea on 25 April, followed by the 4,000-ton armed transport Kinshu Maru the next day.

The Kinshu Maru incident was particularly noteworthy in Japanese martial lore as, by legend, the ship’s crew surrendered and were taken off while the company of guardsmen aboard refused such dishonor, choosing instead to fire at the Russian cruisers with their rifles as the transport was sunk via torpedo. Some 51 waterlogged soldiers and sailors were later picked up by the Japanese schooner Chihaya and landed at Kobe on 30 April.

Last scene aboard the Japanese transport Kinshu Maru, depicting an Imperial Japanese Army infantryman aboard the Japanese transport Kinshu Maru firing rifles at Imperial Russian Navy cruisers that are sinking Kinshu Maru in the Sea of Japan off Gensan, Korea on 26 April 1904. Via The Russo-Japanese War, Kinkodo Publishing Co., 1904, illustration between p. 250 and p. 251.

She would be our subject’s last combat of her first war.

While creeping around in the fog on the morning of 15 May 1904, Bogatyr’s bow struck rocks at Cape Bryus in Amur Bay, sustaining considerable damage.

After being almost written off, she was finally freed on 18 June and, patched, was towed into Vladivostok for repairs.

Bogatyr remained under repair throughout the Russo-Japanese War while her skipper, Capt. Stemman was reassigned to the Vladivostok fortress. He never commanded another ship and retired from the Navy in 1911 after 40 years in uniform. He was made a VADM on the retired list for his past service. He passed in 1914, aged 58.

Bogatyr iced in at Vladivostok over the 1905-06 winter

Bogatyr’s sister Oleg likewise escaped an early demise during the conflict, eluding Togo’s bruisers at Tsushima long enough to be interned under U.S. guns in the Philippines.

A shell-riddled Oleg in Manila, 1905

Meanwhile, sister Ochakov, left in Europe with a skeleton crew, mutinied in 1905 in conjunction with the battleship Potemkin and, after a delusory shootout with ships and coastal batteries loyal to the government, suffered 52 large caliber hits and was left to burn. Rebuilt over four years, Ochakov was renamed Kagul to escape the revolutionary stain. For some unknown reason, the existing Kagul, another one of Bogatyr’s Russian-built sisters, was renamed Pamiat’ Merkuria (Memory of Mercury), at the same time, I guess, to muddy the waters as if Ochakov had never existed.

Interbellum

Once the war with Japan was over, the old Russian Pacific Squadrons (both of them) had ceased to exist, with the few hulls left afloat and in Russian custody reorganized into the rump destroyer-heavy Siberian Military Flotilla, with the more capable ships transferred back to the Baltic to make up losses there. This saw Bogatyr transfer to Kronstadt.

She became a stepping stone for several upwardly mobile professional officers, with her next five skippers (Bostrem, Vasilkovsky, Girs, Petrov-Chernyshin, and Vorozheikin) all later pinning on admiral’s stars. As a side note, Vasilkovsky was later shot by the Cheka during the Red Terror of Sevastopol in 1918, while Girs was drowned in the Gulf of Finland by the Petrograd Cheka at roughly the same time.

Still, they were no doubt happy during this quiet time in the ship’s history, and I’d bet that at the time never saw it coming.

Bogatyr arriving at Sevastopol on 18 February 1909, Romanian Elisabeta in the background

Bogatyr arriving at Sevastopol on 18 February 1909

Russian cruisers Aurora, Diana, and Bogatyr in the Baltic, 1909

Between the wars, Bogatyr participated in a series of training cruises back and forth from the Baltic to the Black Sea via the Mediterranean.

It was while in the company of the cruiser Admiral Makarov and battleships Tsarevich and Slava that news of the December 1908 Messina earthquake broke. RADM Litvinov immediately sent ships to join the international response to the disaster. Sailors from Bogatyr were among the first to come to the aid of the inhabitants of Messina buried under the rubble. In total, Russian sailors rescued about 1,000 people from the ruins.

Russian Midshipmen’s Training Detachment and USS Connecticut (Battleship # 18) off Messina to provide earthquake relief, 9 January 1909. Connecticut, in the right background with a white hull, was then in the Mediterranean during the final stages of the Great White Fleet World cruise. The Russian ships, in the center wearing grey paint, are (from right to left): armored cruiser Admiral Makarov, battleship Slava, battleship Tsararevich, and (probably) cruisers Bogatyr and Oleg. Collection of Lieutenant Commander Richard Wainwright, 1928. NH 1570

Bogatyr by Bourgault, circa 1910.

In 1911, Bogatyr picked up a Telefunken radio system. In the same overhaul, she landed her two Hotchkiss 37mm Gatling guns and two of her torpedo tubes.

Her seventh skipper, Capt. 1st Rank Evgeny Ivanovich Krinitsky assumed command in August 1912. The captain of the destroyer Silny, which distinguished herself in the defense of Port Arthur in 1904, was a solid naval hero who earned the St. George cross for the war. Wounded and only slightly recovered during his stint as a POW in Japan, he was further wounded by a mutinous sailor’s bayonet during the 1906 uprising in Kronstadt. He came to Bogatyr after command of the old minelaying cruiser Ladoga.

Bogatyr was on hand in the Baltic when French President Raymond Poincaré visited with Nicky on the eve of the Great War.

Protected Cruiser Bogatyr welcoming the French President to Kronstadt aboard the newest French Dreadnought, France, 20 July 1914

Protected Cruiser Bogatyr welcoming the French President to Kronstadt aboard the newest French Dreadnought, France, 20 July 1914

War (Again)

Part of the Russian Baltic Fleet’s 2nd Cruiser Squadron when the war began, Bogatyr, with naval hero Krinitsky still in command, was urgently dispatched on 13 August 1914, along with the cruiser Pallada, to Odenholm Island off the northern coast of modern Estonia. There, on a rock since the night before, was pinned the grounded German light cruiser SMS Magdeburg, with the destroyer V-26 busily taking off her 370-man crew.

The Magdeburg is aground. The Odenholm Island lighthouse is visible in the background. Bundesarchiv_Bild_134-B2501

Bogatyr and Rossia interrupted the scuttling, with V-26 fleeing and Magdeburg’s remaining crew setting off a scuttling charge that broke her back after an exchange of gunfire. Bogatyr captured three officers, including Capt. (ZS) Richard Habenicht, three mechanical engineers, and 51 sailors from the destroyed German cruiser, and, much more importantly, recovered a waterlogged bag full of code books and important ship’s papers from the shallows around the ship. A second signal book and a rough draft of a radiogram reporting the clash were found in Magdeburg’s radio room and proved especially useful for cryptologists in London, Paris, and Petrograd for the rest of the war.

With the Russian fleet taking the wise step to seal the Eastern Baltic shut with mines, Bogatyr received rails and chutes to carry as many as 100 M08 mines on deck.

One of her fields was credited with extensively damaging the German light cruiser SMS Augsburg off Bornholm on the night of 24–25 January 1915, and she struck a mine, knocking her out of the war for four months.

For these actions, Krinitsky received his second St. George in as many wars and was promoted to rear admiral, replaced in January 1915 by Capt. Dmitry Nikolaevich Verderevsky, former skipper of the cruiser Admiral Makarov.

Soon after the Baltic thaw, Bogatyr and her sister Oleg, working with the 8-inch gunned armored cruiser Bayan, participated in the Battle of Aland Islands on 2 July 1915, during which they drove the German light minelaying cruiser SMS Albatross onto the beach in neutral Swedish waters just off Ostergarn. Riddled with six 8-inch shells from Bayan and 20 6-inchers from Bogatyr and Oleg, Albatross was a loss, but the Russians were deprived of their trophy.

Oil painting by J Hägg. “Albatross under fire” Swedish Marinmuseum B1397

German minelayer SMS Albatross beached

Nonetheless, Bogatyr had accounted for her third German cruiser in less than a year. Her skipper, Verderevsky, earned a St. George of his own.

With the writing on the wall for mine warfare in the Baltic, Bogatyr was laid up in late 1915 for a further conversion in which she was fitted to carry as many as 150 mines. To allow for the extra space and weight, her dozen 6″/45 Canet guns, 12 3″/50s, and 8 Hotchkiss 3-pounders were replaced with an all-up battery of 16 5.1″/55 Pattern 1913 (B-7) Vickers-Obukhov guns. Likewise, her final torpedo tubes were removed.

Bogatyr was photographed fairly late in the ship’s career, at an unidentified location. From the P.A. Warneck Collection, 1981; Courtesy of B. V. Drashpil of Margate, Florida. NH 92160

After quiet service laying minefields and conducting coastal operations, Verderevsky left the ship in December 1916 to assume a rear admiral’s post over a submarine squadron at Revel, while he handed the cruiser over to Capt. Koptev Sergei Dmitrievich, who was cashiered shortly after the Revolution and would die of pneumonia in 1920, aged just 39.

Speaking of Revolutions, one of Bogatyr’s sailors, a 25-year-old boatswain’s mate by the name of Aleksandr Kondratyevich “Ales” Gurlo, took part in both of them, leading a detachment from the ship in the siege and later storming of the Winter Palace in November 1917. Continuing to fight for the Reds against Kolchak in Siberia, post-war, he became something of a poet, publishing five collections by the late 1920s.

Under a Red Star

After the Bolsheviks signed an armistice with the Germans and their allies on 15 December 1917, leading to the formal Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, Russia’s Great War was over, replaced by a civil war that would drag on until 1924.

What this meant for the Russian Baltic Fleet was that the ships based in the frozen ports of the Baltic states and Finland, which the Germans meant to occupy, needed to be saved from capture and pulled back to Red Kronstadt. This great retreat, conducted between 16 February 1918 and 20 April 1918, was dubbed the “Ice Cruise” by the Russians and involved successfully moving 236 ships and vessels, including six battleships, five cruisers (our Bogatyr included), 59 destroyers, and 12 submarines.

Painting of the icebreaker Jermak opening a way to other ships on the Ice Voyage, seen as the chrysalis moment for the Red Navy. The fleet withdrew six battleships, 5 cruisers, 59 destroyers and torpedo boats, 12 submarines

Ensign Beno Eduardovich von Gebhard, a mysterious figure, was Bogatyr’s elected skipper during the Ice Cruise. He was dispatched shortly after for reasons lost to history.

The Red commander of the Baltic Fleet that pulled off the Ice Cruise against all odds with no coal, near mutinous crews ruled by committee, and few remaining engineers, was Capt. Alexey Mikhailovich Shchastny. Just after the fleet was solidified in Kronstadt, Shchastny was executed under orders of Trotsky for the “treason” of saving the Baltic Fleet. No heroes from the officer class were allowed.

In November 1918, Bogatyr and her sister Oleg participated in the aborted invasion of Estonia by the Red Army, at a time when most of the rest of the fleet’s sailors were rushed to the front to fight the Whites on four different fronts.

By this time, a British cruiser-destroyer force under RADM Sir Walter Cowan was operating in the Eastern Baltic. While Bogatyr never scrapped with the British, Oleg was torpedoed and sunk on the night of 17 June 1919 in a daring CMB raid on Kronstadt.

Lt Augustus Agar, in the tiny 40-foot HM CMB4, attacked and sank the Russian Cruiser Oleg in Kronstadt whilst working for British Intelligence under MI6, earning him the Victoria Cross. HM Coastal Motor Boat 4 remains today on display at the IWM.

Bogatyr’s last listed skipper was Red LT Vladimir Andreevich Kukel, who left the ship with her crew at the end of June 1919 for the Volga-Caspian Military Flotilla, to fight Wrangel’s Whites in the South. Once the party was through with Kukel and there was no more fighting to be done, he was arrested and shot, then posthumously “rehabilitated” in 1958.

Bogatyr’s page in the 1921 Janes

By the time Kronstadt was in turn the subject of a revolt against the Bolsheviks in March 1921, leaving hundreds dead and 8,000 sailors fleeing to Finland on foot over the ice once the Red Army moved in, Bogatyr had long before been abandoned and neglected. She was disarmed, towed away, and scrapped in 1922– by a German firm– while the wreck of her sister Oleg, sunk in the Kronstadt shallows, was slowly broken up by local means well into the 1930s.

Another of Bogatyr’s sisters, Kagul (the ex-revolutionary Ochakov), was captured by advancing German troops in the Black Sea in March 1918, then captured by British and French troops post-Armistice. Transferred to the Whites, she was renamed General Kornilov after their fallen leader and, when the Whites evacuated Crimea in November 1920, was sailed into exile in Bizerte and interned by the French government, who broke her up in 1933.

GENERAL KORNILOV Possibly photographed at Bizerte, where the ship spent 1920 to 1932 as a unit of the White Russian "Wrangel-Fleet." From the P.A. Warneck Collection, 1981; Courtesy of B. V. Drashpil of Margate, Florida. Catalog #: NH 92158

Bogatyr class cruiser General Kornilov, ex-Kagul, ex-Ochakov, photographed at Bizerte, where the ship spent 1920 to 1932 as a unit of the White Russian “Wrangel-Fleet.” From the P.A. Warneck Collection, 1981; Courtesy of B. V. Drashpil of Margate, Florida. Catalog #: NH 92158

Ironically, the head of the White Russian exile Naval Corps in Bizerte during that era was (former) RADM Vorozheikin, who had commanded Bogatyr in 1911. Old Vorozheikin died there in Tunisia in the late 1930s, reportedly spending his last years maintaining the salvaged ships’ libraries of the scrapped exile fleet.

Epilogue

Of Bogatyr’s most significant Great War Tsarist-era skippers, the Russo-Japanese War hero Krinitsky– who was her commander during the capture of the Magdeburg— was dismissed from the service he gave everything to in 1918, then spent the rest of his life living quietly under the Bolshevik regime as an electrician at a printing machine factory, passing in 1930.

The second, Verderevsky, who commanded her in the Ahland Islands against Albatross, was (briefly) the commander of the Baltic Fleet in early 1917, then Kerensky’s naval minister, arrested by the Bolsheviks (including, ironically, a detachment of sailors from Bogatyr) in the Winter Palace along with other members of the Provisional Government during the “10 Days that Shook the World.” He lived in exile in the West until 1947, and post-WWII warmed to the Moscow government, receiving Soviet citizenship just before he passed in France at age 73.

Bogatyr’s final sister, Pamiat Merkuria, had exchanged fire with the Germans and Ottomans in the Black Sea during WWI on at least 10 separate occasions. When the Revolution and Civil War era came, she was stripped of her armament and armor, used to build war trains, while her crew had been scattered.

Sabotaged and vandalized by successive waves of interventionist foreign armies, Whites, and Reds, she was rebuilt with salvaged guns and parts from Oleg and, in 1923, recommissioned as the slow and under-armed training cruiser/minelayer Komintern.

Soviet Bogatyr class cruiser Komintern ex Pamiat Merkuria shelling Romanian positions near Odesa, Sept 1941

Nonetheless, she got in several licks against the Germans in 1941-42, then was sunk in shallow water by Luftwaffe air attacks; her guns were salvaged and moved ashore to keep fighting.

Afterall, it was in her blood.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Warship Wednesday 4 February 2026: Big Guns, Shallow Waters

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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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”

Warship Wednesday 4 February 2026: Big Guns, Shallow Waters

Above, we see the immaculate 15-inch gunned Erebus-class monitor HMS Terror (I03) leaving Malta’s Grand Harbor in October 1933 on her way to serve as the station ship in Singapore for the rest of the decade. Note the Revenge-class battlewagon HMS Resolution (09) in the background.

A Great War vet with the battle honors to prove it, Terror would return to the Med and fight her last battle some 85 years ago this month.

A 101 on British Great War monitors

A relic of the mid-19th Century, the shallow draft monitor unexpectedly popped back into service with the Royal Navy in 1914 when the Admiralty acquired a trio of 1,500-ton Brazilian ships (the future HMS Humber, Mersey and Severn) being built at Vickers which carried 6- and 4.7-inch guns while being able to float in just six feet of water, having been designed for use on the Amazon. The idea was these would be crackers for use off the coast of France and Belgium, as well as against Johnny Turk in the Dardanelles, and in steaming up African rivers to sink hiding German cruisers– all missions the Humbers accomplished.

A similar class of monitors taken up from Armstrong, intended for the Norwegians (the future HMS Gorgon and Glatton), were a bit larger, at 5,700 tons, and carried a mix of 9.2-inch and 6-inch guns while having a 16-foot draft.

Then came a flurry of new construction monitors after it was seen how useful the Humbers and Gorgons were, and the RN ordered, under the Emergency War Programme:

  • Fourteen M15 class (540 ton, armed with a single surplus 9.2 inch gun)
  • Eight Lord Clive-class (6,100 tons, armed with a twin 12-inch turret taken from decommissioned Majestic-class battleships).
  • Four Abercrombie class (6,300 tons, armed with embargoed Bethlehem-made 14″/45s)
  • Five M29 class (540 tons, armed with two 6″/45s taken from the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships’ nearly unusable rear casemate mounts)
  • Two Marshal Ney class (6,900 tons, 2 x modern 15″/42s, which were surplus from lightening up the new battlecruisers Renown and Repulse).

All of which began arriving in the fleet in mid-1915. In all, some 38 new monitors of all types entered RN service between August 1914 and the end of 1915. Talk about meeting a demand!

Royal Navy monitor HMS Marshal Ney underway during trials, 28 August 1915, contrasted with a scale model of her sister, HMS Marshal Soult. They carried a twin 15″/42s turret left over from lightening up the new battlecruisers Renown and Repulse.

With this scratch monitor building initiative in the rear view, the Admiralty ordered what would be the pinnacle of their Great War monitors, the twin ships of the Erebus class.

Ordered from Harland & Wolff, the renowned ocean liner builder, with one built in Govan and the other in Belfast, Erebrus and Terror were similar to the Palmers-built Marshal Ney class but larger (at 8,500 tons and 405-feet loa vs 6,900 tons, 355-feet) with better protection and speed.

What was amazing was the size of their beam, some 88 feet across, giving them a very tubby length-to-beam ratio of 5:1. Still, these cruiser-sized vessels could float in just 11 feet of water, their massive pancake anti-torpedo bulge, some 15 feet deep, subdivided into 50 watertight compartments.

Powered by four Babcock boilers, which drove two 4-cyl VTE engines on two screws, they had a 6,000shp powerplant capable of pushing them to 12 knots or greater, roughly twice the speed of the smaller Marshals, which only carried a 1,500 shp plant. On speed trials, Erebus was able to generate 7,244 hp and hit 14.1 knots, while Terror was able to generate 6,235 knots to hit a still respectable 13.1 knots. Jane’s noted later that “Their speed, considering their great beam, is remarkable.”

Like the Marshals, they were designed to carry guns large enough to outrange the 11- 12- and even 15-inchers inchers mounted by the Germans on the Belgian coast.

During the Great War, the Germans established extensive coastal artillery, managed by the Marinekorps Flandern under Admiral Ludwig von Schröder, to defend occupied Belgium and its submarine bases at Zeebrugge and Ostend. These defenses included massive 15 inch SK L/45 “Lang Max” (the most powerful German naval gun of World War I) and 12 inch SK L/50 guns, such as the Batterie Pommern and Kaiser Wilhelm II, respectively, capable of firing 37 km out to sea, with many positions (e.g., Battery Aachen) built in concrete. The Germans constructed no less than 34 batteries along the coast in the 20 miles between Knokke-Heist and Middelkerke alone.

A German 15-inch SK L/45 “Lang Max” as Coastal Artillery. The Pommern battery, located at Leugenboom in Belgium, is perhaps best known for firing about 500 rounds between June 1917 and October 1918 at ranges of up to about 48,000 yards, including many at Allied positions in and around Dunkirk (Dunkerque).  IWM photograph Q 23973.

Their main armament for Erebus and Terror was a pair of Heavy BL 15-inch/42 cal Mark Is, a gun described by Tony DiGiulian over at Navweaps as “quite possibly the best large-caliber naval gun ever developed by Britain, and it was certainly one of the longest-lived of any nation, with the first shipboard firing taking place in 1915 and the last in 1954.” Capable of firing a 1,900-pound HE or Shrapnel shell to 40,000 yards at maximum charge and elevation (as contended by Jane’s), the monitors carried 100 rounds per gun.

A tall five-level conning tower was sandwiched just behind the casemate of the main guns, topped by a large range finder, while a tripod mast and pagoda with a 360-degree view towered above both gunhouse and CT.

