HMS Asphodel (K56): Only Five Survived When U-575 Found Her

A Corvette Built for Coastal Work That Ended Up Mid-Ocean

HMS Asphodel was a Flower-class corvette built by George Brown and Company at Greenock, her keel laid on 20 October 1939 and launched on 25 May 1940, entering service on 11 September that year. She displaced 925 tons, carried a single 4-inch gun, machine guns and 40 depth charges, and was built with a crew of 85, a fairly typical fit for the class.

George Brown and Company is worth a moment, because the Flower class was deliberately designed to be built by firms exactly like it. The Garvel Park yard at Greenock was set up around the turn of the century and spent its life building modest commercial tonnage for owners in Australia, Canada, France, Siam, Malaya, Chile and Colombia. It was not a warship builder and had no business being one. That was the entire point of the Flower: the hull was based on a whalecatcher, it was riveted rather than welded, its machinery was a single four-cylinder triple-expansion engine of a type any commercial yard could obtain, and it could therefore be laid down by dozens of small yards on rivers that had never seen a fighting ship. Close to three hundred were built. Asphodel was ordered before the war was two months old and was in commission eleven months later, which no purpose-built escort design could have managed, and which is why the Atlantic was not lost in 1941.

Command passed through three officers during her career: Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Stewart from her commissioning until September 1942, then Lieutenant Henry Carse, DSC, until February 1944, when Temporary Lieutenant Michael Halliday, RNZNR, took over. Halliday had held command for barely five weeks when Asphodel went down with him still aboard.

Flower-class corvettes had originally been intended for coastal convoy work, but their surprisingly long range meant they instead became the backbone of the Mid-Ocean Escort Force, the ships that shepherded convoys across the most dangerous stretch of the Atlantic, far from the protection of shore-based aircraft, for the opening years of the war.

She was also present at one of the strangest convoy actions of the war. Asphodel joined convoy SL 67 on 1 March 1941 and stayed with it until the 11th, and on 7 March the fifty-eight merchant ships of SL 67 were found by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The two German battleships were loose in the Atlantic on Operation Berlin and had already destroyed a good deal of shipping. What saved the convoy was the old battleship HMS Malaya, stationed with it as ocean escort: Admiral Lütjens was under strict orders not to risk his ships against enemy capital ships, so instead of attacking he shadowed the convoy from over the horizon and radioed for the U-boats. They came. On 8 March U-105 and U-124 sank the Harmodius, Hindpool, Lahore, Tielbank and Nardana, some twenty-eight thousand tons in a night. Somewhere in the middle of that, a corvette five months old was doing what corvettes did, which was to run about in the dark looking for submarines while two of the most powerful ships afloat watched from a distance and declined to join in.

Her career divides very neatly into three, and the shape of it is the shape of the war. Through 1941 she worked almost entirely on the Freetown route, escorting SL 64, 65, 67, 72, 74, 76, 78, 83, 87 and 89 up from West Africa and the odd outbound convoy back down, which meant heat, long passages and the South Atlantic rather than the North. From January 1942 she moved onto the North Atlantic run proper and spent two solid years going backwards and forwards between Britain and Canada with the ON, HX and SC convoys, twenty-one of them, through the worst winters of the campaign. Then in July 1943 she shifted again, to the Gibraltar and Mediterranean series, the KMS convoys going out and the MKS convoys coming home, which is precisely why she was where she was in March 1944. A great many escort careers look like this: no single famous action, just three and a half years of being permanently somewhere cold or somewhere far away, and then one torpedo.

A Torpedo Off Cape Finisterre

Asphodel spent years on exactly this kind of demanding, unglamorous convoy escort duty, the patient, repetitive work of shepherding merchant shipping safely across the Atlantic that rarely made headlines but that the entire war effort depended upon. Her luck ran out on 10 March 1944, while she was escorting the combined convoy SL 150 and MKS 41 near Cape Finisterre off the coast of Spain.

At 1.54am, the German submarine U-575, under Kapitänleutnant Wolfgang Boehmer, hit her with a Gnat, an acoustic homing torpedo that steered itself towards the noise of a ship's propellers, still a relatively new and much-feared weapon at that stage of the war.

