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. 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.

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. The German submarine U-575 torpedoed her, and the attack proved catastrophic: only five of her crew were pulled from the water by HMS Clover, while 92 others 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.

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.