HMS Columbine (K94): Four Years of Convoy Escort Between Freetown and the Atlantic

The Build: Bristol

HMS Columbine was built by Charles Hill and Sons at Bristol, launched on 13 August 1940 and commissioned that November, a Flower-class corvette built to the class's simple, whaling-ship-derived design that let British yards produce convoy escorts quickly and in notably large numbers at the height of wartime need.

Charles Hill and Sons is not a name that comes up often in naval history and the yard is worth a moment, because it is a genuinely improbable place to build a warship. The Albion Dockyard sits in Bristol's floating harbour, in the middle of the city, six miles up a tidal river from the Bristol Channel with a lock to get out through. The firm took the yard on in the 1840s and built there for well over a century. Constructing corvettes in it in 1940 makes complete sense once you understand what a Flower actually was: a merchant ship design that any yard used to commercial work could produce quickly, which is precisely why the Admiralty ordered them from places like this rather than from the naval builders, who had destroyers to get on with.

The firm went the way of nearly all of them, and it went out on a good note. Its last ship was launched on 9 July 1976 and she was the Miranda Guinness, the first purpose-built beer tanker in the world, ordered to carry stout in bulk across the Irish Sea. The Albion Yard closed on 4 January 1977 and Charles Hill and Sons failed the same year. Unlike a good many of the yards in this series, though, the place is still there and still working: the dry dock was restored and reopened for ship repair and building in 2018, under a partnership involving Bristol City Council and the trust that looks after Brunel's Great Britain a few yards along the same harbour.

What a Flower actually was, and why the Royal Navy fought the Battle of the Atlantic in ships derived from a whalecatcher, is set out in the article on HMS Clematis.

A Rescue at Sea

On 20 May 1941, HMS Columbine picked up survivors from the Dutch tanker Marisa, torpedoed three days before east of Freetown by the German submarine U-107. U-107 had struck just after midnight, killing two of the tanker's crew, then allowed the remaining forty-seven men to abandon ship before finishing her off with gunfire, a small mercy amid an otherwise ruthless campaign, and one that left Columbine three days to find them adrift before she did.

The boat that sank her is worth knowing about. U-107 was on the most successful single patrol any U-boat made in the whole war: she had left Lorient on 29 March 1941, worked the Canaries and the approaches to Freetown, and by the time she got home on 2 July she had sunk fourteen ships totalling 86,699 tons. Nobody bettered it. Her commanding officer was Günter Hessler, who had married Karl Dönitz's daughter Ursula in 1937, which created a small problem when the patrol ended: Dönitz did not feel able to recommend his own son-in-law for the Knight's Cross he had obviously earned, so Grand Admiral Raeder signed the papers instead. Somewhere in that tally of fourteen are the two men killed aboard Marisa and the forty-seven Columbine went looking for.

Under Attack From an Italian Submarine

HMS Columbine escorted the 58-ship Convoy SL76 from Freetown to the United Kingdom between 30 May and 21 June 1941, a convoy that came under attack in the early hours of 13 June from the Italian submarine Benedetto Brin, commanded by Luigi Longanesi-Cattani and operating out of Bordeaux under German command alongside the rest of Italy's own Atlantic submarine force. She sank two merchant vessels, the Greek Eirini Kyriakides and the British Djurdjura, a reminder that Italy's submarine fleet, while less renowned than Germany's U-boats, posed a genuine and sometimes deadly threat to Allied shipping across the same broad stretches of ocean.

The Italian Atlantic force is one of the genuinely forgotten parts of the Battle of the Atlantic, and it was not small. From August 1940 the Regia Marina ran its own submarine base at Bordeaux, code-named BETASOM, with about sixteen hundred men, berths for thirty boats and an Italian admiral in charge who took his operational orders from Dönitz. Thirty-two Italian submarines fought in the Atlantic between 1940 and 1943. They sank 101 Allied merchant ships of some 568,000 tons, and sixteen of the thirty-two never came back. When Italy signed the armistice in September 1943 the Germans simply took the base over. It is a campaign that suits nobody's national story, which is roughly why it is not better known.

Transatlantic Crossings and German Air Attack

HMS Columbine took part in the transatlantic Convoy HX220 between December 1942 and January 1943, sailing from New York to British waters alongside multiple Canadian corvettes and destroyers, part of the international escort effort that kept the vital North Atlantic supply line running.

