HMS Honeysuckle (K27): The Corvette That Rescued Hundreds, From Iceland to Sicily

Constructed at Port Glasgow

HMS Honeysuckle was built by Ferguson Shipbuilders Ltd at Port Glasgow, ordered on 31 August 1939, laid down on 26 October that year, launched on 22 April 1940 and commissioned on 14 September 1940, a Flower-class corvette, one of the small, tough little escorts that formed the backbone of Britain's convoy protection effort throughout the Battle of the Atlantic.

She was fitted with a single 4-inch gun, machine guns and depth charge equipment, a modest armament for a ship whose real value lay in sheer numbers and endurance rather than firepower.

Rescue work is the thread running through her whole war, and it is worth saying why a corvette ended up doing so much of it. The standing instruction to a convoy escort was that she did not stop. A ship lying motionless beside a sinking merchantman is a gift to the submarine that has just sunk it, and escorts were told in the plainest terms to hold their station and let somebody else pick men out of the water. The trouble was that there was rarely anybody else. Dedicated rescue ships were introduced from 1941, small passenger vessels fitted with sick bays and scrambling nets, but there were only ever about thirty of them for the whole Atlantic, and a convoy that had one was lucky. So the job fell, over and over again, to whichever escort happened to be nearest and whichever captain was willing to take the risk. Honeysuckle's captains were willing rather more often than most, and the numbers, fifty-one here, twenty-two there, two hundred and seventy-six on one afternoon off Algeria, are the result of a series of individual decisions to stop the ship.

A Day of Rescue

HMS Honeysuckle worked up with anti-submarine exercises off Tobermory in early 1940 before joining a string of transatlantic convoy operations, including HX 91, HX 122, HX 125 and HX 137.

Her most remarkable single day of service came on 20 September 1941, when, within the space of hours, she rescued 51 survivors from the CAM ship Empire Burton, torpedoed by U-74 while carrying a cargo of wheat, and a further 22 survivors from the tanker T.J. Williams, loaded with over 10,000 tons of motor spirit and struck the same day by U-552, commanded by Erich Topp, one of the most successful U-boat aces of the entire war. Both ships had been sailing in the same convoy, SC 44, and both sets of survivors were landed safely at Reykjavik, a particularly extraordinary rescue effort carried out amid the same dangerous waters that had just claimed both stricken vessels.

The Empire Burton had a detail to her that makes the loss slightly worse. She was a CAM ship, a Catapult Armed Merchantman, an ordinary cargo vessel with a rocket-driven catapult bolted across her bow and a single Hurricane sitting on it, to be fired off at any Focke-Wulf Condor that came sniffing round the convoy. The pilot had no way of landing again: he shot the German down if he could, then flew until his fuel ran out, ditched alongside a ship and hoped somebody would fish him out. The whole desperate arrangement, and the nine occasions on which it was actually used, is described in the article on HMS Columbine (K94). Empire Burton never got the chance. U-74 fired four torpedoes into convoy SC 44 at about a quarter past one in the morning of 20 September 1941, east of Cape Farewell, and one of them found her; she went down with nine thousand tons of Canadian wheat and her Hurricane still sitting on its rails, and two of her sixty crew with her. Honeysuckle got the rest.

The man who sank the tanker a few hours later is one of the more unsettling figures of the war, in that he went on to have a perfectly respectable second career. Erich Topp finished as the third highest scoring U-boat commander of the whole conflict, with thirty ships to his name over ten patrols in U-552, a boat known throughout the service as the Rote Teufel, the Red Devil, from the grinning devils painted on her conning tower. Six weeks after he sank the T.J. Williams, and more than a month before the United States was formally at war with anybody, he put a torpedo into the American destroyer USS Reuben James off Iceland and killed a hundred of her crew, the first US warship lost in the Second World War. He survived, went into architecture, and then in 1958 joined the navy of the Federal Republic, spent four years in the United States on the staff of NATO's Military Committee and retired in 1969 as a rear admiral. The man who sank the first American warship of the war ended his working life as an ally of the United States Navy, which is either a tidy summary of the twentieth century or a very poor joke, depending on the day.

Into the Arctic: PQ 16 and QP 13

HMS Honeysuckle escorted Arctic convoys to northern Russia in 1942, going out with PQ 16 in May and coming home with QP 13 in June and July. Between them those two operations manage to cover very nearly everything that could go wrong on the Murmansk run, including one thing nobody had allowed for at all.

PQ 16 was the largest Arctic convoy sent up to that point and the most heavily bombed of the war so far. Thirty-five merchantmen left Iceland on 21 May 1942 and spent five days under more or less continuous attack from the Luftwaffe airfields in northern Norway, well over two hundred sorties being flown against them by Heinkel torpedo bombers and Junkers dive bombers while U-boats worked the edges of the screen. Eight ships were lost, six of them to aircraft. The convoy got through, and at the time that counted as a considerable success. The next one did not: PQ 17 was ordered to scatter on a mistaken report that the German battleship Tirpitz was at sea, and lost twenty-four of its thirty-five ships to aircraft and submarines picking off lone merchantmen with nobody left to protect them.

