HMS Avon (K97): From Convoy Escort in the Atlantic to Task Force 57 Off Okinawa

A Frigate Built to Stretch Resources Further

HMS Avon was built by Smith's Dock Company of South Bank-on-Tees as a Group II River-class frigate, one of 151 River-class ships launched between 1941 and 1944 and named, in keeping with the class's tradition, after a British river.

The design was intended to combine much of the endurance and anti-submarine capability of the larger Black Swan-class sloops with a considerably more economical build, allowing Britain to produce capable convoy escorts in the kind of numbers the Battle of the Atlantic demanded.

Commissioned on 18 September 1943 under Lieutenant Commander Patrick King, RNR, she worked up with anti-submarine exercises off Tobermory before joining convoys out of Londonderry that winter.

She carried Hedgehog anti-submarine mortars and depth charges as her primary weapons against the U-boat threat.

A Rescue in the Indian Ocean

Avon spent much of the war on exactly the kind of unglamorous, essential North Atlantic convoy escort duty her class was built for, but her most notable single action came further afield: in 1944 she rescued survivors of the torpedoed Norwegian freighter Tarifa in the Indian Ocean, a ship that had been carrying Australian troops home from North Africa, a rescue that likely saved a considerable number of Allied soldiers' lives far from the war's more famous battles.

Tarifa had been sunk on 7 March 1944 by the German submarine U-510 some 250 nautical miles east of Socotra Island; Avon reached the scene on 13 March and pulled 123 survivors from the water.

The following year she took part in the Battle of Okinawa as part of Task Force 57, the British Pacific Fleet's carrier force, supporting one of the largest and bloodiest amphibious operations of the entire Pacific War, a considerable distance both geographically and in character from her earlier Atlantic convoy work.

Her role there was largely to screen the fleet's logistic support group, escorting RFA tankers through their replenishment runs, including on 3 and 4 May 1945, so that the carriers themselves could stay on station off Okinawa rather than withdraw to refuel.

A New Flag, and an Emperor's Voyage

Avon was paid off and placed in the Reserve Fleet after the war, before being sold to Portugal in 1949 and recommissioned as NRP Nuno Tristão.

She went on to serve the Portuguese Navy for over two decades, including a rather unusual duty in 1959, transporting Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia on a state visit from Bayonne to Portugal, and later supported Portuguese marine operations in Africa during the colonial conflicts of that era.

She was finally decommissioned in 1970 after 21 years of Portuguese service and scrapped in Lisbon in 1972, closing out a career that had carried her from the North Atlantic convoy routes to the Pacific and finally into service ferrying an exiled African emperor.