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Warship Wednesday 18 March 2026: A Lake by any Other Name

Posted on March 18, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

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 18 March 2026: A Lake by any Other Name

Via the New Zealand Navy Museum, Torpedo Bay, photo AAT 0005

Above we see the very Commonwealth-oriented Loch-class frigate HMNZS Tutira (F 571) with a bone in her teeth off Korea between August 1950 and April 1951.

Built in Tyneside, she served with a Canadian crew under a different name during WWII before shipping to her new home a world away with a Kiwi crew– and a much different war against a new enemy.

The Lochs

The 151 frigates of the River class, built in 29 yards across three continents between May 1941 and May 1946, were a baseline for anti-submarine escorts in the British Royal and Commonwealth nations. While built in five slightly different groups, the Rivers were all generally 1,500 tons light/2,000 tons full load displacement, 301 feet overall length, and with a 36-foot beam. Using twin reciprocating steam engines that could generate about 5,500 shp, they could make 20 knots and steam for 7,000 at an economical 12.

Manned by a ~100-man crew, they carried a couple of 4″/40s augmented by an AAA suite but were primarily outfitted as sub-busters with a Hedgehog projector, up to eight depth charge throwers, two depth charge rails, and allowance for as many as 150 “ash cans.”

River-class frigates fitting out at Vickers Canada, 1944

Where the Lochs were an incremental improvement over the Rivers was that they were gently larger (307 feet oal), were simplified in construction, used mercantile engineering machinery, and had an allowance for a single 4″/40 mount, then ditching the Hedgehog for a pair of triple-barreled Mark IV Squid ASW mortars. Each Squid could project three 440-pound depth bombs to 275 yards abeam.

The overall layout of the Loch class frigates. Note the single 4″/40 mount forward, followed by two Squids on the forecastle. Her quad 40mm Mark VII QF 2-pounder Pom Pom gun was aft, while two 40mm singles and as many as eight 20mm Oerlikons were arrayed abeam.

Installed on only some 70 RN and Commonwealth frigates and corvettes during the war, Squid’s first successful use was by the Loch-class frigate HMS Loch Killin on 31 July 1944, when she sank U-333.

HMCS Iroquois and Swansea at Halifax with two Squid ASW mortars shown forward. The system was credited with sinking 17 submarines in 50 attacks over the course of the war – a success ratio of 2.9 to 1. MIKAN SWN0284

Anti-Submarine Weapons: Anti-submarine Mortar Mark IV Squid launchers and loading apparatus on the forecastle of Loch class corvette, HMS Loch Fada, in Gladstone Dock, Liverpool. 27 October 1944 IWM (A 26153)

Royal Navy sailors loading a Squid anti-submarine mortar.

Battle class destroyer HMS Barrosa steams through the wake of her Squid anti-submarine mortar system, showing the usefulness of its triple-barreled format. IWM (A 33111)

The Loch design catered to small yards with limited infrastructure through the miracle of prefabricated modular construction techniques. No subassembly of the ship would be larger than 29 feet long, 8.5 feet wide, and 8.5 feet tall, with a maximum weight of 2.5 tons to allow for easy lift by even the most modest of crane and rail systems. As much as 80 percent of the ship could be prefabbed and then sent for assembly in the graving dock, with great effort meant to eliminate curves in favor of straight-line construction.

The late-war sensor fit was advanced compared to what RN escorts were working with just a few years earlier, with the Lochs carrying Type 277 radars (good for detecting high flying aircraft out to 40 miles and surface contacts at 20) and Type 144 ASDIC with Type 147B depth finding sonars.

Using a pair of VT4cyl (18.5, 31 & 38.5, 38.5 x 30ins) engines and two Admiralty 3-drum boilers, they could gen up 5,500 hp and push it out on twin screws. With 724 tons of fuel oil carried, these ships were slightly slower than the 20-knot Rivers, typically hitting 19.5 knots on trials and 18 or so when dirty and fully loaded at 2,200 tons displacement, but had a higher cruising speed (15 knots vs 12) for a 7,000nm range.

Loch class frigate HMS Loch Insh, October 1944 IWM (FL 14742)

With class leader HMS Loch Achanalt (K424) ordered from Henry Robb Limited, Leith in July 1942, the first completed Lochs only started arriving in the fleet in early 1944.

While 110 hulls were planned and 82 ordered from at least 10 yards, peace intervened, and only 28 were completed, the rest being canceled or, in the case of 26, converted to Bay class AAA frigates for Pacific service with a much reduced depth charge capacity and no Squid mortars to allow room for a roughly doubled gun battery.

Meet Loch Morlich

Our subject is the only warship named for the peaceful 5,000-foot freshwater loch (Mhor Thalamic in Gaelic) in the Badenoch and Strathspey area of Highland, Scotland, near Aviemore. Ordered 13 February 1943 as Yard No. 1784 from the fine Tyneside firm of Swan Hunter, Wallsend, for construction at the Neptune Yard in Low Walker, the future HMCS Loch Morlich (K 517) was laid down five months later on 15 July 1943.

Loch Morlich was one of eight Loch class frigates ordered from Swan Hunter, with sister Loch Shin (K 421) ordered five months prior. Sister Loch Cree was instead completed by Swan as the South African Navy’s SAS Natal (K 10). Meanwhile, two other Swan-built sisters, the planned Loch Assynt and Loch Torridon, were instead completed post-war as the unarmed depot ships Derby Haven and Woodbridge Haven. Of the rest, Swan was told to cancel the planned Loch Griam, Loch Kirbister, and Loch Lyon as the war ended.

Morlich’s sister, HMSAS Natal (K 10), a South African Loch class frigate fitting out, 5 March 1945. One of three Lochs completed for the South African Navy, she would go on to sink the German submarine U-714 on 14 March, only four hours after having left Swan! IWM A 28216

Launched 25 January 1944, Loch Morlich was bound for Canadian service and fully Canadian manned with her first skipper, T/A/LCDR Leslie Lewendon Foxall, RCNVR, assuming command while she was fitting out on 6 March 1944. Foxall had commanded the smaller Flower-class corvette HMCS Chilliwack (K 131) for two years on Atlantic convoy runs, so he knew his trade.

War!

With WWII well into its sixth year, Loch Morlich broke out her colors on 17 July 1944 and was assigned to the 8th Canadian Escort Group. Two other Lochs likewise went to the Canadians, Loch Achanalt (to the 6th CEG) and Loch Alvie (9th CEG), in July and August, respectively.

Morlich’s workups in the Western Approaches were delayed due to accidents while training, but she eventually made ready and sailed with her first convoys, MKS 067G and SL 176MK, on 17-18 November.

Loch Morlich CTB016772

HMS Loch Morlic (K 517) secured to a buoy on the Tyne. IWM FL 6042

She would clock in on at least six other convoys over the next five months, most of them under the command of Lt. George Frederick Crosby, RCNVR, who took over from Foxall in December 1944.

The Lochs were on hand to corral the last of Donitz’s steel sharks at sea in May 1945.

Loch class frigate HMCS Loch Alvie (K 428), and a surrendered U-boat, May 1945. (Library and Archives Canada Photo, MIKAN No. 4950920, color)

The class is credited with assisting in the sinking of at least 17 U-boats as vetted by post-war examination boards.

After VE-Day, it was decided that the three Canadian-manned Lochs should return to England to prep for possible Pacific service under RN control. Morlich returned to Sheerness, and her Canadian crew was released on 20 June 1945, apparently returning home with the ship’s HMCS-marked bell. Paid off, the frigate was reduced to Reserve status.

Her RN crew never came, preempted by VJ Day.

No Lochs were lost in combat.

Meet Tutira

While some had thought the post-WWII New Zealand Squadron should be built around one of the RN’s many surplus aircraft carriers–after all, Canada and Australia had gotten into the flattop game as well– and, indeed, the Colossus-class carrier HMS Glory had operated from New Zealand as part of J Force in 1946, taking RNZAF Squadron No. 14 to Japan for occupation duties, RADM George Walter Gillow Simpson CB, CBE, head of the New Zealand Navy Staff in the late 1940s, instead championed for a smaller, more anti-submarine, force.

A series of non-violent mutinies among the ships of the NZ fleet in April 1947 over poor living and working conditions, coupled with outrageously low pay, further emphasized the downshift from such lofty carrier goals, and J Force returned home from occupation duties by September 1948, its mission complete.

While over 10,000 men served in the RNZN and RNZNVR during WWII on 60 commissioned ships, by the late 1940s, the peacetime New Zealand fleet shrank to just 2,900 officers and men, enough to man two 5,900-ton light (5.25-inch gunned) Dido class cruisers (HMNZS Black Prince and Bellona, later Royalist), six surplus ASW frigates, four 1,000-ton Bathurst-class escort minesweepers, eight minesweeping trawlers (including the famous Kiwi and Tui), the disarmed River-class frigate Lachlan used as a survey ship, a dozen 72-foot MLs, as well as miscellaneous tenders and tugs.

The half-dozen above-mentioned “surplus ASW frigates” were laid up Lochs that were sold to NZ for the princely sum of £1,500,000 for the lot, weapons included, transferred between 13 September 1948 and 11 April 1949 after refits. Loch Morlich in particular went for £228,250.

Taking a page from their original loch names, in NZ service they earned names of lakes from their new home country, with Loch Eck becoming HMNZ Hawea, Loch Achray – Kaniere, Loch Achanalt – Pukaki, Loch Katrine – Rotoiti, Loch Shin – Taupo, and our Loch Morlich now HMNZS Tutira. They kept their old pennant numbers, just changing the K to an F, with Loch Morlich (K 517), for example, becoming Tutira (F 517) in New Zealand service.

HMNZS Pukaki (formerly Loch Achanalt) and two other Loch class frigates of the Royal New Zealand Navy

HMNZS Taupo, a Loch class frigate of the Royal New Zealand Navy, Auckland Anniversary Regatta, 29 January 1951

Loch-class frigate HMNZS Hawea (F422), formerly HMS Loch Eck (K422), photographed in 1955

HMNZS Tutira F 517

The NZ Lochs were soon frolicking in their home waters in exercises with the British East Indies Fleet and RAN.

15 March 1950. Ships of the Australian and New Zealand naval fleets are arriving at Auckland for combined naval exercises. HMNZS Tutira (left) and Pukaki (middle). Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1370-U045-08.

March 1950. HMNZS Pukaki (F424) and other frigates in Akaroa Harbour during combined naval exercises of the Royal New Zealand and Australian Navies. The exercises included the British submarine HMS Telemachus, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Sydney, four New Zealand frigates-HMNZS Taupo, Rotoiti, Tutira, and Pukaki-the Australian frigate HMAS Murchison, the destroyers HMAS Bataan and Warramunga, and the cruisers HMNZS Bellona and HMAS Australia. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1370-313-15.

