HMS Amethyst (F116): Trapped on the Yangtze for One Hundred Days

A Capable Wartime Escort

HMS Amethyst was a Modified Black Swan-class sloop built by Alexander Stephen and Sons at Govan, laid down on 25 March 1942, launched on 7 May 1943, and commissioned on 2 November 1943. Armed with six 4-inch anti-aircraft guns and a dozen 20mm cannon, she was originally designated a sloop with the pennant U16, later modified and redesignated a frigate under the new number F116 after the war.

Her wartime complement ran to 192 crew, plus, in the great tradition of Royal Navy ships, one ship's cat.

Amethyst proved a particularly effective escort during the war, carrying out anti-submarine patrols in the Atlantic. Her finest moment came on 20 February 1945, when she attacked and sank the German submarine U-1276 with depth charges, all 49 of the U-boat's crew lost.

The kill carried a particular edge of justice to it: U-1276 had only shortly before sunk the corvette HMS Vervain, at the cost of 60 of her crew.

She was also credited for a time with sinking U-482 in January 1945, though the Admiralty later withdrew that credit on postwar reassessment of the evidence.

Trapped on the Yangtze

Amethyst's true claim to lasting fame came four years after the war ended. On 20 April 1949, sailing up the Yangtze River from Shanghai toward Nanjing to relieve the British embassy guard ship, she was fired on by artillery of the Chinese Communist People's Liberation Army, then in the final stages of the Chinese Civil War and crossing the Yangtze in force.

It is worth asking what a British sloop was doing more than a hundred miles up a Chinese river in the first place, because the answer explains the whole incident. For a century Western warships had used the Yangtze as of right, under the treaties forced on China after the Opium Wars, which allowed foreign gunboats to sail deep inland to look after their own nationals and their own trade. Britain kept a guard ship at Nanjing for the embassy, and relieving it was routine. The Communists recognised none of those treaties and never had. So on 20 April 1949 there were two entirely coherent views of the same ship: a vessel making a lawful passage she had made many times before, and a foreign warship in a Chinese river in the middle of a Chinese civil war. One of those views had artillery.

The shelling killed nineteen of her crew outright and wounded around twenty-seven more, drove her aground on a sandbank known as Rose Island, and left her stranded, unable to proceed in either direction, in the middle of a warzone she had no part in creating.

Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Bernard Skinner, was among the mortally wounded and died of his injuries within a day; badly wounded himself, First Lieutenant Geoffrey Weston held temporary command for some fifty-six hours until Lieutenant Commander John Kerans, the assistant naval attaché in Nanjing, made his way downriver overland to take over on 22 April.

What followed became one of the most dramatic stories in postwar Royal Navy history. Amethyst remained trapped on the river for more than three months, subject to prolonged and difficult negotiations between British and Communist Chinese authorities, while her crew endured cramped conditions, dwindling supplies, and the constant tension of being effectively hostages aboard their own ship.

The negotiations turned on a single sentence, which is why they lasted three months. The People's Liberation Army's representative, Colonel Kang, was willing to let Amethyst go. His price was a signed statement from Kerans admitting that the British had wrongly invaded Chinese national waters and had fired first. Kerans would not sign it, because it was not true and because signing it would have handed away the legal position of every British ship in Chinese waters. So the talks went round and round on a point of principle while a ship's company sat in a steel hull through a Yangtze summer, running short of fuel, food and fresh water, being neither prisoners nor free.

Amethyst was not the only ship to suffer. Over the following days the frigate HMS Consort, the cruiser HMS London and the sloop HMS Black Swan each tried in turn to reach her or draw the shore batteries’ fire away from her, and were driven back under heavy fire; Consort lost ten men killed, London thirteen, and although Black Swan escaped without fatalities several of her crew were wounded too.

More Royal Navy sailors died trying to relieve Amethyst than were killed aboard her in the initial bombardment.

