HMS Campanula: Pulling Survivors From the Atlantic, Convoy After Convoy

Built at Paisley

HMS Campanula was built by Fleming and Ferguson at Paisley, launched on 23 May 1940 and commissioned on 6 September that year, a Flower-class corvette built to the class's proven, quickly constructed design at a moment when the Battle of the Atlantic was already placing enormous strain on Britain's available escort ships.

Two dates in that sentence are the whole argument for the Flower class. She was launched on 23 May 1940 and she was in commission on 6 September, which is fifteen weeks from hitting the water to being a warship, at a yard whose usual trade was dredgers, hoppers and floating cranes rather than anything with a gun on it. Fleming and Ferguson of Paisley, and how a firm that built harbour plant came to be turning out corvettes, is described in the article on HMS Amaranthus (K17). The point of the design was never that it was a good warship. It was that a great many yards that had never built one could build this one, quickly, and that in the autumn of 1940 there was nothing else on offer at all.

A Season of Rescues

HMS Campanula spent 1941 heavily engaged in Atlantic convoy escort work, serving with Convoy SC24 from Halifax to British waters in February and March, Convoy HX116 that March and April, HX119 in April, and HG61 departing Gibraltar that May, moving between convoy protection groups across the full width of the Atlantic.

Across these operations, and particularly during one brutal week in August 1941, HMS Campanula repeatedly found herself pulling survivors from the water after German U-boats struck home, a grim but essential secondary duty that fell to almost every escort corvette of the period, and one that brought her crew face to face with the human cost of the U-boat campaign again and again.

That week was convoy OG 71, a 23-ship convoy escorted by thirteen warships that endured two separate maulings within days of each other. On 19 August, U-boats sank four ships in a single wave, among them the coal carrier Alva, torpedoed by U-559; Campanula, under her commanding officer Lieutenant-Commander Richard Vere Essex Case, DSC, pulled six of Alva's crew from the water. Two other merchantmen in the convoy, Clonlara and the tug Empire Oak, had also stopped to rescue Alva survivors of their own, thirteen and eleven respectively, only for both rescue ships to be torpedoed in turn three days later by U-564, commanded by the decorated U-boat ace Reinhard Suhren. The thirteen who survived Clonlara's sinking, eight of her own crew and five more from Alva, were picked up not by Campanula but by her similarly named sister ship HMS Campion, a mix-up easy enough to make that old accounts still occasionally credit the rescue to the wrong ship. Campanula herself picked up eight men from Empire Oak, some of Alva's crew going into the sea for the second time in three days.

OG 71 has a name of its own in the convoy records, and it is the Nightmare Convoy. She had left Liverpool on 13 August and was found four days later by a Focke-Wulf Condor of Kampfgeschwader 40, which is what a long-range maritime patrol aircraft was for: not to attack, but to tell the submarines where to go. Eight U-boats came. By the time they lost contact on 23 August, ten ships of some 15,185 tons had been sunk, eight merchantmen and two of the escorts, the Norwegian-manned destroyer Bath with 88 of her people and the corvette HMS Zinnia with 68 of hers. Over four hundred lives were lost out of a convoy of twenty-three ships. Five of the surviving merchant ships reached Gibraltar. Ten gave up and ran for neutral Portugal.

The worst of it happened in the small hours of the first night, and it is a story that deserves better than a footnote. The commodore's ship, the Aguila, was torpedoed by U-201 some 341 miles south-west of Fastnet Rock. She broke in two and was gone inside two minutes, taking 145 people with her; sixteen were pulled out alive. Among those lost were twenty-one members of the Women's Royal Naval Service, nine officers and twelve ratings, the ratings all hand-picked chief wireless telegraphists on their way to the naval air station at Gibraltar, and a Queen Alexandra's nursing sister, Kate Ellen Gribble. Not one of them survived. It remains the largest single loss of Wrens in the war.

What the service did about it says a good deal. Wrens across the country gave a day's pay to a memorial fund, and the money went towards a new escort ship, HMS Wren, launched in 1942 to do the job the Aguila's escorts had not been numerous enough to do. There is a memorial to them now at the National Memorial Arboretum, a giant wren on a granite obelisk. Campanula was one of the thirteen escorts trying to hold that convoy together, and this is the water her ship's company were pulling people out of.