March 1950. The cruiser HMAS Australia (D84) in the foreground with other ships in Akaroa Harbour during combined naval exercises of the Royal New Zealand and Australian Navies. The exercises included the British submarine HMS Telemachus, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Sydney, four New Zealand frigates-HMNZS Taupo, Rotoiti, Tutira, and Pukaki-the Australian frigate HMAS Murchison, the destroyers HMAS Bataan and Warramunga, and the cruisers HMNZS Bellona and HMAS Australia. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1370-313-12

March 1950.Aircraft and crew on the deck of HMAS Sydney (note her 805 Squadron Hawker Sea Furies and 816 Squadron Fairey Fireflies) with an unidentified frigate behind during combined naval exercises of the Royal New Zealand and Australian navies in Akaroa Harbour. The exercises included the British submarine HMS Telemachus, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Sydney, four New Zealand frigates-HMNZS Taupo, Rotoiti, Tutira, and Pukaki-the Australian frigate HMAS Murchison, the destroyers HMAS Bataan and Warramunga, and the cruisers HMNZS Bellona and HMAS Australia. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1370-313-18

On 12 May 1950, LCDR Peter James Hill Hoare, RN, assumed command of Tutira. Born just months before Jutland, the 34-year-old Hoare had graduated from the Nautical College at Pangbourne and earned his lieutenant’s stripe in 1938, going on to command the sloop HMS Bridgewater (L 01) and frigate HMS Hoste (K 566) on Atlantic convoy duties during WWII. He would soon be in his and Tutira’s second war.

Korea

Just three days after North Korea invaded its democratic neighbor to the South, New Zealand answered the call of the United Nations and said it would be dispatching two warships.

Those ships were our Loch Morlich/Tutira and Loch Achanalt/Pukaki, which ironically were two-thirds of the Lochs that had served with the Canadians during WWII.

As noted by the NZ Navy Museum, Torpedo Bay:

On the 3rd of July, HMNZS Tutira and Pukaki left Auckland. The ships arrived in Korea on the 27th of July and were given an escort role with up to four convoys a week. The assigned task of the frigates was described as the most thankless of the sea war – ‘dull, daily routine patrol’. However, this work was of vital importance to the United Nations cause in Korea. The commander of the U.S. Naval Forces, Vice Admiral Joy, noted ‘The unspectacular role of carrying personnel and supplies to Korea was perhaps the Navy’s greatest contribution’.

Skipped over in that description is the fact that the two NZ frigates were on hand for the famed amphibious landings at Inchon on 15 September 1950 as part of TG 90.7 (the screening and protective group) and patrolled the waters just off the bridgehead to guard the Marines ashore from potential seaborne attack.

Then came use with the U.S. Navy task group off Wonson in October. It was there that one of Loch Morlich’s crew, Petty Officer Henry Matthew Blizzard, was killed by shrapnel from an exploding mine, one of just three RNZN personnel killed during the war.

The NZ frigates remained in Korean waters until early November, when they were sent to Sasebo, Japan, for quick refit.

An RN photographer caught up to Tutira in Japan in November 1950 and captured some great images of her crew, which included several English lads and at least one Scot.

November 1950. The Asdic team of the Tutira kept constant watch for 42 days. In the harbor, they are engaged in depth charge equipment. A/B M Anderson, Tekuiti, North Island, New Zealand; A/B M M Clark, Wellington, New Zealand; L/S J Belcher, Torbay; A/B M W Bailey, Waitara, N Island, New Zealand; A/B R Allister, Liverpool; A/B M R Lewis, Christchurch, New Zealand. IWM 31760.

AB J Teaika, Christchurch, New Zealand, Tutira’s Quartermaster. IWM A 31759.

HMNZS Tutira’s port Oerlikon crew at action stations. Note the old tin plate helmets, certainly quaint in 1950. Leading Seaman B J Mason, Taihape, N Island, New Zealand; and Able Seaman A B Tripp, Wembley, England. IWM A 31754.

HMNZS Tutira. On the signal platform, left to right: Signalman R H (Curly) Richardson, Masterson, North Island, New Zealand; Signalman R P Davies, Morden, Surrey, England; Signalman C J Pitcher, Ringwood, Hants, England; Leading Signalman P J Stewart, Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand. IWM A 31755.

Tutira Galley staff, right to left: P/O Cook R Lowndes, Worthing, Sussex; Cook D Hornsby, Sheffield; Cook D W Jackman, Guildford, Surrey; Cook (O) A Davidson, New Plymouth, New Zealand; Cook M Pickard, Christchurch; Cook T Goddard, Southampton. IWM A 31757

Some of Tutira’s engine room company. Stoker Mech V G Brightwell, Auckland; Stoker Mech W Coppins, Ashford, Kent; Stoker Mech J O’Grady, Manchester; Stoker R A Blann, Epsom, Surrey; Stoker P/O J V Murray, Hythe, Kent; Stoker P/O A C Cameron, Auckland; Stoker Mech B A Gabb, Larkworth, New Zealand; Stoker Mech K D Bickham, Auckland, New Zealand; Stoker Mech W A Page, Deptford; ERA W S Watson, Christchurch, New Zealand; Stoker P/O J Adams, Aberdeen, Scotland; ERA C J de Larue, Auckland, New Zealand. IWM A 31758

Early 1951 saw Tutira and Pukaki patrolling Korea’s coast, supporting the evacuations from Inchon and Chinampo, and later supporting ROKN mine-clearing operations. In particular, they took turns operating with the South Korean Navy minesweepers YMS 502 and YMS 503 between 15 March and 7 April.

RNZN frigate crews in Korea often went ashore in several “Nelsonian” night raids against coastal targets and took several prisoners for intelligence gathering. One of Tutira’s former sailors, Able Seaman Robert Marchioni, who joined the crew of her sister Rotoiti, was killed ashore on 26 August 1951 on one such nocturnal raid near Sogon-ni while trying to do a prisoner grab on a Chinese gun emplacement. Marchioni’s body was never recovered.

While Pukaki was relieved by sister Rotoiti in February 1951, Tutira remained on station for three more months until relieved by sister Hawea, only arriving back home in Devonport on 30 May, having steamed 35,400 miles and having been away from New Zealand for nearly 11 months. LCDR Hoare and two ratings were awarded a Mention in Despatches, and the ship earned her only battle honor (Korea 1950-51).

New Zealand’s naval involvement in the Korean War lasted three years and involved all six of its Lochs, with the last, Kaniere, returning home on 2 March 1954. Almost half the manpower of the RNZN– approximately 1,350 officers and ratings- shipped out for Korean waters over those nearly four years. In their eight tours (Rotoiti and Hawea both went twice), the New Zealand Lochs steamed 339,584 nautical miles and fired 71,625 rounds of ammunition in action.

Kayforce, a New Zealand Army artillery and engineer detachment that served in Korea from December 1950 onward with the 27th British Commonwealth Infantry Brigade, saw 4,600 men rotate through its ranks before it was finally brought home in July 1957, suffering 42 deaths and 79 wounded.

New Zealand’s 16 Field Regiment fired 800,000 rounds in the Korean War- far more than any Kiwi regiment fired in World War II- and the conflict was described as an “artilleryman’s paradise.” National Library PA1-f-113-1861

End time

After service with the 11th Flotilla and fleet exercises with the Australians, in August 1953, the well-traveled Tutira was put into reserve at Auckland, then partially refitted and given limited sea trials in late June 1954. Following these trials, she was partially cocooned and not modernized as her sister vessels had been. Placed in extended reserve, she was slowly and extensively cannibalized for parts to keep her active duty sisters on the job.

In February 1957, with the realization that, under SEATO, a future Pacific War would likely see combat against roaming Soviet submarines, the NZ government ordered a pair of Type 12 (Rothesay) class ASW frigates to be built eight months apart in Britain at Thornycroft and White, respectively. Named HMNZS Otago (F 111) and Taranaki (F 148), the 2,500-ton frigates were modern with a Seacat missile system, Limbo depth charge mortars, and a twin 4.5-inch turret. They were followed by a third, improved Type 12 (Leander) class, HMNZS Waikato (F 55) in 1966, while a fourth Type 12, HMS Blackpool (F 77) was leased from the RN.

These new vessels meant the New Zealand admiralty could divest itself of its obsolete WWII-era cruisers and frigates. Black Prince reverted to RN control and was scrapped in Japan in 1962, while Royalist was decommissioned in 1966, likewise reverting to the RN for disposal.

New Zealand Lochs, Jane’s, 1960

Of the Lochs in NZ service, Taupo and Tutira were sold for scrap to a Hong Kong-based broker on 15 December 1961, with Hawea and Pukaki following in September 1965. The final pair, Rotolti and Kanire, by then classed as 2nd Rate Escorts, served until they were disposed of in 1966.

October 1961. The frigates HMNZS Tutira F517 (right) and HMNZS Taupo (left) off Cape Reinga en route to Hong Kong, where they were sold for scrap. In the center, the Otapiri tows the tug Atlas to Whangaparāoa Harbor for repairs after its towline fouled the seabed five miles north of Cape Reigna. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1370-029-22-02

Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1370-029-22-03

HMNZS Rotoiti paying off, 1965, Loch class frigate. Image AAR 0032

As far as her Loch class sisters still afloat elsewhere, the RN kept a couple in service as F-pennant frigates (Loch Lomond and Loch Killisport) until as late as 1965, while Loch Fada served as a missile test bed until 1970– vetting Sea Wolf. One interesting sister who began life as Loch Eil was converted to a Bay class AAA frigate (Herne Bay), finally became the survey ship HMS Dampier, and was kept until 1968.

Of interest, Dampier, limping along with a broken shaft from Freetown to Chatham in December 1967, hoisted three lug sails and a set of square sails made from awning canvas to gain an extra knot or two to make England just in time for Christmas– thus is the pluck of frigatemen.

HMS Dampier (A303) – ex Loch-class frigate, survey ship. 1967 under sail

The South Africans kept their trio of Lochs active well into the 1970s, with the last, SAS Good Hope (ex-Loch Boisdale) scuttling in December 1978, the final member of the class. She remains part of an artificial reef some 101 feet under False Bay near Cape Town.

Epilogue

One of the Loch Morlich’s/Tutira’s 3-pounder guns has been preserved ashore at the stone frigate HMNZS Philomel, the RNZN base at Devonport, Auckland.

Her 1944-marked HMCS Loch Morlich bell, presumably removed before she went to New Zealand, has long been in private hands and was sold at auction in Boston last year for less than $3,000.

A For Posterity’s Sake page exists for Loch Morlich’s RCN veterans.

She and her sister Pukaki are also remembered in maritime art, immortalized on their Korean deployment.

Painting of HMNZS Pukaki and HMNZS Tutira at Inchon by Colin Wynn.

CDR Peter James Hill Hoare, OBE, Tutira’s Korean War skipper, retired from the RN on 29 January 1966, capping 28 years in uniform. He passed away in 1984, aged 68.

