HMS Camellia: A U-boat Kill Off Iceland, Then Into the Arctic Convoys

The Build: Belfast for the Convoy War

HMS Camellia was built by Harland and Wolff at Belfast, her keel laid on 14 November 1939, launched on 4 May 1940, and commissioned on 18 June that year, a Flower-class corvette built to the class's characteristically simple, whaling-ship-derived design that allowed it to be produced quickly and in large numbers at a moment when Britain desperately needed convoy escorts.

Sinking U-70 and a Dramatic Rescue

HMS Camellia's most significant single action came on 7 March 1941, when she joined HMS Arbutus in sinking the German submarine U-70 southeast of Iceland, a particularly important early-war success against the U-boat threat at a time when Allied anti-submarine tactics and equipment were still developing rapidly.

The action came in the middle of a chaotic night. A wolf pack of four U-boats had fallen on convoy OB 293, among them the celebrated ace Otto Kretschmer's U-99, which finished off the already-damaged tanker Athelbeach and the whale factory ship Terje Viken. U-70 herself torpedoed the British tanker Delilian and the Dutch tanker Mijdrecht, whose master, J. Swart, was in the middle of picking up survivors from Delilian's own lifeboats when the torpedo struck; spotting the U-boat's periscope, he simply rammed it, badly damaging U-70's conning tower before reporting her position to the escorts.

Camellia sighted the crippled U-70 on the surface at 0815 and gave chase as she dived. Over the following hours Camellia and Arbutus between them dropped some 48 depth charges, finally forcing the U-boat back to the surface at 1244, where her crew abandoned ship; twenty of the forty-five men aboard drowned, and the remaining twenty-five were taken prisoner.

In the same action, HMS Camellia rescued 37 survivors from the Athelbeach, first torpedoed by U-70 and then finished off with a coup de grace from U-99, and landed them safely at Greenock; her master, Malcolm McIntyre, was among the seven men who did not make it, a vivid reminder that convoy escort work combined combat action with the equally vital, and often equally dangerous, business of pulling survivors from freezing waters.

That convoy was the beginning of a fortnight that changed the Battle of the Atlantic, and Camellia opened it. The three highest-scoring U-boat commanders in the German navy were all at sea that week: Gunther Prien in U-47, who had sunk the battleship Royal Oak inside Scapa Flow, Otto Kretschmer in U-99, whose tonnage figure was higher than anybody's, and Joachim Schepke in U-100. Camellia and Arbutus sank U-70 on 7 March. The following evening U-47 vanished, with Prien and all forty-five men aboard. HMS Wolverine was credited with sinking her and held that credit for half a century, but the modern assessment is that Wolverine's target that night was Eckermann's UA, which survived, and that there is no convincing explanation for the loss of U-47 at all.

Nine days after that, around convoy HX 112, the destroyers HMS Walker and HMS Vanoc accounted for both of the others in a single night: U-100 rammed and sunk with Schepke killed, and U-99 forced to the surface and destroyed, with Kretschmer and forty of his men picked out of the water and taken prisoner. Kretschmer spent the rest of the war in a Canadian camp. In something under a fortnight the U-boat arm lost the three men its own propaganda had been built around, and the first happy time was over. It began with a Belfast-built corvette and a whale factory ship on the night of 6 March, and the corvette's share of it was one submarine and thirty-seven survivors landed at Greenock.

Years of Convoy Escort

HMS Camellia went on to escort a long list of convoys across the Atlantic, including SL 38, HX 58, HX 69, HX 82 and SL 67, the patient, unglamorous work that formed the backbone of the Battle of the Atlantic, keeping merchant shipping moving despite the constant threat of U-boat attack.

Command of HMS Camellia passed through five different officers over the course of the war: Lieutenant-Commander Eric Morrison Mackay, RNR, from her commissioning in 1940; Lieutenant-Commander Alfred Ernest Willmott, RNR, who took over at the very end of that year and was in command for the U-70 action; then, in turn, Temporary Lieutenant Reginald Frederick James Maberley, RNVR, from May 1942; Temporary Acting Lieutenant-Commander Archie Herbert Lyons, RNVR, from December 1943; and finally Temporary Lieutenant George Walter Charlton, DSC, RNR, who saw her through to the war's end, reflecting both the length of her service and the pressures the escort fleet placed on experienced personnel across years of continuous operations.

Into the Arctic

HMS Camellia's war took her into some of the most dangerous waters of the entire conflict when she was assigned to the Arctic convoys, escorting PQ18 and QP14-15 to and from northern Russia as part of the Allied effort to keep the Soviet Union supplied, sailing through waters plagued by German aircraft, U-boats and surface raiders, and made all the more brutal by the extreme cold and near-constant darkness or daylight depending on the season, conditions that tested ships and crews to their absolute limits.

She escorted PQ 18 and the homeward QP 14 in September 1942, followed by QP 15 that November and December, and returned to the Russian run in February 1943 with convoy JW 53, a crossing remembered for one of the worst storms of the entire Arctic convoy campaign: mountainous seas battered the escort cruiser HMS Sheffield and six merchant ships badly enough to force them back to Iceland, while ships that pressed on, some carrying deck cargoes of fighter aircraft, tanks and high explosives, had to ride it out in conditions every bit as dangerous as anything the U-boats could offer.

By the summer of 1943 she had moved south again, escorting the Gibraltar convoys KMS 19 in June and July and OG 92/KMS 24 that August, a reminder that a single Flower-class corvette might spend the war shuttling between the Arctic Circle and the Mediterranean approaches as the escort fleet's needs demanded.

A Quiet Peacetime Conversion

HMS Camellia was removed from active service by October 1945 and sold on 9 August 1946, converted in 1948 to the merchant vessel Hetty W. Vinke, a fate shared by a number of Flower-class corvettes whose sturdy, versatile hulls proved just as useful for commercial shipping once their wartime work was done, closing out the career of a ship that had helped sink a U-boat, rescued dozens of stranded sailors, and braved some of the most hostile convoy routes of the entire Second World War.

What she was converted into is the detail that makes the whole story come round in a circle, and it is easy to miss. The Flower class was not merely inspired by a whaling ship: it was adapted directly from a specific one, the whale catcher Southern Pride, designed and built by Smith's Dock on the Tees, because in 1939 the Admiralty needed an escort that ordinary commercial yards could build and a whale catcher was already the right size, the right shape and the right cost. Camellia was sold out of the Navy in 1946, and the Dutch firm that bought her, Vinke, converted her back. Hetty W. Vinke was a whale hunter. After six years of hunting submarines in the North Atlantic and the Barents Sea she spent the best part of two decades doing the job her own design had been taken from, and she stayed in that fleet until 1965.

She was not alone in it either; Vinke did the same to several other former corvettes, which tells you something about both the ships and the industry. Postwar Antarctic whaling was an enormous business, run from vast factory ships that needed a swarm of small, fast, tough catchers working round them in the worst seas on earth, and a surplus Flower was very close to being exactly that already: a hull built to take punishment, a single screw, an economical reciprocating engine and a bow designed to be driven into a head sea for weeks. The main alteration was to take the 4-inch gun off the forecastle and put a harpoon gun there instead. There is a certain grim symmetry in it. The design was borrowed from whaling to fight a war, handed back when the war ended, and used for another twenty years on the animals it had been drawn for in the first place.