HMS Alisma (K185): Built for France, Fought for Britain

Built for One Navy, Delivered to Another

HMS Alisma began her life under an entirely different flag. Built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, she was originally laid down as the French corvette Pertuisane, intended for the French Navy. When France fell to Germany in 1940, the ship was taken over by the Royal Navy instead, renamed in keeping with the Flower class's tradition of flower names, and commissioned on 14 February 1941, a fairly literal example of one country's wartime misfortune becoming another's useful asset.

Into the Convoy War

Alisma spent her early service with Escort Group 1, and in the summer of 1941 helped defend Convoy ON 69, a formation of 26 merchant ships, against a determined attack by eight U-boats and two Italian submarines between 19 July and 1 August, an intense introduction to the realities of convoy escort work.

From 1942 into 1943 she served with the celebrated Escort Group B7 as part of the Mid-Ocean Escort Force, protecting convoys across the most dangerous stretch of the North Atlantic, the mid-ocean gap beyond the range of shore-based aircraft where U-boat wolfpacks did their worst work. She was present for the loss of three ships from Convoy ON 153 in December 1942, and went on to take part in a punishing string of convoy battles around ONS 20, ON 206, ON 207 and ON 208, engagements in which her escort group collectively accounted for nine U-boats destroyed, a genuinely formidable record for a group of small, unglamorous corvettes and their consorts.

Under Australian Command

For much of this period, Alisma was commanded by Acting Lieutenant Commander Maurice George Rose of the Royal Australian Navy Volunteer Reserve, from May 1941 to May 1943, followed by fellow Australian Lieutenant George Lanning, who remained in command until June 1945, a reminder of just how thoroughly the Commonwealth contributed manpower and leadership to the Battle of the Atlantic, often in ships that had started out being built for someone else's navy entirely.

South, Then Home Again

From autumn 1943 through to April 1945, Alisma moved to the Mediterranean, escorting KMS and MKS convoys between Britain, Gibraltar and Mediterranean ports, before returning to the North Atlantic for her final months of service, escorting convoys on the Liverpool to New York run right through to the end of the war.

A Restless Retirement

Alisma was decommissioned on 11 June 1945 and sold in 1947, converted into a small merchant cargo vessel with diesel engines replacing her original steam machinery. She entered civilian service in 1949 under Panamanian registry as Laconia, before being bought by Greek interests in 1950 and renamed Constantinos S., and sold again in 1952 as Parnon. Her merchant career, much like her wartime one, seemed unable to settle on a single identity for long.

It finally ended on 16 July 1954, when, carrying a cargo of ammonium sulphate from Marseille to Eleusis, she began taking on water and sank southwest of Naples. A ship that had survived some of the fiercest convoy battles of the Battle of the Atlantic, under a flag she had never originally been built for, was ultimately lost not to any enemy but to a simple, unglamorous leak, nine years after the war that had defined her had already ended.