The Loch Class Frigates Association was formed in 1993 but held its last reunion in 2019 and disappeared from the internet in 2023. Before they faded away, they established a memorial cairn at Alrewas in 2005, finished with stones from each of the 28 Lochs completed.

Colin Sweett via IWM

Likewise, a Loch class frigate is featured on the Korean War memorial plaque at Devonport, New Zealand, dedicated by the New Zealand Korea Veterans’ Association in 2000. It rests upon a stone donated by the city of Pusan.

As you may remember, Devonport Naval Base is where Tutira and Pukaki sortied from for Korea on 3 July 1950.

Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 3003-0217

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Warship Wednesday, 11 March 2026: Mighty Morrill

Posted on March 11, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Warship Wednesday 11 March 2026: Mighty Morrill

Detroit Publishing Collection in the Library of Congress. LC-D4-9007

Above we see, roughly some 125 years ago, the U.S. Revenue Cutter Morrill, forward, just off the sleek yacht Pathfinder, “standing guard at the first turn,” during the Canada’s Cup yacht race on Lake Ontario in 1901, when Pathfinder hosted the judges. The race was won by the Invader of Mr. Aemilius Jarvis, for the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, besting the yacht Cadillac of the Chicago Club in three of four races.

While dressed in gleaming white and buff, Morrill was a fighter when needed and had already seen service in one war with the “Mosquito Fleet” and had another on the schedule.

Meet Morrill

Our subject is the only U.S. warship named for President Ulysses S. Grant’s circa 1876-77 Treasury Secretary, Lot Myrick Morrill, a former Maine governor and longtime U.S. Senator who passed in 1883. As such, the vessel continued the cutter service’s common naming convention, which repeatedly used the names of past Treasury Secretaries, dating back to Alexander Hamilton.

Part of a trend in the 1880s-90s to build new cutters that could double as gunboats and dispatch boats for the Navy in time of war, USRC Morrill was steel-hulled and had a steam plant capable of pushing her at 13 knots on a compound steam plant (engine cylinders measuring 24 and 38 inches, with a 30-inch stroke). At the same time, her auxiliary schooner rig could be used to extend cruising range.

Some 145 feet overall with a 24-foot beam, Morrill displaced 288 tons and had a draft of just over 12 feet on a standard load. She was a forerunner of the six slightly larger 205-foot “Propeller-class” plow-bowed cruising cutters built 1896-98.

USRC Morrill, circa 1898-1917, while stationed on the Great Lakes, via the Edward J. Dowling Collection, University of Detroit-Mercy

USCG Morrill, circa 1916-1917 (note her “Coast Guard” life rings), while stationed on the Great Lakes, via the Edward J. Dowling Collection, University of Detroit-Mercy

USRC Morrill, circa 1898-1917, while stationed on the Great Lakes, via the Edward J. Dowling Collection, University of Detroit-Mercy

Morrill’s peacetime armament was a single light 6-pounder 57mm Hotchkiss QF gun forward, which could be quickly doubled and augmented with a 3-inch mount in time of war, with weight and space reserved for the extra ordnance. Cutters of the era typically shipped with 55 service rounds for their main gun and 110 blank charges for drill, salutes, or “shots across the bow.”

2nd LT Godfrey L. Carden instructing a 6-pounder gun crew aboard the Revenue Cutter Morill in South Carolina waters, circa 1892. Note the rarely-seen USRSC officer’s sword. Carden would later become the Captain of the Port for New York City in the Great War. USCGH Photo 210210-G-G0000-1002

A significant small arms locker of rifles and revolvers could arm half of her 40-man crew for duty ashore or in seizing vessels, be they bandits and smugglers in peacetime or enemy shipping in war. The service of the era was often called upon to restore law and order ashore, as exemplified in a famous incident where a squad from the revenue cutter McLane landed in Cedar Key, Florida, in 1890 to reclaim the town from its pistol-toting mayor and his gang of ruffians!

Morrill’s berth deck enlisted accommodations were considered spacious for the period and, if needed, would “readily admit of 70 men.”

Her magazine included provision for several large electrically detonated “wrecking mines” packed with as much as 238 pounds of guncotton, used in destroying derelicts– or in reducing hazardous icebergs and blasting paths in the ice sheet both on the Great Lakes and North Atlantic.

Back in the days of wooden-hulled fishing vessels and cargo schooners (sometimes loaded with buoyant cargo such as timber), abandoned vessels could often remain afloat for weeks and remain an enduring hazard to navigation, requiring the dangerous task of sending a wrecking crew in a small boat to rig the gun cotton mines to a waterlogged, unstable hulk.

Cutter destroying a derelict ‘A subject for Dynamite’ drawn by W. Taber, engraved by H. Davidson.

Derelict located by Revenue Cutter Seneca had drifted 285 miles, circa 1900. NARA 56-AR-006

Revenue Cutter McCulloch, attaching mines to destroy a derelict, circa 1900. National Archives Identifier 158884024. NARA Local Identifier 56-AR-63

Revenue Cutter Miami, Preparing to place mines to destroy derelict, circa 1900

Revenue Cutter Onondaga, Loading mines for destroyed sunken wreck, circa 1900. NARA AR-066

Built in 1889 by the Pusey and Jones Corp., Wilmington, Delaware, for a cost of $72,600, USRC Lot M. Morrill (typically only ever seen as “Morrill” in paperwork) was commissioned on 10 October of that year.

In typical Revenue Cutter fashion, her crew crossed decked from an older cutter that was decommissioned in the same stroke– the Civil War-era USRC Naugatuck, which had been based at New Bern, North Carolina since 1865.

Taking up Naugatuck’s old beat– which her experienced crew was familiar with– Morrill was stationed at Wilmington, North Carolina, for her first homeport.

In March 1891, our new cutter performed a then novel inland passage, a military experiment, making it the 155 miles from Charleston, South Carolina, to Fernandina, Florida via the North Edisto, Ashley, Wadmalaw, Stono, and Amelia rivers. She did so with sometimes just a foot of water under her keel and just 30 feet of wetted width between banks as opposed to her 24-foot beam! It was often slow going, especally in tight bends, and in some stretches the charts of the river were quite bad, but via leading with a small boat ahead of her bow dropping lead to verify depth, the task was accomplished in three winding days, only running up on a mudbank once –some six miles up the Wadmalaw– and able to free herself with minor effort. At night, the cutter lay up, ablaze with electric light, proving much the attraction to the locals who came out to watch the curious “bluejackets” in the marsh.

Still, she proved, at least in theory, that a squadron of torpedo boats could run the shallow brackish and fresh waterways from Philadelphia to Fernandina– save for a short break between Moorehead City, North Carolina, and Bulls Bay, South Carolina– keeping well hidden from a European blockading squadron.

With Morrill’s officers dutifully updating their chart and leaving range stakes behind them, it was deemed that, with a little minor dredging here and there, a blue water vessel under 175 feet overall drawing less than 11 feet could make the run from Philly to Florida almost completely inland, enabling dispersed operations of torpedo boat squadrons which could run out from river mouths and shoreline bays to strike enemy battlelines then retreat into their havens.

It should be noted that the USS Cushing (Torpedo Boat #1), which entered service in 1890, was only 140 feet overall with a draft of just less than five feet, and it was only when Farragut (TB-11) joined the fleet in 1899 that American torpedo boats stretched longer than 175 feet.

While the river haven tactic wasn’t actively pursued much further in the U.S., Morrill’s marsh cruise did help lay the way for today’s Intracoastal Waterway, which has rambled 3,000 miles from Boston to Brownsville since 1949 and is key for the movement of commerce in the country today.

Anyway, speaking of Fernandina, Florida, and points south, in early January 1895, Cuban exile leader Jose Marti completed preparations in the area to attempt to ignite a revolt against Spanish colonial despotism in his homeland. He and his followers purchased three small ships, the Amadis, Baracoa, and Lagonda, then outfitted them to carry his freedom fighters and supplies to Cuba. These were foiled by the Treasury Department, which had been ordered to southern Florida to abort such filibuster activities, with Morrill helping with the seizure of Lagonda at Fernandina directly.

From 1895 to 1898, cutters, including our Morrill, Boutwell, Colfax, Forward, McLane, and Winona, patrolled the Straits of Florida to enforce neutrality laws amid attempts to launch illegal expeditions to Cuba. According to Commandant Capt. Charles F. Shoemaker, these efforts required constant vigilance. One tug, Dauntless, was seized by cutters no less than three times. The cutters seized seven ships (besides Dauntless, including all three of Marti’s), detained 12 suspected violators, and disrupted two organized filibustering plots (Marti’s and one by Cuba Gen. Enrique Collazo) before the USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana harbor in February 1898.

Remember the Maine!

With the war drum beating, Morrill and her fellow cutters were soon mobilized a full month before war was declared by Congress on 25 April 1898.

On 24 March, President McKinley ordered Morrill, along with the cutters Gresham (206 foot), Manning (206 foot), Windom (170 foot), Woodbury (138 foot), Hamilton (133 foot), Hudson (94 foot), Guthrie (85 foot) and Calumet (95 foot), “with their officers and crews, be placed under the direction of the Secretary of the Navy, and cooperate with the Navy, until further orders…”

Before the conflict was over, 13 revenue cutters were transferred to naval service, staffed by 98 officers and 562 enlisted RCS men. Eight would serve at sea with the North Atlantic Squadron, one (McCulloch) famously fought with Dewey in the Philippines, and four patrolled the U.S. West Coast.

Morrill proceeded to Norfolk Navy Yard and was gently made ready for war, largely via adding at least one extra deck gun, which had varied widely in reports from a second 6-pounder to a gun as large as a 6-incher! Her crew was boosted to nine officers (including a surgeon) and 47 enlisted, allowing for an extra gun crew and ammo handlers.

Morrill’s wardroom during the Spanish-American War:

Captain Horatio Davis Smith, commanding
First Lieutenant John Cassin Cantwell, executive
Second Lieutenant F.A. Levis, navigator
Second Lieutenant C.S. Craig
Third Lieutenant Henry G. Fisher
Chief Engineer E.P. Webber
First Assistant Engineer William Robinson
Second Assistant Engineer F.G. Snyder
Surgeon J. Spencer Hough

USRC Morrill at the Norfolk Navy Yard, Portsmouth, Virginia, 22 April 1898. Photograph from the Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives. 19-N-19-21-10

Morrill and her fellow cutters Hudson, Hamilton, and Windom would join the 1st division of the North Atlantic Squadron under the bewhiskered Commodore John Adams Howell (USNA, 1858, best known to history for his early locomotive torpedo). A veteran of the Battle of Mobile Bay, Howell’s division included his flag, the 4,800-ton USS San Francisco I (Cruiser No. 5), the cruiser Montgomery (C-9), four monitors, and 15~ gunboats, with many of the latter being armed yachts quickly converted.

