HMS Convolvulus (K45): "Never Put a Foot Wrong", Captain Walker's Trusted Deputy

Built at Bristol

HMS Convolvulus was built by Charles Hill and Sons at Bristol, her keel laid on 17 January 1940, launched on 22 September that year, and commissioned on 26 February 1941, a Flower-class corvette built to the class's proven, quickly constructed design at a moment when the Battle of the Atlantic demanded escort ships in the greatest numbers Britain's shipyards could possibly produce.

The yard that built her, Charles Hill and Sons of Bristol, has a longer pedigree than any other name in British shipbuilding and is set out in the article on HMS Burghead Bay, another of the ships that came off the same slips.

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

Serving Under a Legendary U-Boat Hunter

HMS Convolvulus served with the 36th Escort Group under the command of Captain F. J. Walker, one of the most celebrated and successful anti-submarine commanders of the entire Battle of the Atlantic, whose escort groups would go on to account for a remarkable number of U-boat kills over the course of the war. The group had formed only that October, led from Walker's own sloop HMS Stork, and Convolvulus was one of its founding corvettes, a partnership that would go on to write some of the most consequential chapters of the whole U-boat war.

Walker is worth more than the adjective. He had spent the 1930s as an anti-submarine specialist in a Navy that did not think anti-submarine work mattered very much, had been passed over for promotion, and spent the first two years of the war ashore on the staff at Dover, where he had at least had Dunkirk to organise. He got himself back to sea, was given the 36th Escort Group in October 1941, and proceeded to become the most successful submarine killer the Royal Navy has ever produced. Twenty U-boats are credited to him. What he actually contributed was a method: escorts that hunted in pairs, that stayed with a contact for hours rather than making one pass and rejoining, and that were trained to think of themselves as attackers rather than shepherds. Convolvulus was there from the first day of it.

Her first proper action came a month before HG 76 and was, in its way, more peculiar than anything that followed. On 16 November 1941 she sailed from Gibraltar as one of the escorts for convoy GM 3, bound for Malta with five merchant ships and the fleet oiler Brown Ranger. GM 3 did not exist. The whole thing was Operation Chieftain, a piece of deception intended to pull Axis aircraft away from the land fighting in the Western Desert, where Operation Crusader had just opened. The merchantmen were under orders to turn round after dark and make their own way back, leaving the escorts to carry on for a two-day anti-submarine sweep with nothing to escort.

The mood among those escorts was murderous, and with reason. HMS Ark Royal had been torpedoed three days earlier and had gone down on the morning of the 14th while under tow towards Gibraltar, after a night-long struggle to save her. Every ship in the western Mediterranean was hunting the boat that had done it. Late on the 16th they found a U-boat, and Convolvulus put her depth charges down on U-433 before HMS Marigold, another of Walker's corvettes, finished her. The Navy went to bed satisfied that it had avenged the Ark. It had not. Ark Royal was killed by U-81, and U-433 was simply the wrong submarine in the wrong stretch of water.

So the record of her first six months reads: convoys HX 125 and HX 129 across the Atlantic, SL 78 up from Sierra Leone, OG 67 and OG 70 out to Gibraltar, and a fake convoy that ended in a real kill. It is a fair summary of what escort work in 1941 actually consisted of, which is to say a very great deal of steaming and a few minutes that mattered.

Her first major test came escorting Convoy HG76, which left Gibraltar on 15 December 1941 with 32 ships and, with Convolvulus and six other corvettes screening alongside Stork and the sloop Deptford, ran straight into the six-strong U-boat wolfpack Seeräuber. The week-long battle that followed cost the convoy the destroyer HMS Stanley and two merchant ships, and, more painfully still, the escort carrier HMS Audacity, Britain's first of her kind, sunk on 21 December. The U-boats paid a far heavier price: U-131 was sunk on 17 December after being spotted by one of Audacity's own Martlet fighters; U-434 was forced to the surface and finished off by HMS Blankney and HMS Stanley the next day; U-574 was rammed and sent down by Walker's own Stork on the 19th; and on the 21st, HMS Deptford and HMS Samphire between them destroyed U-567, killing with her one of Germany's most decorated U-boat aces, Engelbert Endrass.

Audacity is worth a paragraph too, because she was the answer to the whole problem and everybody knew it. She had been built in 1939 as the Hannover, a Norddeutscher Lloyd cargo liner running bananas from Germany to the West Indies, and the Royal Navy took her in the Caribbean in March 1940. The Admiralty then cut her superstructure off, laid a flight deck on top of what was left, and sent her to sea in June 1941 as the first escort carrier in the world. She had no hangar and no lift. Her half-dozen Martlet fighters lived on the flight deck in all weathers, and their job was to shoot down the Focke-Wulf Condor that shadowed a convoy and told the U-boats where it was. She was doing exactly that when U-751 sank her on 21 December, four days short of Christmas and six months old.

Endrass was not an ordinary loss for the Germans either. He had been Günther Prien's first watch officer in U-47 on the night she went into Scapa Flow and sank the Royal Oak, which made him famous at home before he ever had a command of his own. The Germans thought enough of him to name the next wolfpack after him. That the pack named for him then failed to sink a single escort, and lost none of its own only because Walker's group had been cut in half, is the kind of arithmetic the Kriegsmarine had started having to do by the middle of 1942.