One survivor of the shelling became famous in her own right. Amethyst’s ship’s cat, Simon, was wounded by shrapnel in the same blast that killed Skinner, suffering burns and injuries to his legs, yet went on to keep down a rat infestation threatening the crew’s dwindling food stores through the months that followed, seeing off one particularly troublesome rat the crew nicknamed Mao Tse-tung.

For his service he was later awarded the PDSA’s Dickin Medal, the only cat ever to receive what is often called the animal Victoria Cross, its citation praising behaviour “of the highest order” throughout the ordeal.

Simon's own story deserves the full telling. He was found in March 1948 on Stonecutters Island in Hong Kong, about a year old, thin and scrounging round the dockyard, and was smuggled aboard inside the jacket of a seventeen-year-old Ordinary Seaman named George Hickinbottom, on the entirely sound reasoning that the ship had rats and needed something done about them. The shell that killed Skinner blew a fifteen-foot hole in a bulkhead and left Simon with shrapnel in his legs and burns across his back and face. He recovered, went back to work, and by all accounts also spent a good deal of time sitting with wounded and frightened young sailors, which the citation counted alongside the rats. Besides the Dickin Medal he collected a Blue Cross medal and the Amethyst campaign medal, which is more decorations than most of the crew.

The Dash for Freedom

On the night of 30 July 1949, Amethyst made her escape, slipping her cable and running downriver under cover of darkness. A stroke of luck helped her along the way: a fully lit merchant vessel, the Kiangling Liberation, came into view heading downriver ahead of her, and Kerans tucked in behind it, letting the confusion between the two ships help mask Amethyst’s own passage past the Communist shore batteries.

It was a properly nerve-wracking journey through more than a hundred miles of hostile, closely watched river, and when she finally reached open water in the early hours of 31 July, Kerans signalled the message that would become famous back home: “Have rejoined the Fleet south of Woosung. No damage or casualties. God Save the King.”

The run itself was a hundred and four miles. That is a hundred and four miles of unlit river in the dark, on machinery that had been sitting idle for over three months, with batteries on both banks and no possibility of turning round. She reached Hong Kong on 10 August with a shell hole still in her stern, which is as good a photograph of the whole affair as anyone could want.

The escape made Amethyst, and Kerans, household names, and cemented her place in naval folklore as the ship that had defied a trap most observers had assumed she would never escape.

Simon did not live to share in the welcome home. Weakened by his wounds, he died in quarantine in England on 28 November 1949, just weeks before he was due to receive his Dickin Medal in person, and was buried with naval honours.

His funeral was not a token gesture either. He was buried at the PDSA animal cemetery at Ilford in Essex, in plot 281, wrapped in cotton wool with the Union Flag over his coffin, and hundreds of people came, including men from Amethyst herself. It is very easy to be arch about a cat with a medal. It is worth remembering that these were men who had spent a hundred days on a river not knowing whether they were going home, and that the cat was the one member of the ship's company with no idea what any of it was about.

A Film Role, and a Final Scrapping

Amethyst's fame outlived her active service. In 1957 she was brought out of reserve to play herself in the film Yangtse Incident: The Story of H.M.S. Amethyst, a fitting bit of casting for a ship whose real story needed no embellishment.

Since her engines were by then inoperable, her sister ship HMS Magpie stood in for the moving shots.

The stand-in has a story of her own. HMS Magpie was another Modified Black Swan, and between 1950 and 1951 she was commanded by the Duke of Edinburgh, the only seagoing command he ever held before his wife's accession ended his naval career. So the film contains one sloop of the class playing another, with the borrowed ship being the one the future Queen's husband had run a few years earlier.

Shortly after filming wrapped, Amethyst was scrapped, her final disposal recorded on 19 January 1957, bringing to a close the career of a ship that had gone from sinking U-boats in the Atlantic to becoming, quite literally, a story that Britain told about itself on screen.

The river had a longer postscript. No British warship went up the Yangtze again for thirty-one years, until HMS Alacrity made a courtesy visit to Shanghai in 1980. The difference between the two passages is the entire point. Amethyst went up the Yangtze because a hundred-year-old treaty said she could. Alacrity went up it because she was asked.