Morrill linked up with the three-masted 204-foot Annapolis-class gunboat USS Vicksburg (PG-11) for the first time on 31 March at Hampton Roads. The two would become partners off Havana, with Vicksburg’s logs mentioning our cutter at least 31 times between then and 14 August. The two worked in conjunction with Vicksburg’s sistership Annapolis, the 275-foot armed yacht USS Mayflower (PY-1), and the plucky 88-foot armed tug USS Tecumseh (YT-24, ex-Edward Luckenbach).

On 24 April 1898, the up-armed Morrill, Hudson, and Hamilton, bound for Howell’s “Mosquito Fleet,” passed through Hampton Roads and, after asking formal permission of the Commodore, proceeded to Key West. From that point, they joined the Navy ships of the Cuban blockading fleet.

After delivering dispatches to the flagship USS New York, Morrill joined the blockade station 5 miles west of the Havana entrance on 5 May and soon captured the Spanish schooner Orienta. One of 25 seized Spanish merchantmen sold as prizes at Key West on 21 June 1898, Orienta must have been either very small or in poor condition, or both, as the vessel, including cargo and equipment, only brought $350 at auction (about $12K when adjusted for inflation) — the lowest of all 25.

It was off Havana that Vicksburg and Morrill became targets for Spanish coastal batteries mounting heavy 10- and 12-inch German pieces for about 20 minutes, with Smith noting in his official report, “came very close” and damaged the bridge with a fragment of shrapnel.

As chronicled in Our War with Spain for Cuba’s Freedom by Trumbull White:

The Spanish set a trap one day during the blockade. The wily Spaniards arranged a trap to send a couple of our ships to the bottom. A small schooner was sent out from Havana harbor to draw some of the Americans into the ambuscade. The ruse worked like a charm. The Vicksburg and the Morrill, in the heat of the chase and in their contempt for Spanish gunnery, walked straight into the trap that had been set for them. Had the Spaniards possessed their souls in patience but five minutes longer, not even their bad gun practice would have saved our ships, and two more of our vessels would lie at the bottom within two lengths of the wreck of the ill-starred Maine.

Friday evening, the Vicksburg and the Morrill, cruising to the west of Morro Castle, were fired on by the big guns of the Cojimar batteries. Two shots were fired at the Vicksburg, and one at the Morrill. Both fell short, and both vessels, without returning the fire, steamed out of range. It would have been folly to have done otherwise. But this time the Spaniards had better luck. The schooner they had sent out before daylight ran off to the eastward, hugging the shore, with the wind on her starboard quarter. About three miles east of the entrance to the harbor, she came over on the port tack. A light haze fringed the horizon, and she was not discovered until three miles offshore, when the Mayflower made her out and signaled the Morrill and Vicksburg.

Captain Smith, of the Morrill, and Commander Lilly, of the Vicksburg, immediately slapped on all steam and started in pursuit. The schooner instantly put about and ran for Morro Castle before the wind. By doing so, she would, according to the well-conceived Spanish plot, lead the two American warships directly under the guns of the Santa Clara batteries. These works are a short mile west of Morro and are a part of the defenses of the harbor. There are two batteries, one at the shore, which has been recently thrown up, of sand and mortar, with wide embrasures for eight-inch guns, and the other on the crest of the rocky eminence which juts out into the water of the gulf at the point.

The upper battery mounts modern 10-inch and 12-inch Krupp guns behind a six-foot stone parapet, in front of which are twenty feet of earthwork and a belting of railroad iron. This battery is considered the most formidable of Havana’s defenses, except Morro Castle. It is masked and has not been absolutely located by the American warships. It is probably due to the fact that the Spanish did not desire to expose its position that the Vicksburg and Morrill are now afloat.

The Morrill and Vicksburg were about six miles from the schooner when the chase began. They steamed after her at full speed, the Morrill leading until within a mile and a half of the Santa Clara batteries. Commander Smith, of the Vicksburg, was the first to realize the danger into which the reckless pursuit had led them. He concluded it was time to haul off and sent a shot across the bow of the schooner.

The Spanish skipper instantly brought his vessel about, but while she was still rolling in the trough of the sea, with her sails flapping, an 8-inch shrapnel shell came hurtling through the air from the water battery, a mile and a half away. It passed over the Morrill between the pilothouse and the smokestack and exploded less than fifty feet on the port quarter. The small shot rattled against her side. It was a close call.

Two more shots followed in quick succession, both shrapnel. One burst close under the starboard quarter, filling the engine room with the smoke of the explosion of the shell, and the other, like the first, passed over and exploded just beyond.

The Spanish gunners had the range, and their time fuses were accurately set. The crews of both ships were at their guns. Lieutenant Craig, who was in charge of the bow 4-inch rapid-fire gun of the Morrill, asked for and obtained permission to return fire. At the first shot, the Vicksburg, which was in the wake of the Morrill, slightly in-shore, sheared off and passed to windward under the Morrill’s stern.

In the meantime, Captain Smith also put his helm to port, and was none too soon, for as the Morrill stood off, a solid 8-inch shot grazed her starboard quarter and kicked up tons of water as it struck a wave 100 yards beyond. Captain Smith said afterward that this was undoubtedly an 8-inch armor-piercing projectile, and that it would have passed through the Morrill’s boilers had he not changed his course in the nick of time.

All the guns of the water battery were now at work. One of them cut the Jacob’s ladder of the Vicksburg adrift, and another carried away a portion of the rigging. As the Morrill and the Vicksburg steamed away, their aft guns were used, but only a few shots were fired. The Morrill’s 6-inch gun was elevated for 4,000 yards and struck the earthworks repeatedly. The Vicksburg fired but three shots from her 6-pounder.

The Spaniards continued to fire shot and shell for twenty minutes, but the shots were ineffective. Some of them were so wild that they roused the American “Jackies” to jeers. The Spaniards only ceased firing when the Morrill and Vicksburg were completely out of range.

If all the Spanish gunners had been suffering from strabismus, their practice could not have been worse. But the officers of both the Morrill and Vicksburg frankly admit their own recklessness and the narrow escape of their vessels from destruction. They are firmly convinced that the pursuit of the schooner was a neatly planned trick, which almost proved successful.

If any one of the shots had struck the thin skin of either vessel, it would have offered no more resistance than a piece of paper to a rifle ball.

The accurate range of the first few shots is accounted for by the fact that the Spanish officers had ample time to make observations. The bearings of the two vessels were probably taken with a range-finder at the Santa Clara battery, and, as this battery is probably connected by wire with Morro, they were able to take bearings from both points, and by laborious calculations, they fixed the positions of the vessels pretty accurately. With such an opportunity for observation, it would have been no great trick for an American gunner to drop a shell down the smokestack of a vessel.

As soon as the ships sheered off after the first fire, the Spanish gunners lost the range, and their practice became ludicrous. If they had waited five minutes longer before opening fire, Captain Smith says it would have been well-nigh impossible to have missed the target.

By 28 May, Morrill was assigned duty as a guard ship at Tampa, which grew tense a week later when three Spanish warships were said to be closing on the roadstead there. She remained in the greater Tampa area until early August, when she was ordered to rejoin the blockade off Matanzas on the 11th, one that she was released from on the 14th with the cessation of hostilities.

She was then ordered to tow the small torpedo boat USS Ericsson back to Norfolk, where she arrived on the 21st. Morrill would be held there for another month on naval orders in reserve, just in case she was needed for further war service. She had suffered no casualties during the war and only very minor damage.

In addition to Orienta, Morrill is noted in her USCG history as also seizing the 3,364-ton French steamer, Lafayette, in conjunction with Annapolis, and the Espana, a little Spanish fishing sloop. Espana is marked as taken by the Morrill about three miles off Mariel, just after a sharp engagement. The USS Newport was close at hand at the time, and a prize crew made up from both ships brought the capture into Key West. The Espana sold at auction for $1,350 in prize money. Lafayette was later released after it was determined that she was not carrying Spanish soldiers or contraband and was permitted to continue to Havana, her declared destination.

Two of Morrill’s officers were later awarded Bronze West Indies Naval Campaign Medals under the authority of a joint resolution of Congress, approved on 3 March 1901.

White hull days

On 28 September 1898, after nearly a decade of tough service, Morrill, her extra wartime armament landed, left Norfolk for Philadelphia, to receive new boilers and undergo dry docking. Once complete, she shipped to her new homeport on the Great Lakes, replacing the larger 205-foot cutter Gresham, which had been cut in two to move to the East Coast during the SpanAm War, and the service was in no mood to bisect again to send her back.

Morrill arrived at her new home on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee on 19 November, closing out her busy year.

Later, shifting to Detroit, she would begin a very quiet time in her career, stretching some 17 years. Underway during the open shipping season, she patrolled the waters of Lakes Huron, St. Clair, Erie, and Ontario, aiding vessels in distress and enforcing navigation laws. When the ice came, she was laid up during the winter months.

Morrill became part of the service’s first Vessel Traffic Service (VTMS), established on 6 March 1896, to track the movement and anchorage of vessels and rafts in the St. Mary’s River from Point Iroquois on Lake Superior to Point Detour on Lake Huron.

Originally named the River Patrol Service, this first VTMS was comprised of the Revenue Cutter Morrell and lookout stations at Johnson’s Point, Middle Neebish Dyke, and Little Rapids Cut. The stations were connected by telegraph lines linked back to the Pittsburgh Steamship Company offices in Sault Sainte Marie. Throughout the next several years, many lookout stations were established and then closed as needs and funding levels fluctuated. At one point, there were as many as 11 active stations along the river. During the early days, lookouts communicated with passing ships by kerosene lanterns and signal flags. Often, messages were delivered to passing ships by lookouts rowing out to them in small dinghies.

USRC Morrill at a Great Lakes port, circa 1898-1917. Courtesy of Donald M. McPherson. NH 45730

An image from a dry plate negative of the freighter William E. Corey passing alongside an unidentified, white-hulled vessel at anchor, circa 1905, is almost certainly the Morrill. Library of Congress – Detroit Publishing Co. Collection LC-D4-21878

She performed lots of local community service, including providing the honor guard and salutes for Civil War monument dedications (for instance, at Two Rivers, Wisconsin, in 1900, and another at Kenosha the same summer).

The U.S. Revenue Cutter W.P. Fessenden (center), along with other vessels in the harbor at Kenosha, Wis., for the unveiling of the Soldiers Monument in Library Park on Decoration Day, May 30, 1900. The ship on the left is the steam yacht Pathfinder owned by F. W. Morgan, Chicago, Ill. On the right outboard is the U.S. Revenue Cutter Morrill, and inboard of that is the venerable U.S.S. Michigan. The photograph is part of the Louis Thiers Collection of the Kenosha History Center. It was taken by Louis Milton Thiers (1858-1950) and created from a glass plate negative.

In addition to her regular duties, she also patrolled many regattas, including the T. J. Lipton Cup regatta off Chicago, Illinois, in August of 1904.