It is worth saying plainly what HG 76 was, because it usually gets written up as a costly draw. Thirty of the thirty-two merchant ships got through. Four U-boats went down, and the Germans broke off. The Admiralty treated it as the first convoy battle the Royal Navy had unambiguously won, and it was studied as such: not because of the tally, but because it showed that a properly trained group with air cover over the convoy could beat a wolfpack rather than merely survive one. Everything the Royal Navy did in the Atlantic for the next three years is downstream of that week.

By April 1942, escorting Convoy OG82 with a reduced group of Stork and four corvettes including Convolvulus, Walker's team added a fifth kill, U-252, sunk on 14 April by Stork and HMS Vetch, without losing a single ship from the convoy in their care.

Holding the Line Alone

That June, the Germans sent a wolfpack after Convoy HG84 named, with a certain grim irony, Endrass, in memory of the very ace Walker's group had killed off HG76 six months before. This time the escort group was down to just Stork and three corvettes, Convolvulus, Gardenia and Marigold, and the fighting went harder: five merchant ships were lost and, though the escorts damaged five U-boats between them, none were sunk.

During this escort, HMS Convolvulus frequently found herself serving as the convoy's sole close escort while the rest of Captain Walker's group broke off to investigate U-boat contacts or engage submarines spotted on the surface, a notably demanding responsibility for a single small corvette to shoulder, standing alone between an entire convoy and whatever additional threats might appear while her consorts were occupied elsewhere.

It was exactly this kind of steady, dependable performance under pressure that led Captain Walker to single her out for praise, writing that he was proud of the offensive spirit, initiative and sheer guts displayed by his corvettes, and noting specifically that HMS Convolvulus, serving as his deputy during his own absences from the convoy, 'never put a foot wrong', a significant compliment from a commander not known for handing out praise lightly.

A Quiet End

Convolvulus's war did not end with Walker. She went on to support the Operation Torch landings in November 1942 and continued escorting Mediterranean-bound convoys through 1943. Command passed through three officers over the course of the war: Temporary Lieutenant Richard Sinclair Connell, RNR, who commanded her through the HG76, OG82 and HG84 actions from her commissioning until August 1942; Acting Lieutenant Commander Richard Francis Roger Yarde-Buller, RNVR, who took over for the Torch landings and the convoys that followed; and Lieutenant George Lachlan Fraser, RNR, who saw her through to the war's end.

That single sentence covers a good deal of hard steaming. Convolvulus was not on the fringes of Torch: she escorted KMS 1, KMF 1 and KMS 3, which are the assault convoys themselves. The lettering is worth decoding because it turns up constantly in these records. KM meant United Kingdom to Mediterranean, F meant fast and S meant slow, so KMF 1 was the fast convoy carrying the troops who would go ashore in North Africa on 8 November 1942 and KMS 1 the slow one carrying what they would need when they got there. Getting them across the Bay of Biscay and through the Straits without the Germans working out what they were for was the single largest convoy problem of the war to that date, and it was solved.

She then stayed on the route for another year and more, on convoys including KMS 15G in May 1943 and KMS 34 in November and December, running men and stores into a Mediterranean that was still thoroughly dangerous and would remain so until the Luftwaffe was pushed off the Italian airfields. It is unglamorous in a way that the Atlantic battle is not, and it is a large part of the reason the Sicily and Italian landings were possible at all. She did it for the rest of the war and nothing much happened to her, which for a Flower-class corvette in 1943 counts as a considerable achievement.

The middle one of those three had her longest, and by a distance. Yarde-Buller commanded Convolvulus from August 1942 to February 1945, two and a half years covering Torch, the Mediterranean run and the last winter of the war, which is more than the other two put together.

He is also the least likely-looking corvette captain in the Royal Navy. Richard Francis Roger Yarde-Buller was the eldest son of the 3rd Baron Churston and of Denise Orme, a musical comedy actress of the Edwardian stage, and he succeeded to the barony himself. He was RNVR, which is to say a weekend sailor by training rather than a professional, and he held the Volunteer Reserve Decoration for it. His marriage broke up in 1943, in the middle of his command, which cannot have helped. He lived until 1991.

It is a useful corrective to the way this sort of story usually gets told. The ship Walker chose to leave in charge of a convoy while he went hunting was commanded, for most of her war, by a part-time officer with a title, and the reason he was trusted with it had nothing whatever to do with either.

HMS Convolvulus was sold to John Cashmore Ltd on 21 August 1947 and scrapped at Newport that October, closing out the career of a corvette whose most enduring legacy is not any single dramatic action of her own, but the trust placed in her by one of the Royal Navy's greatest anti-submarine tacticians, a testament to the quiet reliability that so often separated a merely adequate convoy escort from an excellent one.

Walker did not live to see the end of it. He was given the 2nd Support Group in June 1942, took it into the worst of the Atlantic, and worked at a pace nobody could have sustained. On 7 July 1944 he had a cerebral thrombosis, and he died two days later at the Royal Naval Hospital at Seaforth. He was forty-eight, and the cause was recorded as overwork and exhaustion. They buried him from Liverpool Anglican Cathedral with full naval honours, took the coffin down through streets lined with thousands of people, put it aboard the destroyer HMS Hesperus and buried him at sea in Liverpool Bay. His statue has stood at the Pier Head since 1998. Convolvulus went to the breakers at Newport three years after he died, having never put a foot wrong.