HMS Black Swan (U57): She Gave Her Name to a Class, and Tried to Rescue the Amethyst

The Ship That Named Her Class

HMS Black Swan was laid down by Yarrow Shipbuilders on 20 June 1938, launched on 7 July 1939, and commissioned on 27 January 1940, the name ship of the entire Black Swan class of sloops, one of the most successful anti-submarine escort designs of the war.

She carried six 4-inch anti-aircraft guns alongside pom-poms, machine guns, and by war's end up to 110 depth charges, a particularly formidable submarine hunter for her size.

The Black Swans were the end of a line and the best of it. The Royal Navy had been developing the escort sloop since the Bitterns of the mid-1930s, refining it through the Egret class, and what came out at the end was a ship that could do three things at once: shoot accurately at aircraft with six 4-inch guns on high-angle mountings and a proper director to lay them, hold an asdic contact through a long hunt, and then drop enough depth charges to make the hunt count. They were expensive and slow to build compared with a corvette, and they were worth every hour of it. Captain Frederic Walker built his 2nd Support Group out of them, Starling, Wild Goose, Wren, Woodpecker, Kite and Magpie, and that group went on to destroy more U-boats than any other Allied formation of the war.

Bombed, Mined, and Still Fighting

HMS Black Swan's early war service included convoy escort along Britain's east coast and operations during the 1940 Norwegian Campaign, during which she suffered bomb damage on 27 April 1940 and mine damage that November, absorbing a punishing start to her career.

From 1941 she escorted convoys in the Irish Sea and the Mediterranean, and her most significant single action came on 2 April 1943, when, escorting Convoy OS 45 from Liverpool to Freetown, HMS Black Swan and the corvette HMS Stonecrop sank U-124, one of the top-scoring German U-boats of the entire war, a major kill against one of the most successful and dangerous submarines the Kriegsmarine ever put to sea.

U-124 was not just any submarine, and the scale of what Black Swan and Stonecrop ended is worth stating. Over eleven war patrols she had sunk forty-six merchant ships and two warships, something in the order of two hundred and twenty thousand tons of shipping, which puts her among the highest-scoring boats Germany ever sent to sea. Her commander, Johann Mohr, was one of the best-known aces in the service and had made his name off the American coast in 1942. On 2 April 1943 she attacked convoy OS 45 west of Oporto, was hunted down by the two escorts and went to the bottom with all fifty-three men aboard. Every ship she would have sunk over the following two years is an unknowable number, and it is the whole argument for escort work in a single sentence.

What happened to her next is a decent illustration of how the Navy used a ship that had proved itself. Through the first eight months of 1944 she was on the Mediterranean run between Gibraltar and Port Said, and in March she was one of the British ships sent to reinforce an American formation, Task Force 64, covering convoy UGS 36 on its way across from the United States, helping to see off attacks by U-421, U-450 and U-509. Her radar was brought up from Type 272 to the better Type 276 while she was at Alexandria. In September she went home to Western Approaches Command at Holyhead for coastal convoy work, and in December she went into Leith for the refit that would make her fit for the tropics.

She worked up at Tobermory again in the spring of 1945, took a last few home convoys with the 12th Escort Group in May, trained at Malta, and then made the long passage out to Manus in the Admiralty Islands to join the British Pacific Fleet, which is about as far from the Western Approaches as a warship can be sent. The Japanese surrender came before she saw much of that war. Afterwards she joined the fleet at Hong Kong and spent a long stretch on reoccupation and repatriation work, serving with the 1st and then the 3rd Escort Flotillas. That is how a sloop built at Scotstoun to hunt U-boats in the Atlantic came to be lying on the China station in the spring of 1949, within steaming distance of the Yangtze.

Under Fire on the Yangtze

HMS Black Swan went on to serve in the Far East and Pacific theatres against Japan, and her postwar career brought her into one of the most dramatic diplomatic and military incidents of the immediate Cold War era: the 1949 Yangtze Incident, when the frigate HMS Amethyst became trapped under fire from Communist Chinese forces on the Yangtze River.

