HMS Adventure (M23): The Minelayer Whose Own Stern Sabotaged Her

A First Attempt at a New Idea

HMS Adventure holds a remarkably significant place in naval engineering history: she was the Royal Navy's first purpose-built minelaying cruiser, and the first Royal Navy warship to use diesel engines for cruising, an ambitious combination of steam turbines for speed and diesels for long, economical range.

Ordered on 18 July 1921 and built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness with further work at Devonport, she was laid down on 29 November 1922, launched on 18 June 1924, and commissioned on 2 October 1926. One of her earliest commanding officers, from January 1928, was Captain John H. D. Cunningham, who would go on to become First Sea Lord.

As built she displaced 6,740 tons standard, rising to 8,370 tons deep load, measured 539 feet long with a 59 foot beam, and could reach nearly 28 knots on her steam turbines or a more economical 17 knots on diesel power alone, with a crew of around 395 in peacetime and up to 560 in war, and stowage for as many as 340 mines.

The name had a long tail behind it. She was the twentieth Royal Navy ship to be called Adventure, a name that goes back to a medal awarded to Captain Wyard in 1650, and she inherited a battle honours board that starts at Dover in 1652 and runs through Portland, the Gabbard, Lowestoft, Orfordness, Solebay, Barfleur, Belle Isle and China before reaching Normandy in 1944. Her badge was a silver anchor on black between two shields carrying the Cross of St George and the Irish harp, and her motto was the admirably direct Dare All. After a Warship Week savings campaign in March 1942 she was adopted by the civil community of Plymouth, the city that had built her.

Being first at something new tends to come with teething problems, and Adventure had a particularly memorable one. Her designers gave her a flat transom stern intended to improve efficiency, but in practice it created an area of dead water directly behind the ship that had a habit of sucking newly laid mines straight back into the hull rather than letting them drop cleanly away.

It is hard to imagine a more fundamental design flaw for a ship whose entire purpose was laying mines, and the Navy eventually had to rebuild her with a conventional rounded stern to fix it, during a refit in the early 1930s that added a full 19 feet to her length in the process.

An Early War, and an Early Wound

After a spell with the Atlantic Fleet and a tour on the China Station in the late 1930s, Adventure went straight to work when war broke out, laying mines in home waters almost immediately. Between 11 and 16 September 1939, working alongside the coastal minelayer Plover and two converted train ferries, and escorted by the cruiser Cairo, she helped lay over 3,000 mines in the Straits of Dover.

That Dover barrage did its job with a thoroughness rarely matched. Adventure laid Field GR there in September 1939 with the auxiliary minelayers Hampton and Shepperton, and within seven weeks three U-boats had been destroyed in it: U-12 on 8 October, U-40 on the 13th and U-16 on the 24th. She was pulled off the operation on 16 September because she proved awkward to handle inside Dover harbour, which is a very Royal Navy sort of problem for the ship that had just laid the most productive minefield of the early war.

The mine that got her was the first of its kind to go off. At 05.25 on 13 November 1939, off the Tongue Light Vessel in the Thames Estuary, Adventure detonated a German magnetic mine, one of a field laid only hours earlier by four German destroyers, Hans Lüdemann, Hermann Künne, Karl Galster and Wilhelm Heidkamp. Nobody yet knew what a magnetic mine was, or that this was the first one to be triggered. She lost 24 of her ship's company killed or missing and had 69 wounded, and flooded extensively. HMS Basilisk took off her survivors.

The story has a bitter tail. HMS Blanche was standing by to protect the crippled minelayer when she was mined herself, and she sank under tow the same day. She was the first Royal Navy destroyer lost in the war, killed by the same field, while looking after the ship that had found it first.

It took roughly a year of repair work at Chatham Dockyard to get her back into service, a sobering reminder that a ship built to sow mines was every bit as vulnerable to them as anyone else.

What followed was three solid years of the least celebrated work in the fleet. From October 1940 she was part of the 1st Minelaying Squadron at Kyle of Lochalsh, and she spent the next three years laying the Northern Barrage across the gaps between Scotland, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, plus the East Coast Mine Barrier, and a series of fields in St George's Channel that she laid entirely unescorted. Twice, in December 1940, she went down to Little Sole Bank west of Lorient to lay anti-submarine fields on the doorstep of a U-boat base.

