HMS Bryony (K192): Sunk by the Belfast Blitz Before She Ever Put to Sea

The Build: Harland and Wolff

HMS Bryony was built by Harland and Wolff at Belfast, her keel laid on 16 November 1940, a Flower-class corvette designed for the unglamorous but essential work of convoy escort against the U-boat threat.

She was armed with a single BL 4-inch gun, twin .50-inch machine guns, .303-inch Lewis guns and stern depth charge racks carrying 40 charges, a modest but effective fit for a class of ship built in vast numbers precisely because it could be produced quickly and cheaply on commercial slipways using a design based on a whaling ship.

Sunk Before She Was Finished

HMS Bryony's story took a dramatic and sobering turn before she had even been completed. On 15 April 1941, during a devastating German air raid on Belfast, part of what became known as the Belfast Blitz, HMS Bryony was struck directly while fitting out at Harland and Wolff's yard, barely a month after she had been launched, on 15 March, a cruelly short interval between entering the water and very nearly leaving it for good.

Her upper deck and superstructure were wrecked, most of her hull plates were blown off, and the remainder of her hull flooded, leaving her effectively sunk at her own berth, a stark reminder of just how devastating the Belfast Blitz was, not only for the city's civilian population but for the shipyards and vessels caught in the middle of it.

The scale of that night is worth setting down. More than 150 bombers, Heinkel 111s, Junkers 88s and Dornier 17s, came over from bases in northern France and the Netherlands, and by morning some 987 people in Belfast were dead and about 1,500 injured. Outside London it was the worst night of the entire Blitz. The city had almost no anti-aircraft guns, no night fighters worth the name and very few public shelters, on the comfortable pre-war assumption that Belfast was too far from Germany to be worth the fuel. Harland and Wolff, which was building warships and Stirling bombers at the same time, lost forty of its workforce, two thirds of its workshops and its power station in a single night, and did not get back to full output until November. Three corvettes were burnt out in the yard. Bryony was one of the ships caught on the stocks, and she was the lucky one, in the sense that she was still there to be salvaged.

Rather than write her off entirely, the Admiralty judged HMS Bryony recoverable, and she was salvaged and rebuilt, a process so extensive that her construction became the longest build time of any Flower-class corvette. She was not finally commissioned until 4 June 1942, the better part of two years after her keel had first been laid, a remarkable feat of shipyard resilience carried out in a city that was itself still absorbing the shock of one of the worst air raids to strike the United Kingdom outside London.

Into the Arctic Convoys

Under her first captain, Lieutenant Commander John Parker Stewart, DSC, RNR, who had taken command that May, HMS Bryony, still working up on trials, was assigned to escort Convoy PQ18 in September 1942, one of the most fiercely contested Arctic convoys of the entire war, carrying vital supplies to the Soviet Union. The convoy assembled at Loch Ewe on 1 September and sailed the next day, shadowed relentlessly by German forces, including seven U-boats by mid-September.

On 14 September, the tanker Atheltemplar was torpedoed by U-457, and on 19 September, twelve Junkers Ju 88 dive bombers attacked the convoy, one of them targeting HMS Bryony directly.

Her bombs fell wide, and HMS Bryony emerged unscathed, a considerable stroke of luck given that thirteen merchant ships were lost from the convoy overall before it reached Archangel, one of the costliest Arctic convoy operations of the war.

PQ18 is worth understanding as more than a set of losses. It was the first Arctic convoy sailed after the destruction of PQ17 in July, when the merchant ships had been ordered to scatter and were picked off one by one, and the Admiralty had concluded that the answer was to send air cover with them rather than hope to meet it at the other end. So PQ18 sailed with an escort carrier, HMS Avenger, and a dozen Sea Hurricanes aboard her, specifically to break up the massed torpedo-bomber attacks the Luftwaffe had been mounting from northern Norway. Thirteen merchant ships were still lost. The difference was that this time the convoy fought its way through rather than dissolving, and Bryony, straight off her trials and not yet a fully worked-up ship, was in the middle of it.

