HMS Enchantress (L56): An Admiralty Yacht That Sank an Italian Submarine

Built as an Admiralty Yacht

HMS Enchantress was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down on 9 March 1934 initially under the name Bittern, before being renamed Enchantress, taking the name of the previous vessel that had served in the same role, ahead of her launch on 21 October 1934.

The name she gave up went on to have a rather shorter career than the one she kept. A new HMS Bittern was laid down two years later at J. Samuel White's yard on the Isle of Wight, and where Enchantress survived the entire war and beyond, that later Bittern did not: bombed and set ablaze off Namsos during the 1940 Norway campaign, she was finished off by gunfire from HMS Carlisle, making Enchantress, in a sense, the lucky one of the two ships to have carried the name.

She was completed on 4 April 1935 and commissioned four days later, the lead ship of the Bittern class, a design intended to combine the dignified duties of an Admiralty yacht in peacetime with genuine convoy escort capability should war ever come.

In her early peacetime role, HMS Enchantress served as an Admiralty yacht, and in September 1936, amid the growing turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, she carried First Lord of the Admiralty Samuel Hoare to visit the Mediterranean Fleet at Malta.

She was also considered, briefly, for an altogether more delicate assignment: carrying the recently abdicated King Edward VIII into exile in France following his abdication in December 1936. The idea was dropped, her name apparently judged too provocative for the occasion, and the job went instead to the destroyer HMS Fury, which slipped out of Portsmouth at two in the morning on 12 December 1936 carrying the new Duke of Windsor, his cairn terrier Slipper tucked under one arm, bound for Boulogne, a wry footnote to a remarkably awkward moment in royal history.

Escorting the Convoys

When war broke out in September 1939, HMS Enchantress entered convoy escort duty under Western Approaches Command, beginning a six-year commitment that would ultimately see her escort more than 100 trade convoys, the great majority on the demanding Gibraltar and South Atlantic routes, helping ensure the safe passage of more than 3,000 merchant ships over the course of the war, a notably staggering cumulative total for a single escort vessel.

Those convoys were far from uneventful. In July 1940, Convoy OB 188 came under attack, losing four ships to the German submarine U-34.

In October 1940, Convoy SC 6 lost three ships and suffered a fourth damaged to two separate U-boats, and the following month brought an even heavier blow, when Convoy SC 11 lost seven ships in a single night to U-100, one of the more devastating individual convoy battles of the early Battle of the Atlantic.

In February 1941, Convoy OB 322 lost four further ships to the German ace Günther Prien's U-47, the same submarine that had famously penetrated Scapa Flow to sink HMS Royal Oak. HMS Enchantress bore witness to a particularly brutal run of losses across these years, the everyday reality of convoy escort work in the North Atlantic during the war's most dangerous early phase.

Not every encounter that spring ended in loss. In March 1941, under her newly arrived commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Arthur Christie, HMS Enchantress located the Royal Navy's own submarine HMS Taku, damaged and adrift, and helped escort her safely back to port, a reminder that an escort's job was as often about looking after friendly vessels in trouble as it was about hunting enemy ones.

Among the First to Trial the Hedgehog

Following a refit in May 1941, HMS Enchantress received the new Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar system, becoming one of the first two Royal Navy ships, alongside the destroyer HMS Westcott, to trial the weapon operationally that autumn, a significant technical distinction given how much more effective Hedgehog would prove than the depth charge patterns it was designed to supplement, since it allowed attacking ships to fire ahead while still holding sonar contact rather than losing it during the final approach as older depth charge attacks required.

Hedgehog is worth describing properly, because it was the first weapon that gave an escort a real chance. A depth charge is rolled or thrown over the side and set to burst at a chosen depth; the trouble is that the attacking ship has to pass directly over the submarine to drop it, and her own sonar goes deaf in the last hundred yards of the run because the beam cannot look straight down. So the final approach was made blind, on a guess about where the boat had gone. Hedgehog fired twenty-four small bombs from spigots on the forecastle, out ahead of the ship to land in a ring about forty metres across some two hundred metres in front of her, while the sonar was still holding contact. And the bombs were contact-fuzed: they only went off if they hit. What Hedgehog's eventual successor, Limbo, did with the same idea a generation later is set out in the article on HMS Duncan (F80).

