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

Built at 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. 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. 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, a genuinely 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

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.

A Long Second Career as a Weather Ship

HMS Bryony went on to serve on escort and patrol duties in the North Sea and home waters through the rest of the war, before being sold to the Royal Norwegian Navy in 1948 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 over three decades. She was finally sold for scrap in 1979 and broken up the following year, closing out a career that had begun with her being sunk before she had even left her own fitting-out berth, and ended with more than thirty years of quiet, useful service reporting the weather for a different navy entirely.