HMS Black Swan was among the ships that attempted to reach and relieve Amethyst, and came under fire herself in the process, suffering twelve wounded and severe damage to her superstructure, a truly dangerous episode that unfolded amid the chaos of the closing stages of the Chinese Civil War and drew international attention to the plight of British ships caught up in it.

The Yangtze Incident is worth setting out in order, because the sequence explains why a sloop ended up shot to pieces four hundred miles from the sea. On 20 April 1949 HMS Amethyst was making her way upriver to Nanking to relieve the guardship there when People's Liberation Army batteries on the north bank opened fire on her. She was hit repeatedly, her captain was mortally wounded, and she ran aground. The destroyer Consort came down from Nanking at speed to help and was driven off, badly damaged. The following day the cruiser HMS London and Black Swan came up from Shanghai and were beaten back in turn. Across the four ships something over forty British sailors were killed.

The tactical problem is not hard to see. A river is a place where a warship has no room to manoeuvre, cannot open the range, and is presenting her length broadside on to guns that are dug in, camouflaged, firing over open sights at a mile or less and are extremely hard to see from the water. A cruiser's armament is designed for engagements at ten miles against something she can spot. Neither London nor Black Swan was in any real sense in a fight she could win, and both of them went anyway, which is rather the point.

And there was more to it than one damaged ship. British and other Western warships had been navigating the Yangtze as of right for the best part of a century, under treaties imposed on China in the nineteenth century, keeping a guardship at Nanking for the embassy there as a matter of routine. The People's Liberation Army did not accept those rights and had no intention of doing so. Amethyst eventually got herself out, slipping down a hundred and thirty-nine miles of river in the dark on the night of 30 July after a hundred and one days trapped, and signalling on reaching the sea that she had rejoined the fleet, with no damage or casualties, God save the King. But no British warship went up the Yangtze again. The incident is generally read, correctly, as the end of a century of Western gunboats on Chinese rivers.

A Final Tour Off Korea

HMS Black Swan went on to serve during the Korean War, adding yet another conflict to a service record that already spanned the Second World War and one of the most tense confrontations of the early Cold War.

Korea gave her one more kind of war. With no enemy fleet to fight, the ships on the west coast spent their time blockading, supporting the offshore islands still held by friendly guerrillas, and shelling coastal roads, railways and gun positions. A sloop designed in the late 1930s to hunt submarines in the Western Approaches finished her fighting career lying off the Korean coast putting 4-inch shells into a road cutting. Very few ships have had a run quite like it: bombed off Norway in 1940, sinking one of the great U-boats in 1943, shot up on a Chinese river in 1949, and still in action off Korea in 1951.

She was there from the very beginning, too. When the war broke out in June 1950 she was one of the first British ships into the operational area, and she went straight into the first naval action of the whole conflict, off the east coast in company with the cruiser Jamaica, in which five of six North Korean torpedo boats were sunk. She was also one of a very small number of United Nations ships to be hit by enemy air attack during the entire war, which in a conflict fought largely without an opposing navy or air force at sea is a distinction of sorts. Altogether she did three tours of about three months each and steamed something in the order of forty-one thousand miles on operations.

It ended, as these things do, with a signal and a handshake. In December 1951 Rear-Admiral Scott-Moncrieff, second in command on the Far East Station, came aboard to thank the ship and see her off for home, and in March 1952 she sailed for Portsmouth to pay off. She lay in reserve at Devonport and then at Lisahally in Northern Ireland, went on the disposal list in 1956, and arrived at Troon on 13 September that year to be broken up. Twelve years of war and near-war across three oceans, and then four years swinging round a buoy waiting for the decision.

She was finally scrapped in 1956 at Troon in Scotland, closing out the career of a ship that had lent her name to an entire successful class and, in her own right, survived bombs, mines, a major U-boat kill and gunfire on the Yangtze.