HMS Arabis (K385): The Corvette Built for Britain and Sent Straight to New Zealand

Built on the Clyde, Bound for the Pacific

HMS Arabis was a modified Flower-class corvette built by George Brown and Company at Greenock on the Clyde, ordered on 22 July 1942, laid down on 26 February 1943 and launched on 28 October that year.

Rather than joining the Royal Navy's home fleet, she was earmarked for New Zealand from the outset and commissioned directly into the Royal New Zealand Navy on 22 February 1944 under her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander John Henry Seelye, RNZNVR, a Dunedin-born officer who had been in the RNZNVR since 1928 and had spent the previous three years on loan to the Royal Navy.

She became HMNZS Arabis while still carrying her British-allocated pennant number, K385. She displaced 980 tons standard, carried a single 4-inch gun, eight 20mm anti-aircraft cannon, a Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar and 72 depth charges, a solid, unglamorous fit typical of the class.

The word modified in front of Flower class is doing real work. The early corvettes were notoriously wet, cramped and short of endurance, and the later ships were reworked to fix as much of that as could be fixed without starting again: a longer forecastle carried further aft to keep the sea off the well deck, a better bridge, more fuel, and a proper Hedgehog mortar in place of the depth charges alone. She was still only good for sixteen knots on a single shaft, which is slower than a surfaced submarine, and the ship's company still numbered eighty-five people in a hull that displaced less than a thousand tons. But she was a considerably more habitable object than the corvettes of 1940, which mattered on a voyage from the Clyde to Auckland.

The arrangement she was built under is a small piece of constitutional history. Until October 1941 New Zealand had no navy of its own: what it had was the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy. The Royal New Zealand Navy came into being as a separate service in the middle of the war, and it needed ships. Arabis was one of the answers, laid down in a British yard, paid for through the war effort and handed straight over without ever serving under the White Ensign at all. She kept the British pennant number she had been allocated, which is why a New Zealand warship spent her whole career wearing a number issued in London.

A single-shaft reciprocating engine gave her 2,280 indicated horsepower and a top speed of 16 knots, modest even by corvette standards, and she carried a complement of around 85 officers and ratings.

She worked up out of Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides through April 1944, running repeated anti-submarine exercises against the British submarine HMS H32 and the sister corvette HMS Charlock, before completing her work-up on 27 April.

On 23 May she left the Clyde to join the combined convoy OS 78/KMS 52 off Oversay as an escort, detached for Bermuda on 30 May, and arrived there on 6 June 1944, the same day Allied forces were storming ashore in Normandy on the other side of the Atlantic.

From Bermuda she continued on toward New Zealand, reaching Devonport, New Zealand's naval base at Auckland, on 15 August that year for further refitting ahead of active service.

Minesweeping the Solomons

Arabis departed for the Solomon Islands on 26 November 1944, arriving at Renard Sound on 14 December, and two days later replaced HMNZS Matai as Senior Officer of the 25th Minesweeping Flotilla, based in the Solomons alongside HMNZS Tui, Kiwi and Breeze.

The same handover brought a change of captain: Seelye left the ship, and command passed to Lieutenant Commander Peter Phipps, DSC, RNZNVR, who transferred across from Matai along with the flotilla's senior officer duties.

Phipps arrived with a formidable reputation. Not quite two years earlier, on 29 January 1943, he had commanded HMNZS Moa when she and her sister ship Kiwi rammed and sank the Japanese submarine I-1 off Guadalcanal, an action that earned him a Bar to his DSC and the United States Navy Cross; he was then wounded in April 1943 when Japanese aircraft sank Moa at Tulagi Harbour.

The action that made Phipps's name deserves telling properly, because it is one of the least likely engagements of the Pacific war. On the night of 29 to 30 January 1943, off Kamimbo Bay on Guadalcanal, Kiwi and Moa were two converted Bird-class minesweeping trawlers of six hundred tons apiece, armed with a single 4-inch gun each. What they found was I-1, a Japanese fleet submarine of well over two thousand tons on a supply run. Kiwi's depth charges forced her up with her motors disabled, and Bridson in Kiwi then rammed her. Then rammed her again. Then, over the objections of his own engineer, rammed her a third time, holing a main ballast tank and wrecking Kiwi's own stem and asdic in the process. Moa took over the pursuit and drove the submarine onto a reef.

What was taken off the wreck afterwards has been exaggerated for eighty years and is still worth having. The story that two hundred thousand secret documents were recovered goes back to a mistranslation in a postwar history and is not supported by anybody who was there. What Moa's people actually got was a quantity of charts and papers, including material of real cryptographic value, which went straight to the American authorities on Guadalcanal. A submarine driven onto a reef in shallow water cannot be scuttled properly, and the Japanese knew perfectly well what that meant: they later sent aircraft and a submarine to try to destroy the wreck. The two little New Zealand trawlers had done more damage than they could possibly have known.