In 1906, her cruising grounds included the waters between Niagara Falls through Lakes Erie, St. Clair, and Huron to the Straits of Mackinac.

It seems during this period that her port side was her most photogenic.

U.S. Revenue Cutter Morrill, at Detroit with her glad rags flying, likely for July 4th between 1900 and 1910. Note her boat in the water. Detroit Publishing Collection in the Library of Congress. LC-D4-34826

USRC Morrill before WWI, circa 1907, with her bow gun covered in canvas. Note the large building in the background, dressed with a Sherwin-Williams paint ad. Detroit Publishing Collection in the Library of Congress. LC-D4-22466

USRC Morrill before WWI. Note her understated bow scroll and 6-pounder. Detroit Publishing Collection in the Library of Congress. LC-D4-9016

Morrill at the Goodrich Company dock in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Port bow view of vessel at dock near harbor entrance, with lighthouse at right in 1912. Wisconsin Maritime Museum P82-37-10-62C

Morrill, the revenue cutter Tuscarora, and eight reserve gunboats: USS Dubuque (PG-17), at the time the training ship by the Illinois Naval Militia; USS Don Juan de Austria (Wisconsin Naval Militia), USS Wolverine (Pennsylvania Naval Militia), USS Dorothea and USS Essex (Ohio Naval Militia), USS Gopher (Minnesota Naval Militia), USS Hawk (Naval Militia of New York) and USS Yantic of the Michigan Naval Militia, were the featured guests of the Chicago Yacht Club’s August 10-17, 1912 Great Naval Pageant which included 400 swabs from the training station at Lake Bluff, fireworks, and the conclusion of a cruise of 2,000 motorboats carrying 15,000 passengers from the Central Plain and inland rivers to Chicago to “rediscover” Lake Michigan.

As the club had 10 bona fide warships on hand, a mock battle was staged with large yachts, armed with saluting cannons, fleshing out the battle line.

As for the naval pageant, preparations were underway to defend Chicago against an August 10 naval attack. Under the command of the gunboat Dubuque, the attacking fleet of the Hawk, Gopher, Don Juan de Austria, and the revenue cutter Morrill from Lake Erie would be pitted against the Tuscarora, Yantic, Wolverine, Dorothea, and Essex. No part of Chicago, from Michigan Avenue to Oak Park, would be safe from the 4” guns trained on the City which could drop 4” shells with precision anywhere within the City limits. Hydroplanes traveling 40 mph were also to be used to determine whether this type of craft would be of assistance in warfare.

From 12-14 September 1912, Morrill and Dubuque patrolled the course of the speedboat races held by the Motor Club of Buffalo in the Niagara River.

Morrill and USS Dubuque (PG-17) at the Niagara motor boat races in September 1912. Edward J. Dowling Collection, University of Detroit-Mercy

Morrill at the opening of the Livingstone Channel in the Detroit River on October 19, 1912. Edward J. Dowling Collection, University of Detroit-Mercy

She also clocked in on more sobering duties. In the late summer of 1913, she found the lost 6,322-ton ore carrier SS Charles S. Price turned turtle, 13 miles northeast of Port Huron, Michigan, “taking every witness with her.”

The Kaiser to St. Helena!

On 4 August 1914, Morrill, along with other cutters, was ordered to “observe neutrality laws” after the outbreak of the Great War in Europe. This kicked into overdrive when the service, now part of the U.S. Coast Guard, was transferred to the Navy on 6 April 1917 with the country’s entry into the war.

Morrill was soon pulled from her familiar Great Lakes home in Detroit to patrol the Atlantic coast for German submarines out of Philadelphia with the 4th Naval District.

Leaving Detroit on 10 November 1917, she called at Quebec City on her way out and found herself in crowded Halifax on the afternoon of 5 December, anchoring near Dartmouth Cove to take on fuel and water.

Being jammed out of the main roadway saved her from destruction the next morning, with the cutter and her crew spending a fortnight in a very different Halifax, rendering aid and assistance.

Halifax explosion, with HMS Highflyer shown in the channel, via the Halifax Naval Museum

As detailed by the NHHC in Morrill’s DANFS entry:

Just after 0800, 6 December, the old French Line freighter Mont Blanc, carrying a full cargo of bulk explosives, was involved in a collision with the Norwegian steamship Iona in the Narrows of Halifax Harbor. A fire broke out on Mont Blanc, and at 0905, the ship and cargo exploded in a tremendous blast that shook all of Halifax.

The most reliable casualty figures list 1,635 persons killed and 9,000 injured in the tragedy. Sixteen hundred buildings were destroyed, and nearly 12,000 more within an area of 16 miles were severely damaged. Property damage was estimated at $35 million.

Morrill, not seriously damaged, turned her attention to the needs ashore. A rescue and assistance party under 2d Lt. H. G. Hemingway rendered valuable aid while the cutter stood by to tow other craft from the danger zone.

Morrill departed Halifax on 18 December. Her services had come to the attention of Sir Cecil Spring Rice, the British Ambassador to the United States, in a letter dated 9 January 1918, Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, noted that Morrill, “though considerably damaged by the violent explosion of munitions on another ship, was the first to render assistance to the distressed inhabitants of the stricken city.”

Morrill in Navy service, photographed during World War I. NH 45729

The cutter-turned-gunboat would remain part of the 4th Naval District throughout 1918 and well into 1919, retaining her prewar skipper, Capt.(T) George E. Wilcox, USCG.

This notably included responding to the tanker SS Herbert L Pratt, which struck a mine laid by U-151 off Cape Henlopen in June 1918.

SS Herbert L. Pratt (American tanker, 1918) under salvage after striking a mine off Cape Henlopen, southeast of Lewes, Delaware, on 3 June 1918. Note the tug alongside. This ship later served as USS Herbert L. Pratt (ID # 2339). U.S. History and Heritage Command Photograph NH 14

USS SC-71 and USS SP-544 (ex-yacht Sea Gull) tied up with another Section Patrol boat at the Cape May Naval Base, Sewells Point, New Jersey, circa 1918. The ship in the background is a Coast Guard Cutter, probably USCGC Morrill. A Curtiss HS-2L seaplane is taxiing by. NH 42452

Morrill in dry dock at Camden, New Jersey, in December 1918. Courtesy of D.M. McPherson, 1974. NH 79741

Back to a changing Coast Guard

After 21 months under Navy orders, Morrill returned to USCG duties and was reassigned to the Lakes Division on 28 August 1919.

The two-time warrior, back on her old Detroit station, resumed a quiet life of patrolling regatta, saving lives, and interdicting smuggling– the latter a task grown more common after the Volstead Act took effect in 1920 and Motown became a hotbed of bootlegging from Canada.

Morrill, 1921, Janes, showing her with two 6-pounders and assigned to Detroit

In October 1925, she was reassigned to Boston to serve as a mothership for small fast picket boats attempting to keep “Rum Row” under control just off Cape Cod. It was on the way to her new station that, while near Shelbourne, Nova Scotia, one of her whaleboats with 10 enlisted aboard overturned in the cold water while returning to the cutter at night from liberty ashore. Tragically, nine of them perished, one of the USCG’s worst peacetime losses of life. The bodies were later recovered and brought back to Boston by the cutter Tampa for proper burial.

Morrill would again suffer at the hands of the sea in November 1926 when she sliced in two the George O. Knowles Wharf in Provincetown, at the northern tip of Cape Cod, during a storm, causing $100,000 worth of damage ashore and leaving the cutter aground.

Via the Scrapbooks of Althea Boxell, Provincetown History Preservation Project.

Pulled off the shore at Provincetown, and was soon back to work. In April 1927, she came to the rescue of the grounded schooner Etta Burns, which turned out to be a rumrunner with 500 cases of booze aboard.

Morrill saved the crew– then put them in shackles.

With new 165 and 240-foot cutters on the way, Morrill was decommissioned at Boston on 19 October 1928, completing an almost 40-year career.

She was sold to the Deepwater Fishing and Exploration Corp. (Antonio De Domenico) of New York City for the princely sum of $7,100. Renamed Evangeline, it doesn’t seem she saw much commercial use as the former cutter burned to the waterline at Rockway, Long Island, on 30 July 1930.

Epilogue

Few relics of Morrill remain. The USCG chose not to name another cutter after her, despite her honorable record, including service in two wars. Her plans and logbooks are in the National Archives, although not digitized.

Morrill’s SpanAm War skipper, Horatio Davis Smith, extensively documented voyages of various cutters, including the cutter Golden Gate doing “good service” during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and transporting President Taft across the bay in 1909, and the cutter McCullough being the first to pass through the Suez Canal. He retired and later wrote an early history of the Revenue Marine Service. He passed in Massachusetts in 1918, aged 73.

Her Great War skipper, George E. Wilcox, went on to command the Coast Guard destroyer Downes out of New London– one of 31 destroyers that formed the Coast Guard Destroyer Force during the Rum War– and was head of the service’s Personnel Bureau when he passed in 1931, aged 50. He is buried at Arlington.

Several young officers served aboard our cutter who went on to make their mark on history. Besides the above-mentioned Godfrey Cardin— who led 1,400 men (fully one quarter of the mobilized service!) as the Captain of the Port of New York during the Great War, future admirals Joseph Francis Farley (a later USCG Commandant) and Detlef Frederick Argentine de Otte— a mustang who enlisted in the cutter service as a seaman in 1886 and retired in 1931 as one of just sixteen Commodores (later promoted to RADM on the retired list) in the history of the Coast Guard.

Morrill’s third lieutenant during the Mont Blanc disaster in Halifax, Henry G. Hemingway, later served as the gunnery officer aboard the USS San Diego in 1918 and survived the mining of that cruiser by the U-156. He went on to command the cutter Snohomish in 1923 during a search-and-rescue case off Port Angeles that defied belief and earned him the Gold Lifesaving Medal for his actions in saving the entire crew of the SS Nika during a gale.

Nicknamed “Soo Traffic,” the U.S. Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Service St. Marys River carries the lineage of the old River Patrol Service, which Morrill joined in 1898, and is still in operation after almost 130 years. They logged some 61,532 vessels, including ferries, tour boats, tankers, and freighters, as they transited through the St. Marys River in 2010.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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Warship Wednesday 4 March 2026: Lucky Tartar

Posted on March 4, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Warship Wednesday 4 March 2026: Lucky Tartar

Photo by Harold William John Tomlin, Imperial War Museum catalog A 4114.

Above we see a cluster of happy ratings aboard the Tribal (Afridi) class destroyer HMS Tartar (G 43) in June 1941 after having bagged a German Heinkel in the slow crawl back to Scapa after helping sink Bismarck. They had several reasons to be proud of their little greyhound, as Tartar, some 85 years ago today, chalked up as many as five German vessels in the Norwegian Sea off the Lofoten Islands as part of Operation Claymore.

And that wasn’t even the hairiest of her surface actions during the war!