The very next day, 23 August, she picked up 38 survivors from the Aldergrove, torpedoed by U-201 north-west of Lisbon, the single largest rescue of her career and a fitting, if exhausting, end to a week that had asked more of her ship's company than most crews faced in a year.

There is one more thread in it. The submarine that sank the Aguila on the first night was U-201, and it was U-201 again, four days later and several hundred miles further south, that torpedoed the Aldergrove. The thirty-eight men Campanula took out of the sea north-west of Lisbon on 23 August were survivors of the same boat's work as the twenty-one Wrens she had not been able to save on the 19th. Escort work in 1941 was very often like that: the same handful of submarines, the same handful of escorts, and a week that felt like a single continuous action.

Into the Arctic

HMS Campanula went on to serve on the Arctic convoy route, by then under a new commanding officer, Lieutenant-Commander Walter Hine, who had taken over in January 1942, providing close escort for Convoys PQ14 and QP10 and later PQ15 and QP11 between April and May 1942, sailing the treacherous northern route to and from Russia that combined the U-boat threat with brutal weather, near-constant German air attack from occupied Norway, and the ever-present danger of surface raiders operating from the Norwegian fjords.

Those four convoy numbers are doing a great deal of work, and three of them are worth opening up. PQ 14 sailed from Iceland in April 1942 with twenty-four ships, at the time of year when the daylight is coming back and the ice has not yet gone, which is the worst possible combination. On the night of 10 and 11 April the convoy spent thirty hours in fog and pack ice and did itself so much damage that sixteen of the twenty-four had to turn round and go back to Iceland. One more was sunk by aircraft and U-boats on the 16th. Seven ships out of twenty-four reached Murmansk, and the Germans had almost nothing to do with it. The same route is followed from a requisitioned trawler's deck in the article on HMS Duncton (T220). The return convoy, QP 10, had the opposite problem: it was attacked from the moment it left Murmansk until it passed Bear Island three days later, lost four ships, shot down six aircraft and dodged two destroyer sorties.

PQ 15, the next month, is the one where the escorts came off worse than the convoy. On 1 May the battleship King George V, out with the distant covering force, ran down the Tribal-class destroyer Punjabi in fog. Punjabi sank, forty-nine of her people died, and her depth charges went off underneath the battleship as she went down, doing enough damage that Duke of York had to be sent out to relieve her. The following day the escorts got an asdic contact and HMS St Albans and the minesweeper Seagull attacked it. What came up was the Polish submarine Jastrzab, a long way out of her patrol position, too badly damaged to save; she was abandoned and scuttled. Set against that, the convoy itself lost three merchant ships and put twenty-two fully loaded ones into Murmansk, the largest number that had yet got through to the Soviet Union.

And QP 11, coming back, is the convoy that everybody remembers for something else entirely. It was the one HMS Edinburgh was covering when she was torpedoed with a large quantity of Soviet gold in her bomb room, and the fight that followed round the crippled cruiser is set out in the article on HMS Edinburgh (16). Campanula was there, in company, doing what a corvette does on that route, which is to stay with the merchant ships while the interesting things happen somewhere over the horizon. Four Arctic convoys in two months: ice that beat a convoy without a shot fired, a battleship that sank her own destroyer, a submarine sunk by her own side and a cruiser lost with a fortune aboard. And Campanula came home from all of it and went back to the Atlantic.

One More Rescue, Then a Long Wind-Down

Command changed hands twice more before the war reached its final stretch: Lieutenant-Commander Benjamin Andrew Rogers took over in November 1942, and it was under him that Campanula made her last dramatic rescue, joining HMS Mignonette on 7 February 1943 to pick up 37 survivors from the Afrika, sunk by U-402 in the North Atlantic.

Three more commanding officers followed over 1943 and 1944, by which point Campanula's war had settled into a long stretch of anti-submarine training exercises off Lough Foyle rather than front-line convoy escort, a quieter final chapter for a ship that had already done more than her share of dragging survivors out of the Atlantic.

A Quiet End

HMS Campanula does not appear as an active unit in the July 1945 Navy List, her service having wound down as the war reached its close, and she was sold for scrapping, arriving at Dunston on 21 August 1947, bringing to a close the career of a ship whose contribution to the Atlantic and Arctic convoy battles, while rarely marked by dramatic single actions of her own, was measured just as much in the survivors she pulled from the sea as in any U-boat she might have sunk.