A Long Second Career as a Weather Ship

Bryony's Arctic service did not end with PQ18. She escorted the returning convoy QP14 that same September and QP15 in November, two more hard convoys through some of the roughest, most dangerous waters the war had to offer, before Stewart handed over command to Temporary Lieutenant Thomas Hand, RNR, on 9 December 1942.

QP 14 was not the quiet trip home that a return convoy sounds like. She sailed from Archangel on 13 September 1942 with fifteen merchant ships, a good many of them survivors of PQ 17 who had been sitting in Russian ports since July with no way back, and reached Loch Ewe on the 26th having lost the minesweeper Leda, the destroyer Somali, the fleet oiler Grey Ranger and three merchantmen. Somali is the one that stays with people. She was torpedoed by U-703 on 20 September and hit in the engine room, and her sister ship Ashanti took her in tow and kept towing for four days through worsening weather, until at about half past two on the morning of the 24th she broke in two. Thirty-five of her hundred and two men came out of the Arctic water alive. Bryony had taken PQ 18 in and QP 14 out inside three weeks, and she was, on paper, still working up.

It was Hand who took her into a fourth Arctic convoy, JW53, in February 1943, before her war shifted dramatically south that summer, escorting a long run of Gibraltar and West African convoys through 1943, among them OS 48, KMS 18B, OS 52, OG 92 and KMS 30, a considerable change of scenery, and climate, from the Barents Sea.

JW 53 deserves a note of its own, because on that passage the Germans were very nearly beside the point. 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 Sheffield and seven other ships eventually had to go home to be repaired. Deck cargo was simply washed away. Not one ship was lost to the enemy.

That is worth holding on to as a description of the route, because the numbers usually quoted for the Arctic convoys are all about U-boats and aircraft. Here was a nine-thousand-ton cruiser having steel peeled off her by waves, and out in the same water, doing the same job, was a nine-hundred-ton corvette with a single 4-inch gun and a hull based on a whale catcher. The Flowers were notorious for their motion; the standard line among the men who served in them was that they would roll on wet grass. In a Barents Sea February that stopped being a joke.

She was sold to the Royal Norwegian Navy in 1947 and renamed Polarfront II, converted to weather ship duties monitoring the North Atlantic's often ferocious conditions, a role that suited her sturdy corvette hull well and that she continued for the best part of thirty years.

The weather ship job was a more serious business than it sounds, and it is the reason she lasted so long. Polarfront II was one of the first two ships to man Norwegian ocean weather station M, known as Mike, at 66 degrees north and 2 degrees east in the Norwegian Sea. Manning a station means exactly that: staying in one patch of open ocean, in weather that in a Norwegian Sea winter is as bad as the North Atlantic offers, taking readings and sending them, for weeks at a time, and then being relieved so the other ship can do it. Before satellites there was no other way to know what the atmosphere over the deep ocean was doing, and every shipping forecast and every transatlantic flight plan depended on somebody sitting out there. Station Mike outlasted every other ocean weather station in the world. A Flower-class corvette that had been sunk at her fitting-out berth in 1941 spent the next three decades keeping it.

She was withdrawn from active service on 1 January 1977 and finally scrapped in 1979, closing out a career that had begun with her being sunk before she had even left her own fitting-out berth, and ended with three decades of quiet, useful service reporting the weather for a different navy entirely.

The station outlasted her by a long way, and then it ended too. Ocean weather station M had been set up in 1948 as the northernmost of thirteen such stations spread across the North Atlantic, and one by one the others were closed down as satellites and automatic buoys took the work over. Mike was the last of them anywhere in the world. The final weather ship, a later Polarfront, came off station at the end of 2009, and from 1 January 2010 the position has been visited five or six times a year by research vessels instead of being permanently occupied. That gives station M an unbroken run of more than sixty years of measurements, from the surface down past two thousand metres, and the record has turned out to be one of the most valuable long series in oceanography; it is still being used for work on ocean acidification and on how the waves of the Norwegian Sea have changed. Bryony was one of the first two ships to man it. A corvette that was bombed onto the bottom of her own fitting-out berth in April 1941 is at one end of a scientific record that people are still citing.