Modified Mark I* Turret on HMS Terror in 1915. Note the armor plates covering the gunports under the barrels and the armor cowls under the bloomers above the barrels. These were the result of changing the range of elevation from -5 / +20 degrees to +2 / +30 degrees. Also note the smoke generator apparatus on the direct control spotting tower, useful in “shooting and scooting” in the Belgian littoral against German coastal artillery. IWM photograph SP 1612.

The Guns, “HMS ‘Terror’ by John Lavery, H 61.2 x W 63.8 cm, circa 1918, Imperial War Museums art collection IWM ART 1379. Note: This artwork was relocated in August 1939 to a less vulnerable site outside London when the museum activated its evacuation plan.

There were 184 such 15-inch guns manufactured by six different works across England, and they equipped the Queen Elizabeth and Royal Sovereign battleship classes, the Glorious, Repulse, and Hood (“Admiral”) battlecruiser classes, and the monitors of not only the Erebus but also the preceding Marshal Ney class, and later WWII-era Roberts class. The Brits even used them ashore, fitted as giant coastal artillery pieces at Dover and Singapore. These superb guns allowed one of the longest hits ever scored by a naval gun on an enemy ship when, in July 1940, HMS Warspite struck the Italian battleship Guilio Cesare at approximately 26,000 yards.

HMS Erebus and HMS Repulse, both mounting 15-inch guns, at John Brown shipyard at Clydebank.

To keep in the fight against German coastal batteries, the Erebus class was extensively armored with up to 13 inches of plate over the main gun house, 8 inches on the barbette, 6 inches on the large conning tower, 4-inch bulkheads, a 4-inch box citadel over the magazines, and an armored deck sloping from 4 to 1.25 inches. Due to the design and low freeboard transitioning into the huge anti-torpedo blisters, there was no traditional side belt as known by period battleships and cruisers.

A varied secondary armament repurposed from old cruisers was arrayed around the main deck, including two (later four) 6″/40 QF Mark IIs, two 3″/50 12pdr 18cwt QF Mk Is, a 3″/45 20cwt QF Mk I anti-balloon gun, and four Vickers machine guns. This was later expanded to eight 4-inch/44 BL Mk IXs in place of the four 6″/40s, 2 12 pounders, two 3-inch AAA, and two 40mm 2-pounder pom-pom AAAs by the end of the war.

Erebus and Terror surely lived up to British Admiral George Alexander Ballard’s notions of monitors as being like “full-armored knights riding on donkeys, easy to avoid but bad to close with.”

Meet Terror

Our subject is the ninth such warship to carry the name in Royal Navy service, going back to a 4-gun bomb vessel launched in 1696. Most famously, a past HMS Terror, a 102-foot Vesuvius-class bomb vessel, had bombarded Fort McHenry in 1814, which resulted in the Star Spangled Banner, and then was lost with the bomb vessel HMS Erebus on Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition in 1848.

Sir John Franklin’s men dying by their boat during the North-West Passage expedition: H.M.S. Erebus and Terror, 1849–1850: Illustrated London News. July 25, 1896 ,by W. Thomas Smith.

Terror was laid down as Yard No. 493 at Harland and Wolff’s Belfast site (the same yard that had just three years before completed RMS Titanic) on 12 October 1915 and launched on 18 May 1916.

Terror immediately after her launch on 18 May 1916, with Workman, Clark’s North Yard in the background. The 12-sided barbette armor and the armored conning tower have already been fitted.

She completed fitting out and entered service on 6 August 1916.

Captain (later Admiral Sir) Hugh Justin Tweedie, RN, was her first of 15 skippers. A 39-year-old regular, Tweedie had joined the Navy as a 13-year-old cadet, commanded the armored cruiser HMS Essex before the war, and the monitor Marshal Ney during the war. Nonetheless, he soon passed command to Capt. (later RADM) Charles William Bruton, late of the first-class protected cruiser HMS Edgar. Bruton would command Terror through 31 January, 1919.

Honors attached to the seven previous Terrors allowed her to commission with the two past honors, “Velez Malaga 1704” and “Copenhagen 1801”, carried forward.

War!

Joining the Dover Patrol, after a short shakedown, Erebus and Terror were soon engaged in bombarding German positions, batteries, and harbors along the Belgian coast, alternating with guard ship roles in The Downs.

Erebus class monitor HMS Terror as photographed by E. Hopkins, Southsea photographer. IWM Q 75504

Some of the more interesting sorties across the channel were a May 1917 attempt to knock out the lock gates of the Bruges Canal at Zeebrugge while acting as flag of the Dover Patrol under VADM Reginald Hugh Spencer Bacon, famous for being the first skipper of HMS Dreadnought, and two bombardments of Ostend in June and September, respectively.

British monitor HMS Terror off Belgium, 1917-1918

Incredibly, Terror and her sister showed their construction made them almost impervious to attempts to sink them.

On 19 October 1917, Terror shrugged off three direct torpedo hits from German CTBs A59, A60, and A61,  off Dunkirk, which blew off and caved in large chunks of her anti-torpedo bulge. Bruton brought his ship into shallow water and beached her with “commendable promptness under the difficult circumstances.” She suffered no casualties and, after a yard period, was back in action by January 1918.

Sister Erebus was, on 28 October 1917, hit by German distance-controlled explosive boat FL12. which carried a massive 1,500-pound charge that, while blowing a 50-foot hole in the torpedo bulge, did very little damage to the hull itself. The monitor was back in service by 21 November of the same year.

Not all RN monitors were that lucky. The Abercrombie-class monitor HMS Raglan was sunk during the Battle of Imbros in January 1918 by the Ottoman battlecruiser Yavuz Sultan Selim (ex-SMS Goeben). The Gorgon-class monitor HMS Glatton was wrecked by an internal explosion in September 1918. Three of the M15-class coastal monitors were lost: one to a mine, one to a U-boat, and one to Yavuz at Imbros. The M29-class coastal monitor HMS M30 was sunk by an Austrian howitzer battery in the Gulf of Smyrna in May 1916.

Back in service in early 1918, Terror helped spoil a German destroyer raid on Dunkirk in March, riddled German-occupied Ostend (where said destroyers sortied from) in retribution, and provided long-range bombardment support for the April 1918 Zeebrugge raid.

Her 15-inchers were replaced in September after 340 rounds. Terror and Erebus plastered German positions around Zeebrugge and Ostend to divert Jerry’s to other fronts during the Fifth Battle of Ypres, a five-day offensive that let the British take possession of a decent chunk of liberated Belgium, at least by Western Front standards.

And with that, the war to end all wars came to an end just weeks later.

Terror’s Great War service brought her two honors of her own: “Belgian Coast 1916-18,” and “Zeebrugge 1918,” upping her tally to four.

Interbellum

Terror, June 1919

While some coastal monitors saw extended post-1918 service aboard, such as on the Dvina Flotilla in Northern Russia fighting the Reds, Terror and Erebus were given more auxiliary tasks in home waters.

It was during this period that Erebus was fitted out as a cadet’s training ship, and a large extra cabin accommodation was erected on her upper deck, the roof coming just under the 15 inch guns.

Comparison of profiles for Erebus and Terror, 1929 Jane’s.

Between January 1919 and the end of 1933, Terror was assigned to the RN gunnery school at Portsmouth (aka the “stone frigate” HMS Excellent), tasked with armor-piercing shell trials against the retired Jutland veteran Bellerophon-class dreadnought HMS Superb, and the trophy German Bayern-class dreadnought SMS Baden, which had been saved from scuttling at Scapa Flow.

On 2 February 1921, the ex-SMS Baden was sunk in shallow water by 17 hits from the monitor Terror at point-blank (500-yard) range, but again refloated and, on 10 August, badly damaged by 14 hits from the monitor Erebus off the Isle of Wight. She was then towed away and scuttled in deep water off the Casquet Rocks in the Channel Islands on 16 August 1921. Painting by William Lionel Wyllie, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Collection. PW1872

Terror also tested new guns, and served as a general Director & Fire Control, and Turret drill ship (keep in mind that her 15″/42s were in use across the fleet) during her gunnery school days.

HMS Terror, Sept 1930

HMS Terror

Terror, Navy Week, 1929. Note the numerous small gun houses for her eight 4-inch/44 BL Mk IXs

Jane’s 1929 listing of Erebus and Terror. Note Erebus’s large deck house

In early 1933, with Japan’s walkout from the League of Nations and war drums in the Pacific, Terror was made ready for war, to a degree, and sent to Singapore to add her big guns to the defense of that strategic colonial outpost and just generally serve as a station ship.

It was a slow three-month slog via the Suez and Aden, but she made it before Christmas.

HMS Terror underway in Plymouth Sound, October 1933, IWM (FL 3724)

Terror, leaving Malta for Singapore, Oct 1933

Terror in Singapore dry dock, 1937

In October 1938, CDR Henry John Haynes, DSC, RN, became Terror’s final skipper, a distinction that he, of course, was not aware of at the time.

A career officer, he signed up as an 11-year-old Boy in 1906 and, picking up his first stripe in 1914, earned his DSC in March 1918 during the Great War “for services in Destroyer and Torpedo Boat Flotillas.” A regular salt, he achieved his first command in 1924, the destroyer HMS Sylph, then would inhabit a series of seven further captain’s cabins prior to moving into Terror’s, most recently the minelaying destroyer HMS Walker.

War (Again)

When Hitler sent his legions into Poland in September 1939, and the world again devolved into a global war, Terror was still at rest in Singapore.

Word came to make her ready for European service and she put into dry dock for a fresh coat of paint and an update in her armament, landing her secondary battery for six 4″/45 QF Mk Vs (with a 15 rounds per minute rate of fire and 50-degree elevation allowing an AA ceiling of 21,000 feet), and two quad Vickers .50 cal mounts.

She said goodbye to Singapore in December 1939, her home for six years, and headed for the Mediterranean via the Suez, arriving at Malta on 4 April 1940 to strengthen the defences against a foreseen Italian entry into the war.

On 10 June 1940, her gunners fired at the first (of many) Axis air raid over Malta.

Terror, in the distance, under air attack, 1940 AWM 306675

She spent the next several months on the periphery of several operations in the Mediterranean, including the Operation MB 8 convoy, Operation Coat (transferring of reinforcements from Gibraltar to the Eastern Mediterranean), Operation Crack (escorting carriers for an air attack on Cagliari, Sardinia), and Operation Judgment (the carrier raid on Taranto). Then, after serving in Suda Bay as a guardship, rode slow shotgun on Convoy ME-3 from Malta to Alexandria, then remained in Egypt for local defense.

Then came a very active six-week period supporting the operations of the British 8th Army across Egypt into Libya, starting with a bombardment of Italian-held Bardia on 14 December 1940, a port she would repeatedly haunt.

It was off Bardia during Operation MC 5 that, on 2 January 1940, Terror, operating in conjunction with several small Insect-class river gunboats as part of the Inshore Squadron, was attacked by Italian torpedo bombers around 1820 hours, but no damage was done to her. Another four air raids the next day were also shrugged off.

British monitor Terror under Italian air attack, 2 January 1941, off Bardia AWM 12793

17 January to 22 January saw Terror on Operation IS 1, the nightly bombardment of Italian positions around Tobruk to support the 8th Army’s efforts to capture the port.

On 12 February, she was attached to Operation Shelford, the clearance of Benghazi harbor, arriving at the Libyan port on Valentine’s Day.

She was still there through an increasingly stout series of Axis air raids, which concluded as far as Terror is concerned, at 0630 on 22 February, when a trio of Junkers Ju-88 bombers of the III/LG.1 from Catania, along with a trio of He.111 torpedo bombers of 6/KG.26 flying out of Comiso, made runs on the harbor with our monitor sustaining flooding from three near-misses. In rough shape, she was ordered to sail for Tobruk, where the anti-aircraft defense was better, but hit two German magnetic mines on the way out of the harbor, flooding her engineering spaces.

Persevering on her way to Tobruk, Terror eventually began settling in 120 feet of water about 15 nautical miles north-west of Derna, and, abandoned at 2200 on the 22nd with the intention of scuttling, sank at 0415 on 23 February 1941, capping a career of just under 25 years.

True to form, she suffered no casualties, and her 300-strong crew was taken off in toto by the escorting minesweeper HMS Fareham and corvette HMS Salvia.

She earned two further RN honors, “Libya 1941” and “Mediterranean 1941.”

She also picked up the dubious distinction of being the largest warship, by displacement, sunk in the Med by Ju-88s during the war.

Photograph of painting titled, “Terror’s last fight,” depicting the aerial bombardment of HMS Terror by German bombers in February 1941, shortly before her sinking. Pictures For Illustrating Ritchie II Book. November and December 1942, Alexandria, Pictures of Paintings by Lieutenant Commander R Langmaid, Rn, Official Fleet Artist. These Pictures Are For Illustrating a Naval War Book by Paymaster Captain L. A. Da C Ritchie, RN, IWM A 13648.

As for Erebus, she finished the war, receiving damage in covering the Husky Landings in Sicily and only narrowly avoiding being sunk by the Japanese at Trincomalee in 1942. She later clocked in as a gunfire support ship off Utah Beach for U.S. troops during the Neptune/Overlord operations on D-Day with Bombardment Force A, lending her 15-inchers to the cacophony raised by the “puny” 14-inchers on the old battlewagon USS Nevada (BB-36), and the 8-,7.25-, 6-, and 5.25-inchers of USS Tuscaloosa and Quincy, and HM’s cruisers Hawkins, Enterprise, and Black Prince.

British monitor HMS Erebus at a buoy in Plymouth Sound. IWM

HMS Erebus, camo

HMS Erebus monitor at a buoy in Plymouth Bay, 4 February 1944, IWM (FL 693)

Erebus then roamed up the French coast and, with HMS Warspite, dueled with German coastal artillery in the Le Havre area and Seine Bay in August and September 1944, supporting the British Army as it moved into the Lowlands. In November 1944, she supported Operation Infatuate, the amphibious assault on Walcheren, Netherlands.

HMS Erebus in Action off Walcheren by Stephen Bone, Nov 2nd 1944 IWM ART LD 4706

Erebus was scrapped in 1946, but it is believed that one of her 15-inch guns was, along with surplus guns from a half-dozen battleships and battlecruisers, used to equip HMS Vanguard, the Royal Navy’s final dreadnought.

Epilogue

Terror’s final skipper, CDR Haynes, added a DSO to his DSC “For courage, skill and devotion to duty in operations off the Libyan Coast,” and went on to command, in turn, the cruisers HMS Caledon and Argonaut, then the escort carriers HMS Asbury and Khedive, then the RN Air Station Wingfield near Capetown before moving to the Retired List. Capt. Haynes passed away in 1973, aged 80.

In recognition of her role in Singapore’s pre-WWII history, the new accommodation barracks adjacent to the base became known as HMS Terror from 1945 to 1971, and today the Terror Club remains in Singapore as part of the U.S. Navy’s MWR system.

The military of Singapore borrowed the name and legacy for “Terror Camp,” a training center in the Sembawang area of the old base in the 1970s and 1980s, and today the Republic of Singapore Navy’s elite Naval Diving Unit (NDU) frogman school has graced its four-story high Hull Mock-up System dive chamber as HMS Terror.

Combrig, among others, has offered detailed scale models of the Erebus class.

As for monitors, the RN kept the WWII-era HMS Roberts around as an accommodation ship at Devonport until 1965, and one of her 15″/42 guns (formerly in HMS Resolution) is mounted outside the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, South London, together with one from the battleship Ramillies.

HMS Roberts/Resolution’s 15″/42 guns on permanent display at the Imperial War Museum, London, preserved alongside one from her sistership HMS Ramillies (07).

The 1915 Programme M29-class coastal monitor HMS M33, converted to a fueling hulk and boom defense workshop in 1939, is one of only three surviving First World War Royal Navy warships and the sole survivor of the Gallipoli Campaign. Now located at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, close to HMS Victory, she opened to the public in 2015, preserving the memory of the RN’s World War monitor era.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Warship Wednesday 28 January 2026: Juliana’s Enforcer

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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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”

Warship Wednesday 28 January 2026: Juliana’s Enforcer

U.S. Navy photo 80-G-708163

Above we see the Dutch S (Saumarez/Savage)-class destroyer Hr.Ms. Evertsen (D 802) at Yokosuka some 75 years ago this month, in January 1951, while deployed with the UN Blockading and Escort Force off Korea.

She had been ordered under a different name by the British some 10 years prior, in January 1941, for a very different war, and gave good account not only in the Atlantic against the Germans but would also draw blood in a third conflict in 1962– oddly enough against a German-built warship.

The S-class

The 16 wartime British “S” & “T” class destroyers were long ships (363 feet) but thin (just 35 feet), giving them a 10:1 length-to-beam ratio, making them a knife on the water.

Tipping the scales at just 2,500~ tons, they were slender stilettos made for stabbing through the waves at nearly 36 knots on a pair of Parsons geared turbines generating 40,000 shp. Armed with a quartet of shielded 4.7-inch QF Mk IX guns for surface actions, U-boat busting depth charges, and two four-packs of anti-ship torpedo tubes along with a mixed battery of AAA guns, they were ready for a fight.

Class leader HMS Saumarez (G12) was completed in July 1943, right in time for the crucial part of the Battle of the Atlantic, and the 15 ships that followed her were made ready to go into harm’s way as soon as they could leave the builders’ yards. The class proved so successful that the design was essentially reused for the only incrementally improved “U” & “V” and “W” & “Z” destroyer classes, a further 32 greyhounds.

Saumarez would cover herself in glory, being instrumental in the sinking of both the German battleship Scharnhorst and the Japanese cruiser Haguro.

Beam view, HMS Saumarez (G12). IWM A 18404

Another S-class, HMS Success, was transferred on completion to the Free Norwegian forces on 26 August 1943 as KNM Stord (G26), and soon got to chasing the Germans, helping scrap with Scharnhorst just four months after transfer. A third, HMS Shark, while serving as KNM Svenner, was lost on D-Day off Sword Beach by torpedoes from a German S-boat. A fourth, HMS Swift (G46), was sunk by a mine off Sword on 24 June 1944.

But we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves.

Meet Scourge

Our subject was ordered from Cammell Laird, Birkenhead, on 9 January 1941 as Yard No 1095, the future HMS Scourge (G01). Laid down on 26 June 1941– the same week the Axis invaded the Soviet Union– she would be constructed at the yard alongside wartime sisters HMS Scorpion, Teazer, and Tenacious, as well as near-sisters Ulysses and Undaunted.

Christened 8 December 1942, she was the 10th (and, sadly, the last) to carry the splendid name of Scourge in the Royal Navy, going back to a 14-gun brig-sloop launched in 1779. Notably, the eighth Scourge, a Beagle-class destroyer, landed ANZACs at Gallipoli. This allowed our final Scourge to begin life carrying the past battle honors Crimea 1855, and Dardanelles 1914-15.

Adopted by the civil community of Bexhill, East Sussex, who held a “warship week” to raise money for her completion, HMS Scourge was commissioned on 14 July 1943, LCDR George Ian Mackintosh Balfour, RN, in command. A regular who earned his sub-lieutenant stripe in 1932, Mackintosh Balfour had seen much of the war already, having commanded the destroyers HMS Decoy (H 75) and HMS Tuscan (R 56).

As completed, beside her main and torpedo batteries, she carried a twin 40/56 Bofors Mk VIII and four twin 20/70 Oerlikon Mk IIs for AAA defense, as well as four depth charge throwers and two racks with room for as many as 130 “ash cans” for ASW. Her sensor suite included Type 271, 285, and 291 radars, as well as Type 144 sonar.

HMS Scourge (G01) S-class destroyer 12 October 1943. Note the great layout view of her twin quad torpedo turnstiles and four 4.7/45 guns. IWM A 19638

HMS Scourge (G01) S-class destroyer 12 October 1943. IWM A 19639

A very clean HMS Scourge (G01) S-class destroyer, undated, likely soon after delivery. Photo by Stewart Bale Ltd, Liverpool IWM FL 18828.

Getting into the war!

Her construction was drawn out nearly three years due to the late delivery of armament and fire-control equipment.

Scourge began her shakedown with the 23rd Destroyer Flotilla just in time to take part in Convoy TA 58 (Operation Quadrant), whose primary mission was to zip HMT Queen Mary, with Churchill aboard, to the Quebec Conference in August 1943.

By 20 October 1943, she took part in Operation FR, the movement of 10 wooden-hulled American Admirable-class minesweepers and SC-class submarine chasers for Lend Lease to the Soviet Navy from Iceland to the windswept Kola Peninsula in Northern Russia.

Scourge then picked up Convoy RA 054A, her first of a dozen such runs between Archangel/Murmansk and Britain and back. Often traveling in conjunction with her sisters, she braved the harsh Barents Sea weather, U-boat attacks, a near brush with Scharnhorst, and long-ranging German Condor aircraft.

