HMS Bittersweet (K182): The British Corvette That Never Wore the White Ensign

British on Paper, Canadian in Practice

HMS Bittersweet was built by Marine Industries Ltd at Sorel, Quebec, laid down on 17 April 1940 and launched that September, ordered by the Royal Navy under the 1939-40 Flower-class building programme and towed to Liverpool, Nova Scotia to complete construction once ice on the St Lawrence River threatened to delay her further.

In an unusual arrangement, HMS Bittersweet remained British property throughout her entire wartime career, yet was commissioned directly into the Royal Canadian Navy on 23 January 1941 at Halifax as HMCS Bittersweet, never actually serving under Royal Navy command despite technically belonging to it, one of a number of Flower-class corvettes built in Canada under exactly this kind of dual arrangement.

The flag itself is worth clearing up, because it is one of the more surprising details of the period. The Royal Canadian Navy had no ensign of its own during the Second World War. Canadian warships wore the White Ensign at the stern, precisely as British ones did, with the Canadian Blue Ensign as a jack forward, and they went on doing so long after the war: the White Ensign did not come down in Canadian ships until 1965, when the new maple leaf flag was adopted. So Bittersweet flew the White Ensign every day of her working life. What she never did was serve under British command.

She displaced 950 tons, carried a single 4-inch gun and depth charge equipment, and her crew grew from an initial 47 to 104 by the war's end as her equipment and responsibilities expanded.

The loan arrangement existed for a thoroughly practical reason. By 1940 Britain had more empty hulls than trained sailors to man them, while Canada's rapidly expanding wartime navy had rather the opposite problem: plenty of keen recruits and precious few ships to put them aboard. Handing over newly built corvettes like Bittersweet solved both headaches in one stroke.

The scale of what Canada did in those six years is genuinely startling. In 1939 the Royal Canadian Navy consisted of thirteen ships and about three and a half thousand people, which is to say rather less than a squadron. By 1945 it had over a hundred thousand personnel and several hundred ships and was, by hull count, the third largest navy in the world. Almost none of those people had been sailors in 1939. A corvette's company in 1941 might consist of a regular officer or two, a handful of fishermen and merchant seamen, and forty men who had been students, clerks and farm hands a few months earlier, sent out into the worst ocean in the world to fight the most experienced submarine service on earth. That they did it at all is remarkable. That they did it well took rather longer.

Into the Wolfpacks

HMS Bittersweet joined the Newfoundland Escort Force in 1941, escorting Convoy HX 148 and successfully avoiding the German wolfpack Markgraf. On 15 November that year she pulled 11 survivors from the British merchantman Larpool, torpedoed by U-208, before undergoing a forecastle extension over the winter of 1941 into 1942 to improve her seakeeping.

The forecastle extension was one of the most important modifications ever made to the class and it is worth knowing what it fixed. As designed, a Flower had a short raised forecastle that ended just behind the gun, with an open well deck behind it. In an Atlantic sea that well deck was a swimming pool, the messdecks forward were permanently wet, and getting from one end of the ship to the other in bad weather was a genuine hazard. Extending the forecastle right back past the bridge gave a drier ship, a safer working route and, crucially, somewhere to put people. That is why her complement could go from forty-seven to a hundred and four: the radar, the extra depth charge crews and the additional lookouts all needed berths, and until the rebuild there simply were not any.

She joined the Mid-Ocean Escort Force in 1942 as part of Escort Group A3, and found herself in the thick of some of the Battle of the Atlantic's fiercest convoy battles. Wolfpack Hecht found the 42-ship Convoy ON 92 on 11 May and sank seven ships over the following two days before losing contact. At one point a fast-closing radar contact forced her captain, Lieutenant-Commander J.A. Woods, to swing Bittersweet hard out of the way, believing he was about to run down the returning corvette HMCS Arvida. He hadn't: it was a U-boat, which slid past in the confusion close enough to touch and far too close to fire on, a near-miss of identification rather than of torpedoes. Convoy SC 95 was attacked by wolfpack Lohs and lost two ships, and Convoy SC 100, escorted alongside fellow corvettes Trillium, Mayflower, Rosthern, Lunenburg and Weyburn with the benefit of Bittersweet's newly fitted Type 271 radar, was attacked first by Lohs and then by Pfeil, losing five ships in total, a brutal run of engagements for any single escort ship to endure.