In July 1943, she escorted the major Freetown-bound Convoy SL133, which merged with Convoy MKS18G during the voyage and, on 28 July, came under attack from two Focke-Wulf Condor long-range bombers, a demanding and dangerous combination of threats for a single convoy to face.

The convoy's own catapult-launched Sea Hurricanes, a stopgap measure by then nearing the very end of its service life, rose to meet them. Flying Officer J.A. Stewart, launched from the CAM ship Empire Darwin, sent one Condor crashing into the sea after a short chase; Flying Officer "Paddy" Flynn, launched from Empire Tide, damaged the second badly enough to send it away losing height and jettisoning its bombs. Both pilots ditched near the convoy and were picked up safely, in what turned out to be one of the very last actions ever fought by the Royal Navy's improvised catapult fighters before escort carriers made the whole scheme redundant, HMS Columbine and her fellow escorts having successfully seen the convoy through regardless.

The scheme those two pilots were flying under deserves explaining, because it was one of the more desperate improvisations of the war. A CAM ship, a Catapult Armed Merchantman, was an ordinary cargo ship with a rocket-driven catapult bolted to her bow and a single Hurricane sitting on it. There was no way of landing again. The pilot flew off, fought whatever was out there, and then either ditched alongside the convoy and hoped to be picked up, or baled out and hoped the same. Every launch destroyed the aeroplane. Volunteers were not short, which says something about the RAF in 1941, and it also says something about what a Focke-Wulf Condor circling a convoy for six hours, calling up U-boats, did to the nerves of everybody in it.

In the whole life of the programme there were only nine combat launches. Between them those nine pilots destroyed nine German aircraft, four Condors, four Heinkels and a Junkers 88, damaged one more and drove off three. Eight Hurricanes went into the sea. One pilot was lost. Two of the nine launches were the two on 28 July 1943, and they were made from the last two CAM ships still at sea: Fighter Command had already ordered the Merchant Ship Fighter Unit disbanded from 8 June, and the last of it was wound up on 7 September. Stewart was pulled out of the water by the sloop Enchantress and Flynn by the sloop Leith. Escort carriers had made the whole idea unnecessary, which is the best possible reason for an idea like that to end.

She went on to escort the further Convoy SL142 between November and December 1943.

A Career of Steady Service

Command of HMS Columbine passed through five different officers over the course of the war: Lieutenant Louis Alan Sayers, RNR, from her commissioning until April 1941; Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Sydney John Lavis, RNR, from April 1941; Temporary Lieutenant Alfred Laurence Turner, RNR, from February 1942, in command for the HX220 crossing; Temporary Acting Lieutenant Commander William Joseph Griffiths, RNR, from March 1943; and finally Lieutenant John Coade Grose, RNR, commanding from November 1943 through to the middle of 1945, a period spanning the war's final, hard-fought stretch.

Even the sea itself could prove a fiercer opponent than any U-boat or bomber: in December 1944, on an outward convoy bound for Canada, HMS Columbine ran into heavy seas that tore her Asdic cabinet clean off the front of the bridge, knocked out her wireless telegraphy and damaged her 4-inch gun, damage serious enough to force her home for repair when four years of enemy action never had.

HMS Columbine was sold on 9 August 1946 and converted for merchant service, becoming the Leif Welding in 1949, before being scrapped at Grimstad in 1966, closing out a career built almost entirely on the patient, unglamorous work of convoy escort across some of the most consistently dangerous shipping routes of the entire war.

Her afterlife is worth a line as well, and she was not unusual in where she found it. Sold in 1946 and converted for merchant work, she became the Norwegian Leif Welding in 1949 and traded under that name until she was broken up at Grimstad in 1966, which is twenty years of civilian life against five and a half of war. Norway took a great many Flowers, for the simple reason that the design had started as a whalecatcher and the Norwegians knew exactly what to do with a hull like that; one of Columbine's sisters became the Norwegian weather ship that manned ocean station Mike in the Norwegian Sea for a quarter of a century, as set out in the article on HMS Bryony (K192). A design copied from a ship built to chase whales in the Southern Ocean turned out to be very hard to wear out.