HMS Clover (K134): Finding Only Four Survivors From a Destroyer's 155 Crew

Paisley-Built

HMS Clover was built by Fleming and Ferguson at Paisley, ordered on 25 July 1939, laid down on 29 July 1940, launched on 30 January 1941, and commissioned that May, a Flower-class corvette built to the class's simple, quickly produced design at a moment when the Royal Navy needed convoy escorts in large numbers as quickly as British yards could turn them out.

Escorting Convoys Across Two Oceans

HMS Clover spent 1941 on convoy escort duty across a wide span of the Atlantic, escorting Convoy OS9 to Freetown in West Africa in October and November, the return passage of Convoy SL90 that same October, and the troop convoy WS12Z that November, before crossing to escort the transatlantic Convoy HX220 between December 1942 and January 1943, this time as senior escort officer, in overall charge of the whole escort group rather than just her own ship.

That last detail is easy to skim past and should not be. A corvette was the smallest thing in the escort, and her captain was almost always a Reserve officer rather than a regular. Making a corvette the senior ship of an escort group, with her commanding officer running the group, was not how the Royal Navy of 1939 imagined the Atlantic being fought. By the end of 1942 it was routine, because the Reserve officers had turned out to be very good at it and there were nothing like enough regulars to go round. What the class was, and where the design came from, is set out in the article on HMS Clematis.

From the summer of 1943 she moved into a long run of Mediterranean-facing convoy work, escorting OG91/KMS22 in July and August, MKS21G that August, MKS25G in September and October, KMS30 in October and November, OS60/KMS34 that November and December, and OS64/KMS38 in January 1944, a demanding and near-continuous operational tempo typical of the corvette fleet during this critical phase of the war.

A Grim Discovery

HMS Clover was herself part of the escort for convoy ON 176 in April 1943, alongside the destroyer HMS Beverley, a veteran ship that had already escorted the Arctic convoy PQ 14 to Russia and, that February, helped spot the U-boat U-187 for HMS Vimy to sink during convoy SC 118. On 9 April, Beverley collided with the merchant ship Cairnvalona in poor visibility, an accident that knocked out her Asdic and degaussing gear and left her effectively blind to the submarine threat; two days later, in the small hours of 11 April, U-188 found and torpedoed her. She sank quickly, taking her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Rodney Price, down with her along with all but a handful of her 155-strong crew, one of the more devastating single losses of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Beverley is worth knowing about, because she was one of the fifty American four-stackers handed over in 1940, built at Newport News, the same yard that produced HMS Churchill. The collision with Cairnvalona did not simply damage her; it made her useless. Her Asdic was out and her degaussing gear was out, meaning she could neither hear a submarine nor protect herself from a magnetic mine, and a damaged escort in that state is put where she can do least harm to the formation, which is the back. She spent thirty hours at the rear of the convoy waiting to be repaired, and that is where U-188 found her at ten to six in the morning.

There is a detail in the German record that says a great deal about what those nights were actually like. Kapitänleutnant Lüdden fired five torpedoes in three minutes, listened, and logged hits on four separate ships: a tanker that broke her back and went down in forty-five minutes, two more hit together, and a fourth settling by the bow. Allied records show that nothing was hit except Beverley. He had heard depth charges, end-of-run detonations and his own imagination, written it up in good faith, and been wrong about all of it except the one ship that mattered. Four men came out of her, from a hundred and fifty-five.

HMS Clover recovered just four survivors from the wreck, a stark and sobering statistic that speaks to how quickly and completely a ship's company could be lost in the cold waters of the North Atlantic once a U-boat's torpedo found its mark, and to the truly harrowing nature of the search and rescue work that fell to escort vessels like HMS Clover in the aftermath of such losses.