Taking a break from her convoy work after her initial five runs (besides RA 054A, she was on JW 054B, JW 055B, JW 056B, and RA 056), Scourge was nominated to join the great Neptune flotillas for the Overlord (D-Day) landings in Normandy.

On hand with the Sword Bombardment Group, she fell in with the battleships HMS Ramillies and Warspite, the heavy cruiser Frobisher, the light cruisers Arethusa, Danae, Mauritius, and Dragon (Polish), and 13 destroyers, including sisters Saumarez, Scorpion, Serapis, Stord, Svenner, and Swift. Scourge lent her guns to the cacophony on 6 June 1944 and continued to defend the beachhead as the fight moved inshore.

Just days later, Scourge joined with near-sister HMS Urania and the K-class destroyer HMS Kelvin to escort first Churchill and later King George VI himself, then aboard Arethusa, to Sword. Keep in mind that the control of the Channel was still very much in question at the time, with German U-boats below and S-boats above frequently encountered along with mines, midget submarines, and the occasional Luftwaffe aircraft.

The Navy lands supplies in Normandy, 13 June 1944, on board HMS Kelvin during Mr. Churchill’s crossing to France. At 30 knots in the Channel, HMS Scourge is seen from the destroyer HMS Kelvin. Photo by LT CH Parnall, RN, IWM A 24090.

The Navy lands supplies in Normandy, 13 June 1944, on board HMS Kelvin during Mr. Churchill’s crossing to France. At 30 knots in the Channel, HMS Scourge is seen from the destroyer HMS Kelvin. Photo by LT CH Parnall, RN, IWM A 24089.

The King goes to France. 16 June 1944, on board the cruiser HMS Arethusa and at the beachhead in Normandy. The S-class destroyer HMS Scourge, seen from the Arethusa during the crossing. Photo by LT CH Parnall, RN, IWM A 24198.

On 25 June, she escorted vital Convoy FTM 017 from the Thames estuary to the Normandy landing beaches, backfilling equipment and supplies for the push inland.

In addition to seven further Russian runs (JW 061A, RA 061A, JW 063, RA 063, RA 064, JW 065, and RA 065) between November 1944 and March 1945, Scourge clocked in as a carrier escort on Operation Mascot (the July 1944 attempt to cripple the German battleship Tirpitz in the Kaa Fiord), Operation Turbine (August 1944 anti-shipping sweep of the Norwegian coast), Operation Offspring (mining the Norwegian coast), Operation Victual (a distant covering operation for Russian-bound convoy JW59, spoiling to fight Tirpitz), Operations Handfast and Provident (two further Norwegian mining sorties in November 1944), Operation Selenium (more Norwegian mining in February 1945), Operation Newmarket (to raid German U-boat tenders in Kilbotn, Norway in April 1945) and Operation Invective, the latter a destroyer-only anti-shipping run that saw the tin cans shell German searchlight positions on the Norwegian coast.

In early May, she went on one further combat operation in Norwegian waters, as part of the Operation Judgement escort for three jeep carriers bound for another bite at the U-boats of Kilbotn.

It was the Royal Navy’s last offensive operation against the Germans.

Operation Judgement, May 4, 1945, was an attack on the U-boat base at Kilbotn, near Harstad, Norway. This proved to be the last offensive operation by the Home Fleet, as the war in Europe ended just a few days later. The main targets of the attack are, in fact, hidden behind water columns and smoke in the center of the photo. They were the depot ship Black Watch and the Type VIIC submarine U-711 — they were both sunk. The ship visible in the center of the pic is, in all probability, the motor vessel Senja, also sunk in this attack but raised and repaired after the war. U-711 was the last U-boat sunk by the Fleet Air Arm in WW2. The attack was carried out by Avenger torpedo-bombers and Wildcat fighters from Squadrons 846 (HMS Trumpeter, Capt. K. S. Colquhoun), 853 (HMS Queen, Capt. K. J. D’Arcy), and 882 (HMS Searcher, Capt. J. W. Grant).

Wrapping up her RN service in WWII, Scourge sailed as part of VADM McGrigor’s Force 6 into the Skagerrak and Kattegat from 7 to 12 May 1945, marking VE-Day at sea.

For her WWII service, Scourge was granted the battle honors Arctic 1943-45 and Normandy 1944.

Post VJ Day, she was laid up and quietly placed out of service.

At least for a few months.

Dutch Days

Ex-Scourge was sold to the Royal Netherlands Navy on 1 February 1946 after a short spell in ordinary.

At the time, she had her original four 4.7/45s, depth charge armament, Type 144 sonar, and eight torpedo tubes, but had been fitted with two 40mm Bofors Mk IV Hazemeyer mounts, four twin 20mm Oerlikons, and carried upgraded Type 276, 285, and 291 radars.

She joined sisters ex-Scorpion and ex-Serapis, which had been transferred in October 1945 and renamed Hr.Ms. Kortenaer (D 804) and Hr.Ms. Piet Hein (D 805), respectively, in Dutch service. Following the trend of her now-Dutch sisters being named after famous admirals, Scourge became at least the sixth RNN warship named for the storied Evertsen family of naval heroes with pennant D 802. Taking the naming convention forward, all three names had been carried previously by Dutch destroyers (torpedobootjager) lost against the Japanese in 1942.

Evertsen (D 802), ex-HMS Scourge, between 1946 and 1957. NIMH 2158_002503

Almost as soon as their crews got acquainted with their new ships, they were off to the Dutch East Indies, which was fighting mad in the process of becoming Indonesia.

Hr.Ms. Evertsen (ex. HMS Scourge), D 802, and Hr.Ms. Kortenaer (ex. HMS Scorpion), D 804, at Soerabaja, Dutch East Indies, April 1950, clad in flags and tropical canvas. NIMH 2158_028763

The sisters in Jane’s circa 1954, referred to as the Evertsen class in Dutch service.

Aerial photograph of the Hr.Ms Evertsen or the Hr.Ms Kortenaer in the Strait of Madura, 1949. Note her extensive use of canvas awnings. Marine Luchtvaart Dienst Indië KITLV MLD392 30D

Aerial photograph of laying a smoke screen near Gili Pandan Island in the Madura Strait by Hr.Ms Evertsen, Marine Luchtvaart Dienst Indië KITLV MLD390 013

Aerial photograph of gunnery exercises by the Hr.Ms Evertsen or the Hr.Ms Kortenaer in the Strait of Madura, Marine Luchtvaart Dienst Indië KITLV MLD392 017

Korea

Still in the waters off Java when the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel in June 1950, Evertsen was dispatched to the Yellow Sea to join the UN forces off the embattled South Korean coast, arriving on 19 July.

She ultimately joined Task Force 96 in the U.S. Seventh Fleet, and saw service during the Battle of Pusan Perimeter and then covered the amphibious squadron at Inchon’s outer port.

Hr. Ms. Evertsen in action at Wonsan, letting her 4.7s ring, 26 April 1951. Nationaal Archief 904-5397

The Dutch naval service off Korea led to the country further sending a battalion of 646 men (the NDVN), which served as part of the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division, ultimately being rotated out several times.

Speaking of being rotated out, Evertsen was relieved in place by the Dutch destroyer Van Galen at the end of April 1951 and was soon pointed back to Holland, having served 10 months of the “Forgotten War.”

Evertsen on her way home from Korea to the Netherlands, 8 May 1951. In “Sunday uniform” (“Zondags tenue”), most of the officers and men pose on the forecastle. Nationaal Archief 35017_002

Return of destroyer Hr.Ms. Evertsen from Korea, 1951. 2158_028806

As for the Dutch effort in Korea, Van Galen was rotated out in early 1952, replaced by Evertsen’s sister Piet Hein, who in turn was tapped out by the frigate Johan Maurits van Naasau in early 1953. A fifth destroyer, Hr. Ms. Dubois, arrived in November 1953 to enforce the peace, followed by Hr. Ms. Van Zijll in September 1954.

As noted by the Dutch Defense Ministry:

On average, each Dutch ship carried out 10 patrols, mainly along the west coast of Korea. The ships were also given the task of escorting a U.S. or British aircraft carrier on a regular basis. The Dutch ships were also given the task of protecting the lines of communication and bombarding enemy troop concentrations, reinforcements and infrastructure.

The Netherlands sent 5,322 soldiers to Korea, with 2,980 men seeing combat, of which 120 of them were killed and 645 wounded. They fought in battles at Hoengsong, Wonju, Soyang River, and the Iron Triangle, among others. After the armistice, the ground forces withdrew from Korea in December 1954 and the Navy in January 1955.

Some 1,360 Dutch naval personnel served in the Korean War, with the first four warships active in the fighting– Evertsen included– earning the South Korean Distinguished Unit Citation. Only one Dutch sailor, a signalman on Johan Maurits van Nassau, was killed during the conflict.

A peaceful respite

With that, Evertsen would remain in European waters for a few years at least. It was while on this domestic service that she came to the rescue of the distressed Danish schooner Svaerdfisken during a storm in the North Sea in 1954. After towing the Dane to Stavanger, the Danish ambassador to the Netherlands later presented the ship and crew with a commemorative cup in Rotterdam as an official thanks.

A great profile shot of Evertsen working in the North Sea, showing her twin torpedo turnstiles, circa 1953. NIMH 2009-001-018_008

Kortenaer (D 804) with Evertsen (D 802) behind her, dressed for ceremonies. Circa 1953-1955. NIMH 2158_007043

Presto-changeo, you are now a frigate

All of the S-class destroyers in Dutch service were converted at Rijkswerf Willemsoord between 1957 and 1958 to fast frigates (FF) with new sensors, the “X” 4/7″/45 mount removed, a shorter mainmast installed, and a helicopter platform fitted aft for Bell 47s. This saw the class switch from “D” pennants to “F” with Evertsen carrying F 803 afterward.

Meanwhile, the British did a similar Type 15/16 ASW frigate conversion to three dozen remaining T, U, V, W, and Z-class near-sisters during the same period, removing most of the gun armament and fitting new sensors and either a Squid or Limbo A/S mortar.

Jane’s on the class, 1960.

Frigate HNLMS Evertsen (F 803) in the harbor of Ponta Delgada, Azores, 15 December 1957. NIMH 2158_028782

Targeting exercises with a late model 40mm gun aboard the frigate Hr.Ms. Evertsen, 1957. Aiming is at a Grumman TBM-3W2 Avenger, a type that flew with the Dutch fleet between 1953 and 1961. NIMH 2009-003-111_008

Evertsen as a frigate, 1961 2158_107708

Post-conversion, the Evertsens were dispatched once again to the Pacific, this time to keep watch over the last Dutch colony in the Far East, 10 December 1957.

Departure of Hr Ms Evertsen to New Guinea, Nationaal Archief 909-1735

Splash one Jaguar

Queen Juliana, who took over the throne from her ailing mother, the indefatigable Queen Wilhelmina, in 1948, saw a reign that included the decolonization and independence of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and Suriname, although not without a stout fight for the former.

This became particularly sticky when it came to the remnant colony of Dutch New Guinea, which escalated from a tense Confrontation (Konfrontasi) dispute in 1959 into direct low-level military conflict between the Netherlands and Soviet-backed Indonesia in 1962.

With the stage thus set, the Evertsen class was on hand in New Guinea for this endgame.

Evertsen underway as seen from a maritime patrol aircraft off the Nederlands Nieuw-Guinea in the South Pacific, note her frigate conversion. NIMH 2158_028792

Evertsen in the Konijnenburg shipyard slipway Manokwari, Netherlands New Guinea. Note her helicopter platform. NIMH 2158_028817

This conflict came to a head in what is known as the Battle of Vlakke Hoek or the Battle of Arafura Sea in the early morning of 15 January 1962. In the engagement, a trio of brand new West German-built Type 140 Jaguar-class torpedo boats– essentially Lürssen-built updated S-boats– operated by the Indonesian navy, attempted to land 150 infiltrators into Kaimana in Dutch New Guinea as part of Operation Trikora.

The boats, Matjan Tutul, Matjan Kumbang, and Harimau, were blisteringly fast, capable of hitting 42 knots in bursts, and well-armed, bristling with torpedo tubes and 40mm guns.

A 139-foot Lurssen-built Jaguar class, constructed to the Schnellboot 55 design.

However, the little Indonesian flotilla was spotted by an alert Dutch Navy P-2 Neptune patrol plane, and Evertsen, nearby, was diverted to the scene to intercept. Sister Kortenaer and a third Dutch destroyer, the newly commissioned Hr.Ms. Utrecht trailed behind.

By the time the smoke cleared, Evertsen sank the flagship MTB, RI Matjan Tutul (650). The two other Jaguars were damaged but made their escape more or less intact. Among the 23 missing considered dead was the flotilla commander, Commodore Yosaphat “Yos” Sudarso.

The Battle of Vlakke Hoek (Dutch New Guinea). Empty shells after the action aboard a fast frigate of the Evertsen class. NIMH 2158_035634

A short color film in the NIMH archives contains footage from Evertsen’s radar during the night battle near Vlakke Hoek with the Indonesian motor torpedo boat Matjan Tutul, including the captured survivors on the quarterdeck of the frigate the next morning.

The three Evertsens remained in Dutch service through the UN-brokered agreement to the transfer of Dutch New Guinea from Dutch to Indonesian control in October 1962.

An Evertsen-class destroyer (with tropical canvas) photographed from the air at Mios Woendi, Papua, between May and July 1962. NIMH 2007-11-27

Sent back to Europe, the class, obsolete for NATO use, was retired and scrapped in 1963.

Epilogue

The Dutch ships were the final S-class destroyers, the type having left British service in 1960. The last of their (near) sisters, the V-class destroyer HMS Grenville (R97/F197), remained in RN service until 1974 as a trials ship and was only broken up in 1983.

The British have not reused the awe-inspiring sea dog-appropriate name HMS Scourge, but the Dutch have recycled Evertsen for a Van Speijk-class frigate (F815), active from 1967 to 1989, and a De Zeven Provincien-class frigate (F805), commissioned in 2005.

HNLMS Evertsen conducts a high-speed turn in the Gulf of Aden while on JTF duties

As for Indonesia, a replica of Matjan Tutul has been created.

Matjan Tutul (replica), at the Satriamandala Museum in Indonesia. Wikimedia Commons image

The Troika commodore who was killed in the operation, Yos Sudarso, was promoted to vice admiral posthumously and has had two frigates named after him since then. Ironically, the current one to bear the name is a former Dutch Van Speijk-class frigate that has remained in Indonesian service since 1985. 

KRI Yos Sudarso (353) Indonesian Navy, Ex HNLMS F 803 van Galen

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

If you like this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

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The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

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Warship Wednesday 21 January 2026: Interdiction Trendsetter

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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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”

Warship Wednesday 21 January 2026: Interdiction Trendsetter

From the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, call no AAE-1505

Above we see a great period shot of the two-gunned U.S. Revenue Cutter Wolcott in the Bay area circa 1884, with a good view of the flag established by her namesake. A fine steamer with the lines of a yacht, she made history some 140 years ago this week when she made the service’s first large drug bust.

How large? Like 3,000 pounds of opium hidden in barrels at a salmon cannery in southern Alaska kind of large. And her crew did that after a 736-mile race through a storm to secure the stash.

All in a day’s work.

Meet Wolcott

Our subject was the second cutter to carry the name of Oliver Wolcott Jr., a Yale-educated Continental Army veteran who replaced Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury in 1795 after serving as the department’s auditor and Comptroller for several years.

It was while in the office that Wolcott, with the approval of President Adams, selected a design for the Revenue Marine’s Cutter ensign and pennant that he described in a letter to his collectors in 1799 as “consisting of sixteen perpendicular stripes, alternate red and white, the Union of the Ensign to be the Arms of the U.S. in dark blue on a white field .” The stripes stood for the States that comprised the Nation at that time. The original 13 States were commemorated by an arch of 13 blue stars in a white field. The flag was also flown over U.S. Customs Houses until the 1900s and, in 1916, was modified into the USCG flag with the addition of that service’s distinctive insignia. Oddly enough, the only two surviving pre-Civil War Revenue Cutter flags both have 13 stripes. 

A Civil War era Revenue Cutter Flag, carrying the correct, as specified, 16 stripes and 13 stars. 

The first cutter named for Wolcott was a light and fast 4-gun Morris-Taney-class topsail schooner of some 73 feet that entered service in 1831. She was one of 11 U.S. Revenue cutters assigned to cooperate with the Army and Navy in the Mexican-American War, but foundered shortly after.

Our subject was built in 1873 for use on the West Coast (which was inherited after the war with Mexico) and was constructed at the Risdon Iron and Locomotive Works in San Francisco.

Risdon Iron Works, Ship-Yard, Potrero, San Francisco – During Repairs to Steamers “Sonoma,” Alameda,” “Australia” and German Ship “Willie Rickmers.” British Ship “Dowan Hill” Discharging. From the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library AAC-7340

A 155-foot steamer built of white oak and yellow fir from Oregon and Washington, with bilge keels and iron-wire standing rigging and a sheathed hull, she had a standing (vertical cylinder) surface condensing steam engine with a 34-inch stoke and matching 34-inch diameter.

NHHC NH 309

With a beam of 22 feet and a draft of just over 9, the graceful 235-ton cutter could make an average of nine knots under canvas in fair seas with a good breeze or 9.5 with her engine chugging away.

Port Townsend. USRS Oliver Wolcott, Steam Revenue Cutter, 2-mast, Anchored, ‘Stbdside profile, Bunting flying, 4 July 1888, Jefferson County Historical Society. 2004.117.68

She was built to replace the smaller Civil War-era cutter Wayanda, which had served in Alaskan waters since 1868. As such, when Wolcott was commissioned in the summer of 1873, it was the crew of the laid-up and soon-to-be decommissioned Wayanda that cross-decked, bringing much of their equipment with them, to bring the new cutter to life.

Intended for the often lawless stomping grounds of the Bering Sea Patrol, where she would typically be the only government vessel in any direction for several days steaming, she carried a stand of small arms and cutlasses as well as two mounted guns, which the Coast Guard Historian describes as “of unknown type and caliber.”

It should be noted that during this period in the Territory’s history, the USRCS served largely the same role as the Army’s horse cavalry during the settlement of the Old West, being typically the only armed federal force in most of the region.

While I can find no source that details the two guns Wolcott carried, they may have been brought over from her first crew’s last cutter. Wayanda, famous for what may be a 1863 photo of Lincoln aboard with Seward, was armed with several bronze 12-pounder 4.6-inch smoothbore Dahlgren boat howitzers on slide carriages.

Twelve Pound Dahlgren Boat Howitzer (1856) by Ulric Dahlgren

Ranges for the 12 pdr heavy (at just 5 degrees elevation) were 1,150 yards with shrapnel and 1,085 yards with solid shell, the latter of which was practical for shots across the bow.

As those handy 772-pound muzzleloader percussion-fired guns had a history of being swapped among Navy warships and Revenue cutters as late as the 1890s, it is more than likely that Wolcott shipped out with a couple of those– which may, in turn, have had a connection to the famed President in the stovepipe hat.

Her crew was generally eight officers and 31 enlisted, with an August 1877 list of USRM officers listing the cutter with seven filled billets for a captain, first, second, and third lieutenants; a first and second assistant engineer, as well as an acting second assistant engineer– only missing a chief engineer for the eighth chair in her wardroom.

Walking the beat

Homeported to Port Townsend, Washington Territory, at the northeast tip of the Olympic Peninsula at the gate of Puget Sound and just shy of Vancouver, Wolcott settled into a routine of keeping tabs on the passage of goods and timber from that region in the winter, while sorting north to Alaska in the summer months.

The strategic location was the maritime key to the region, and Wolcott, with her two guns, predated the Army’s Fort Worden coast defense complex, which wouldn’t be built to protect Puget Sound from invasion by sea until the 1890s, as well as the Navy’s Indian Island Magazine.

“Business section, looking down Taylor Street with Central Hotel in the center. Ships: Queen of the Pacific and the Ancon at the Union Dock; U.S. Revenue Cutter Oliver Wolcott and sailing ship Mercury in harbor. Photo taken before 1889. Handwritten across the bottom of the photograph: “Port Townsend, W.T. Mount Rainier.  A. Queen of The Pacific. B. The Ancon. C. U.S. Rev. Cutter, Oliver Wolcott. D. ship Mercury.” Port Angeles Public LibraryPTTNBLDX005

“Streetcar on Water Street, Port Townsend, WA;  five ships in harbor, with United States Revenue Service Cutter (USRSC) Oliver Wolcott the furthest ship on the right.” 1891. Note the Key City Boiler Works. Port Angeles Public Library PTTNBLDX021

In August 1881, the cutter was placed at the disposal of a detachment of officers from the 21st Infantry Regiment under one Capt. S.P. Jocelyn to make a reconnaissance for the military telegraph line to be built between Port Townsend and Cape Flattery.