The Tribals

The Afridis were a new type of destroyer designed for the Royal Navy in the late 1920s off experience both in the Great War and to match the large, modern escorts on the drawing boards of contemporary naval rivals of the time.

The Royal Canadian Navy’s HMCS Huron (G24), in dazzle camouflage, is sailing out to sea during the Second World War, during one of her countless trans-Atlantic escorting runs. The Tribal-class destroyer, commissioned on July 28, 1943, also served in the Pacific theatre during the Korean War under the new pennant number 216.

These 378-foot vessels could make 36+ knots on a pair of geared steam turbines and a trio of Admiralty three-drum boilers, while an impressive battery of up to eight 4.7″/45 (12 cm) QF Mark XII guns in four twin CPXIX mountings gave them the same firepower as early WWI light cruisers (though typically just three turrets were mounted).

Twin Twin Mk XVI 4-inch mount on Commonwealth destroyer L M Tribal by Alex Colville 7.29.1944 19820303-226

Tartar’s “A” gun crew cleaning their guns back in port, 9 July 1944. Photo by Harold William John Tomlin IWM (A 23986)

Gun crew on Tribal-class destroyer HMCS Algonquin cleaning up their 4.7″/45 (12 cm) Mark XII guns after firing at the Normandy Beaches on 7 June 1944. Note that the crewman kneeling in the rear is holding a 4.7″ (12 cm) projectile. Library and Archives Canada Photograph MIKAN no. 3223884

Some 32 Afridis were planned in eight-ship flights: 16 for the RN (named after tribal warriors: HMS Eskimo, HMS Sikh, HMS Zulu, et al.), eight for the Royal Australian Navy, and eight for the Canadians. Of the Canadian ships, four were to be built by Vickers in the UK and the other four by Halifax shipyards in Nova Scotia. All the Canadian ships were to be named after First Nations tribes (Iroquois, Athabaskan, Huron, Haida, Micmac, Nootka, Cayuga, etc.)

An unidentified Tribal class destroyer in profile

Meet Tartar

Our subject is at least the eighth warship (the 17th if prizes and launches are included) to carry the name in the Royal Navy, going back to a 32-gun fifth rate launched in 1702. They had a storied past and earned our subject the carried-forward eight battle honors: Velez Malaga 1704, Lagos 1759, Ushant 1781, Dogger Bank 1781, Baltic 1855, Shimonoseki 1864, South Africa 1899-1900, and Dover Patrol 1914-18.

The Archer class torpedo cruiser HMS Tartar seen at the 1893 Columbian Naval Review on the Hudson in New York City via the LOC’s Detroit Postcard company collection. This sixth Tartar, in service from 1886 to 1906, is famous for her crew rushing dismounted 12-pounder guns across 200 miles of rough terrain from Durban to Ladysmith in October 1899 to relive counter Boer “Long Tom” artillery– the historical basis of the Royal Navy’s command field gun competition.

Her colorful ship’s crest was taken from a circa 1690 depiction of the Emperor of Tartary.

Laid down on 26 August 1936 at Swan Hunter, Wallsend, alongside sister HMS Somali (the only other Tribal built at the yard), the eighth Tartar was launched on 21 October 1937.

She commissioned on 10 March 1939 while the world was (largely) still at peace. Given the pennant L43 while building, this changed to F43 by completion (Somali was F33). She was later shifted to G43.

Tartar was fitted for use as a Flotilla Leader and constructed for £339,750, exclusive of armament and RN supplied equipment.

Following trials, she was transferred to the newly reformed 6th Destroyer Flotilla alongside sisters HMS Somali, Ashanti, Bedouin, Matabele, Punjabi, and Eskimo.

Her first skipper was Capt. Gerald Harman Warner, DSC, RN, aged 48, a regular who joined up in 1911 and earned his DSC in Russia in 1919.

Warner’s steady hand would be needed on Tartar very soon.

War

Just a fortnight into the conflict, on 14 September, while on patrol out of Scapa Flow looking for German blockade runners, Tartar picked up 42 survivors from the torpedoed British merchant Fanad Head, which had been sunk by U-30 about 200 nautical miles west of the Hebrides.

HMS Tartar G43 at a buoy WWII IWM FL 19719

In October 1939, Tartar sailed on her first of at least 28 convoys, the dozen steamer Narvik 1, shuttling British merchant vessels back to Methill from neutral Norway. She would join two other Norwegian runs, Convoy ON 1 and Convoy HN 1, by mid-November.

In late November, she sortied to help chase the roaming German battleship Scharnhorst following the latter’s sinking of the armed merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi.

Norway

Over the several months into the new year, she logged nine more Norway-to-Methill and back convoys (HN 6, ON 7, HN 7, ON 9, ON 10, HN 11, ON 22, HN 22, and ON 24), and was part of the posse that unsuccessfully chased the German blockade runner Trautenfels. She then helped screen the new liner RMS (HMT) Queen Elizabeth in March 1940 on her first outbound run. By this time, her skipper was CDR Lionel Peyton Skipwith, RN, who had earned his lieutenant’s stripe in 1922.

In April 1940, Tartar was heavily engaged in the Norway campaign, screening the fast battlecruisers HMS Renown and Repulse during Operation Duck, bombarding captured Norwegian airfields around Stavanger in April, then in May, rushing the troopships Ulster Monarch and Ulster Prince from Scapa Flow to Åndalsnes and Molde to evacuate Allied troops. June saw her once more screening Allied evacuations from the doomed Norwegian front, operating alongside the battlewagon HMS Valiant during the withdrawals from the Narvik/ Harstad /Tromso pockets.

Late July, following the Fall of France and the Low Countries, saw her once again sortie out with the fleet to chase a German raider, the battlecruiser Gneisenau, without luck.

By August, she was again on convoy runs, AP 1 and AP 2, shuttling desperately needed troops to Egypt, then tagged along with the Dakar-bound Convoy MP.

September 1940 saw her back in Norwegian waters, escorting the carrier HMS Furious and the battleship HMS Nelson on Operation DF, an anti-shipping raid off Trondheim. The same month, she escorted the ships of the 1st Minelaying Squadron during egg emplacement in Northern Barrage and helped shepherd the wounded cruiser HMS Fiji after the latter was torpedoed by U-32 off the Shetlands.

October through December 1940 saw Tartar in a much-needed refit by HM Dockyard, Devonport, and by January 1941, she was back to chasing reports of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and riding shotgun on minelayer sorties, which would keep her very busy over the next couple of months.

4 March saw Tartar as part of Operation Claymore, the first large Commando raid on Norway, hitting the isolated Lofoten Islands, an all-day festival of destruction that saw the large cod boiling plant in the islands torched, 225 prisoners and collaborators bagged, and 300 local volunteers tag along back to Britain to join Free Norwegian troops. Further, Commandos sank four small German-controlled vessels by demolition charges while Tartar’s sister Bedouin sank a fourth via gunfire.

Raid on the Lofoten Islands, 4 March 1941. Commandos watching fish oil tanks burning.

Speaking of gunfire, during Claymore Tartar sank no less than two German merchant vessels at Solvær, the Hamburg (fishmeal factory ship, 6136 GRT) and Pasajes (1996 GRT). She likewise damaged the Kriegsmarine coal ship Elbing (1422 GRT) so badly that she had to be beached to keep from sinking and only returned to service a year later. Other reports cite Tartar as also sinking Bernhard Schulte (1058 GRT) and Gumbinnen (1381 GRT) during the operation, but most hold that the Army accounted for them.

Soon after, she was back to saving lives, joining on 25 March with sister HMS Gurkha to pull the entire 86-member crew from SS Beaverbrae when the freighter was sunk by land-based Condors of 1./KG 40.

Bismarck and Enigma

In May 1941, she was part of the epic chase that ran Bismarck to ground, escorting Rodney and being present at the leviathan’s sinking on the 27th. Ludovic Kennedy insists that film footage of Bismarck’s brutal last battle was apparently shot from HMS Tartar.

On the way back to Scapa with Tribal-class sister HMS Mashona, the two destroyers, low on fuel and forced to steam at a leisurely 15 knots, were attacked by numerous Luftwaffe Heinkel He 111 bombers of 1./KG 28 that left Mashona dead in the water and sinking. Tartar rescued her 184 survivors from her 14 officers and 215 ratings and landed them at Greenock.

Tartar then helped get the gang in Bletchley Park along in the Enigma decoding business when, sailing with the light cruiser HMS Nigeria and her sister Bedouin on 28 June, the task force chased down the 344-ton German weather ship (Wetterbeobachtungs-Schiff) Lauenburg (WBS 3) some 300 miles north-east of Jan Mayen Island via HF/DF. Although the weather ship’s crew tried to scuttle, Tartar’s boarding party managed to secure and recover codebooks and the vessel’s Enigma machine.

HMS Tartar’s boarding party prepares to board the German weather ship Lauenburg, north east of Jan Mayen.

The converted trawler, Lauenburg, deployed on Operations Gebiet northeast of Jan Mayen with a 20-man crew and eight meteorologists, began sending weather reports on 2nd June from naval grid square AB 47/48. She was sunk by Tartar on 28 June after the salvage of her sensitive equipment.

Lauenburg’s haul, coupled with a similar find from the captured trawler Munchen and the submarine U-110, effectively broke Naval Enigma.

July 1941 saw Tartar on an antishipping raid (Operation DN) off Norway’s Stadtlandet, followed by operations around and the evacuation of Spitsbergen (Operations FB and Gauntlet) in August.

By November 1941, she was screening the new battleship HMS Duke of York and later KGV during Russia-bound convoy operations out of Iceland, with the runs needing such big guns as the bruising heavy cruiser Hipper, the pocket battleship Scheer, and the actual battleship Tirpitz, which were all operating out of occupied Norway. As such, Tartar would sail with Convoys PQ 7B/QP 5 in January 1942, followed by PQ 12/QP 8 and PQ 13/QP 9 in March.

HMS Tartar going out on patrol. Taken from HMS Victorious at Hvalfjörður, Iceland, 6 February 1942. Photo by CH Parnall IWM A 7513

In June 1942, her next skipper, CDR St. John Reginald Joseph Tyrwhitt DSC, RN, arrived aboard, late of the destroyer HMS Juno (F 46)— on whose decks he earned a DSC.

Torch, Husky, Avalanche

HMS Tartar G43 28 June 1942

By August 1942, Tartar was nominated for detached service for support of the Malta relief operation, then sailed from Clyde as part of the escort for military convoys WS21 during Operation Pedestal. This soon saw her lock horns with the Italian subs Cobalto, Emo, and Granito, as well as U-73, missing torpedoes and replying with depth charges.

Her job done in the Med, she was back in Scapa by September and would sail with Force A out of Iceland to provide cover for Convoys PQ 18/QP 14.

Shifting back to the Med once again– twice in three months!– Tartar sailed with Force H from Scapa Flow on 30 October, including the familiar battlewagons Duke of York, Nelson, and Renown, bound to support the Torch Landings in North Africa.

