HMS Azalea (K25): The Lone Escort at Slapton Sands

A Corvette Built for Convoy Work

HMS Azalea was a Flower-class corvette built by Cook, Welton and Gemmell of Beverley, laid down on 15 November 1939, launched on 8 July 1940, and commissioned on 27 January 1941.

Like most of her class, she spent her early war years on the essential, unglamorous business of convoy escort, and in April 1941 she and the Canadian corvette HMCS Kenogami intercepted the American liner Siboney some 590 kilometres from Lisbon after receiving a radio alert, a routine piece of wartime maritime policing.

The Night Exercise Tiger Went Wrong

Azalea's place in history was secured on the night of 28 April 1944, when she served as the primary escort for Convoy T-4 during Exercise Tiger, a large-scale rehearsal for the D-Day landings taking place off Slapton Sands in Devon.

Slapton Sands was chosen for a very specific reason: a long shingle beach with a shallow freshwater lake immediately behind it and gently rising farmland beyond, which is almost exactly the shape of Utah Beach on the Cotentin peninsula. To use it, the Allies had to empty it. In November 1943 compulsory evacuation orders went out across some twenty-five square miles of the South Hams, covering Slapton, Torcross, Strete, Blackawton and East Allington, and around three thousand people were given six weeks to leave their homes, their farms, their livestock and their churches and go and live somewhere else. Most of them had never been further than Totnes.

The convoy of eight landing ships was meant to have a second escort, the First World War-vintage destroyer HMS Scimitar, but Scimitar had collided with one of the landing ships earlier and withdrawn to Plymouth for repairs.

A replacement, HMS Saladin, was dispatched but failed to arrive in time. Compounding the danger, the American landing ships and the British naval headquarters coordinating the exercise were operating on different radio frequencies, and the American forces involved did not even know this was the case.

The radio failure deserves setting out properly, because it is the heart of what went wrong. The American landing ships and the British naval headquarters at Plymouth were working on different frequencies, and, worse, the Americans did not know it. Plymouth had picked up German E-boat activity and put out warnings. Those warnings reached Azalea. They did not reach a single one of the eight landing ships full of soldiers. Azalea, following the orders she had been given, held to radio silence rather than breaking it to pass the warning across. It is very easy to condemn that from eighty years away, and rather harder to say what a corvette captain should have done with standing instructions in front of him and a full-scale invasion rehearsal in progress.

Azalea led the convoy in a straight line formation, an arrangement that would later draw considerable criticism for presenting German E-boats with an almost ideal target. Nine E-boats from Cherbourg slipped past British patrols undetected and launched a coordinated torpedo and gunfire attack around 1:30am.

The formation is the other criticism, and it is a fair one. Eight landing ships in a single line astern, with one small escort at the head of the column, offers an attacker a target he could hardly improve on: come in from the flank and every torpedo that misses the ship it was aimed at has seven more behind it. Nine E-boats out of Cherbourg found exactly that. LST-507 burned and was abandoned, LST-531 went down inside a few minutes, LST-289 was hit and got herself ashore, and a fourth was damaged. One corvette, however handled, was never going to stop nine motor torpedo boats attacking at speed in the dark.

LST-507 caught fire and had to be abandoned, and LST-531 was hit and went down quickly; LST-289 caught fire too but managed to limp ashore, and a fourth vessel was also damaged. The disaster killed 749 American servicemen, 551 soldiers and 198 sailors, with many of the deaths caused not by the attack itself but by inadequate lifebelt training and hypothermia in the cold water that followed.

And then there is the detail that killed more men than the torpedoes did. The soldiers had been issued inflatable lifebelts and had not been properly taught to wear them. Worn round the waist, as a great many of them were, the belt inflates below a man's centre of gravity, and when he jumps into the sea it tips him face down and holds him there, particularly if he is wearing a pack. Hundreds died that way, in April water off the Devon coast, within sight of England, of a combination of a badly fitted piece of equipment and cold. The lifebelt drill for the actual landings was changed as a direct result.

The disaster very nearly became a security catastrophe on top of a human one.

Ten officers with Bigot clearance, the very highest level of access to the D-Day invasion plans, had been aboard the convoy and were among those unaccounted for afterwards, and Allied commanders spent an anxious few weeks establishing that all ten were dead rather than captured before they could be certain the coming Normandy landings had not been compromised.

It remains one of the most costly training disasters in American military history, a particularly tragic episode kept secret for years afterward for fear of compromising the coming Normandy invasion, and one in which Azalea, as the only escort actually present when the attack began, found herself at the very centre of events she had no realistic way of preventing alone.

The suppression afterwards has fed a good deal of conspiracy theory over the years, and the truth is both simpler and more uncomfortable. There was nothing sinister about keeping it quiet in April 1944: with the invasion six weeks off, announcing that the Germans had torpedoed a rehearsal for it would have told them a great deal. What is harder to defend is what happened afterwards. The story stayed largely untold for four decades, the dead were folded into the general D-Day casualty figures, and many families were never told how their sons had actually died. It took a Devon hotelier, Ken Small, buying a sunken Sherman tank from the American government for fifty dollars and raising it off the seabed in May 1984, to give the men a memorial. It stands at Torcross now, with their names beside it.

There is a second memorial at Slapton, thirty years older than the tank, and it is for the other people this story happened to. The villagers of Blackawton, Chillington, East Allington, Sherford, Slapton, Stokenham, Strete and Torcross went in December 1943 and were not allowed back for the better part of a year. What they came home to was not what they had left. The whole area had been handed over as a battle practice ground and live ammunition had been fired across the beach and inland during the rehearsals, so the fields they went back to farming still had things in them that had not gone off. Nobody, remarkably, was killed by any of it afterwards, though for years the occasional explosion was set off by a plough or by sheep.

In 1954 the United States Army put up a granite obelisk at the north end of Slapton Ley, and its inscription is worth reading in full because it is a rare piece of official gratitude that actually says something. It is addressed to the people of the South Hams who generously left their homes and their lands to provide a battle practice area for the successful assault in Normandy in June 1944, and it records that their action resulted in the saving of many hundreds of lives and contributed in no small measure to the success of the operation. So Slapton now has two memorials facing the same stretch of water: one raised by the Americans in 1954 to thank the farmers who were turned out of their houses, and one raised by a Devon hotelier thirty years later to name the seven hundred and forty-nine men who died offshore while the farmers were still away.

A Quiet Postwar End

Azalea survived the war and was sold out of naval service on 5 April 1946, converted into the merchant ship Norte, which continued trading until she herself sank on 19 January 1955, a quiet, almost anonymous end for a ship whose single most significant night had been anything but quiet.