Little is in the CG Historian’s files on Wolcott but a few interesting tidbits are known, such as the fact that her whole crew deserted in 1882 “for unknown reasons although it was probably due to low wages as her commanding officer at the time, Revenue Captain L. N. Stodder, was then ordered ‘to ship crew at port’ with wages not to exceed $40.00 per month.”

Wolcott was, in August 1883, briefly placed at the disposal of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who, accompanied by Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, his former aide-de-camp, was on a 10,000-mile inspection tour of the West. This included a trip around the Sound and across to Victoria.

The same year, at the request of the British Columbia authorities, as no British man-of-war was available in the Pacific, Wolcott was rushed north of the border to Port Simpson with two magistrates aboard, to prevent an “Indian outbreak” near Metlakahtla, which later turned out to be a false alarm.

Opium buster

In the 1880s, the unlicensed smuggling of opium imported from Canada to the Pacific Northwest was a serious matter– and Wolcott wound up in the thick of it.

As detailed by Captain Daniel A. Laliberte, U.S. Coast Guard (Retired) in a 2016 Proceedings piece, by 1887, 13 factories in Victoria were producing more than 90,000 pounds of the drug per year for legal use, but it was being trafficked across the line into Washington without paying the 1883 Tariff Act fees. The Port Townsend collector of customs, Herbert Beecher, worked hand-in-hand with the Wolcott to seize such illegal shipments.

On 26 December 1885, Beecher and 13 officers and men from Wolcott were waiting for the steamer Idaho to make port, acting on a tip from a confidential informant that the ship was packed to the gills with undeclared opium. After much searching, just 30 pounds were found. A bit of a whomp whomp moment that, once addressed, allowed Idaho to soon weigh anchor and continue about her business, headed to Alaska.

Shortly after, an aggrieved and unpaid crewman who had missed the Idaho’s movements came to Beecher and ratted out the whole operation, upset that he was being cut out of his share of the deal. He advised Idaho had stashed 14 barrels of opium in tins at the Kaasan Bay Salmon Fishery, in Alaska, on the freighter’s last trip north, and he could show them exactly where.

Beecher cabled Washington for permission to dispatch Wolcott in pursuit of the drug stash, with all speed, as Idaho may be headed that way.

With permission received and Wolcott steaming north on 10 January 1886 with a bone in her teeth, the little cutter had to fight out gale-force winds that required her to heave to in Metlakatlah Bay for eight hours.

Finally, on the morning of 14 January, Wolcott arrived at Kaasan Bay and anchored, sending Beecher, accompanied by Lieutenant Rhodes and eight men from the cutter, ashore to the cannery. Soon enough, the 14 barrels were located, and 3,012 pounds of tinned Canadian opium were recovered on U.S. territory, without the taxes paid.

Yes, it sounds piddly, but keep in mind the seamanship involved in racing over 700 miles north through the waters of British Columbia and Alaska that were still relatively ill-charted, in the face of a storm in winter, for a ton and a half drug bust.

Wolcott arrived back in Port Townsend on the 18th, with the drugs aboard, a scene no doubt familiar to Coast Guard cutter crews today.

Article clipped from the Daily Alta, California,19 January 1886:

As detailed by Laliberte:

The total of 3,600 pounds of opium confiscated during the case brought in $45,000 when auctioned on 20 April [1886] by the U.S. Marshal’s Service. This was the first seizure of opium by a U.S. revenue cutter and at the time the largest seizure of the drug in U.S. history, both in terms of amount of opium captured and in value of cargo forfeited. As a result of his further investigation, Beecher was able to present sufficient evidence that the U.S. District Court ordered the Idaho forfeited in December.

Wolcott would later go on to seize the steamer SS George E Starr in 1890, after “Two Chinese subjects, together with a quantity of opium, were discovered secreted on board.”

She also made at least one other record-setting bust, as detailed by the National Coast Guard Museum:

Wolcott would make the service’s first at-sea interdiction that included seizure of both opium and the vessel smuggling it, and the arrest of its crew. Prompted by intelligence from customs agents in Victoria, on Jan. 10, 1889, the Wolcott steamed from Port Townsend to nearby Port Discovery Bay. Once there, the cutter hid behind Clallam Spit, just inside the entrance to the bay. That evening, when the British sloop Emerald entered, one of Wolcott’s boats shot out to intercept it. The Emerald’s master and crew immediately began tossing packages overboard, but the Wolcott’s boarding party quickly scrambled aboard and took control. They found nearly 400 pounds of opium on deck.  A subsequent search of the vessel also revealed 12 undocumented Chinese migrants hidden aboard.

Wolcott was also a savior when needed. In 1895, she rescued the survivors of the schooner Elwood, marooned at Killisnoo in Southeast Alaska, and transported Captain E. E. Wyman and his remaining crew to Sitka.

Then, as time does, it marched on and things changed.

Washington became a state in 1889.

Wolcott changed with the times as well, picking up an all-white scheme, with a buff stack and black masts and cap, late in her career.

Port Townsend. USRS Oliver Wolcott, Steam Revenue Cutter, 2-mast, Anchored, ‘Stbdside profile, In PT harbor, boat alongside. Postcard by Fulton, Jefferson County Historical Society. 1995.334.15

With the service moving on to newer, larger, and more capable steel-hulled gunboats, Wolcott was disposed of, sold on 19 February 1897 to Joshua Green of Seattle, Washington, for $3,050. Her spot was replaced by the cutter Corwin, and her crew dispersed among the service.

Epilogue

Wolcott would go on to serve briefly in commercial service during the Klondike rush, even being hired by an Army mapping expedition in 1898. 

She cracked open her hull in January 1900 on a submerged reef now named after her on the windswept West coast of Kodiak Island, and was abandoned.

In 1909, the importation and use of opium for other than medicinal purposes was outlawed, thus ending the war on drugs (right?)

A third Wolcott, a Defoe-built 100-foot steel-hulled patrol cutter, entered service in 1926 to fight rum-runners. She gained a bit of notoriety out of Pascagoula during the sinking of the defiant bootlegger schooner I’m Alone in 1929. The cutter, which was sold at auction in 1936, is still around as a houseboat in California. 

As for drug busts, hot pursuit, and the vertical striped Cutter flag, those very much remain in vogue.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

If you like this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO, has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships, you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday 14 January 2026: ‘A Complete Shambles’

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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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”

Warship Wednesday 14 January 2026: ‘A Complete Shambles’

Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. Catalog #  80-G-K—11242 (Color).

Above we see a great period Kodachrome showing the flight deck of the Commencement Bay-class “deluxe” jeep carrier USS Palau (CVE 122), looking forward past her tiny island, while operating in rough seas off the Florida Coast, 27 February 1950. The jumble of aircraft includes (left to right): a TBM-3S Avenger, an HO3S-1 helicopter (probably Bu #122528), and an “Able Dog” AD-3W radar picket Skyraider conversion.

While Palau was a war baby, commissioned some 80 years ago this week, she didn’t have a chance to earn any battle stars.

Nonetheless, this unsung little “jeep carrier” played an important role in naval, Marine, and aviation history and deserves more than a footnote– which is why we are here today.

The C-Bays

Of the 130 U.S./RN escort carriers– merchant ships hulls given a hangar, magazine, and flight deck– built during WWII, the late-war Commencement Bay class was by far the Cadillac of the design slope. Using lessons learned from the earlier Long Island, Avenger, Sangamon, Bogue, and Casablanca-class ships.

Like the hard-hitting Sangamon class, they were based on Maritime Commission T3 class tanker hulls (which they shared with the roomy replenishment oilers of the Chiwawa, Cimarron, and Ashtabula classes). From the keel up, these were made into flattops.

Pushing some 25,000 tons at full load, they could make 19 knots, which was faster than a lot of submarines looking to plug them. A decent suite of about 60 AAA guns spread across 5-inch, 40mm, and 20mm fittings could put as much flying lead in the air as a light cruiser of the day when enemy aircraft came calling.

Finally, they could carry a 30-40 aircraft airwing of single-engine fighter bombers and torpedo planes ready for a fight, or about twice that many planes if being used as a delivery ship.

Sounds good, right?

Of course, had the war run into 1946-47, the 33 planned vessels of the Commencement Bay class would have no doubt fought kamikazes, midget subs, and suicide boats tooth and nail just off the coast of the Japanese Home Islands.

However, the war ended in Sept. 1945 with only nine of the class barely in commission– most of those still on shake-down cruises. Just two, Block Island and Gilbert Islands, saw significant combat at Okinawa and Balikpapan, winning two and three battle stars, respectively. Kula Gulf and Cape Gloucester picked up a single battle star.

With the war over, some of the class, such as USS Rabaul and USS Tinian, though complete, were never commissioned and simply laid up in mothballs, never being brought to life. Four other ships were canceled before launching, just after the bomb on Nagasaki was dropped. In all, just 19 of the planned 33 were commissioned.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Meet Palau

Our subject was the first (and only as of 2026) U.S. Navy warship named for the island group in the Carolines, some 850 miles east of Mindanao, which was the focus of the Operation Stalemate II landings in September 1944. The ensuing nine-week campaign for the islands was an Allied victory, but at a hard cost of over 10,000 casualties. Palau today is part of the Federated States of Micronesia, linked to the U.S. since 1986 via the Compact of Free Association.

Invasion of Angaur, Palau Islands, September 1944. Two amphibious tanks with gunners race toward the flaming shore of Anguar during the invasion of this island in the Palaus by the 81st Army Division. U.S. Coast Guard Photograph. NHHC Photograph Collection, L-File, Wars & Events.

Laid down on 9 February 1945 at Todd Pacific Shipyards, Tacoma, as Yard No. 78, Palau was built alongside sisters USS Rabaul (Yard No. 77, CVE-121) and Tinian (Yard No. 78, CVE-123), which likewise broke the class’s “Bay” naming convention and were instead named for Pacific Island battles.

The future USS Palau slid down the ways– just a week before the Japanese signaled they would quit the war– after being launched on 6 August 1945, sponsored by Mrs. J. P. Whitney, the wife of Capt. John Perry Whitney (USNA 1922). Of note, Whitney earned a Navy Cross as skipper of the escort carrier USS Kitkun Bay (CVE-71) of Taffy 3 fame during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944.

Launching of the USS Palau (CVE122) at the Tacoma Pacific Shipyards, Tacoma, Wash. L-R: Mrs. Charlotte Bridget Matron of honor; Capt. John P. Whitney, USN, and Mrs. John P. Whitney sponsor. 80-G-326722

80-G-326720

USS Palau (CVE-122) Going Down the Ways After Launching at Todd Pacific Shipyards Inc., Tacoma, Washington. August 6, 1945. 80-G-326721

With the pressure off Todd to rush Palau to completion post VJ-Day, she only commissioned on 15 January 1946.

Starboard broadside of the USS Palau (CVE-122), likely shortly after she commissioned. 19-N-91598

CVE-122 at sea, likely on trials. 19-N-91599.

Palau’s first skipper was Capt. Willis Everett Cleaves (USNA 1924), who retired six months after she was commissioned and moved to the Retired List as a rear admiral, capping 22 years in service, his last task was to complete the new carrier’s shakedown cruise off California with the Corsairs of VMF-461 aboard, and deployment to the Atlantic Fleet via the Panama Canal. Cleaves had previously earned a Silver Star during the Aleutians campaign as commander of the seaplane tender USS Casco.

USS Palau, CVE-122, shake down cruise

Following post-shakedown shipyard availability, Palau was laid up, still in commission but with just a skeleton crew, at Norfolk in March 1946.

West Africa

Reactivated on 22 May 1947, Palau was deployed for carrier landing quals in the Gulf and Caribbean, then picked for a special assignment.

Our little carrier represented the U.S. at the Liberian Centennial Ceremonies at Monrovia, Liberia, in the last week of July 1947, sailing to West Africa via Recife. This included a visit by Liberian dignitaries and civilians, and attending events ashore. She steamed into Monrovia with a big Liberian flag on her mast and her band playing the Liberian national anthem.

USS Palau (CVE 122) at Monrovia, Liberia. Photograph released July 25, 1947, with the one-star red-white-and-blue Liberian flag atop her mast. Although Palau was inactive from June 1946 to May 1947, she still wears her wartime Camouflage Measure 21.80-G-399807

The band learned the anthem by ear in an unusual way– hearing U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. sang it to them as they crossed the Atlantic. Davis had previously served as military attaché in Liberia from 1909 to 1911, taking a break from his company in the 9th Cavalry, and was requested by the Liberian government to represent the U.S. in the ceremony. At the time, Davis was in his 49th year in uniform, having volunteered to fight Spain in 1898.

USS Palau (CVE-122) at anchor, with F4U Corsair fighters parked on her flight deck. The original photograph is dated July 1947. NH 106720

USS Palau (CVE 122) with American Minister Lanier onboard at Monrovia, Liberia. Photograph released July 25, 1947. 80-G-399800/ President William V.S. Tubman delivers an address at Civic Center. Photograph released July 26, 1947 80-G-399830

Palau returned to the east coast on 16 August and, after another yard availability at Boston, was again laid up at Norfolk through March 1948.

Reactivated for a second time, she was prepped for a 3 June to 7 August 1948 deployment to the Mediterranean, schlepping a load of aircraft (surplus ex-USAF Beechcraft AT-11 Kansan trainers) to Turkey as deck cargo.

Operation Homecoming

In November 1948, Palau was instrumental in returning the Wright Brothers’ famous “Kitty Hawk” flyer to the U.S.

The first successful heavier-than-air powered vehicle, which took off briefly in 1903, had been in England since 1928, and was at the time on exhibit at the Kingston Science Museum in London, where an estimated 10 million visitors had filed past it. Its place in London was filled by a 1:1 replica; the original was shipped back across the Atlantic, carefully disassembled and stored in three crates for permanent exhibition in the U.S. National Museum (the Smithsonian)

Handed over to the custody of Livingston Lord Satterthwait, the American Civil Air Attaché in London, on 18 October 1948, the crates made it to Halifax aboard the liner Mauretania, riding in style. The director of the Smithsonian’s National Air Museum, Paul E. Garber, met the aircraft in Nova Scotia and oversaw its transfer to the bluejackets aboard Palau on 16 November in what became a Navy operation.

Palau had been part of a two-week amphibious assault exercise in the North Atlantic with the destroyer USS Hobson (DMS-26), and ‘phibs USS Colonial (LSD-18) and Donner (LSD-20). After being open to the public for tours, she received the Wright Flyer with orders to repatriate the aircraft to the U.S., arriving two days later at New York NSY in Bayonne.

While aboard the carrier, the crates were guarded by two armed Marines the entire time, and during the transfer ceremony at Bayonne, an honor guard of six Sailors, six Marines, and an officer of each service was in attendance.

19 November 1948 The original Wright Brothers’ aeroplane, the 1903 “Kitty Hawk”, 1 of 3 crates being unloaded from the USS Palau (CVE-122) at the New York Naval Shipyard annex in Bayonne, NJ on November 19, 1948 on Operation Homecoming, enroute from London, England to Washington DC, for permanent exhibition in the US National Museum (the Smithsonian). Two of the 3 crates were reported to have been originally built by Orville Wright himself.

Trucked to DC from Bayonne, the guard was more than just ceremonial; they remained with the aircraft until it arrived at the Smithsonian on 22 November, under the command of LT (j.g.) Arthur E. Grabill, USN.

The reassembled Wright Flyer has been on display since December 1948.

Marine One

On 1 December 1947, the first experimental Marine Corps helicopter squadron, HMX-1, was activated at Quantico. The Nighthawks started small, with only 7 officers and 3 enlisted men, then quickly grew to 18 pilots and 81 enlisted. In the spring of 1948, the squadron received its first helicopters, five Sikorsky HO3S-1s– aircraft able to carry just a pilot and three Marine passengers– then commenced pilot training and qualifications.

MCB Quantico, VA – Inventor Igor Sikorsky, the father of American helicopters, visits HMX-1 at Marine Corps Air Station Quantico, Virginia. In the background is an HO3S-1 helicopter, one of the first two “Whirlybirds” assigned to the U. S. Marine Corps. Photo By: National Archives Photo (USMC) 127-N-A322389

As detailed in the squadron history, the first Marine helicopter operational deployment occurred in May 1948 when five HMX-1 “pinwheels” flying off Palau conducted 35 flights to land 66 men and several hundred pounds of communications equipment at Camp Lejeune during Packard II, an amphibious command post exercise.

One of five Sikorsky HO3S-1s from HMX-l prepares to land on USS Palau (CVE 122) during Operation Packard II in May 1948. USMC Photo

The squadron’s commanding officer, Colonel Edward C. Dyer, described the initial 18 May fly-on as “a complete shambles. There were sailors running all over the place in mortal danger of walking into tail rotors, and the Marines were totally disorganized as well. It was complete bedlam; there was no organization and no real system developed.”

Dyer and his pilots, working with Navy LSOs and Palau’s crew, hammered out procedures to be able to safely conduct simultaneous rotor-wing operations from the baby flattop, and five days later made history.

On 23 May 1948, the first airborne ship-to-shore movement began at Onslow Beach, Camp Lejeune, N.C. The first wave of the assault commenced with all five HO3S-1s taking off from Palau and arriving 30 minutes later in the landing zone. HMX-1 pilots made continuous flights, putting 66 Marines in the right place at the right time.

Fast forward a year later, and HMX-1, working again with Palau, had its act together with Packard III.

In May 1949, HMX-1 participated in another exercise, deploying eight Piasecki HRPs, three Sikorsky HO3Ss, and a single Bell HTL-2. The squadron and aircraft performed beyond expectations. Flying over choppy seas that swamped several landing craft, the HRPs—known as “Flying Bananas”—quickly put 230 troops and 14,000 pounds of cargo in the designated landing zone.

USS Palau (CVE-122) with Piasecki HRP-1 helicopters on deck.

It was thought that Packard III vetted the concept of 184 HRPs, operating from six CVEs, could lift a complete Marine regimental combat team ashore. Of course, only 28 HRPs existed, so there was that.

This would be repeated in Packard IV in May 1950, which led to the largest single helicopter formation to that time, taking place when six HRPs, six HO3Ss, and one HTL flew by a reviewing stand at Quantico.

An HRP “Flying Banana” troop-carrying helicopter takes off from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Palau (CVE 122), during exercise Packard IV conducted in the Potomac River near Quantico, Virginia, on 8 May 1950. An HO3S-1 observation helicopter hovers in the background.

This paid off in the real world in very short order.

On 13 September 1951, HMR-161, using more advanced Sikorsky HRS-1s carried to Korea aboard the escort carrier USS Sitkoh Bay, conducted operation Windmill I, history’s first mass helicopter resupply mission, lifting an 18,848 pounds of combat gear seven miles to a Marine battalion on the front lines, then evacuating 74 casualties to the rear. They followed that up with Operation Bumblebee in October when a dozen HRS-1s flew 958 Marines of the 3d Battalion, 7th Marines, in 156 sorties over 15 miles from their base to the crest of a mountain on the front lines to relieve another battalion in a little more than six hours.

“Operation Bumblebee marked an important point in the development of Marine Corps aviation, showing that helicopters could carry enough troops in the first wave of an amphibious operation to achieve mass on an objective in a relatively brief period of time.”

But back to our girl…

Other than Marine missions

Grumman TBM-3W Avenger early warning aircraft of Composite Squadron VC-12 on the deck of the escort carrier USS Palau (CV-122), off New York, between September 1948 and July 1950. Note the “potbelly” AN/APS-20 S-band search radar. NNAM 1996.253.1211

Project Skyhook involved the use of polyethylene balloons carrying instrument packages to altitudes in excess of 100,000 feet (30,480+ meters); these balloons provided a stable vehicle for long-duration observations and offered the opportunity of collecting highly specialized information and photographs.

Palau made a dozen Skyhook balloon launches in mid-November 1949 to study cosmic rays and take neutron measurements.

November 1949 Project Skyhook balloon being prepared for launch aboard USS Palau (CVE-122). Corsairs parked aft belong to Marine Fighter Squadron 212 (VMF-212).