A Long Merchant Career

Remarkably, it happened again. Eleven months later, on 10 March 1944, HMS Clover picked up just five survivors from a crew of 97 aboard HMS Asphodel, a sister Flower-class corvette sunk by U-575's homing torpedo while escorting the combined convoy SL150/MKS41 off Cape Finisterre. Asphodel's own commanding officer, Temporary Lieutenant Michael Halliday, RNZNR, was among the dead, commemorated on the New Zealand Naval Memorial at Auckland; U-575 herself survived only three more days before a genuinely international hunting group, a Canadian frigate, two American destroyers and aircraft from a US escort carrier among them, sent her to the bottom in turn. Twice in less than a year, then, it fell to this one modest corvette to count the survivors of a fellow escort's destruction, and twice the count came back in single figures.

The word to notice up there is homing. By 1944 the U-boats had a torpedo that steered itself, the T5, which the Germans called the Zaunkönig and the Royal Navy called the GNAT, and it ran towards the loudest propeller noise it could hear. It had been introduced in September 1943 for one specific purpose. Dönitz had lost the convoy battle to the escorts, and his answer was to kill the escorts first and get at the merchant ships afterwards, which meant that for the first time in the war the most dangerous place in a convoy was the escort screen rather than a column of tankers. The counter was a device called Foxer, a pair of noisemakers towed a long way astern to give the torpedo something more attractive to run at than the ship. Asphodel was hit at four minutes to two in the morning, and her Foxer, if it was streamed at all, did not save her.

The hunt is a fair picture of what the Atlantic had become by 1944. The escorts held U-575 down for eighteen hours after she fired, and she still got away. It took three more days and, when she was finally caught north of the Azores, the Canadian frigate Prince Rupert, the American destroyer Hobson, the destroyer escort Haverfield, Avengers flying off the escort carrier Bogue, and Royal Air Force Wellingtons and Fortresses. Six units, three services, three countries, one boat. In 1941 she would have gone home and rearmed.

Command of HMS Clover passed through four different officers over the course of the war: Lieutenant Commander Frank Arthur Shaw, RNR, from her commissioning in May 1941; Lieutenant Philip Henry Grieves, RNR, from March 1943, in command for the Beverley rescue; Lieutenant Thomas Evelyn Fanshawe, RNR, from October 1943, in command when she found Asphodel's survivors; and finally Lieutenant Ronald Parkyn Booth, RNVR, who saw her through to the war's end in December 1945.

She was sold on 17 May 1947 and converted for merchant service as the Cloverlock, operating out of Hong Kong for Wheelock Marden & Co., before passing to the Chinese Navy in 1952 as the Kai Feng, a fate shared by many Flower-class corvettes whose sturdy, versatile hulls found a useful second life in commercial and naval shipping once their wartime work, including some of its grimmest moments, was finally done.

What happened after Hong Kong deserves rather more than that clause, because it is one of the more improbable second lives any ship in this series has had. Clover was one of three ex-British Flowers sold out into Chinese hands as merchantmen and then converted straight back into warships. The navy that did it was the People's Liberation Army Navy, at that point about three years old, and the year was 1952, which is to say while Chinese and British troops were shooting at each other in Korea. She was rearmed with Soviet weapons: two 100mm guns, a 45mm and four 37mm anti-aircraft. A hull built at Paisley to a Scottish whale catcher's drawings, carrying Russian guns, under a Chinese ensign.

She served as the escort Kai Feng for something over twenty years, was struck off the active list by 1972, disarmed in 1974 and converted into a survey ship, and she was still in existence in 1990. So a corvette laid down in July 1940 for the Battle of the Atlantic was still afloat and doing useful work half a century later, on the other side of the world, for a state that had not existed when her keel went down.

It is worth sitting with that alongside the rest of her record. Four men came out of HMS Beverley in April 1943 and five out of HMS Asphodel in March 1944, and both times they came up the scrambling nets of this ship. Two hundred and forty-odd of their shipmates did not. Clover was still in the water, under another name and another flag, when the youngest of those survivors would have been in his seventies. There is no tidy way to finish a sentence like that, and there does not need to be.