The weapon that killed her deserves explaining, because it was designed to do exactly this. The Germans introduced the T5 acoustic torpedo, which the Allies called the Gnat, in the autumn of 1943, and its purpose was not to sink merchant ships. It homed on the propeller noise of an escort, which meant a U-boat could fire it into the screen and strip a convoy of the very ships protecting it. The counter was a device called Foxer: a set of noisy metal bars towed astern that made more racket than the ship herself and drew the torpedo away. Aboard Asphodel that night the Foxers were streamed. They did not work properly.

The attack proved catastrophic: only five of her crew were pulled from the water by HMS Clover, while 92 others, Halliday among them, went down with the ship, a casualty rate of over 91 percent and one of the heaviest single losses suffered by any Flower-class corvette during the entire war. The rest of the escort hunted U-575 for eighteen hours afterwards, but the submarine got away.

The ship that found those five men had done the same job before, and the coincidence is a grim one. HMS Clover, a Flower-class corvette like Asphodel, had spent the small hours of 11 April 1943 searching for the crew of the destroyer HMS Beverley, torpedoed out of convoy ON 176, and had found four men out of a hundred and fifty-five. Eleven months later she was picking five out of ninety-seven. Her commanding officer that night was Lieutenant Thomas Evelyn Fanshawe, RNR. Twice inside a year the same small ship was left counting the survivors of a fellow escort, and twice the count came back in single figures; her side of both nights is set out in the article on HMS Clover (K134).

The submarine did not enjoy her escape for long, and the manner of her end says a great deal about how the Atlantic had changed by 1944. The escort hunted U-575 for eighteen hours and lost her. Three days later, north of the Azores, she was found again, and what found her was a Royal Air Force Wellington, an American Fortress, Avengers flying from the American escort carrier Bogue, the Canadian frigate Prince Rupert and the American destroyer Hobson. Four nations, two continents and both elements, converging on one submarine in the middle of an ocean. In 1941 U-575 would very probably have got clean away. In March 1944 she was dead inside seventy-two hours of sinking Asphodel.

The position is worth being precise about too. She was not close in to the Spanish coast but roughly three hundred and ninety miles out into the Atlantic, west-north-west of Cape Finisterre, at half past one in the morning. That matters for what happened next. An acoustic torpedo homes on the propellers, so it arrives at the stern, and the stern of a Flower is where the depth charges live. A small ship opened up at the after end in the middle of the night, hundreds of miles from anywhere, with the rest of the escort under standing orders to stay with the convoy, does not give her people much time and does not leave many ships free to look for them. Five men out of ninety-seven is what that arithmetic produces.

Among the 92 lost was Stoker 1st Class David Bradley, a 20-year-old from County Donegal, one of the many ordinary sailors whose names are now recorded on the Plymouth Naval Memorial rather than on any grave.

The Plymouth Naval Memorial, where those ninety-two names are, exists for a particular reason. It commemorates men of the Royal Navy who have no grave but the sea, from both world wars, and there are more than twenty-three thousand of them on that one monument alone, with sister memorials at Portsmouth and Chatham carrying tens of thousands more. Stoker Bradley from County Donegal is one line of one panel. That is what the Battle of the Atlantic looks like when you stop counting tonnage.

The ship that went down within moments off Cape Finisterre had herself spent much of the war pulling other sailors from the sea.

In October 1941 she rescued 51 survivors from the torpedoed merchantman Serbino, in February 1943 she picked up 16 more from the tanker Inverilen, and in April that same year she rescued a further 54 from the merchant ship Amerika, well over a hundred lives saved across three separate sinkings before her own crew needed exactly that kind of rescue and found it waiting from only a single ship.

The Inverilen rescue has a sequel that almost nobody knows, and it is worth telling because it shows how thin the margins were. U-456 found convoy HX 224 at the end of January 1943 and sank three ships on 2 February, the tanker Inverilen among them; Asphodel picked up sixteen of her people the following day. Two days after that, a different boat, U-632, came across a survivor from one of the sunk tankers still in the water. He told her commander that another convoy, a slow one, was following two days behind on the same route. That convoy was SC 118, sixty-three ships with ten escorts, and what happened to it over the following week was one of the hardest-fought convoy battles of the entire war: something like twenty U-boats were brought against it, three of them were sunk, and the losses on both sides were severe. One exhausted man in a lifeboat, answering a question, cost a great many lives. It is not a criticism of him. It is simply what the Atlantic was.

It is a stark, sobering statistic, and a reminder that behind the broad strategic story of the Battle of the Atlantic lay individual ships and individual crews for whom a single moment, a single torpedo strike in the dark, could bring an entire ship's company's war to an end almost instantly.