On 8 March 1950, Operation Portrex began on Vieques Island, Puerto Rico. The exercise was the first use of airborne troops in support of an amphibious landing. The two-week-long exercise evaluates joint service doctrine for the combined operation. Among the brass in attendance were SECNAV Francis P. Matthews, SECDEF Louis Johnson, and Admiral Forrest P. Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations.

Palau was front and center, hosting the brass and the umpire group.

USS Palau (CVE 122) operating in rough seas off the Florida coast on her way to participate in Operation Portrex, 27 February 1950. Planes parked aft include AD-3W and TBM-3S types. National Archives photograph, 80-G-K-11249 (Color).

Douglas AD-3W Skyraider Radar Picket Aircraft ready for catapulting on USS Palau (CVE 122) during Operation Portrex, March 1950. National Archives photograph, 80-G-K-11718 (Color).

Douglas AD-3W Radar Picket Aircraft on the flight deck of USS Palau (CVE 122) during Operation Portrex, March 1950. National Archives photograph, 80-G-K-11721 (Color).

Grumman TBM-3S Avenger ready for catapulting on USS Palau (CVE 122) during Operation Portrex, March 1950. National Archives photograph, 80-G-K-11699 (Color).

Sikorski HO3S-1 Helicopter (probably Bu #122528) after landing on board USS Palau (CVE 122) during Operation Portrex, March 1950. National Archives photograph, 80-G-K-11715 (Color).

USS Palau (CVE 122) ZP2K Navy blimp takes off from the after flight deck, past TBM-3S airplanes, during Operation Portrex, March 1950. National Archives photograph, 80-G-K-11706 (Color).

USS Palau (CVE-122) underway, 10 May 1950. Note the anti-submarine Grumman TBM-3E Avengers on deck.  Photo # CVE-122-554-(L)-5-10-50.

It was in June 1950 that a young BM3 shipped aboard Palau, serving as a Motor Whaleboat Coxswain in the carrier’s Deck Division until the next November, when he left for USS Tripoli (CVE-64) and dive school. That young coxswain was the future BMCM(MDV) Carl Maxie Brashear, USN. 

She also made four short deployments as an active ASW carrier out of Norfolk during 1951-52, backfilling larger fleet carriers that were parked off Korea, providing close support to troops fighting the Chinese. During these cruises, she carried a sub-busting squadron of Avengers or Guardians, augmented with an HO3S-1 helicopter det from HU-2.

One of the largest single-engine aircraft in Naval service, the AF-2W Guardian usually flew as part of a two-plane “hunter-killer” team, its role being the search for submarines (note the large radome) while the depth charge/rocket-carrying AF-2S Guardian attacked. With an 11-ton max takeoff weight, they had a 60-foot wingspan and 43-foot length. They were replaced by the “all-in-one” S-2 Tracker in 1955.

These deployments included a January- June 1951 cruise to the North Atlantic under 2nd Fleet orders with VS-32 aboard, and a follow-on deployment with VS-24.

A TBM-3W Avenger (BuNo 69476) from Anti-Submarine Squadron 32 (VS-32) “Norsemen” aboard the escort carrier USS Palau (CVE-122) in June 1951.

Palau in 1952 saw two short cruises to the Mediterranean to operate with the 6th Fleet: 19 April to 28 June with VS-31, and August to September with VS-27.

USS Palau (CVE-122) at anchor in Augusta Bay, Sicily (Italy), between 14 and 19 May 1952. The submarines USS Chivo (SS-341) and USS Burrfish (SSR-312) are visible alongside. Palau, with assigned AF-2W/AF-2S Guardians of Air Anti-Submarine Squadron 31 (VS-31) “Topcats” was deployed to the Mediterranean from 19 April to 28 June 1952.

Palau, designated for inactivation in early 1953, was retained in commission to perform one final ferry assignment, carrying planes to Yokosuka, Japan (8 August – 22 October). On her return, she entered the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, decommissioningon 15 June 1954.

The rest of her class soon joined her on red lead row.

The Commencement Bay class listing in Janes, 1954

The Commencement Bay class listing in Janes, 1960, by which time they had been redesignated AKVs

Berthed with the Philadelphia Group, Atlantic Reserve Fleet, Palau remained a unit of that fleet until struck from the Navy List 1 April 1960 and sold, 13 July 1960, to Jacques Pierot, Jr. and Sons, New York for breaking.

The last of her sisters in active duty, USS Gilbert Islands (CVE-107), was converted to a Major Communications Relay Ship (AGMR) in 1963 and renamed Annapolis. This allowed her another decade of life in service that saw her transmit the first documented ship-to-shore satellite radio message, and she was decommissioned in 1969.

Epilogue

Of note, all eight of Palau’s skippers were pre-WWII Annapolis ring knockers who all retired as one-stars.

Some parts were salvaged from Palau at the scrapyard in Sestao, primarily the preservation igloos over her stern 40m mounts used while in mothballs, and were installed in Spain’s Picos de Europa as a mountaineers’ hut, the  Cabana Veronica.

As for Marine Helicopter Squadron One (HMX-1), they are still very much around and have been in the business of ferrying Presidents since 1957.

And they still make carrier landings, as required.

251002-N-SK738-1122 ATLANTIC OCEAN (Oct. 2, 2025) A VH-60N Whitehawk attached to the “Nighthawks” of Marine Helicopter Squadron One (HMX-1) prepares to land aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77) in preparation for the Titans of the Sea Presidential Review.  (U.S Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Pierce Luck)

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Warship Wednesday, 7 January 2026: Wilbur’s Beachcombing

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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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”

Warship Wednesday 7 January 2026: Wilbur’s Beachcombing

Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. Catalog #: 80-G-432570

Above we see the modified Flower (Honesty) class frigate Prasae of the Royal Thai Navy aground behind enemy lines on the Korean east coast, some 75 years ago this week, in January 1951. Several U.N. personnel are standing on the beach near a boat, surveying the near-hopeless situation. An LCVP is also stranded just inshore of the frigate. Note ice on the shore and on the seaward side of the ship.

The hard-luck frigate may have been a loss, but all 111 of her survivors were all successfully plucked off the snow-covered beach by one intrepid “silver eagle” aviator and his primitive eggbeater.

Albeit slowly.

Amid a blizzard.

And under near constant enemy fire.

Meet Betony & Sind

Our subject started life as the Royal Navy’s Flower-class corvette HMS Betony (K274), ordered 8 December 1941– the day of the first Japanese attacks on British Hong Kong and other possessions in the Pacific, kicking off a whole new war.

Laid down 26 September 1942 at Alexander Hall and Sons in Aberdeen as Yard No. 687, the future Betony launched on 22 April 1943 and commissioned on 31 August 1943.

Her inaugural commander was the long-serving Lt. Nicholas Bryan John Stapleton, RD, RNR– who formerly was skipper of the Flower-class sister HMS Amaranthus (K 17), and before that the ASW whaler HMT Southern Pride (K 249).

HMS Betony (K274) underway, likely in British Home waters, circa 1943. IWM FL 2011

WWII Service

Our vessel suffered her first loss, with Act/Petty Officer Hubert M. Jones, P/SSX 20752, of her company listed as “died of wounds” on 28 November 1943 without further elaboration.

She was soon on convoy runs, tagging along with OS.59/ KMS.33 out of Liverpool for two weeks before 1943 was out.

After further workups in Scotland and a deployment to the Eastern Fleet at Trincomalee in early 1944, Stapleton handed command of the new Betony over to T/Lt. Percy Ellis Croisdale Pickles, RNVR, on 20 October 1944. While in the Indian Ocean, she performed escort duties for a dozen slow convoys on the CJ (Calcutta to Colombo) and BM/MB (Bombay to Colombo) runs between February and October 1944.

HMS Betony (K274) broadside view

She was loaned to the Royal Indian Navy in January 1945 and assigned to the hardscrabble Burma Coast Escort Force, operating alongside sistership corvettes HMIS Assam, HMS Meadowsweet, and HMS Tulip; the River-class frigates HMS Taff, Shiel, Lossie, Deveron, Test, and Nadder; and the old Town-class destroyers HMS Sennent (ex-USCGC Champlain) and Lulworth (ex-USCGC Chelan) out of Colombo.

When the war was all but over, Betony was officially commissioned on 24 August 1945 into the RIN as HMIS Sind, keeping her same pennant number (K274). Her only “Indian” skipper was T/A/Lt.Cdr. Leonard George Prowse, RINVR, formerly commander of the armed yacht HMS Rion (FY 024), who assumed command in March 1945.

With the corvette suffering from engine troubles, she was nominated for disposal and paid off on 17 May 1946

Bangkok Bound

Thailand had a winding path during WWII. Having fought in 1940-41 with the Vichy French over Cambodia (some things never change!), the country claimed neutrality until a near-bloodless “invasion” by Japan in December 1941, after which it entered into an outright military alliance that only ended post-VJ Day. Ceding territories its troops had seized in Burma and Malaya back to Britain and in Cambodia back to France under an American-brokered agreement in 1946, the country became the 55th nation to join the UN in December 1946 and swung more or less to the West.

This opened the country to military aid, which included receiving two surplus former RIN corvettes from Britain– ex-HMS Burnet/HMIS Gondwana (K 348) and our ex-HMS Betony/HMIS Sind on 15 May 1947. They were given a short refit and recommissioned into the Thai fleet as the frigates HTMS Bangpakong and HTMS Prasae, respectively.

HMTS Prasae

The British also transferred the humble 1,000-ton Algerine-class minesweeper HMS Minstrel (J 445), which became HTMS Phosamton (MSC-451).

The turnover ceremony was held in the naval dockyard of Singapore.

Although third-hand, the two surplus corvettes/frigates and the minesweeper were much appreciated and joined a Thai fleet that included the quaint but decrepit Thonburi-class coastal defense ship HTMS Sri Ayudhya (2,350-tons, 253 ft oal, 15 knots, 4×8″/50s, 4×3″/50s) whose sister had been sunk by the French in 1940, the 1,400-ton Japanese-built sloop HTMS Maeklong (which doubled as the royal yacht and naval cadet training ship), seven remaining pre-war Italian-built 300-ton Trad-class torpedo boats, the two old Armstrong-built Rattanakosindra-class gunboats (800 tons, 174 feet, 2×6″, 12 knots), four long-laid-up Japanese-built Matchanu-class costal submarines, and a handful of old coasters, dispatch, and survey vessels.

Later in 1947, the U.S. transferred three surplus PC-461-class 173-foot subchasers: HTMS Sarasin (ex USS PC-495), HTMS Thayanchon (ex USS PC-575), and HTMS Khamronsin (USS PC-609); and two LSM-1 class landing craft (ex USS LSM-333 and 338), further modernizing the Thai fleet, which by 1950 numbered 1,100 officers and 10,000 ratings.

Things were looking up.

Korea

In the wake of the Korean War in June 1950, Thailand was the first Asian nation (besides the exiled KMT on Taiwan, which is a whole ‘nother story) to offer ground troops to the UN Force. Before the end of the war, the anti-Chinese Prime Minister (former Field Marshal) Plaek Pibulsonggram wholeheartedly contributed over 11,700 ground troops (soon reequipped with U.S. uniforms and small arms), 40,000 tons of rice, and both of the country’s new frigates to the effort.

A newly formed unit of picked men, the 21st Infantry Regiment, Queen’s Guard (Thahan Suea Rachini), was drawn from across the Army.

Thai troops of the 21st Regiment embarking for Korea, October 1950. Note their French-style helmets, U.S.-marked haversacks, and Japanese-made Showa-period Mausers. Ultimately, more than 10,000 Thai troops would serve in the Korean War alongside U.S. forces, fighting notably at the Battle of Pork Chop Hill. (Photo: UN News Archives)

The two frigates, each with a picked crew of 110 officers and men, were made ready by early October 1950, and they would escort the first battalion of the Thai Army to Korea, with the latter carried on the old Japanese-built transport coaster HTMS Sichang, and the chartered merchant ship Hertamersk.

Prasae’s skipper was Prince (CDR) Uthaichalermlab Wutthichai, 35, who had learned his trade in England and had pinned on his lieutenant bars in 1938 before serving in WWII, and earning the Tritaphon Mongkut Thai among other decorations. Prince Wutthichai, the senior officer afloat, became the commodore of the little Thai squadron headed to Korea.

Some 307 Thai Navy personnel and ~1,200 troops left Thailand’s Khlong Toei port aboard the four ships on 22 October 1950, headed north. They arrived in Pusan on 7 November.

The U.S.-reequipped 21st Infantry, which soon earned the nickname the “Little Tigers,” served alongside the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division and would see hard combat in the Third Battle for Seoul and at Pork Chop Hill.

Once attached to the UN Forces on 10 November, the two Thai frigates were given a short overhaul in Japan, which included updated sonar and radar suites, then tasked for a month under CTF-95 as guard ships for the entrance to the naval roads at Sasebo, Japan, with Prasae on the morning shift and Bangpakong overnight.

Then came a more kinetic assignment.

In early January 1951, Prasae and Bangpakong were under Task Force 77 orders on the gun line off the east coast of Korea near the 38th parallel, providing fire support missions to troops ashore with their single 4-inch BL Mk.IXs, steaming with a destroyer force including USS Wallace L. Lind (DD-703) as part of the East Coast Blockading and Patrol Task Group (TG 95.2).

The first shelling operation on North Korea’s east coast by the Thai Navy began on 3 January, firing along the coast between latitudes 38 and 39 degrees North, between the cities of Changjon and Yangyang. On 5-6 January, shelling of railway stations, transportation routes, and military structures in the Chodo area was carried out.

Then came a blizzard that was so severe that it grounded carrier and most fixed wing sorties between 6 and 11 January and filled central Korea with snow showers, haze, smoke, low clouds, 30 knot winds, and fog, dropping visibility to zero and bottoming out thermometers, Prasae drifted into the shallows on the cape of Kisamun-dan in Hyeonbuk-myeon, Yangyang, Gangwon, North Korea. She was hard aground, at a 60-degree angle to the shoreline, just 200 yards offshore.

She was also in enemy held-territory some 16 klicks north of the 38th Parallel.

Stranded Thai frigate Prasae, January 1951 80-G-432568

The Lewis S. Parks Papers in the Harry S. Truman Library contain dozens of Navy images of the rescue operation, digitized (low rez) in the National Archives. They were taken in most cases by U.S. Navy LT William DuCoing, presumably of the USS Manchester, who “witnessed several enemy soldiers killed while on this beach.”

During a blizzard night, the Thailand Corvette Prasae grounded on North Korea’s eastern coast in enemy territory about 200 yards offshore, NARA 350892732

A group of unidentified Thai sailors makes a close inspection of the ship HMTS Prasae after it grounded on the Korean coast during a United Nations operation. NARA 350898508

During a blizzard night, the Thailand Corvette Prasae grounded on North Korea’s eastern coast in enemy territory about 200 yards offshore. The sailor in the foreground is unidentified. Jan. 6, 1951. NARA 350892736

A view of the coast of Korea, where the Thailand ship HMTS Prasae was grounded during a blizzard. NARA 350898520

Snow covers a beach in Korea during the evacuation of Thai troops from the grounded HMTS Prasae in enemy territory. NARA 350892752

The alert went out, and Task Force 77 sprang into action to save the stranded Thai warship and her crew.

The salvage operation included the old Gleaves-class destroyer/minesweeper USS Endicott (DMS-35), which tried to send in LCVPs to recover marooned Thai sailors, joined by Prasae’s sister Bangpakong, whose small boats attempted to approach the beach without success due to fierce surf and rollers.

Endicott’s sisters USS Thompson (DMS-38), Carmick (DMS-33), and Doyle (DMS-34) moved in to assist and clear lanes for mines. De-beaching lines were attempted by Comstock (LSD-19) and Bolster (ARS-38), which also proved unsuccessful.

A U.S. Navy salvage crew aboard the Thailand Corvette HMTS Prasae, which ran aground in enemy territory on the coast of Korea. Left to right, HMC E.P. Wacham, USN; Lieutenant Junior Grade M.D. Taylor, USN; and RM2 C.K. Hayard, USN. Note, only three names were listed. 80-G-426187

Endicott rescued three Thai sailors after they were washed overboard from one of the pulling boats, but unfortunately, a fourth one drowned. Endicott’s doctor and chief corpsman also went ashore to care for casualties until they could be evacuated.

With carrier aircraft grounded due to the poor flying conditions, fire support to keep interloping Chicom and Nork troops at bay was provided by the Cleveland-class light cruiser USS Manchester (CL-83) and her companion destroyers USS English (DD-696), Borie (DD-704), Hank (DD-702), and Forrest Royal (DD-872).

Truman got a White House briefing on Prasae at least ten times during this period as part of his daily situation reports on the war.

The USS Manchester guards the grounded HMTS Prasae with destroyers and other ships while rescue efforts take place in enemy territory on shore. NARA 350892746

Two unidentified U.S. sailors unwrap blankets brought to stranded sailors from Thailand. In the background, their ship, the HMTS Prasae, can be seen where she grounded on the Korean coast during a blizzard. The Prasae was part of a United Nations operation when she ran aground. Gunfire from the USS Manchester protected the stranded sailors and rescuers from enemy troops. NARA 350898492

Early attempts at using helicopters in the rescue proved fatal.

As noted by NHHC:

On 8 January, a Sikorsky H03S1 of Helicopter Utility Squadron TWO (HU-2) embarked on the carrier USS Valley Forge, maneuvered near Prasae when a rogue wave caused the ship to roll. The helicopter’s rotors hit the mast, causing the mast to collapse and the helicopter to crash in flames, which then ignited 20mm shells, causing more damage to the ship. The crew put the fire out in under 30 minutes. Somewhat miraculously, the helicopter pilot, Lieutenant (junior grade) John W. Thornton, his aircrewman, and a salvage officer all survived the crash, but another Thai sailor drowned.

Manchester was lucky enough to have a replacement Sikorsky HO3S-1 (H-5/S-51) helicopter (“UP27” BuNo 122715) detached from Helicopter Utility Squadron 1 (HU-1) aboard USS Philippine Sea.

Nicknamed Clementine, she was piloted by the one and only Chief Aviation Structural Mechanic, ADC (Aviation Pilot), Duane Wilbur Thorin (NSN: 3165995). An enlisted pilot who joined the Navy in 1939 at age 19 and earned his silver NAP wings after finishing flight training in 1943. The blonde-haired Thorin– eighth son of Swedish emigrants to Nebraska– moved into rotary-wing billets after the war. He had already earned something of a swashbuckling reputation, shuttling out on one-man missions to rescue downed fliers in his contraption, typically while clad in his trademark non-regulation green headgear.

Clementine wasn’t much, with her 450hp R-985 Wasp Junior only enabling her to lift about 900 pounds of useful cargo (pilot included) off the ground on a full tank of gas in good weather, but she was on hand and had enough range to shuttle back and forth from Prasae to Manchester.

A Sikorsky HO3S-1 (H-5) helicopter lands on the deck of the USS Manchester, with the cruiser’s 6- and 5-inch guns bristling in an undated photograph in good weather. The helicopter is BuNo 124345 (MSN 51204), which survived the war. NARA 350898476

USS Manchester (CL-83) Sikorski HO3S helicopter, UP20 of squadron HU-1, lands on the cruiser’s after deck after a gunfire spotting mission off the Korean coast, March 1953. Note: Manchester’s wooden decking with aircraft tie-down strips and hangar cover tracks; 6″/47 triple gun turrets; 5″/38 and 3″/50 twin gun mounts. NH 92578

With the likelihood that the grounded ship could be pulled off while under fire dropping to zero, and hypothermia setting in with the survivors who were running out of supplies and battling below-zero temperatures overnight, the order went to Clementine to pull them off, typically just two or three men at a time.

On inbound flights to Prasae, Thorin and Clementine dropped off a small medical team under Doc Myers, and a security team under LT Taylor to help guard and mark the LZ for future flights. At one point, they exchanged long-distance shots with a four-man enemy patrol just over the dunes.

They also brought blankets and some hot chow.

