HMS Bergamot (K189): From the Murmansk Run to the Surrender of the Italian Fleet

A Belfast-Built Corvette

HMS Bergamot was a Flower-class corvette laid down at Harland and Wolff in Belfast on 15 October 1940, launched on 15 February 1941, and commissioned on 12 May that year, joining the ranks of corvettes built rapidly in wartime to fill an urgent gap in convoy escort numbers, with Temporary Acting Lieutenant Commander Richard Chapman RNR as her first commanding officer.

Into the Arctic Gauntlet

Bergamot's early war service took her a long way south before it ever took her north: through 1941 she escorted convoys as far as Freetown in Sierra Leone and beyond, including the large troop convoy WS 10 bound for South Africa and the Middle East, refuelling from tankers off Brazil's Abrolhos Islands in company with HMS Birmingham and HMS Lavender along the way.

That refuelling stop deserves its context, because Brazil in 1941 was neutral and fully intended to stay that way. She did not declare war on Germany and Italy until August 1942, and through 1941 even the Americans were in the country as guests rather than as allies, both governments still formally neutral. What that meant for a British warship was that she could not simply put into a Brazilian port and draw fuel from a naval oiler, because there were none and there was no agreement to permit it. The only arrangement it had been possible to make in advance was a purely commercial one, with the oil companies, who would sell fuel to ships that arrived and asked for it.

So a Flower-class corvette escorting a troop convoy to Suez in 1941 went the long way round the Atlantic and topped up her tanks off a neutral coast under a contract with an oil company. It is a fair picture of how thin the margins were before the United States came into the war: the Royal Navy could not get an army to the Middle East without buying oil, commercially, from a country that had not yet decided whose side it was on.

By September 1942 she was escorting Convoy PQ 18, sailing all the way from Loch Ewe in Scotland to the Kola Inlet while under sustained German air and U-boat attack for days on end; thirteen of the convoy's forty merchant ships never arrived, placing Bergamot at the heart of one of the most punishing convoy battles the Royal Navy fought.

That figure needs its context, because it reads like a defeat and was very nearly the opposite. PQ 18 was the first convoy to sail after PQ 17, which had been ordered to scatter in July on a mistaken report that Tirpitz was at sea, and which lost twenty-four of its thirty-five ships to aircraft and submarines picking off lone merchantmen with nobody left to protect them. The Arctic run was then suspended for two months while the Admiralty worked out whether it could be done at all. PQ 18 was the answer: forty merchant ships, an escort of more than fifty warships in relays, and, for the first time on that route, an escort carrier. HMS Avenger brought Sea Hurricanes north so that the bombers could be met over the convoy rather than mourned after it. Twenty-seven ships got through, and the Germans paid some forty aircraft and three U-boats for the thirteen they stopped. The Luftwaffe never mounted a torpedo attack on that scale in the Arctic again.

The worst of it came on 13 September. The German torpedo squadrons had trained a tactic they called the Golden Comb: forty or so aircraft coming in together at mast height, line abreast across the front of the convoy, each dropping a pair of torpedoes so that the whole formation laid down a comb of tracks that no merchant ship could turn out of without turning into another one. It worked exactly as designed. Eight ships went down in about eight minutes. Seen from the deck of a corvette, that is a wall of aircraft at fifty feet, and every gun in the convoy firing flat across the water at them, which was a hazard in its own right.

The return legs proved just as costly: on the westbound QP 14 that same autumn the minesweeper HMS Leda was torpedoed and sunk amid severe weather, and QP 15 that December lost two more merchantmen to U-boats after the convoy scattered in a storm.

It is worth saying what a Flower was actually like up there. The design came off the drawing board of a whale catcher and was meant for coastal work in the North Atlantic: a little over two hundred feet, one shaft, one screw, and a motion so violent that the standing lower-deck line was that she would roll on wet grass. Take her north of the Arctic Circle and you add freezing spray, which builds ice on the upperworks, the guns and the rigging faster than the hands can chip it off, and ice high up on a small ship is topweight, which is a stability problem rather than an inconvenience. Men kept the Murmansk run open in ships aboard which staying upright was itself a job of work.