Honeysuckle was not in PQ 17. She was on the other side of the Barents Sea by then, bringing QP 13 home, and QP 13 turned into a disaster of its own with nobody but the Royal Navy to blame for it. The convoy had left Archangel on 26 June 1942 with four corvettes among its escort, Honeysuckle, Hyderabad, Starwort and the Free French Roselys. The passage was uneventful. Off the north-east corner of Iceland on 4 July the convoy divided, sixteen ships going on to Loch Ewe with the Commodore and nine turning for Reykjavik. The following day, in dense fog, the minesweeper HMS Niger leading the Reykjavik section took a drifting iceberg for Iceland's North Western Cape, altered course accordingly, and led the section straight into a British minefield laid a month earlier at the entrance to the Denmark Strait. Five ships were sunk and two more badly damaged. Niger blew up and went down almost at once, taking more than 120 of her 127 men with her and leaving eight survivors, and the merchantmen Heffron, Hybert, Massmar and Rodina were lost with her. The corvettes spent the rest of the day working among the mines picking people out of the water; Roselys alone took off 179, in what is still remembered in Iceland as one of the greatest rescues ever carried out in her waters. Her convoy work carried on at a steady pace through the rest of 1942 and into 1943: a South Atlantic run escorting Convoy SL 124 out of Freetown that October, an Arctic run north from Loch Ewe with Convoy JW 51A that December, and the homeward Convoy RA 52 from the Kola Inlet the following January.

HMS Honeysuckle rescued a further 276 survivors from the merchant vessel St Essylt on 4 July 1943, after she was torpedoed by U-375 off Algeria, cementing her reputation as one of the more consistently successful rescue vessels of the entire war, credited with saving hundreds of lives across multiple separate incidents. St Essylt turned out to be no ordinary merchantman: as well as her master, crew and gunners, she was carrying some 320 military personnel as part of the vast convoy traffic supporting Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, when U-375 struck her off Cape Ténès in Algeria. Of the 399 people aboard, all but two survived, rescued jointly by Honeysuckle and two other Royal Navy escorts, HMS Restive and, in a small coincidence of names, HMS Rhododendron, and landed safely at Algiers.

The convoy she was escorting off Algeria that week was not a routine one either. KMS 18B was carrying the 1st Canadian Division to Sicily for Operation Husky, and the U-boats found it. U-409 torpedoed the City of Venice on 4 July with 292 Canadian soldiers aboard; U-375 got St Essylt a couple of hours later; and on the 5th U-593 sank the Devis and took fifty-two Canadian soldiers with her. Fifty-eight Canadians died in that convoy without ever reaching the beach they had crossed an ocean to land on, and they are commemorated as casualties of the Sicilian campaign despite never having set foot in Sicily. Against that background, getting nearly four hundred people off a burning ship in the dark and landing them at Algiers looks less like a footnote and more like the difference between a bad night and a catastrophe.

The End

HMS Honeysuckle served under three commanding officers during the war, Lieutenant George Windsor Gregorie from September 1940, Lieutenant Henry Herbert Dietrich MacKillican from February 1942, and Temporary Lieutenant James Alfred Wright from February 1944 through to the middle of 1945. She survived the war and was sold for scrap to T.W. Ward in 1950, arriving at Grays on the Thames that November to be broken up.

Those three names cover a career that is easily understated, because Honeysuckle's busiest years came later still. From the summer of 1943 she spent the best part of a year on the Mediterranean convoy chain, working the UGS, GTX, KMS and MKS series that shuttled between Gibraltar, Algiers, Bizerta and Port Said and kept the North African and Italian campaigns supplied. In the spring and summer of 1944 she turned up in a very different sort of water altogether, escorting EBC and FTM convoys, the Bristol Channel and Thames coastal traffic feeding the Normandy build-up, which meant weeks of short, mined, E-boat-infested passages up and down the English coast with a load of ammunition lorries astern of her. It is about as far from the Barents Sea as a British escort could get, and she did it in the same hull, with the same engine, that had been pulling men out of the Denmark Strait two years earlier.

Then she went back north, and stayed there to the end. Honeysuckle escorted JW 55B out of Loch Ewe on 20 December 1943, which is the convoy the German capital ship Scharnhorst came out of Altenfjord to attack on Christmas Day. She never found it. The Home Fleet found her instead, and on Boxing Day off North Cape the Duke of York and her cruisers sank the last operational German capital ship in Norway; all nineteen ships of JW 55B reached Murmansk without a scratch, which is the whole point of the exercise and is generally forgotten in favour of the gunnery. That battle is set out in the article on HMS Belfast (C35). She was back for JW 56B, JW 58, JW 59 and their return legs through 1944, and she was there at the finish: JW 66 in April 1945 and the homeward RA 66, which sailed out of the Kola Inlet on 29 April into a pack of U-boats lying in wait outside it. The frigate HMS Goodall was torpedoed and blew up with the loss of about a hundred men, the last major warship the Royal Navy lost in the war against Germany. Two U-boats were destroyed. RA 66 came into the Clyde on 8 May 1945, which was VE Day, and Honeysuckle's war ended, more or less exactly, with the war.

Ward in 1950, arriving at Grays that November for scrapping, closing out the career of a small corvette whose notably remarkable rescue record stands as one of the more quietly heroic individual contributions of the entire Battle of the Atlantic.

Set against that record, the usual way of describing a Flower class corvette, small, cheap, wet, uncomfortable and built to a whale catcher's lines by yards that had never made a warship, starts to look like faint praise disguised as affection. Honeysuckle was in commission from September 1940 to the end of the war in Europe without a break. She crossed the Atlantic on the HX and ON routes through the worst of it, made the Russian run again and again, sat under five days of air attack on PQ 16, watched a British minefield destroy part of her own convoy off Iceland, escorted the Canadians to Sicily, fed the Normandy beachhead, and was present at both the sinking of the Scharnhorst and the last shot of the Arctic war. And in between all of it she stopped, repeatedly and against orders, to pick people up. Three hundred and forty-nine of them in the three incidents recorded above alone, and a good many more besides. That is not a bad four and a half years for a ship named after a hedgerow climber.