An aerial view of the frigate from Thailand, the HMTS Prasae, that ran aground off the western coast of North Korea during a snowstorm. The image was taken from the rescue helicopter sent from the USS Manchester. Original caption: HMTS Prasae as seen from Manchester copter. UN ships are firing air bursts. NARA 350898532

A crewman from the grounded Thailand ship HMTS Prasae stands guard as the helicopter from the USS Manchester shuttles the stranded sailors to safety. NARA 350898468

A helicopter from the USS Philippine Sea, piloted by Chief Aviation Pilot D. W. Thorin, lands on the snowy beach to effect the rescue of the crew of the Thailand ship HMTS Prasae. The Prasae, which was part of a United Nations operation, grounded during a snowstorm. The rescue team was surrounded by enemy troops during the operation, but was protected by gunfire from the USS Manchester. Jan.6, 1951. NARA 350898472

Under enemy fire, unidentified troops and crew members from the USS Manchester use their ship’s helicopter to rescue crew from the HMTS Prasae, which ran aground off the coast of Korea during a blizzard. Lieutenant Taylor is in the foreground, guarding the helicopter with a (likely borrowed) M50 Madsen SMG. 350892804

Dr. Meyers of the USS Manchester attends to the wounded on the shore after the Thailand Corvette HMTS Prasae ran aground off the North Korean coast during a blizzard. All others are unidentified. NARA 350892744

Under enemy fire, unidentified troops and crew members from the run aground HMTS Prasae take shelter on the beach while they await rescue from the USS Manchester helicopter. NARA 350892780

Under enemy fire, unidentified troops and crew members from the run aground HMTS Prasae take shelter on the beach while they await rescue from the USS Manchester helicopter. NARA 350892784

Under enemy fire, troops and crew members from the run aground HMTS Prasae take shelter on the beach while they await rescue from the USS Manchester helicopter. NARA 350892762

APC (NAP) Thorin prepares to take off in his helicopter with another load of survivors from the Thailand corvette, the HMTS Prasae, which ran aground during a blinding snowstorm off the coast of Korea. Other members of the helicopter stand guard as the rescue was conducted behind enemy lines.  Men guarding the rescue operation are armed with M-3 submachine guns. NH 97164

During personnel evacuations on a beach in Korea, two enemy shell bursts are visible. The USS Manchester aided in the evacuation of stranded Thai sailors from the HMTS Prasae that ran aground during a blizzard. NARA 350892750

The USS Manchester’s helicopter, nicknamed the Clementine, lands on the snow-covered beach at Kisamun Dan, Korea. A rescue mission was launched after the HMTS Prasae, a Thai Corvette, ran aground on Korea’s Eastern Coast during a blizzard. The HMTS Prasae is in the foreground. NARA 350892788

Thai sailors are stranded on the western coast of Korea after their ship, the HMTS Prasae, ran aground during a snowstorm. At a snow-covered beach, the United States Navy helicopter UP 27 arrives to rescue the sailors. NARA 350898526

An unidentified Thai sailor from the HMTS Prasae boards the rescue helicopter. The helicopter, which had been borrowed from the USS Philippine Sea after the USS Manchester’s helicopter crashed, was piloted by Chief (Aviation Pilot) D. W. Thorin, who can be seen inside the helicopter facing the camera. NARA 350898512

Under enemy fire, unidentified troops and crew members from the USS Manchester use their ship’s helicopter to rescue crew from the HMTS Prasae, which ran aground off the coast of Korea during a blizzard. NARA 350892798

Meanwhile, CDR Wutthichai, the stricken ship’s skipper, directed his navigators and gunners to destroy anything that could be useful to the enemy, doused the ship with oil and placed gunpowder in various locations, and then left the ship last.

Wutthichai was likewise the final man that Clementine pulled from the beach.

The USS Manchester’s helicopter, nicknamed the Clementine, lands on the snow-covered beach at Kisamun Dan, Korea. A rescue mission was launched after the HTMS Prasae, a Thai Corvette, ran aground on Korea’s Eastern Coast during a blizzard. Original caption: With the temperature at 12 degrees below zero, the last of Commander Wutthichai’s crew are evacuated. NARA 350892786

Over the three days between 11 and 13 January, Chief Thorin and Clementine pulled 126 men from Prasae in 40 sorties, 111 Thai and 15 USN, bringing them all safely to Manchester’s little wooden helo deck.

Seventeen of the 111 evacuees from the Thailand corvette, HMTS Prasae, wear U.S. Navy-issued dungarees while aboard the USS Manchester. NARA 350892830

Of Prasae’s crew, two were killed in the grounding and drawn-out rescue under fire: Petty Officer 2nd Class Chan Muang-am and Petty Officer 2nd Class Phuan Phonsayam, both later posthumously promoted to CPO. Twenty-seven of her crew were injured, with a mixture of frostbite and shrapnel as the cause of wounds.

The unmanned and wrecked hulk of Prasae was destroyed by naval gunfire from USS English on 13 January, via 50 rounds of 5-inch common.

Those not hospitalized in Japan were soon shipped aboard Bangpakong.

Survivors of the stricken Thailand corvette HTMS Prasae board the Thailand corvette HMTS Bang Pakong, off the coast of Korea. Photograph released January 17, 1951. 80-G-426769

As for her sister Bangpakong (ex-Burnet, ex-Gondwana), she remained in Korean service until February 1952 and in Thai service until stricken in 1984.

Epilogue

With the Thai government still eager to contribute to the effort in Korea, the U.S. Navy quickly sold them two laid-up Tacoma-class patrol frigates, late of the Soviet Red Banner Pacific Fleet via Lend-Lease, the USS Glendale (PF-36) and USS Gallup (PF-47), for the princely sum of $861,940.

Transferred in October 1951 at Yokosuka, Glendale became the Thai Navy ship Tachin. Gallup became the Thai Navy ship Prasae. Along with them came five more PC-461s, two LCIs, and three surplus SC-1627-class 119-foot subchasers, these smaller vessels slated for immediate service in Thai coastal waters while the frigates remained deployed.

USS Glendale (PF-36) and USS Gallup (PF-47) fly the flags of Thailand during transfer ceremonies at Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan, 29 October 1951. Both ships are still wearing their U.S. Navy numbers. NH 97102

Following a workup in Japanese waters, the new Prasae and Tachin departed Sasebo on 12 January 1952 in company with sistership USS Bisbee (PF 46) on their first escort mission since their purchase by and addition to the Thailand Navy.

The new pair of frigates served for the duration of the Korean War and well into the tense shift into peace, rotating crews with fresh ones shipped in from Thailand at least twice. Both departed South Korea for their first trip home on 22 January 1956, nearly three years after the shooting had stopped! Some 2,485 Thai naval personnel served in Korean waters, with 1,679 of them receiving UN service medals. Two Thai naval personnel were also awarded U.S. Bronze stars.

In the course of Thailand’s involvement in the Korean War, the country suffered 1,273 casualties, comprising 129 killed in action (including two Navy), 1,139 wounded, and 5 missing. The country maintained a company-sized infantry force in the ROK to watch the DMZ until July 1972. They continue to contribute two officers and 13 enlisted to the more or less permanent UNC Military Armistice Commission-Secretariat (UNCMAC-S) in South Korea today.

Speaking of South Korea today, with the border shifting slightly to the line of contact in place when the armistice was signed, the cape that Praese was grounded on has been part of the ROK since 1953, and these days is often referred to as “38th Parallel Beach,” a popular surfing spot (in the summer).

Prince Wutthichai, Praese’s final skipper, returned home with his crew in March 1951, married Princess Vimolchat, and had two children. Decorated with the Order of the White Elephant in 1953, he passed just five years later, aged 43. There seems to be a story there.

Chief Thorin fully earned a Distinguished Flying Cross for his rescue efforts on the grounded Prasae, then added a Gold Star to his DFC in November 1951 while flying from the cramped deck of the cruiser USS Toledo (CA-133) to successfully pluck a downed pilot trapped some 60 miles behind the enemy’s lines. He added a second Gold Star to his DFC in January 1952 while operating from USS Rochester (CV-124) for picking up two downed pilots just offshore of Hungnam– while under small arms fire from the edge of the beach– in two separate trips.

Just six months after the rescue of Prasae’s crew, Clementine, the helicopter used so successfully, UP 27 (BuNo. 122715), went missing on a rescue mission near Kosong, Korea, with her pilot killed and crewman taken prisoner. Luckily, Chief Thorin was not at the controls that day.

Thorin’s luck ran out in February 1952 when flying a whirlybird from Rochester on a mission to rescue an injured and critically ill Skyraider pilot off Valley Forge— LT(j.g) Harry Ettenger of VC-35– who was down behind enemy lines and being harbored by anti-Communist North Korean partisans. The mission, over known enemy anti-aircraft positions near Kojo, Korea, was almost successful, but at the last minute, Thorin’s helicopter crashed due to mechanical problems. Taken prisoner along with Ettenger, he was a resident of POW Camp 2 until his release during Operation Big Switch on 2 September 1953. He earned a Silver Star for the mission (recommended for the Navy Cross), adding to his three DFCs.

Thorin made over 130 rescues in hostile territory during the Korean War, not counting those from Prasae.

Thorin retired from the Navy in 1959 as a lieutenant and passed “feet dry” in 2002, aged 82. He is buried at Chambers Cemetery, Holt County, Nebraska, Block 1, Lot 35.

Thorin was used as the basis for CPO (NAP) Mike Forney, the enlisted CSAR pilot in The Bridges at Toko-Ri by Pulitzer Prize winner James Michener. Icon Mickey Rooney portrayed him in the movie adaptation, which was filmed in Technicolor in 1954 aboard the USS Oriskany (CV-34). Real UP-coded H-5s were used, and Rooney portrayed his based-on-a-real-story character well, albeit with a green tophat and scarf rather than Thorin’s more understated green ballcap.

That’s Hollywood for you.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Warship Wednesday 31 December 2025: What a wee bit of Whale Oil Tax gets you

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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 31 December 2025: What a bit of Whale Oil Taxes Gets You

(Photographer: James Edward Farrington, radio operator; British Antarctic Survey Archives ref: AD6/19/1A/201/3)

Above we see the unique British polar research ship-turned minesweeper HMS William Scoresby (J 122) approaching Deception Island, in the South Shetland Islands, circa 1944, during Operation Tabarin, the little-known WWII Royal Navy expedition to Antarctica.

A humble 370-tonner that ran 134 feet from bow to stern, Scoresby launched 31 December 1925, a century ago today, and became an icy legend.

Meet Scoresby

Our subject was named for William Scoresby, Jr, a whaling captain and almost accidental Arctic scientist and later ordained Church of England clergyman, who was born in Cropton, near Pickering, Yorkshire, on 5 October 1789.

A veteran of numerous whaling voyages to far off, oft-frozen waters (his first at age 10 with his sea captain father, a man later credited with inventing the crows nest), he penned his An Account of the Arctic Regions in 1820, one of the first clear-eyed examinations of such areas, followed up by Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whale Fishery three years later. These volumes have been called “the beginning of the scientific study of the polar regions.”

Besides his work as a whaler and explorer, Scoresby was also the first chaplain of the Mariners’ Floating Church and passed away in 1857.

In practical terms, the good Rev. Scoresby charted 400 miles of East Greenland’s coast– with most of his place names still in use– and his meticulous ship logs, including weather and current data, provide valuable information for climatologists even today.

Ordered as one of His Majesty’s Royal Research Ships– in the same vein as the legendary RRS Discovery, Scott’s old ship– for the Government of the Falkland Islands from Hull-based trawler maker Cook, Welton & Gemmell in East Riding of Yorkshire (Yard No. 477), the future RRS William Scoresby was launched on New Years Eve 1925, christened by the Lady Harmer.

Built on spec for a thrifty £34,303 to the modified plans of a whale catcher, her intended primary service was to study and mark whales and to conduct research trawls for the South Atlantic fisheries. At the time, it was seen that data on the biological and physical conditions affecting the distribution of the whale stock were of preeminent importance.

Ice-strengthened, she was 134 feet in length, 26 in beam, and could make 12 knots. Her triple-expansion steam engines were built by Amos and Smith of Hull. She had a powerful commercial winch and port side gallows, which would allow her to tow a full-sized otter trawl.

Scoresby AWM P08145001

Her only armament at the time were a couple of revolvers for problems that needed revolvers and a few 12-bore (12 gauge) single-shot marker guns, developed by Holland & Holland to fire special 10-inch marker darts on an Eley-Kynoch charge that could be recovered during the harvest and returned (for a £1 reward), allowing the data of the whale’s travel from when and where it was darted to when and where it was harvested to be cataloged.

The darts were engraved with “Reward for return to the Colonial Office, London” and later “Return to Discovery British Museum [Nat History] London.

Between 1934 and 1938, 5,219 whales of six species were marked in the Southern Hemisphere using such guns from Scoresby and Discovery II, yielding significant data on migration patterns for species such as Blue, Fin, and Humpback whales.

Scoresby also possessed a sampling and sounding winch for oceanographic surveys, along with a small onboard laboratory for conducting scientific work on plankton and hydrology. While deployed, in addition to whales and their krill, the humble vessel’s embarked scientific detachment also branched out to study seals, bird life, lichens, mosses, and algae.

The same fund that paid for Scoresby, raised from taxes levied on whaling exports from the Falkland Island Dependencies and on the whaling companies, in the same year established a new £10,000 marine station at the whaling station at Grytviken on South Georgia Island, later of Falklands 1982 fame.

Once launched and floated down the River Hull for fitting out in Hull’s Queen’s Dock, the RRS William Scoresby was completed on 14 June 1926.

Her first Master was George M Mercer (Lieutenant Commander, RNR), and she arrived at Cape Town two months later to join RRS Discovery. Over the next 13 years, her skippers were all officers either on the Royal Navy’s retired or reserve list.

Scoresby completed seven voyages to Antarctic waters between 1926 and 1937, operating initially with the old RRS Discovery and after 1929 the new RRS Discovery II, based mainly out of Port Stanley in the Falklands and Grytviken on South Georgia– in the very shadow of Shackleton’s grave.

The William Scoresby moored at a snow-covered wharf, believed to be at South Georgia Island, circa 1930. State Library South Australia [PRG 675/1/73]

A ship just visible behind a large iceberg, identified as ‘William Scoresby sheltering beneath iceberg’. State Library South Australia [PRG 675/1/15B]

Coupled with the 13 “Discovery Investigation” voyages made by Discovery I and II in roughly the same period, these missions advanced the understanding of everything in the Antarctic along biological and oceanographic lines.

The 172-foot three-masted barque RRS Discovery I. Scott’s ship, she was taken into service by the British government in 1923 for £5000, becoming the first Royal Research Ship after a controversial £114,000 refit. Replaced in 1929 by a purpose-built steamer with the same name, she later served as the base for the British, Australian, and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) under Douglas Mawson.

The 1081-GRT, 272-foot steel-hulled RRS Discovery II during one of her scientific voyages in Antarctica between 1929 and 1951.

Between voyages, which were usually six-seven months long, Scoresby typically retired to Portsmouth Dockyard for repairs to damages incurred while among the ice floes and bergs. Dredged seabed rocks and preserved biological specimens were brought back for further study.

If too banged up for the 8,000nm return trip to England, she would call at Montevideo– the closest friendly port to the Falklands, some 1,200 miles west– in a pinch, or at the Royal Dockyard at Simonstown, South Africa (2,000 miles East) instead.

The ‘William Scoresby nearing Simonstown, South Africa, for dry dock and repair’, with dark smoke issuing from the funnel. State Library South Australia [PRG 675/1/15F]

William Scoresby in dry dock for repairs, likely Simonstown, circa 1930. State Library South Australia [PRG 675/1/12C]

During this period, her crew tagged and tracked something on the order of 3,000 whales alone and “undertook studies on plankton, fish, and hydrological surveys.” These results were published from Cambridge in the Discovery Reports.

The exception to the rule and the longest of these pre-war voyages was the two and a half year 1928-1930 Second Wilkins-Hearst Antarctic Expedition, so called as it was led by Australian explorer (and soon to be knighted) Hubert Wilkins, MC and Bar, and funded by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Among the cargo and specialized gear crammed aboard Scoresby was a Baby Austin car equipped with snow chains.

This voyage included loading up one of the expedition’s two Lockheed Vega floatplanes on her stern via the ship’s jib crane boom at Deception Island and heading South, aiming for the first trans-Antarctic flight.

Loading a Lockheed Vega floatplane to ship. Aeroplane is marked “Wilkins Hearst”. The ship is the “William Scoresby”. Probably taken by the attached biologist George Rayner. Museums Victoria Collections https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/393662 Accessed 30 December 2025

Ploughing through breaking ice. The Research Ship William Scoresby of Sir Hubert Wilkins’ Expedition photographed from the air off the byplane [sic] which she carried on board, together with a tractor, and three life boats.’ State Library South Australia [PRG 675/1/72]

Royal Research Ship (RRS) William Scoresby in pack ice, Beascochea Bay, Argentine Islands, off the West coast of Graham Land, Antarctica. The photograph appears to have been taken during the Second Wilkins-Hearst Antarctic Expedition of 1929-1930, when an attempt was made to fly over the South Pole by plane. The Lockheed seaplane used by H. Wilkins can be seen secured on the afterdeck of the ship. Museums Victoria Collections https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/393816 Accessed 30 December 2025

Scoresby sailed just below the 67th parallel in an attempt to find somewhere suitable to take off for an attempted flight across Antarctica, but in the end was unable to find a suitable place on the ice to take off with sufficient fuel to complete such a long flight.

Nonetheless, the floatplane did make several shorter flights completed over a period of weeks, in December 1929 and January 1930.

Scoresby moored close to a deep snow-covered shoreline with a steep rocky mountain ridge partially visible in the background to the right. On the afterdeck of the ship is a light aeroplane slung from a jib crane boom attached to the aft-mast. Museums Victoria Collections https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/393656 Accessed 30 December 2025

The Lockheed Vega fitted with pontoons due to ice-free conditions and moored alongside the William Scoresby. State Library South Australia PRG 675/1/2A

Lockheed Vega on water alongside the William Scoresby. State Library South Australia [PRG 675/1/16D]

Lockheed Vega taking off along William Scoresby. State Library South Australia [PRG 675/1/3A]

RRS Discovery II continued such work with floatplanes in the Antarctic, supporting the Ellsworth “Polar Star” which was a specially modified Northrop Gamma 2B monoplane, and embarking two RAAF Gipsy Moths and seven air/ground crew for her 1935-36 expedition.

At least 41 members of Scoresby’s circa 1926-39 crews were authorized bronze or silver Polar Medals “for good services” in 1941, a rare award that to this day has only been handed out less than 1,000 times, as it requires at least 12 months of arduous service in such a region to qualify to receive. By comparison, the U.S. Antarctica Service Medal, the primary medal for American Antarctic service, can be earned these days with just 10 days spent on orders south of 60°S latitude.

War!

When the war kicked off, RRS Discovery II was turned over to the Admiralty and served with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, mainly in the North Atlantic as a buoy tender and rescue ship out of Scotland, before resuming her Antarctic survey work only after the war ended.

Meanwhile, our subject, at the time laid up at St Katherine’s Dock, London, was taken over by the Admiralty in October 1939 and by January 1940 became HM Minesweeping Trawler Scoresby (J122) armed with a single “rather antique looking” manually trained 12 pounder (3-inch) gun on her bow (likely one of the 3,494 Mk I and II guns 12cwt QF 3″/40s on hand in RN stocks hand left over from the Great War) and some basic mechanical sweep gear (paravanes, etc.). This was augmented by a Lewis gun and a few small arms.

Her first wartime skipper was CDR (Retired) Harry Petit-Dann, RD, RNR, originally minted a lieutenant in 1924 and moved to the retired list in 1926.

On 1 May 1940, Scoresby sailed as an escort for ships in Convoy OG.28F, which was formed at sea and arrived at Gibraltar a week later. It had to be hairy as the convoy had 44 merchant ships and just three escorts, our little research vessel, the old destroyer HMS Versatile (D32), and the sloop HMS Folkestone (L22).

From Gibraltar, Scoresby continued alone down the West African coast on patrol.

By mid-May, she was part of the 93rd Minesweeper Group at Freetown, Sierra Leone, joining five other minesweeping trawlers there briefly before shifting across the South Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro in June.

Finally, on 23 January 1941, Scoresby pulled into her old haunt at Port Stanley in the Falklands, assuming station at the local shore establishment “stone frigate” there dubbed HMS Pursuivant. The only other armed floating military assets in the Falklands at the time were the minesweeping whaler HMT Roydur and the minesweeping drifter HMT Afterglow.

There, Scoresby remained on quiet duty, patrolling from Port Stanley in West Falkland to old Port Louis, East Falklands, part of the local effort to defend against passing German raiders and U-boats, as well as interloping Argentine naval ships who were planting flags around the British Antarctic Territories. This duty grew more tense after December 1941, when Churchill feared a move by the Japanese to seize the Falklands.

While the cruisers HMS Ajax, Achilles, Exeter, and Cumberland had sheltered at various times in the Falklands during their Graf Spee chase in late 1939, later joined by HMS Dorsetshire and Shropshire the islands were left fairly on their own after even the old heavy cruiser HMS Hawkins was shifted from the South Atlantic to the Indian Ocean in late 1940 as the traffic in German commerce raiders and blockade runners had thinned– or at least they thought.