She would remain in the Med through the rest of the year and continue to find work not only with Force H. Notably, on 23 March 1942, Tartar also picked up 14 survivors from the French armed trawler Sergent Gouarne that was sunk by U-755 about 25 miles north-east of Alboran Island.

Tartar was on hand for the June 1943 capture of the Italian islands of Pantellaria and Lampedusa between Sicily and Tunisia (Operation Corkscrew) in the weeks before the much larger Husky Landings on Sicily.

It was during Husky that Tartar came to the rescue of a second of her sisters when Eskimo was extensively damaged by two German dive bombers. Tartar towed Eskimo back to Malta, providing counter-U-boat and AAA defense the whole way, then returned to Sicily to conduct NGFS bombardments around the island.

August 1943 saw Tartar, once again with Rodney and Nelson’s screen, as part of Operation Hammer, plastering the Italian coastal batteries on the Calabrian coast adjacent to the Straits of Messina in preparation for the Avalanche landings in early September, during which Tartar supported the Allied landing between Catona and Reggio Calabria. It was there that Tartar embarked C-in-C, Mediterranean, ADM Andrew Browne Cunningham, to bring him inshore to inspect the landing beaches.

Off Salerno, she batted away attacks by German aircraft and radio-controlled glider bombs.

Salerno, 9 September 1943 (Operation Avalanche). The British destroyer HMS Tartar puts up an anti-aircraft barrage with her 4.5-inch AA guns to protect the invasion force from attack by enemy aircraft. Photo by Richard Gee, No. 2 Army Film and Photo Section, Army Film and Photographic Unit. IWM NA 6579

France

In late October, Tartar sailed back to HM Dockyard, Devonport, for refit and remained there into early 1944 when, following post-refit trials, she joined the 10th Destroyer Flotilla at Plymouth as leader in February.

The list of ships in the 10th was both familiar and historic:

On 15 March 1944, CDR Basil Jones DSO, DSC, RN, became Tartar’s 8th skipper and the 10th Commodore by extension. He had earned his DSC as commander of the destroyer HMS Ivanhoe (D 16) and his DSO on HMS Pakenham (G 06).

HMS Tartar G43, 1944

In the months before D-Day, Tartar and her sisters took part in Operations Specimen and Tunnel (anti-shipping patrols of the Bay of Biscay and French west coast) and Operation Hostile (minelaying operations off the French coast).

Then came D-Day itself, with the 10th up front, almost a footnote in Tartar’s extensive career.

On the early morning of D+3, eight destroyers of the 10th DF encountered three German destroyers, the Type 36A Z24 and Z32, and the ZH1 (formerly the Dutch destroyer Gerard Callenburgh), along with the Elbing-class torpedo boat T24 (Theodor von Bechtolsheim). When the smoke cleared, ZH1 was at the bottom, and the mauled Germans limped off to fight another day.

Tartar was hit in the swirling action three times, setting fires in her galley and bridge. Four men were killed and 12 wounded, including Commodore Jones. She arrived back at Plymouth with her foremast hung over the side and all of the radar and communications dead.

But she arrived– and had her shrapnel-riddled ensign flying.

Gifted RN war photographer, LT Harold William John Tomlin, captured a great series of images of our battle-scarred destroyer while back in port on 9 June.

Battlescarred Tartar June 9, 1944 IWM (A 23985)

One of Tartar’s gun crews in great form on their return. IWM A 23987

A wounded Commodore Basil Jones, DSO, DSC, RN (right) of Twyford, Bucks, Commander of HMS Tartar, and Lieut Cdr J R Barnes, of Yelverton, Devon, Commander of HMS Ashanti. IWM A 23988

“A proud souvenir, the torn Battle Ensign of HMS Tartar carried in her action with German destroyers in the Channel. It was in this action on 8 June 1944 at Barfleur that a German destroyer (ZH 1) was torpedoed and sunk by the destroyers Tartar and Ashanti, and the former was hit on the bridge by three 120 mm shells. Left to right: Able Seamen E G Nurse of Swansea; W Wetherall of Chiswick; D J Harvey of Worcester; G Lilley of Rockhampton and P Gill of Manchester. They have all served over three years in Tartar.” IWM A 30906

August 1944 saw Tartar and company maul a convoy of small German coasters in the Bay of Biscay north of the Île d’Yeu. In a single wild action on the night of the 5th, she is credited with assisting in the sinking of German Convoy Nr. 4121 with the minesweepers M 263 and M 486, the patrol vessel V 414, and the coaster Otto (217 GRT) were sent to the bottom.

Headed to the Far East

By October 1944, Tartar was selected for a tropical overhaul with plans to ship her and the rest of the 10th to the East Indies Fleet.

Such modified, she left the Clyde in March 1945 bound for Gibraltar for passage to Trincomalee via the Mediterranean and Red Sea. Once there, she joined Force 63 with her flotilla by 28 April, screening the battleships HMS Queen Elizabeth and Richelieu for a sweep of the Andamans and Nicobars areas. It was during that sweep that Tartar, across a three-night period, bombarded Car Nicohar and Port Blair repeatedly.

She continued to bring the heat to the Japanese in Operation Dukedom, interdicting Japanese surface ships trying to evacuate troops from the Andamans. Then came a push into the occupied Dutch East Indies which included a surface action on 12 June 1945 when, sailing with Eskimo and Nubian, they intercept a Japanese convoy 20 miles north of Sumatra and sank the Japanese submarine chaser Ch 57 (420 tons) and landing ship Kuroshio Maru No.2 (950 tons, former T 149) in a short gun duel.

Afterall, her gunners were used to the work.

She later witnessed the Japanese surrender at Penang in September, then was ordered home, arrived at Plymouth on 17 November 1945, where she was promptly paid off and laid up for use as an accommodation hulk. Sold to BISCO for breaking up, she arrived at J Cashmere’s yard in Newport for demolition on 22 February 1948.

Tartar earned every one of her 12 WWII battle honors: Norway 1940-41 – Bismarck Action 1941 – Arctic 1941 – Malta Convoys 1942 – North Africa 1942-43 – Sicily 1943 – Salerno 1943 – Mediterranean 1943 – Normandy 1944 – English Channel 1944 – Biscay 1944 – Burma 1945.

Of her 15 RN Tribal class sisters, only Ashanti, Eskimo, and Nubian survived the war, and all were scrapped by 1949. Her old 10th Flotilla partner, Haida, the “most fightingest ship” in the Canadian Navy, saw Korean War and Cold War service and survives as a memorial.

HMCS Haida today

Epilogue

Tartar had been adopted by the civil community of Finchley during a 1942 savings week program, and the area, now part of the London Borough of Barnet, maintains some small relics from her.

Of her skippers, her circa 1939 commander, Warner, retired in 1946 as a full captain. Bismarck and Russia Convoy-era Skipwith retired in 1952 and passed in 1975. Tyrwhitt, who commanded her for the Torch, Avalanche, and Husky landings, remained in the Navy until 1958, when he retired as a vice admiral after commanding the cruiser HMS Newcastle during Korea. The unsinkable Basil Jones pinned a Bar to his DSC for Tartar’s actions off Normandy in 1944 and faded into history after the war.

The RN recycled the name one last time, for a new 2,700-ton Tribal-class frigate, HMS Tartar (F133), that served from 1962 to 1984 and then for a further 16 years with the Indonesians. Her motto, appropriately, was “Without Fear,” and she had 21 battle honors carried forward to back it up.

Aerial view of Tribal-class frigate HMS Tartar (F133), 1971. Note her “T A” recognition letters on her heli rep platform. IWM HU 130006

While the current British government would never authorize a new warship by that name, it is the Admiralty’s loss.

Thanks for reading!

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

***

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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.

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Warship Wednesday 25 February 2026: ‘Sorry, Your Bird’

Posted on February 25, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

Warship Wednesday 25 February 2026: ‘Sorry, Your Bird’

Via The Times History and Encyclopaedia of the War Vol XXI, London 1920 (p.127)

In the above depiction, we see, on the left, HM’s Armed Merchant Cruiser Alcantara (M.94), late of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Co, fighting what appears to be a Norwegian-flagged steamer Rena but was actually the very well-armed German auxiliary cruiser (Hilfskreuzer) SMS Greif, some 110 years ago this week.

It was a cutthroat affair, one of swirling action, six-inch guns, and, finally, torpedoes.

At the end of the day, both ships were at the bottom of the North Sea.

Meet Alcantara

Built at Harland & Wolff, Govan (Yard number 435G) for the RMSP Company’s Southampton-to-South America run, RMS Alcantara was a beautiful A-series ocean liner of some 570 feet in length with a displacement of 15,831 GRT. Carrying one large single funnel, two four-cylinder triple-expansion steam engines drove her two outward screws while a low-pressure steam turbine drove the centerline shaft, enabling the liner to cruise at 18 knots all day.

RMS Alacantara, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland. 1_125487

She had accommodation for 1,390 passengers (400 first class, 230 second class, and 760 third class passengers, as well as five holds and a refrigerated cargo space for frozen meat.

Launched 30 October 1913 and completed 28 May 1914, she was preceded in service by her sisters, the Belfast-built RMS Arlanza, Andes, and Almanzora.

Alcantara’s only pre-war commercial cruise was a maiden voyage in June 1914 on RMSP’s route from Southampton to Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires.

Once the Great War kicked off in August 1914, she and several of her sisters were subsequently taken up from trade and quickly modified into armed merchant cruisers. They had lots of company as the Admiralty had over 60 commissioned AMCs employed on patrol– and later convoy protection– during the Great War.

In this, the now HMS Alacantara was fitted with eight BL 6″/40 Mark II naval guns repurposed from old battleships, two 6-pounders, and two 3-pounders. By 10 March 1915, she then joined the Tenth Cruiser Squadron, a catch-all outfit for AMCs that at one time had 33 such vessels on its list, tasked with enforcing the blockade along the Northern Patrol.

Her only wartime skipper was a regular, Capt. Thomas Erskine Wardle, RN, who came aboard on 23 March 1915. Shipping out on the training ship HMS Britannia at the ripe old age of 13 in 1890, Wardle had previously commanded the old battlewagon HMS Canopus in 1909, served as Naval Secretary to the Ordnance Board, and been the skipper of the armored cruiser HMS Crescent and then the small AMC HMS Calyx (formerly SS Calypso) in operations around St Kilda earlier in the war.

Wardle was a scrapper.

Her log books for her 11 months with the Northern Patrol detail she was a busy little searcher, challenging at least 57 ships encountered on the sea and boarding another 77 via small boat despite rough sea states, low temperatures, and howling winds common in the region. During that period, she spent no less than 215 days at sea.