She also kept getting hurt in ways that had nothing to do with the enemy's intentions. On 14 January 1941, diverted to act as an anti-aircraft guardship at Liverpool, she set off a ground mine in Liverpool Bay and was extensively damaged. In May, alongside for repair, she was damaged again when HMS Maplin was hit next to her in an air raid. In February 1942, leaving the Clyde with a British trade mission embarked for Murmansk, she collided with the landing ship Tasajera and holed herself badly enough to need four months in Southampton. In August 1943 she managed to collide with a trawler. For a ship whose job was to be somewhere dangerous on purpose, a striking proportion of her damage was self-inflicted.

Back in Action, and Mined Again

Adventure returned to service in October 1940 under her wartime captain, Norman Vere Grace, only to be damaged by another mine in Liverpool Bay in January 1941, this time keeping her out of action for five months. She was, by this point, developing something of a habit.

Once repaired, she took part in Operation EF in July 1941, an Arctic raid against Kirkenes and Petsamo carried out in support of the newly invaded Soviet Union, arriving in Murmansk on 1 August with a cargo of parachute mines.

Her wartime service kept diversifying from there. In February 1942 she suffered collision damage in the Clyde, requiring another three months of repairs, before returning in June to act as a decoy for the ill-fated Arctic convoy PQ 17 during Operation ES.

A good deal of that later work was carrying mines rather than laying them. Through 1942 and 1943 she ran cargoes of mines and stores down to Gibraltar, Oran and Mers-el-Kébir, and on more than one occasion her job was to restock the fast minelayer HMS Abdiel after she had emptied her rails into the Mediterranean. In April 1943 the diesel engines that had made her a pioneer twenty years earlier were taken out altogether.

The Irene affair deserves the detail. On 10 April 1943, on her way home from Gibraltar, Adventure was diverted to intercept a German blockade runner inbound from Japan. She sighted her and fired two rounds, at which point the German crew scuttled their ship 375 miles west of Vigo. Adventure then picked up 157 survivors, 101 of them naval personnel. Two rounds, one blockade runner accounted for, and a hundred and fifty-seven men saved is a good afternoon by any standard.

From Minelayer to Mechanic

By November 1943, with her minelaying days effectively behind her, Adventure was converted into a tender and repair ship for landing craft, a sensible reuse of a large, capable hull as the Allies began planning the invasion of Europe in earnest.

The conversion was formalised on 25 November 1943, when she went into hand at Liverpool to become a Landing Ship (Engineering), with her anti-aircraft armament increased at the same time. The Navy had finally found a use for a large, roomy, slightly accident-prone hull whose original purpose had been quietly overtaken by faster purpose-built minelayers.

She earned her keep in this new role during the Normandy landings in June 1944, deployed off the artificial Mulberry B harbour as a support and repair vessel, landing parties on 19 June to carry out extensive salvage work on landing craft damaged in the fighting and the notoriously rough Channel weather that struck shortly after the invasion began.

That phrase is doing an enormous amount of work. The weather that struck shortly after the invasion began was the worst June gale in the Channel for about forty years, and it began on 19 June, the day Adventure put her salvage parties ashore. It blew for three days, with twenty-foot seas running straight onto the beaches and gusts to sixty miles an hour, and it did more damage to the invasion than the Germans managed in the same period.

Mulberry A, the American harbour off Omaha, did not survive it. Its seventy-five Phoenix caissons, each one a concrete box the size of a small block of flats, were broken up and driven together into what the official account calls a half-sunken mass of concrete and steel, and the whole harbour was written off and abandoned by the 22nd. Mulberry B at Arromanches, the British one Adventure was working beside, was badly knocked about and held, and was afterwards patched up with caissons salvaged from the wreck of the American harbour and towed along the coast. The idea behind both of them, and the man who thought of it on a destroyer's bridge coming home from Dieppe, is described in the article on HMS Calpe.

Which makes Adventure's job that week rather more than a footnote. Hundreds of landing craft were thrown up the beach or wrecked at their moorings in those three days, and a large, roomy ship full of workshops, cranes and engineering ratings, anchored off Mulberry B with orders to repair damaged landing craft, was suddenly the most useful vessel in the anchorage. The harbours that survived went on to land better than two million men, half a million vehicles and four million tons of stores. A minelayer that had spent her first commission sucking her own mines back into her stern finished her war putting other people's boats back together in a gale.

A Quiet End

Formally reclassified as a repair ship in 1944, Adventure was reduced to reserve in 1945 as the war wound down, her unusually varied career, minelayer, mine victim, Arctic raider, convoy decoy, and finally repair ship, finally at an end.

She was sold to the shipbreakers Thos. W. Ward in 1947 and broken up at Briton Ferry, a quiet conclusion for a ship whose very first outing had been undermined by her own stern.