A red alert went through the Falklands after the German Hilfskreuzer Pinguin (HSK 5) raided into Antarctic waters in January 1941, where it captured the whole of the Norwegian whaling fleet: three factory ships and 11 chasers, capturing a whopping 20,000 tons of precious whale oil in the process. The Admiralty dispatched the armed merchant cruiser HMS Queen of Bermuda to patrol the waters for a few months in response, but even she resumed her regular duties.

A 1,700-man reinforced battalion (11th West Yorks) arrived in the Falklands in 1942 and would remain ashore into early 1944 when they were replaced by a smaller force of Royal Scots. Other than Scoresby and her two fellow armed trawlers, that was it for local defense in the islands, barring passing Allied warships taking the “long way around” Cape Horn.

A small force of several RN armed merchant cruisers protected Simonstown to Freetown convoys up the Southwest coast of Africa, but they generally came nowhere near the Falklands except for a short patrol by HMS Carnarvon Castle in January 1943 to respond to Argentine flag-raising antics on far-away Deception Island.

Meanwhile, CDR Petit-Dann was relieved as Scoresby’s skipper in mid-1942 by one T./Lt Thomas Gentle, RNR– who soon left to command the new Algerine-class minesweeper HMS Welcome (J 386)— and T./Lt. Harold Olaf Olsen, RNR, a Norwegian-born officer who by early 1944 left to command the ASW whaler HMS Thirlmere (FY 206)/ex-Kos XXVI.

This left Scoresby in early 1944 in command of Lt Victor Aloysius John Baptist Marchesi, RN, recently arrived in the islands from England with the mysterious 14 members of Naval Parties 475 and 476, aboard the troop ship HMT Highland Monarch, hitching a ride with the Royal Scots coming to relieve the miserable 11th West Yorks.

The London-born Marchesi was only 30 at the time but was more than qualified, having served some months as an RNR officer in the battlecruiser HMS Hood before joining the Brocklebank Line before the war. As fourth officer in the RRS Discovery II in January 1936, he helped rescue the American airman Lincoln Ellsworth and his Canadian co-pilot, Herbert Hollick-Kenyon, from the Ross ice shelf.

Transferring to the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the war, in addition to commanding Scoresby, Marchesi was also the 2IC of NP 475/476, which had been handpicked by T/LCDR. James William Slessor Marr, RNVR, a 42-year-old Scottish marine biologist and polar explorer who had sailed with Shackleton on the Quest as a lad, took part in the BANZARE expedition, and been a member of both Discovery II and Scoresby’s pre-war crews at one time or another. At the time, Marr already had a mountain named after him in Antarctica, as well as a bay named in his honor in the South Orkney Islands, and had earned both a Polar Medal (with clasp) and a W. S. Bruce Medal.

There was reason Scoresby had such a man in charge.

Tabarin

The expedition was named Operation Tabarin after Bal Tabarin, a famed and chaotic Paris cabaret and nightclub second only to the Moulin Rouge, as a sort of tongue-in-cheek stab at the chaotic nature of the endeavor. Ironically, at the time, the real Bal Tabarin on Rue Victor-Massé just off the Seine was favored by both the German officer corps in Paris and the movers and shakers of the Resistance.

Their mission: establish year-round British bases in the far south, at Deception Island at a minimum, to deny its use in sheltering German, Japanese, or Argentine vessels and strengthen Britannia’s assertions of sovereignty over its claimed Falkland Islands Dependencies

Scoresby took the place of NP 475/476s former mothership, the condemned Norwegian sealing vessel Veslekari. Taken up in Iceland in 1943 and renamed HMS Bransfield, the old sealer proved unsuited for the task and was abandoned, the party left to ship to the Falklands via HMT Highland Monarch while their equipment was transshipped as cargo to Montevideo on other vessels.

Scoresby was assigned as escort to the slightly larger but very familiar coaster Fitzroy (ex-Lafonia), a 165-foot/853-ton steamer which had built by Henry Robb in 1931 for the Falkland Islands Company to serve as the inter-islands mail ship. The islands’ only dedicated lifeline to the world, the needs of the Crown took priority, and she was used first to retrieve the expedition’s equipment from Montevideo before the two vessels set out, bound for Deception Island.

Fitzroy

On 29 January 1944, they left Port Stanley, headed south. 

The first installation, established on 3 February 1944, was Base B, at Whaler’s Bay, on Deception Island, where Carnarvon Castle had called the year prior. Importantly, they had a radio to report any enemy vessels or interactions and were in regular communication with Port Stanley.

Marchesi later said in a postwar interview that, until inside the harbor, he could not see whether it was occupied by an Argentine warship or a German U-boat. “Just as well,” he said, “because my one handgun and William Scoresby’s puny bow-mounted gun would hardly have put the fear of death into anyone.”

The second, larger, post would be Base A, at Port Lockroy, on nearby Goudier Island in the Gerlache Strait, established on 11 February. The base was to have been at Hope Bay on the Antarctic mainland, but Fitzroy was not ice-strengthened and could not risk the sea ice in the bay.

It was sparse to say the least.

As described by the British Antarctic Survey:

The base at Port Lockroy was built on Goudier Island in February 1944. It housed a nine-man wintering team. The hut was erected from prefabricated sections, and some timber used in the construction was salvaged from an abandoned whaling station on Deception Island. The building contained a mess room where the men ate, relaxed, and slept, a work room, a kitchen, a store room, and a generator room. There was even a bathroom. However, because water was rationed, only the person whose turn it was to gather and melt the ice or snow was allowed to bathe. This meant up to nine days between baths!

Unloading cargo for the construction of Base A on Goudier Island, Antarctic Peninsula (1944) British Antarctic Survey Archives.

The secrecy bubble popped, and in April 1944, the existence of both bases was shared globally via a BBC announcement, news that reached the polar outposts– men alone on a continent of some 5 million square miles– and left them amused.

All 14 members of the expedition wintered over the 1944 season, and a third base was set up on the mainland at Hope Bay (Base D) on 13 February 1945, where the Union Jack was unfurled on a 20-foot pole that had been found near the remains of the hut from Otto Nordenskjold’s circa 1901 Swedish Antarctic Expedition.

Dog teams were brought in by Tabarin in 1945 to increase surveying capabilities at Hope Bay, Trinity Peninsula.

On the way back to Port Stanley in 1945, Scoresby stopped at Scotia Bay on Laurie Island to “show the flag” to a group of frostbitten Argentinean meteorologists who had been stuck at their Orcadas Station for 14 months. A little tit-for-tat in the ice.

Scoresby, Fitzroy, and two chartered vessels, SS Eagle and MV Trepassey, would return to the region from the Falklands in early 1946 to resupply the posts and swap out personnel.

Tabarin was extensively documented, with some 1,800 images preserved from the operation today.

For a deeper dive on the operation, check out Operation Tabarin: Britain’s secret wartime expedition to Antarctica, 1944-46 by Stephen Haddelsey.

Post-war service

HMS Scoresby (J122) saw her military service under the Admiralty cease in September 1946.

Landing her gun, she was sent for a major  £11,900 refit and, in November 1949, was released to the Admiralty outright to continue her service under the RFA. She spent the first 10 months of 1950 conducting research into whales off the west coast of Australia– sailing to Fremantle and back to England via the South Atlantic.

On 26 February 1951, the Admiralty transferred Scoresby to the newly formed National Institute of Oceanography, and she would continue serving with that organization in the Southern Ocean for the next two years.

Paid off, ex-Scoresby was on the January 1953 Disposal List, offered for sale for £2,500. She lingered on the list for 17 months until a bid of £1,900 from BISCO (British Iron and Steel Corporation) for demolition was accepted, with her salvaged radio equipment fetching a further £600.

And that was that.

Epilogue

Human habitation of Antarctica has been continuous since the establishment of the first two Tabarin bases by Scoresby and Fitzroy in February 1944.

The scientific observations and surveys initiated during Tabarin continued after the War, and the work was put on a long-term footing under the Colonial Office as the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS). FIDS was re-named the British Antarctic Survey in 1962 and continues today.

Port Lockroy was occupied until 1962, Hope Bay until 1964, and Deception Island until 1967, replaced by newer, less militaristic installations inside the British Antarctic Territory, which formed in 1962 after the Antarctic Treaty came into force. They have been replaced by the year-round Rothera Research Station on Adelaide Island and four smaller stations (Signy, Fossil Bluff, Sky Blu, and Halley VI) that don’t overwinter.

Of note, Base A (Port Lockroy) is now the famous “Penguin Post Office.”

The BAS’s current dedicated research and logistic support ship these days is the hulking 15,000-ton RRS Sir David Attenborough (aka “Boaty McBoatface”), which entered service in 2021, backed up by the armed RN icebreaker HMS Protector.

The archives of the Discovery Investigations are held by the National Oceanographic Library.

The British Antarctic Oral History Project includes interviews with members of the ship’s company, which provides insight into the daily life onboard ship.

A bay on the coast of Antarctica’s Kemp Land, discovered by Scoresby’s crew in 1936, was named after her.

As for Scoresby’s former pals, Fitzroy continued to sail between the Falklands to Montevideo, South Georgia, and Graham Land (Antarctica) until 1957, when she was scrapped. RRS Discovery II’s final Antarctic voyage wrapped in 1951, but she continued to work as an oceanographic ship in the North Atlantic until she was scrapped in 1962. She was replaced by a third RRS Discovery in 1962, which, at 4,378 DWT, was the largest general-purpose oceanographic research vessel in use by the Brits until 2006. The current fourth RRS Discovery joined the fleet in 2013.

When it comes to Scoresby’s Operation Tabarin skipper, LT Marchesi remained in the Royal Navy post-war, served two years aboard the carrier HMS Unicorn during Korea, lectured at public schools about naval careers, and was the senior RNR officer in Northern Ireland. In retirement, he worked for Bass, was a port relief officer for Cunard, and land-locked captain of the famed clipper Cutty Sark at Greenwich.

In 2005, Marchesi recounted the story of Operation Tabarin for the BBC, and his exploits were commemorated in a series of stamps issued by the Falkland Islands in the same year (and reissued for the 80th anniversary recently).

Victor Marchesi, captain of the expedition support ship, HMS William Scoresby, and 2nd-in-command of Operation Tabarin, Jan 1946. (Photographer: M. Sadler. Archives ref: AD6/19/2/E402/43a)

He passed in December 2006, aged a ripe 92.

His obituary notes:

At sea, Marchesi recalled keeping watch for hours on the exposed bridge of Scoresby during icy gales and, when off watch, feeling pain in his hands and feet as his circulation returned. In the winter months, Marchesi serviced the remote islands of the Falklands and, for three months each year, refitted his ship in the bright lights of unrationed Montevideo. There he met a talented, multi-lingual secretary in the embassy who contrived a passage to Port Stanley; she was waiting for him when he returned from his third southern voyage, and they were married within the hour.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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

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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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”

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

Courtesy of Mr. Donald M. McPherson, Naval History and Heritage Command NH 68493

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.

F7752 001

F7752 004

F7752 003

F7752 002

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.

Aerial photograph of British Aphis (Insect) class gunboat. Note the two 6-inchers, fore and aft.

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.

HMS Ladybird, at Port Said, Egypt, November 1917. Note the cruiser and destroyers in the background. Photo by Surgeon Oscar Parkes, IWM SP 560

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.

“Egypt scenes. Monitor HMS Ladybird in the Suez Canal, 1917.” This photo is part of an album compiled by Sub. Lieutenant Bertie Henry Buck, during his service in WWI and is part of the Australian National Maritime Museum’s collection. Object number: 00007425_9

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.

A group of British, Serbian, and Yugoslav officers at Baja on the River Danube in the summer of 1919. Front row from left to right: Commander Jellacic, commander of Yugoslav war vessels on the Danube; Lieutenant Colonel Milossovic, commander of the 9th Serbian Infantry Regiment; Captain Vernon Haggard RN, commander of the Royal Navy Danube Flotilla; Lieutenant Colonel Draskio, town commandant at Baja; Surgeon Lieutant Commander P F Cope RN, medical officer to the Danube Flotilla and Father Gregorevitch, Yugoslav Army Chaplain. Rear row from left to right: Lieutenant Pric, commanding officer of the patrol boat NERETVA; Commander R Stone RN, commanding officer of HMS LADYBIRD; Lieutenant Andric, first lieutenant of the Yugoslav monitor SAVA; Lieutenant Bacic, adjutant to Commander Jellacic; Lieutenant Commander H Hewitt, Senior British Naval Officer, Baja; Lieutenant Commander E Edmonds RN, commander of British MLs on the Danube; Lieutenant E Pigou RN, British liaison officer in SAVA; Lieutenant Kovacek, first lieutenant of the Yugoslav monitor DRAVA; Paymaster Lieutenant Commander Fritz Reger, secretary to Captain Haggard, Lieutenant H S Beresford RN, British liaison officer in DRAVA; unknown Segrbian Army officer. IWM Q 115088

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.

Jane’s 1921 listing on the class, note Glowworm, Aphis, Ladybird, and ML 196 listed as being in the British Danube Flotilla. Glowworm had only joined the force in 1920.

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.

HMS Cicala in North Russia (Yeoman of Signals George Smith)

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.

Jane’s 1929 listing on the class note with Glowworm absent. By this time, the class was all based in China/Hong Kong, where they would run into a whole different set of problems.

Interbellum

The Insect-class river gunboat HMS Ladybird on route from Hong Kong to Shanghai in July 1927. IWM Q 80179

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.

HMS Ladybird at Shanghai, China circa the 1920s. NH 68496

Looking down on the Yangtze River, Ichang, China 1920s. USS Elcano (PG – 38) is above the “X” (bottom, left of center). HMS Ladybird (A British gunboat) is forward and to the right of ship with large single stack at bottom right center. USS Monocracy (PG-20) is forward and above Ladybird. NH 67243

HMS Ladybird British river gunboat, view taken at Ichang, China, May 1937. NH 81636

Yangtze River Patrol. A British gunboat on the Yangtze river, probably the HMS Ladybird, possibly near Ichang, China circa the 1920s. NH 67311

Yangtze River Patrol. A British gunboat on the Yangtze river, probably the HMS Ladybird, possibly near Ichang, China circa the 1920s. NH 67312

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.

USS Panay (PR-5) in background right, beyond HMS Ladybird, British river gunboat. Weldon James of UPI News Service waves a handkerchief at Panay prior to his and others’ evacuation on the U.S. ship at Nanking, China, 12 December 1937. NH 50838

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.

HMS Ladybird, view of the damage on the port side sustained in an artillery attack by a Japanese Army battery on 12 December 1937, the same day as the USS Panay (PR-5) sinking. Courtesy of Vice Admiral Morton L. Deyo, USN (retired) NH 77816

USS Oahu (PR-6). The coffin of SK1 C.L. Ensminger, USN, lies beneath a U.S. flag on the fantail of the Oahu, as she heads to Shanghai, China, with the survivors of sister ship USS Panay (PR-5) which was sunk on 12 December 1937 by Japanese planes. British gunboat HMS Ladybird is astern of Oahu, 15 December 1937. Ensminger was killed in the attack on Panay. NH 50808

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.

31 December 1940. “A visit to a company of Free French in the Bardia area, troops landing on the coast from a warship.” HMS Ladybird. stationary with a small boat in the foreground. Photo by Capt. Geoffrey John Keating, No. 1 Army Film and Photo Section, Army Film and Photographic Unit IWM (E 1538)

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.

31 December 1940. “Off Bardia. At the safest end of the 6-inch guns on HMS Ladybrd during the bombardment of Bardia.” Parker AWM 004991

31 December 1940. “Off Bardia. Rapid fire from the 6-inch guns on HMS Ladybrd during the bombardment of Bardia.” Parker AWM 004990

31 December 1940. “Off Bardia. The crew aboard HMS Ladybrd gives the Pom Pom a drink during the bombardment of Bardia.” Parker AWM 004993

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.

And a meal in the Petty Officers’ Mess, complete with the ship’s cat, Cinders. AWM 005005 and 005013.

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.

“Armed boarding vessel Chakla, under bombing attack in Tobruk harbour, 1941-04-29. Note her camouflage scheme, the colours of which are probably 507a (the darker grey) and 507c. The Chakla was sunk as a result of the attack. (still from a cine film).” AWM 127950.

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

Tobruk, Cyrenaica, Libya. c. May 1941. A general view of bomb damaged buildings. The smoke from the harbour is from HMS Ladybird set on fire by an enemy bomb. (Donor Sergeant Maxwell) AWM 022116

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.

14 August 1941. Original wartime caption, emphasis mine: “Tobruk. HM Submarine Ladybird seen submerged in the harbour. The pride of Tobruk is Ladybird which was sunk in the harbour with only her gun turret above the water line. She still takes part in the defense of the Town. A Gun crew live aboard with their A.A. Gun with which they give a good account of themselves.” Taken by LT Smith, No. 1 Army Film and Photo Section, Army Film and Photographic Unit, IWM E.4846

5 September 1941. Gunners of No 40 Battery, 14th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery, cleaning a gun on board the half-submerged HMS Ladybird, which was sunk by enemy bombs in Tobruk Harbour. Photo by Thomas Fisher. AWM 020575

Same as the above, AWM 020574

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.

Model of Ladybird, via Bonhams

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.

“Greyhound and Ladybird in search of enemy battery off Tobruk, like ill assorted terriers” between November 1942 and December 1942. Pictures of Paintings by LCDR R Langmaid, RN, Official Fleet Artist. These Pictures Are For Illustrating a Naval War Book by Paymaster Captain L a Da C Ritchie, RN. IWM A 13635

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.

“HMS Ladybird, a British converted Yangtze River steamer. January 1951, Sasebo, Japan. HMS Ladybird was the nerve center of the British Commonwealth fleet in the Korean zone. It was the forward headquarters ship of Vice Admiral W. G. Andrewes, who commanded the fleet. It had communications equipment equal to that of a cruiser, and from her, the fueling, feeding, ammunitioning, and welfare of the fleet was administered.” IWM A 31830

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Warship Wednesday 10 December 2025: Dutch Avenger

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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 10 December 2025: Dutch Avenger

NIMH Objectnummer 2158_014036

Above we see the kanonneerboot (gunboat) Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen (U 93) arriving at Willemstad, Curaçao, Dutch Antilles, on Halloween 1939, complete with a large Dutch flag painted amidships as a mark of neutrality. While she arrived to be a station ship in a neutral country’s overseas territory during the first months of WWII, she would go on to put on war paint and go looking for some payback after her homeland was invaded and occupied a few months later.

She would help stop a large German freighter some 85 years ago this week– one of many Axis ships “The Flying Dutchman” would bag.

The need for a gunnery school ship

Our subject was ordered as an artillerie-instructieschip, a vehicle to train the Dutch Navy’s gunners and new gunnery officers in preparation for a series of modern warships, most of which were never constructed before the war began. She was badly needed to replace the very old (laid down in 1897) Holland-class pantser-dekschepen (protected cruiser) Hr.Ms. Gelderland, which had been taken out of front-line service in 1919 and had been working as an artillery training ship ever since.

With a full displacement of just 2,388 tons and a 322-foot length, Van Kinsbergen was rightfully a sloop or frigate. Using two sets of Werkspoor geared steam turbines driven by two Yarrow boilers, she could make 25.5 knots on 17,000shp. Range was 5,790nm at 14.5 knots on 696 tons of oil. Armor was slight, just a half-inch belt, an inch shield on the main guns, a 20mm protected deck over machinery spaces, and 20mm on the conning tower.

Stoom- en motorschepen,Kanonneerboten,Van Kinsbergen 1939-1974,Algemeen plan (Dutch Nationaal Archief )

Her primary armament was four single 12 cm/45 (4.7″) Wilton-Fijenoord Nr. 6 guns in half-shielded (open back) mounts. A dual-purpose gun derived from earlier Bofors SP designs with a 55-degree elevation, they had a rate of fire of 10 rounds per minute and a range of 17,500 yards.

The Dutch aimed to use the same gun on new minelayers (Hr.Ms.Willem van der Zaan (ML-2), the four Tjerk Hiddes/Gerard Callenburgh-class destroyers, seven 1,400-ton 1938 pattern K-class gunboats, and as the secondary battery of a trio of planned 30,000-ton Design 1047 battlecruisers (which were very similar to the German Scharnhorst).