Meet Greif

Meanwhile, the planned 432-foot, 4,962 GRT, steel-hulled ship Guben for the German-Australian Line (DADG) was still on the builder’s ways at Neptun Werft AG, Rostock, when the war began. Unfinished, she was subsequently converted for naval service at Kaiserliche Werft, Kiel in 1915 and commissioned as SMS Greif on 23 January 1916.

The only image I can find of Guben/Grief. Her external appearance was later altered by removing her distinctive second funnel, which was false anyway. She was disguised as the freighter Rena from Tønsberg with large Norwegian flags painted on her sides, plus “NORGE” (Norway)

Slow at just 13 knots on her two-boiler/3,000shp suite, she was armed with four 5.9-inch SK L/40s (two forward abeam, two staggered aft, taken from old battleships) and a single 4-inch SK L/40 hidden aft as well as two 50cm torpedo tubes, one on each side of the bow. and provision to carry as many as 300 mines. Outfitted with an oversized 317-man crew (10 officers, including two doctors; and 307 enlisted– 130 regular navy and 167 reservists), she carried extra manpower to equip prize vessels encountered while on patrol.

Speaking of which, two 2.3-inch landing guns were carried, broken down, for use in arming future raiders of opportunity, ideally in the Indian Ocean.

Hilfskreuzer Greif, 1916, Via Der Kreuzerkrieg in den ausländischen Gewässern

Her only wartime skipper was Fregattenkapitän Rudolf Tietze, aged 41, previously commander of the old coast defense battleship SMS Wörth, which had been reduced to an accommodations hulk in January 1916.

Inspected on commissioning by Großadmiral Prinz Heinrich von Preußen, Greif was detailed to raid the South Atlantic and work her way into the Indian Ocean. Packing enough coal and canned foodstuffs in her holds for an expected 35,000nm sortie, she also shipped aboard 600 6-inch shells, 200 4-inch shells, 12 torpedoes, an extensive small arms locker, and crates of demolition charges. While designed for mines, I am not positive she carried any.

If unable to return home, Greif’s crew was ordered to attempt to land and join colonial warlord Lettow-Vorbeck, holding out in the rump of German East Africa.

Greif set sail from Cuxhaven on 27 February 1916, following behind the submarine U-70, which would see her through the minefields of the Skagerrak.

Our subjects meet

Naval Intelligence advised Jellicoe that an armed German raider was steaming north from the Skagerrak. On this news, he ordered two light cruisers and four destroyers to sail from Rosyth to secure the English east coast against an advance by the expected German auxiliary cruiser. It was probably initially assumed that Greif would lay mines off one of the English naval bases, similar to what SMS Meteor had done at the time.

In addition, three light/scout cruisers, HMS Calliope, Comus, and Blanche, each accompanied by a destroyer, were sent from Scapa Flow to the Norwegian coast to block the northern route for the enemy. They would soon join the alerted Alcantara, low on coal and due to be relieved by her sister Andes.

The AMCs Columbella and Patia were tasked with searching north of the Shetlands.

Post-war German reports note that Greif encountered two large British auxiliary cruisers working their searchlights and quietly sending short low-power Morse signals back and forth– surely Alcantara and Andes–while poking some 70 miles off Bergen in the pre-dawn of 29 February 1916, but, halting engines and engaging their smoke device, Greif managed to remain unseen.

At 0855 on the same morning, while some 230 miles east of the Faeroes, Alcantara, with Andes not far off, sighted the Norwegian ship Rena, alerted to the prospect that a German raider was trying to break out into the Atlantic. Alcantara fired two blank charges from her 3-pounder, ordered the ship to stop, and prepared a boarding party to check for contraband.

After much hemming and hawing and back-and-forth challenges, Alcantara and “Rena” closed to within 1,100 yards.

FKpt. Tietze ordered his guns to open up at 0940, and Greif’s initial salvo, as noted by Wardle, “put the tellmotor steering gear, engine room telegraph, and all telephones on the bridge out of action, besides killing and wounding men, and disabled Alcantara’s communications equipment.”

Wardle also noted that Greif, most ungentlemanly, dropped the Norwegian ensign and “fought under no flag.” German accounts later note that her Reichskriegsflagge war ensign had been mounted on a corroded line, which broke, then rose later.

The combat was swirling, with the larger and better-armed Alcantara, which had regained steering control, missing two of Greif’s torpedoes but unfortunately catching the third, while the British gunners raked the raider’s decks, hull, and superstructure.

The raider’s ready ammunition for her stern guns was hit, sparking a secondary explosion and blaze that soon spread to her oil tanks.

Greif’s torpedo officer, one Lt. von Bychelberg, remained on the raider’s burning bridge until that final fatal torpedo was fired at 2,800 meters.

By 1015, “Rena” (Greif) was aflame some 3,500 yards off Alcantara, which was listing. With the enemy fire ceased, Wardle ordered his own guns to stop while likewise passing the word to abandon his own stricken ship.

By 1120, Alcantara was under the waves, her survivors attempting to crowd into 15 lifeboats. As the engagement took place “North of 60,” the water temperature was a balmy 44 degrees F.

Meanwhile, her sister Andes, joined by the faster and more proper cruiser Comus and the destroyer Munster, rapidly arrived on the scene.

View of HMS Comus alongside Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson shipyard, seen from the south side of the River Tyne, c1915. Equipped with two 6-inch and eight 4-inch guns as well as four torpedo tubes, the 28-knot C-class light cruiser was more than a match for Greif, even if Greif was still in fighting condition when Comus came on the scene. (TWAM ref. DS.SWH/5/3/4/2/B187).

When a round cooked off on the sinking Greif, Comus followed by Andes, opened up on her from 8,000 yards, then, receiving nothing further, signaled, “Sorry, your bird.”

Greif drifted, ablaze, from 1139 to 1212, then sank, carrying 192 of her crew to the bottom, including five of ten officers, her skipper and XO among the lost. With just two of her boats not shot out and generally reserved for use by wounded men, Greif’s survivors grabbed whatever would float that was at hand– ammunition box lids, hatch covers, planking– and took to the water.

Her survivors were picked up by Comus. Post-war German naval tomes report that the remaining officers from Greif were treated well on Comus, fed in the officers’ mess, while the enlisted were “provided for as best as possible.”

Her most senior officer remaining was the navigator, KptLt (Reserve) Jungling, who later compiled a report to the German admiralty in 1919.

Those surviving officers were encamped in Edinburgh Castle, and there found out the extent of British Naval Intelligence’s reach.

Translated from Der Kreuzerkrieg in den ausländischen Gewässern:

From the interrogation questions posed to the prisoners in Edinburgh Castle by naval officers who spoke fluent German, it emerged that the English knew that the Greif had been moored in the Kiel shipyard next to SMS Lützow and that the Greif crew had been provisioned there initially. Furthermore, it was known that the Greif had been inspected on February 24th by Prince Henry of Prussia and the station commander, Admiral Bachmann. It was also known that the Greif had been anchored in Gelting Bay on February 23rd and 24th.

Her movements out to sea were also apparently known, likely due to decoded signal traffic from U70.

“Alcantara sinks in battle with the German auxiliary cruiser Greif, February 29, 1916” By Willy Stoewer

Alcantara lost 72 with two ratings passing of wounds later in March. Her survivors were picked up by Munster and Comus.

HMS Comus rescuing survivors of the Greif, 29 February 1916. The sinking ship on the left is the Greif, which was finished off by the Comus after being crippled by gunfire from the armed merchant cruisers Andes and Alcantara. The ship shown indistinctly on the far right is probably the Andes since the Greif returned the fire of Alcantara, also managed to torpedo her, and she too sank in the action. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Collection

Of note, the Kaislerliche Marine once again tried to send a raider out, the Hilfskreuzer Leopard, disguised as the Norwegian Rena, in 1917. That ended with Leopard being sunk with all hands by the intercepting British cruisers HMS Achilles and Dundee.

Versenkung des deutschen Hilfskreuzers Leopard durch HMS Achilles und HMS Dundee, Art.IWMART15814

Not the first odd twist in this tale.

Epilogue

While FKpt. Tietze, Greif’s skipper, was killed by shrapnel during the sea fight, Capt. Wardle of Alacantra was decorated with a DSO for his gallantry in this fight, then, after a stint with the Naval Intelligence Division, was given command of the light cruiser HMS Lowestoft in the Med, followed by the famed battleship Dreadnought, and, post-war, the cruisers Danae and Calliope. In 1924, he was made Rear-Admiral Commanding, Royal Australian Navy Squadron, a position he held for two years before retiring after a 36-year career.

Appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath, he was made a vice admiral on the Retired List in 1931 and passed in 1944, aged 67.

Vice-Admiral Thomas Erskine Wardle, CB, DSO. Australian War Memorial photos.

One of Alacantra’s most famed survivors was English stoker and firefighter Arthur John Priest, who had previously survived a collision at age 19 aboard RMS Asturias in 1908, then the collision between RMS Olympic and HMS Hawk in 1911, the sinking of the RMS Titanic (1912) and the loss by mine of HM Hospital Ship Britannic (November 1916), then would go on to be an albatross of sorts on his old ship, HMHS Asturias (torpedoed and beached March 20-21st, 1917), and the SS Donegal (sunk in April 1917). Priest, “The Unsinkable Stoker,” subsequently left sea work and spent the rest of his life on dry land in Southampton, passing in 1937 at the age of 49.

Shifting to more infamous survivors, Greif’s waterlogged ship’s doctor from the raider’s decimated wardroom, Assistant Naval Surgeon (Reserve) Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt, went on to become a fairly well-known psychiatrist and neuroscientist. After spending just three months in a British POW camp, he was part of a prisoner exchange and spent the rest of the war assigned to the German naval mission to Constantinople, where he was discharged in 1919. He went on to discover Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and had a rather “complicated” working relationship with the SS during WWII that is beyond our scope.

In a curious twist of fate, the later Royal Mail Lines steamer RMS Alcantara, built by Harland & Wolff in 1926, was taken up in WWII and used as an AMC for three years. She also encountered a German raider at sea, the Hilfskreuzer Thor, with both ships landing hits on each other in the South Atlantic in 1940, then mutually breaking off the fight and limping away.

HM Armed Merchant Cruiser Alcantara (1926) showing battle damage while anchored off Brazil in August 1940 with the Kriegsmarine raider Thor

Sometimes history is like a carousel. You see the same horses over and over.

Thanks for reading!

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

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 (on a Thursday) 19 February 2026: Plywood Warrior

Posted on February 19, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

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. Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron 14 (HM-14), founded in 1978, only received its first MH-53 Sea Dragon E-model on 9 April 1989.

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 HM-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

Posted on February 13, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

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

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.

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

Posted on February 4, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

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

Posted on January 28, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland 3 comments

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 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

***

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Warship Wednesday 21 January 2026: Interdiction Trendsetter

Posted on January 21, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

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

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Warship Wednesday 14 January 2026: ‘A Complete Shambles’

Posted on January 14, 2026 by laststandonzombieisland Leave a comment

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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