That newly fitted Type 271 deserves a line of its own, because it changed the nature of the fight. A U-boat commander's preferred attack was on the surface at night: a submarine trimmed down at night is very nearly invisible, she is faster on the surface than most escorts could search, and asdic, which listens underwater, cannot hear a boat that is not submerged. The escorts were, in effect, blind in exactly the conditions the enemy chose to attack in. The Type 271 was a ten-centimetre set using the cavity magnetron, and it could pick a conning tower out of the wave clutter at a useful range in the dark. From the moment enough escorts had it, the night stopped being the U-boat's ally and started being a liability, because a boat on the surface could now be found, run down and depth charged by a ship she had not seen coming.

The unglamorous, unending nature of escort work rarely made headlines the way a single dramatic sinking did, but it had a cost all the same: Ordinary Seaman William Ansley died in service aboard her on 5 January 1942, and Able Seaman Lloyd Miller was killed on 20 February 1943, two names on a ship's book that most histories of the Atlantic war never get around to mentioning.

More Convoys, More Wolfpacks

Transferred to Escort Groups C5 and C3 in 1943, Bittersweet's toughest crossing that year was Convoy ONS 192, which cost the convoy seven ships. She was also present at the famous Convoy HX 229, sailing against wolfpack Raubgraf in a running battle that, combined with sister convoy SC 122 over the four days that followed, cost the Allies 22 ships, the single worst convoy action of the entire war. German radio crowed at the time that it was the greatest convoy battle in history, and for once the propaganda wasn't far wrong. Whatever put Bittersweet herself briefly out of action that May isn't recorded in the surviving files, but the moment was caught on camera: taken under tow by the destroyer HMCS Skeena, it's this same photograph that Hampshire Prints sells today as her "Under Tow, 1943" print, above. She underwent a refit at Baltimore that October and November before working up again at Pictou.

HX 229 and SC 122 were not merely the worst convoy battle of the war; they were the moment the Allies came closest to losing the Atlantic altogether. Two convoys, more than a hundred merchant ships, were found and worked over by something like forty U-boats over four days in the middle of the air gap, and twenty-two ships went to the bottom for the loss of a single submarine. The Admiralty afterwards recorded, in as many words, that the Germans never came so near to disrupting communication between the New World and the Old as in the first twenty days of March 1943.

And then, within ten weeks, it was over. Very long range Liberators finally closed the mid-Atlantic air gap, escort carriers began sailing with the convoys, enough escorts existed to form support groups that could be sent to reinforce a threatened convoy instead of merely defending their own, high frequency direction finding let escorts run down a U-boat on its own radio transmissions, and the codebreakers were reading the U-boat cipher again. In May 1943 forty-one U-boats were destroyed and Doenitz withdrew the remainder from the North Atlantic. Bittersweet was on that ocean for the worst of it and for the turn, which is more than most ships managed.

There is a reason so many Canadian escorts spent parts of 1943 in dockyards and working-up bases rather than on the ocean. By the end of 1942 the Royal Canadian Navy was escorting a very large share of the North Atlantic convoys with ships that were, in many cases, still fitted with obsolete equipment: older radar, no HF/DF, and crews who had been given the work before they had been given the training. The loss rates in Canadian-escorted convoys reflected it, and in early 1943 the Canadian mid-ocean groups were pulled off the main route and sent to British waters to be re-equipped and retrained. It was a humiliation at the time and it was also exactly the right decision, and the groups that came back were a different proposition entirely.

Her final convoy escort departed Londonderry with Convoy ON 262 in October 1944, and she returned to Canada for refit before finishing the war on coastal duty, briefly with Halifax Force and then with Sydney Force. For her service throughout the Battle of the Atlantic, HMS Bittersweet was awarded the battle honour Atlantic 1941 to 1945.

Returned to Britain, Broken Up in Scotland

HMS Bittersweet was formally returned to the Royal Navy on 22 June 1945 at Aberdeen, the paperwork finally catching up with reality after years of Canadian service, and was broken up at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth the following year, a quietly fitting end for a ship that had spent her entire working life serving one navy while technically belonging to another.