Van Kinsbergen was also given a large and very advanced (for its time) Hazemeyer Signaalapparatenfabriek HSLG-4 fire control device that could be used to direct both her main and secondary armament. Speaking to the latter, she carried two twin 40/56 Bofors Nr.3 guns on advanced triaxial stabilized mounts, one of the first mountings of what would go on to be one of the main Allied AAA mounts of WWII.

The Hazemeyer device was used on both the 4.7-inch guns and 40mm Bofors of the Navy’s late model cruisers, such as De Reuter, and 48 land-based 75mm/43 Vickers Model 1931 AAA guns in service with the K.Lu A.

Dutch AAA HSLG-4 Hazemeyer Signaalapparatenfabriek fire control with 75mm Vickers 1939 AKL071201

Dutch Luchtdoelartilleristen bedienen een Vickers 7,5 cm t.l. vuurmond AKL075817

Most of the Hazemeyer-equipped 7,5 cm Vickers operated by the K.Lu.A were in storage at Artillerie Inrichtingen Hembrug, recently arrived from Britain and waiting to be assembled when the Germans invaded Holland in May 1940.

2158_014040

Een geschutkonstabel-kanonnier bedient een dubbelloops 40mm Bofors mitrailleur (Hazemeyer opstelling) aan boord van Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen NIMH 2158_039637

Van Kinsbergen gun’s crew at action stations on the twin Bofors gun by British LT Sidney James Beadell, RNVR, IWM (A 4686)

She was also fitted in 1939 with four .50 caliber machineguns, and two depth charge racks. Most sources also list her with a pair of 3″/52 SA Nr.2 mounts, at least one of which would be mounted ashore to defend Curacao later in the war.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Meet Van Kinsbergen

Our subject was named in honor of VADM (Count) Jan Hendrik van Kinsbergen, who famously beat the Turks several times while in Tsarist service (the Russian Imperial Navy named destroyers after him), in addition to his multiple feats in Dutch service.

Laid down by Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij, at Rotterdam, Netherlands on 11 September 1937, she launched on 5 January 1939– christened by Mrs. A. van Dijk-Wierda, wife of the then Minister of Defense Jannes van Dijk– and commissioned on 21 August 1939– less than a fortnight before the start of WWII in Europe.

The same day Van Kinsbergen entered service, the ancient cruiser Gelderland was laid up, and many of the new ship’s crew came from the vessel she replaced, including her skipper, Kapitein-Luitenant ter Zee (CDR) John Louis Karel Hoeke, RNN, a Java-born regular who had earned his commission in 1915.

A very clean Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen, early in her career, possibly on trials, before her fire control was installed. NIMH 2158_005639

Same as above NIMH 2173-222-086

Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen was still without her fire control (vuurleiding) installed on 17 April 1939. 2158_014022

Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen at sea,17 April 1939. NIMH 2158_014020

War!

With the Germans marching into Poland and the lights going out across Europe once again for the second time in 25 years, Van Kinsbergen’s planned career as a training vessel was put on hold as her North Sea stomping grounds were now a war zone.

Hr.Ms. Kanonneerboot Van Kinsbergen with fire control, likely 1939 2158_014023

Hr.Ms. kanonneerboot Van Kinsbergen in Nederland, KITLV 377322

Instead, it was decided she would be of better use in reinforcing the neutrality of the isolated overseas garrison in the wind-swept Dutch West Indies, a move which also put her within an easy cruising distance of the crown’s Suriname colony. In this, she relived the 1,800-ton sloop Hr.Ms. Johan Maurits van Nassau— just in time for the latter to return home to be sunk by the Luftwaffe the next year.

On 2 October, after a visit from Queen Wilhemena herself, Van Kinsbergen left Den Helder, escorting the submarines Hr.Ms. O 15 and O 20, on a slow crossing to Curacao via the Azores and Puerto Rico that ended on Halloween. While O 15 would remain in the West Indies for a year, the ill-fated O 20 would continue through the Panama Canal to serve in the Dutch East Indies, where she was sunk by a trio of Japanese destroyers in December 1941.

When the Germans rudely violated Dutch neutrality on 10 May 1940– even while the country hosted the exiled former German Kaiser– war came to both metropolitan Holland and her overseas colonies.

Marineman op wacht bij Hr. Ms. Van Kinsbergen, 1940 Bestanddeelnr 934-9873

In the Dutch West Indies, Van Kinsbergen and her crew clocked in with local authorities, including a company of Marines and the 1-pounder armed local coastguard vessels HM Aruba and HM Practico, then moved to seize seven German merchant ships that were interned in the islands. These included the SS Este (7915 gt), SS Vancouver (8269 gt), MS Henry Horn (3164 gt), MS Patricia (3979 gt), MS Frisia (561 gt), MS Karibia (428 gt), and ES Alemania (1380 gt).

While the German crews– confined to their ships since the invasion of Denmark in April– tried, only one of these seven, the HAPAG turboship Almania, managed to successfully scuttle. The other six were soon in Allied service under new names for the duration, while 220 German nationals (215 men from the seven ships and five German sailors turned over by Dutch steamers) were locked up in an internment camp on Bonaire until the British could pick them up later in the summer.

Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen “Terror of the Caribbean” with her Dutch flag paint job

Of these seized vessels, Este, renamed Suriname, was torpedoed and sunk by U-558 off Venezuela in September 1942 with the loss of 13 crew. Most of the others, including Vancouver (renamed Curacao), Henry Horn (renamed Bonaire), and Patricia (renamed Arbua), survived the war and were given to Dutch shipping firms post-war as reparations, sailing well into the 1950s.

Soon after the seizure of the German ships, the French dispatched 150 colonial troops from Senegal to help garrison out lying Aruba but then, when France fell the next month and dropped out of the war, Van Kinsbergen stood by the tense scene in early July as the Vichy French armed merchant cruiser Esterel (X21) reembarked the Tirailleurs Sénégalais to return them to Africa.

The 40mm story

On 20 August 1940, Van Kinsbergen would find herself steaming with the heavy cruiser USS Tuscaloosa (CA-37) north of Trinidad, with the latter’s gunnery officers very interested in the Dutch ship’s 40mm Bofors mounts, which they saw in action against towed target kites. The performance reportedly convinced them to help push to adopt the gun as the U.S. Navy standard, with BuOrd formally obtaining Swedish licenses in June 1941.

The first U.S. ship to get 40mm Bofors was the gunnery training ship USS Wyoming (AG-17), which received a quad mount in June 1942; shortly after, the destroyer USS Coghlan (DD-606) became the first combat ship fitted with a twin mount in July.

Over 400 U.S. DDs/DEs would carry the weapon, plus a myriad of cruisers, carriers, battleships, LSTs, you name it. During 1944 alone, U.S. factories produced 6,644 single mountings, and approximately 3,650 twin and 750 quad mountings for the Navy.

The Bofors was credited with more “kills” (742.5) than any other USN AAA platform of the war.

Back to our ship

Van Kinsbergen spent the rest of 1940 operating with British ships in patrols off the coasts of Colombia and Venezuela, looking to intercept German, Italian, and Vichy blockade runners– narrowly missing the Hapag-steamers Helgoland (2947 gt) and Idarwald (5033 gt) as well as the French Charles L.D. (5267 gt).

On 11 December 1940, the German Norddeutscher Lloyd freighter Rhein (6049 gt) was en route from Tampico, Mexico, to Germany with cargo and was followed by several warships in an attempt to apprehend and capture her.

German Norddeutscher Lloyd freighter Rhein, ironically in Rotterdam prewar

However, during the attempted arrest by the Van Kinsbergen, some 40 miles NW of the Dry Tortugas, the ship was set on fire by the crew in an attempt to scuttle her. Later that day, the burned-out hulk was sunk by 22 rounds of 6-inch cannon fire by the British light cruiser HMS Caradoc. Van Kinsbergen dutifully rounded up the shipwrecked German merchant sailors whose war had come to a close.

11 December 1940. The capture of the German freighter Rhein by Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen and HMS Caradoc. The crew of the sunken ship. NIMH 2158_052025

In February 1941, Van Kinsbergen, in conjunction with two Canadian corvettes, seized the Danish tankers Scandia (8571 gt) and Christian Holm (9919 gt) at the entrance of the Gulf of Paria, escorting them to Trinidad. These tankers were in Admiralty service within weeks.

On 26 May 1941, just after leaving a much-needed yard period in Bermuda, Van Kinsbergen captured the Vichy French CFN steamer SS Winnipeg (8379 gt) with 732 passengers aboard, including eight Jewish photographers who were saved from internment and persecution in France. Winnipeg would be put into Canadian service and sunk by submarine U-443 while on a convoy run the following October.

Five days after seizing Winnipeg, Van Kinsbergen came across the Vichy-French CGT steamer Arica (5390 gt) and captured the same, escorting her to Trinidad for further Allied service. Like Winnipeg, Arica was soon under the red duster only to be sunk by U-160 off Trinidad in November 1942.

The far-traveled Dutch sloop was directed to Liverpool in July for refit, with 11 captured enemy ships to her credit.

In August 1941, British LT Sidney James Beadell, RNVR, an official war photographer, visited Van Kinsbergen while still in port, and while he dutifully logged several great images that captured a moment in time, he apparently jotted down that she was a cruiser (!) named Van Kingsbergen (sic).

Official wartime period captions, likely by Beadell:

“The Dutch rating responsible for sounding action stations on board Van Kingsbergen (sic)”  IWM (A 4687

“Three Dutch ratings seen busy while sail making” and “A Dutch rating busy with palm and needle.” Actually, it seems like they are mending a tarpaulin cover. IWM (A 4688/4689)

“A Dutch rating who is one of the loading members of the gun’s crew.” Of note, the fixed HE shell of the 4.7″ Mark 6 weighed 70.5 lbs, so the rating is getting his reps in for the photographer for sure. IWM A 4690/A 4691

“A Dutch naval guard with rifles and bayonets.” Note the Indonesian rating and the bluejacket’s Dutch Model 1895 (Geweer M. 95) 6.5mm Mannlicher carbines, complete with web gear. IWM (A 4692)

“A Dutch officer taking a sight,” an obviously posed shot as the ship is tied up. IWM (A 4694)

“A Dutch signalman.”  IWM (A 4693)

It was while in Britain that Van Kinsbergen changed crews and skippers, with KLtz Cornelis Hellingman, late of the sub tender Hr.Ms. Colombia, changing places with the good KLtz Hoeke. Hellingman had earned both a British DSO and a Dutch Bronzen Kruis for his command of the Ymuiden/Ijmuiden naval sector (the gateway to Amsterdam) on 14/15 May 1940 and his decision to demo the six ships in the harbor and wreck the port facilities there rather than allow them to fall into German hands.

In September 1941, leaving Britain to return to the Caribbean, the now camouflaged Van Kinsbergen carried 60 men from the newly-formed Free Dutch Prinses Irene-Brigade to Paramaribo, Suriname, to beef up the garrison there.

18 April 1942. De kanonneerboot Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen departs from Curaçao. Note her camouflage scheme. NIMH 2158_053743

Her first Allied convoy, from 19 to 27 July 1942, was the Curacao/Trinidad-to-Key West TAW.6C in which the Dutch slugger was the main escort, augmented by the plucky little 136-foot minesweeper USS YMC-56 (which had a couple of deck guns but no ASW gear or depth charges). The duo shepherded six merchants (three American, one each Norwegian, British, and Dutch), including the big tankers MT Beacon (10,388 tons, Standard Oil Co.) and the 9,912-ton Nortraship MT Glaron.

Her next convoy was TAW.9, another Trinidad-to-Key West run, from 27 July-4 August, that numbered 10 merchants (again, mostly tankers) and six escorts, the latter including a pair of small (173-foot) U.S. PCs, fresh from the shipyard.

Convoy TAW.14, 15-25 August 1942, teamed up Van Kinsbergen with two PCs and an SC as well as an old American flush-deck tin can (USS Upshur) to run 14 merchants, mainly tankers, to Key West.

Following that, she sailed for Norfolk for modernization. There until late October, she emerged with a Type 271 radar, a Type 128C ASDIC, six 20mm Oerlikons (two twin, two single), eight K-gun DCTs, and racks for 52 depth charges.

Van Kinsbergen was seen in late 1942 post-refit (likely between 7 and 12 November) in camouflage scheme near two U.S. Cleveland class cruisers and two tankers, at least one of which is a U.S. Navy AO. Naval History and Heritage Command NH 87890.

Same as above NH 87895

Same as above NH 87888

In Convoy TAG.20 (11-15 November 1942: Trinidad – Guantanamo) (27 merchants and 10 escorts), Van Kinsbergen joined the “reverse Lend-Leased” American Flower-class corvette USS Spry (PG-64), the old flush-deck tin can USS Biddle (DD-151), the gunboat USS Erie, and a half-dozen PC/SCs.

It was during TAG.20 that on 12 November, Van Kinsbergen rescued survivors of the Erie after the American sloop was torpedoed by U-163 and beached, ablaze.

In Convoy TAG.22   (21-14 November 1942: Trinidad – Guantanamo) 43 merchants and 10 escorts, Van Kinsbergen sailed alongside another American Flower— USS Tenacity (PG-71)— the somewhat infamous flush-decker USS Greer (DD–145), and seven small PCs/SCs, one of which was the mighty Free Dutch Queen Wilhelmina (ex-USS PC 468), later to become nicknamed as the “Queen of the Caribbean” due to her Caribbean beat.

In April 1943, she got a third skipper, KLtz Johannes Jacobus Lukas Willinge, RNN, late of the light cruiser Hr.Ms. Sumatra, and in August would get a fourth, Ktz Jan August Gauw, RNN, who had formerly commanded the minelayer Hr.Ms. Nautilus (M 12) until she was sunk in 1941 after being run down by the British freighter Murrayfield off Grimsby.

By this time, she had added a pair of Mousetrap Mk 20 ASWRLs and upgraded her sensors to an SF radar, a TBS system, and QHB sonar, with the work done in New York.

While operating from New York, she joined the outward bound leg of two very large NYC to Liverpool Atlantic convoys, sailing as part of the escort with a couple of divisions of primarily Canadian corvettes, frigates, and minesweepers.

These included:

  • Convoy HX.304 (17-20 August 1944, 87 merchants and 27 escorts)
  • Convoy HX.311 (30 September- 3 October 1944, 60 merchants and 25 escorts)

Van Kinsbergen in camouflage in October 1944, NARA

Ordered to England in January 1945, her war was over.

She changed her pennant to N 3 in May and arrived back “home” in Rotterdam in August, entering the RDM dockyard there for service.

Wait, another war?

Able to float in just 10 feet of seawater, Van Kinsbergen was ideal to support operations in the littoral of the 17,000-island Indonesian archipelago, which at the time was fighting to break free from Dutch colonial rule.

With that, she set out for the Pacific on 24 October 1945. No rest for the weary.

Practicing with 20mm anti-aircraft guns on the gunboat Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen during the crossing to the Dutch East Indies, October-November 1945. Note the colonial gunner. NIMH 2173-222-009

Van Kinsbergen in heavy weather around 1945. 2173-222-091

Crossing the line headed to the Pacific! (Neptunus a/b van de kanonneerboot Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen in 1945.) 2173-222-085

Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen, 1946, sans camouflage. NIMH 2173-222-096

Officers from Van Kinsbergen ashore in Ambon (Molukken) in March 1946. NIMH 2173-222-022

Van Kinsbergen during actions on the south coast of Borneo in April 1946. NIMH 2173-222-100

A landing with support from the gunboat Van Kinsbergen on the south coast of Borneo in April 1946. NIMH 2173-222-026

Damage to propellers and propeller shafts sustained during support of a landing in April 1946 near Bawal Island (South Borneo) by the gunboat Van Kinsbergen, dry-docked in Singapore. NIMH 2173-222-028

A bow shot of the same. NIMH 2173-222-029

And a Cold War

In late 1947, Van Kinsbergen received a further upgrade, swapping out her old 4.7-inch guns for a pair of 2 x 4″/45 SK C/32s, while keeping her Bofors and Oerlikons. Her ASW suite was reduced to two throwers, landing her Mousetraps and stern racks. The sensor fit at the time included the SL-1, SH-1, and Mk 34 radars, as well as her QHB sonar.

Victims of the bomber disaster arrived in Den Helder on July 24, 1948. Bestanddeelnr  902-8692

Aankomst Van Kinsbergen te Rotterdam, Aug 9 1948 Bestanddeelnr 902-7914

Vertrek Van Kinsbergen uit Rotterdam, 15 October 1948 Bestanddeelnr 903-0544

H. Ms. Van Kinsbergen (N 3) Marvo 3, 14 October 1948 Bestanddeelnr 903-0537

Terugkeer Hr. Ms. kanonneerboot Van Kinsbergen in Den Helder, 2 March 1949 Bestanddeelnr 903-2501

Terugkeer Hr. Ms. kanonneerboot Van Kinsbergen in Den Helder, 2 March 1949 Bestanddeelnr 903-2500

Terugkeer Hr. Ms. kanonneerboot Van Kinsbergen in Den Helder, 2 March 1949 Bestanddeelnr 903-2499

Reclassified as a frigate with the pennant number F804 in November 1950, by February 1952, she was deployed once again to the Pacific, remaining in New Guinea until December 1954 and circumnavigating the globe in the process.

Hr. Ms. Van Kinsbergen na 3 jaar uit Nieuw Guinea weer te Den Helder, Feb 4 1955 Bestanddeelnr 906-9672

Hr. Ms. Van Kinsbergen na 3 jaar uit Nieuw Guinea weer te Den Helder, Feb 4 1955 Bestanddeelnr 906-9673

Van Kinsbergen 1954 Janes

By the time she returned to the Netherlands on 5 February 1955, her 16-year career was all but over. She served as an accommodation ship (pennant A 876) in Vlissingen from 1 November 1955 and would continue in that reduced role until 29 May 1959, when she was stricken.

From left to right, the decommissioned artillery training ship/frigate Van Kinsbergen (A 876) and the frigate Ternate (F 812, ex-M 816, ex-HMAS Kalgoorlie, 1946-1956) lay up at the Marine Etablisement Amsterdam in the early 1960s. NIMH 2158_001595

In five years, the Dutch disposed of eight frigates. Flores on 1 May 1955. Soemba in Jan 1956. Jan van Brakel in Aug. 1957. Batjan, Boeroe, and Ceram in 1958. Johan Maurits van Nassau was sold for scrap in January 1960 for 257,650 florins and was broken up at Diemen. Van Speijk was stricken from the active list in 1960.

Van Kinsbergen lingered until 19 February 1974, when she was towed to Fa. Van Heyghen, Ghent, Belgium, for scrapping, her value listed as 515,500 florins.

Epilogue

The “Flying Dutchman’s” myriad of interactions with U.S. Naval forces during WWII, particularly while working under COMCARIBSEAFRON, are cataloged extensively in the National Archives, as are her Bureau of Ships plans and reports from the October-November 1942 refit in Norfolk. Speaking of plans, dozens of pages of her original drawings are digitized online. 

A Den Haag bar, Gastropub Van Kinsbergen, celebrates not only the admiral but also our training ship/gunboat/cruiser, collecting various militaria and relics of her from around the world, including the ship’s crest, salvaged from an antique dealer in Turkey.

As for Van Kinsbergen’s crew, her first skipper, KLtz JLK Hoeke, after a stint in command of the Dutch submarine tender/auxiliary cruiser Colombia (18 Aug 1941-27 Feb. 1943, when she was sunk by U 516 near Simonstown) died in Wallington, England, in March 1944, aged 50, during the “Baby Blitz.” He is buried in Loenen.

Her second wartime skipper, the DSO-wearing KLtz Hellingman, survived the war and retired in December 1945 as a full captain, concluding 30 years of honorable service. The hero of Ijmuiden passed in 1979, aged 85.

Her third and fourth WWII skippers, Willinge and Gauw, would both rise to wear admiral stars post-war and pass in 1989 and 1967, respectively.

The Dutch Navy recycled the name Van Kinsbergen for a Kortenaer-class frigate, F 809, which entered service in 1980, served for 15 years, and is still in the Greek Navy.

Hr.Ms. Van Kinsbergen (F809) Kortenaer-class frigate NIMH 2158_014137

Keeping the name alive, the first purpose-built naval training vessel for the Dutch Navy, MOV Van Kinsbergen (A902), entered service in 1999. Built by Damen (who else?) she is a trim little 136-footer that typically ships 16 students of the Dutch Royal Naval College (Koninklijk Instituut voor de Marine) around 200 days each year.

Dutch Navy naval training vessel MOV Van Kinsbergen (A902)

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

If you like this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships, you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

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