HMS Amaranthus (K17): The Corvette That Guarded West Africa's Convoy Routes

Built on the Clyde

HMS Amaranthus was built by Fleming and Ferguson at Paisley, ordered on 21 September 1939, laid down on 4 May 1940, launched that October, and commissioned on 12 February 1941, a fairly typical Flower-class corvette of just under a thousand tons, armed with a single 4-inch gun and depth charges, and built for the unglamorous, essential work of keeping merchant convoys safe from U-boats.

A War Spent on the West African Run

After working up off Tobermory in early 1941, Amaranthus spent the bulk of her war on the long, often overlooked convoy routes connecting Britain to West and southern Africa, a theatre that saw less glamour than the North Atlantic but no less genuine danger. She escorted Convoy OG 58 to Gibraltar in April 1941, and through May and June that year worked the Freetown convoys SL 74 and SL 76, before taking part in the substantial troop convoys WS 10X and WS 12 bound for Suez and Africa later that year. In 1942 she continued in much the same vein, escorting Convoys WS 21 and WS 23 from the UK to East Africa, and taking part in Convoy CF 7 that October.

Coming to a Cruiser's Defence

Amaranthus's sharpest moment of action came on 23 October 1942, off Pointe Noire on the Congo coast, when the German submarine U-161 attacked the cruiser HMS Phoebe. Amaranthus, then under the command of Lieutenant Walter Smith Thomson, came up from harbour and attacked the German submarine in Phoebe's defence, a genuinely useful intervention even though the corvette's own small size meant she was never going to be the one delivering the decisive blow in such an engagement.

The following month she was assigned to anti-blockade runner patrol duties in the mid-Atlantic, and in 1943 escorted the floating dock AFD 24 from Trinidad to Freetown, an unusual but practically important towing job, before rounding out her war with anti-submarine exercises off Lough Foyle that September.

A Quiet Retirement

Amaranthus was sold in 1946 and converted into a merchant vessel, continuing in commercial service for several more years before finally being scrapped at Hong Kong in 1953, closing out a career built almost entirely around the patient, unglamorous business of keeping distant convoy routes safe, punctuated by one sharp moment coming to a cruiser's aid off the West African coast.