The numbers make the case, and the reaction to it is one of the more human episodes of the war. Across the whole conflict, 5,174 British depth-charge attacks produced about eighty-five kills, roughly one in sixty. Hedgehog produced forty-seven kills from 268 attacks, roughly one in six: ten times better. And the crews hated it. A depth-charge attack produced a series of enormous underwater explosions, a column of water and a sense that something had been done; a Hedgehog miss produced twenty-four small splashes and complete silence. Ships that had spent years being told that noise meant progress were reluctant to give it up. The Royal Navy used the weapon so sparingly through the early part of 1943 that a directive had to be issued requiring any captain who had a contact and did not fire Hedgehog to explain himself in writing. Enchantress had it a year and a half before that, which puts her among the first ships in the world to carry an ahead-throwing anti-submarine weapon in action.

She was reassigned to the South Atlantic route serving Freetown, Sierra Leone, and in January 1942 received HF/DF radio direction-finding equipment, a further technical upgrade that let escorts triangulate the position of U-boats transmitting radio signals, another meaningful edge in the increasingly technological contest against the German submarine fleet.

The other box she was given in January 1942 was arguably worth more than the guns. A U-boat that found a convoy could not attack it alone; it had to report by radio so that headquarters in France could bring other boats to the spot, and it had to be told what to do. Those transmissions were short, coded and, everyone in Germany assumed, untraceable at sea. They were not. A high-frequency direction finding set in an escort could take a bearing on a transmission lasting only a few seconds, and an escort that had a bearing could turn down it at twenty knots and be sitting over the boat inside the hour; two escorts with bearings could fix her outright. The Germans did not work out what was happening for a long time, partly because it did not occur to them that a set that size could be made to work on a rolling ship. Huff-Duff, as the lower deck called it, is one of the quieter reasons the Atlantic was won.

Sinking the Corallo

HMS Enchantress joined the escort forces supporting Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa, in September 1942.

Her most concrete wartime success came shortly afterwards, and it was no clean kill from a safe distance. On the night of 12-13 December 1942, while escorting Convoy KMS 4 from Gibraltar to Algiers still under Christie's command, HMS Enchantress located the Italian submarine Corallo some 14 miles off Bougie and drove her to the surface with a sustained depth-charge attack. When the submarine tried to fight back with her deck gun, Enchantress simply accelerated and rammed her, a manoeuvre that left the sloop herself with serious damage to her own inner structure but sent Corallo to the bottom with her entire crew of 44, including her commanding officer, lost, the clearest single vindication of years spent honing her anti-submarine skills across dozens of earlier convoys.

Ramming deserves a word too, because it was not a heroic flourish; it was very close to being a last resort. Driving a lightly built escort into the pressure hull of a submarine did enormous damage to the escort: stem plating crushed, frames buckled, forward compartments flooded, and a ship out of the war for months in a dockyard when every escort in the Atlantic was already spoken for. The Admiralty discouraged it for exactly that reason and preferred gunfire or a further depth-charge pattern. But Corallo was on the surface, fighting back with a deck gun at close range at night, in the middle of a convoy Enchantress was responsible for, and there was no time to be tidy about it. She rammed, the submarine went down with all forty-four of her people, and Enchantress went into dock with her own inner structure broken.

A Late Deployment East

HMS Enchantress returned to Atlantic convoy duty in 1943, continuing to escort the Freetown route until May 1945, when she was recalled for refit ahead of deployment to the Pacific to join the British Pacific Fleet.

She was still en route to that theatre in August 1945 when the Japanese surrender brought the war to its close, meaning her final wartime deployment ended not in combat but in the sudden, welcome arrival of peace.

A Quiet Retirement

HMS Enchantress returned to the United Kingdom in 1946 and was paid off from active service, disarmed and sold into merchant service under the name Lady Enchantress, spending her final years in considerably less demanding commercial work than the six years of convoy escort duty that had defined her wartime career.

She was discarded and sold for scrap in 1952, closing out the career of a ship that had begun as a politically sensitive Admiralty yacht and ended as one of the Royal Navy's notably proven U-boat and submarine hunters.