HMS Begonia (K66): The British Corvette Britain Lent to America

A Corvette for the Battle of the Atlantic

HMS Begonia was a Flower-class corvette built by Cook, Welton and Gemmell of Beverley, ordered on 25 July 1939, laid down the following March, and launched on 18 September 1940, commissioning into the Royal Navy on 3 March 1941.

The place she was built is worth picturing, because it is nowhere near the sea. Cook, Welton and Gemmell had its yard at Grovehill on the River Hull at Beverley, nine miles inland, on a stretch of water narrow enough that getting a finished hull down to the Humber was a job in itself. What came out of it, between 1901 and 1963, was more than thirteen hundred vessels, and for a good part of that time it was the largest builder of fishing trawlers anywhere in the world, supplying the fleets of Hull, Grimsby, Aberdeen and Fleetwood. The firm had taken the yard over from Cochrane, Hamilton and Cooper, whose successors moved to Selby and were still turning out warships for the Admiralty forty years later, as the article on HMS Bream (T306) describes.

That is not a coincidence, and it is the single most important thing to understand about the escort fleet. Britain won the Battle of the Atlantic with ships designed to be built by firms that had never built a warship, in yards on rivers, by men who normally made trawlers. The Flower class was drawn from a whale catcher precisely so that Beverley, Selby, Middlesbrough and a dozen places like them could produce it without new tooling, new skills or Admiralty supervision. Begonia was ordered in July 1939, before the war began, from a Yorkshire trawler yard nine miles up a river, and was escorting Atlantic convoys twenty months later. No purpose-built warship programme in the world could have done that, and the Royal Navy knew it, which is why it did not try.

The yard did not long outlive the trade that made it. Distant-water trawling collapsed in the decades that followed, the orders dried up, and Cook, Welton and Gemmell closed under its own name on 31 March 1963 after sixty-two years at Grovehill. The site was bought and carried on for a while under another name, and then that went too. It is a pattern that runs right through this series: the escort fleet that kept Britain fed in two wars came out of the fishing industry, and the fishing industry did not survive the century.

She carried a single 4-inch gun, machine guns, and depth charge throwers with 40 charges, a solid, standard fit for the class, and joined the Western Approaches Escort Force under her first commanding officer, Temporary Lieutenant Thomas Muir RNR, to take up exactly the kind of gruelling convoy protection work that defined the corvette fleet's war.

Twenty-Three Convoys in a Year

In just twelve months of service in the Battle of the Atlantic, Begonia escorted 15 Atlantic convoys and eight Gibraltar convoys, helping shepherd over 800 ships safely through some of the most dangerous waters in the world.

Begonia herself pulled survivors from the sea more than once: 33 men from the merchant Erato after U-126 torpedoed her on 28 July 1941, and 27 more from Empire Stream, sunk by U-124 that September, on top of an earlier rescue of Norwegian sailors from the torpedoed Taranger back in May.

The rescues are what the record ought to be read for. Thirty-three men from Erato, twenty-seven from Empire Stream, an earlier boatload of Norwegians from Taranger: that is nearly a hundred people who came home because a Flower class corvette stopped in a submarine-infested ocean, at night, to pick them out of the water. Stopping is the dangerous part. A ship lying still while her boats are away is the easiest target at sea, and an escort captain doing it is trading his own ship's safety against the lives in front of him. They did it anyway, over and over, for six years.

Her service included some brutal engagements too: Convoy OG 69 in July 1941 saw seven ships sunk, though Begonia's escort group managed to damage a U-boat in return, and Convoy HG 73 that September, escorted by a whole flotilla of flower-named corvettes including Gentian, Hibiscus, Jasmine, Larkspur, Myosotis, Periwinkle and Stonecrop, turned into a running ten-day battle that cost nine ships, a stark illustration of just how costly convoy escort work could be even when the corvettes themselves survived unscathed.

The convoy battles listed above deserve unpacking a little, because the numbers understate them. HG 73 was a homeward convoy from Gibraltar in September 1941 that was found by a shadowing aircraft and then worked over for ten days by a pack of submarines, losing nine ships out of twenty-five. The escort was a garden of corvettes: Gentian, Hibiscus, Jasmine, Larkspur, Myosotis, Periwinkle, Stonecrop and Begonia. Eight small ships, none of them fast enough to catch a surfaced U-boat, trying to protect a slow convoy for ten consecutive days and nights. The men aboard them did not get a run ashore for a week and a half, and nine ships went down in front of them anyway.

Handed to the Americans

In a remarkably unusual reversal of the more familiar Lend-Lease arrangement, in which the United States supplied ships to Britain, Begonia was instead transferred the other way, commissioned into the US Navy as USS Impulse at London's Albert Docks on 16 March 1942 under reverse Lend-Lease, with Lieutenant C. M. Lyons taking command.

The reversal is a great deal less surprising once you know what was happening off the American coast in the winter of 1941 and 1942. Within weeks of the United States entering the war, Germany sent submarines to operate directly off the eastern seaboard in what they called Operation Drumbeat, and found a target-rich environment of a kind they had not seen since 1940: ships sailing independently rather than in convoy, coastal towns still lit at night so that merchantmen were silhouetted against the glow, and almost nothing available to escort anybody. The losses over the following six months were catastrophic, and they were, very largely, avoidable.

So Britain, which had spent two and a half years learning this the hard way and had very little to spare, sent help. In March 1942 twenty-four Royal Navy anti-submarine trawlers and ten corvettes were deployed to the American east coast, and two mid-ocean escort groups were redeployed to the Caribbean. The corvettes went over formally: ten Flowers were transferred to the United States Navy under reverse Lend-Lease, reclassified as patrol gunboats numbered PG 62 to 71 and known in American service as the Temptress class, with a further eight Canadian-built ships following as the Action class. Begonia became USS Impulse. It is one of the few occasions in the whole war in which the traffic ran the other way.

The trawlers paid for it. HMT Bedfordshire, one of the little armed fishing vessels sent across from the Royal Naval Patrol Service, was torpedoed by U-558 off Cape Lookout on 11 May 1942 with no survivors at all, and the bodies of four of her men came ashore on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina, where they are buried in a small British cemetery on American soil that is still tended today. British sailors died defending the American coast in 1942 because the ships to do it did not yet exist, and Begonia's transfer belongs to the same story.

She crossed the Atlantic under her new colours the following month, departing Londonderry on 15 April as a convoy escort and reaching New York on 4 May, before settling into three years of unglamorous but essential coastal escort work running between Norfolk and Key West and out to Cuba, only returning to Boston, and to the Royal Navy, on 6 July 1945, a small but genuine example of British-built naval capacity being put to direct use by America's own wartime navy.

A Long Wreck, Then a Final One

Begonia returned to the Royal Navy in August 1945 and was sold into merchant service on 22 July 1946 as Begonlock, going on to change hands and names three more times over the following decade, becoming Fundiciones Molinao in 1949, Astiluzu in 1951, and finally Rio Mero in 1956.

Under that last name her working life ended when she was wrecked off Punta de los Entinas in Spain on 21 January 1970, closing out a truly well-travelled career, and no fewer than five names, that had taken her from the Atlantic convoy routes to American coastal waters and finally to a Spanish shoreline.