From the Arctic to the Mediterranean

Two more Arctic runs followed in early 1943, Convoy JW 53 to northern Russia in February, on which every merchant ship arrived safely despite attacks by German aircraft and U-boats, and the homebound RA 53 in March, which lost three ships to renewed U-boat activity.

JW 53 deserves a footnote of its own, because the escorts are not really who saved it. The convoy sailed in February 1943 into what is generally reckoned the worst weather any Arctic convoy ever met: the cruiser Sheffield had armour plating torn off the top of one of her forward turrets by the sea, the escort carrier Dasher and six merchant ships were damaged badly enough to turn back to Iceland, and eight ships in all eventually had to go home for repairs. That passage is described from another corvette's deck in the article on HMS Bryony (K192).

Set those two convoys beside each other and you have the Arctic run in miniature. In September 1942 Bergamot was in a convoy that lost eight ships in eight minutes to a wall of torpedo bombers coming in at mast height. Five months later she was in one that lost nothing at all to the enemy and was very nearly taken apart by the sea. The Germans were only ever half of the problem up there, and on a good many passages they were the lesser half.

Bergamot's war then took her about as far from the Arctic as it was possible to go: escorting the Mediterranean-bound Convoy KMS 18B that summer, during which three transports were torpedoed and sunk by German submarines, before supporting Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, and the subsequent landings at Salerno and Anzio, two of the Mediterranean theatre's most hard-fought amphibious operations.

She was present at Malta on 9 September 1943 for the surrender of the Italian fleet, a remarkably significant moment marking Italy's exit from the war on the Axis side and bringing an entire hostile Mediterranean navy over to the Allied cause.

A great deal more happened that week than a flag coming down. The Italian fleet sailed from La Spezia under Admiral Carlo Bergamini to give itself up, and the Luftwaffe came after it on the way. On 9 September, Dornier 217s attacked the flagship, the battleship Roma, with the Fritz X, a radio-guided armour-piercing bomb steered onto its target by an operator in the aircraft. It was the first weapon of its kind ever used in war. The second hit set off a forward magazine, blew a fifteen-inch turret clean over the side and broke her in half, and she went down inside half an hour with something close to fourteen hundred men aboard, Bergamini among them. Her sister Italia was hit as well and got through. The guided missile arrived in the world on the same afternoon the Italian fleet surrendered, and almost everybody was looking at the other thing.

What did reach Malta was, even so, a sight worth being present for, and Bergamot was present for it: battleships, cruisers and destroyers of a navy that had contested the Mediterranean for three years, coming in to anchor and be counted. Admiral Cunningham's signal to the Admiralty is the most quoted sentence of his career, asking that their Lordships be pleased to know that the Italian battle fleet now lay at anchor under the guns of the fortress of Malta. A corvette that had spent the previous September being bombed off Bear Island was entitled to enjoy it.

A Long Retirement as a Greek Ferry

Bergamot survived the war intact and was sold in May 1946 to Greek owners, converted into a coastal passenger ferry and renamed Syros the following year, before changing hands and names twice more, becoming Delphini around 1950 and finally Ekaterini in 1955.

The second career is a good deal less surprising than it sounds. The Flower was a warship drawn on a whale catcher's lines and built by yards that otherwise built merchant ships, so when the war ended there were scores of small, strong, cheap hulls on the market with a thoroughly proven ability to stay afloat in weather that would frighten anybody. Greek coastal shipping had been comprehensively wrecked during the occupation and needed replacing in a hurry. Bergamot went into that trade and stayed in it through three names and several owners for the best part of thirty years, which is roughly six times as long as her entire naval career.

Under that last name she was eventually broken up at Perama in Greece in 1976, closing out 35 years of service that had carried her from the brutal Arctic convoy routes to the Mediterranean invasion beaches and finally into a much gentler life ferrying passengers around Greek waters.