Phipps went a very long way afterwards. He had joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as an ordinary seaman in 1928, and he finished as the first New Zealander appointed to the Naval Board, the first Chief of Naval Staff of the Royal New Zealand Navy, the first Chief of Defence Staff when the Ministry of Defence was formed, and the first New Zealand naval officer to be made a vice-admiral. He was knighted in 1964. The officer who took over Arabis in a Solomons anchorage two days before Christmas 1944 ended up running his country's entire defence establishment.

Under his command Arabis remained on minesweeping duty into the spring of 1945, with a detachment of her operations extending as far as Funafuti in the Ellice Islands, part of the extensive, methodical, and largely unglamorous work of clearing safe passages through waters that had seen heavy fighting between Allied and Japanese forces.

A Quiet Return Home

Arabis left Guadalcanal for Auckland by way of Nouméa on 12 June 1945, arriving home on 20 June. The following month she made two further voyages to Nouméa, this time alongside HMNZS Tui, escorting a dozen RNZN Fairmile motor launches back to Auckland.

A dozen Fairmiles was not a detachment. It was the entire Royal New Zealand Navy Fairmile force, all of it, being brought home in one go. The Fairmile B was one of the more quietly ingenious things to come out of the war: a hundred and twelve feet of double diagonal mahogany, designed from the outset as a kit, so that the frames and bulkheads could be prefabricated by firms that had never seen a boatyard, shipped anywhere in the world in crates and assembled by whoever was available at the far end.

The firms in question were furniture makers and piano makers. That is what the joinery trade of a country at war is for, and it worked: something in the order of six hundred and fifty Fairmiles were built between 1940 and 1945, in Britain and in a dozen other countries. New Zealand's twelve were approved by the British War Cabinet on 4 April 1941, six for Auckland, four for Wellington and two for Lyttelton, built by the Lidgard Syndicate, and commissioned all together on 20 December 1943 as Q400 to Q411.

So on that July passage from Nouméa, a corvette built on the Clyde was shepherding a country's whole coastal force, twelve wooden launches assembled in Auckland out of parts cut by cabinetmakers, across a thousand miles of Pacific. It is not the sort of thing that gets into the histories, and it is the reason there was a New Zealand navy at all.

That autumn brought a change of pace: a 35-day goodwill cruise in October and November 1945 to seven South Island ports and to Wellington, followed by a cruise to Tonga that December, a considerably gentler routine than the one she had left behind in the Solomons.

In January 1946 she was refitted as a minesweeper and set to work clearing the Hauraki Gulf's wartime minefields alongside HMNZS Arbutus and Kiwi and the danlayers Waiho, Waima and Waipu, finishing the job on 4 June 1946.

The mines she was clearing had been sitting there for nearly six years, and the story of how they got there is one of the war's better pieces of nerve. On the night of 13 and 14 June 1940 the German auxiliary cruiser Orion, disguised as an ordinary merchant ship, came into the approaches of the Hauraki Gulf, on the doorstep of New Zealand's largest city, and laid two hundred and twenty-eight contact mines. Nobody saw her do it and nobody knew she had.

Five days later the liner Niagara, thirteen and a half thousand tons, came out of Auckland and hit two of them. She sank by the bow. Every one of the three hundred and forty-nine people aboard got away in eighteen boats, and the only life lost was the ship's cat, which was called Aussie. What went down with her was rather more valuable: a cargo of small-arms ammunition and gold ingots worth two and a half million pounds, on their way to pay for the war.

The gold did not stay down. In late 1941 an Australian and New Zealand salvage party went after it and brought up five hundred and fifty-five bars from sixty fathoms, about a hundred and ten metres, which was a world record for deep water salvage at the time and was done from a converted coaster with a diving chamber. The worst moment of the whole operation came when that chamber, with a man sitting inside it, fouled the mooring wire of one of the mines that had sunk the ship in the first place.

Which is what Arabis was still dealing with in 1946. Five months of steady, careful, extremely dull work in home waters, clearing up after a single night's visit by a disguised German raider six years earlier, and finishing on 4 June. A corvette that had spent her war sweeping the Solomons finished it sweeping Auckland.

She was paid off into reserve on 25 July 1946, though she was briefly recommissioned on 27 January 1948 for Waitangi Day ceremonies that February alongside Arbutus, a fittingly ceremonial final duty for a ship that had spent most of her working life quietly making Pacific waters safer for everyone else.

Through it all she carried an unofficial badge, a wooden tiki carved by Seelye, until the Navy Board approved an official one in 1947: an arabis flower, purple or white, on a red field.

A Long Voyage to the Scrapyard

Arabis left New Zealand for the last time on 16 April 1948, was formally returned to Royal Navy control that year, and made her way home by way of Australia, Singapore and the Mediterranean, reaching Portsmouth on 29 June 1948. She was laid up at Chatham alongside HMS Loch Shin before being towed to Harwich the following month, and eventually sold for scrap and broken up by T.W. Ward at Grays, near Tilbury, in August 1951, bringing her back, in pieces, to within a few dozen miles of the Thames Estuary and not so very far from where her voyage to the other side of the world had effectively begun.