HMS La Malouine (K46): A French Corvette Under Two Flags

Built for a Navy That Surrendered

HMS La Malouine began life as a ship built for an entirely different navy. Ordered by the French Navy on 25 July 1939 and built by Smiths Dock Company, she was commissioned into the Marine Nationale in June 1940, just as France's war was falling apart. France surrendered to Germany on 22 June 1940, a mere handful of days after her commissioning, throwing the future of every French warship still in British or Allied hands into sudden and urgent question.

Seized and Recommissioned

The Royal Navy seized La Malouine on 3 July 1940, as part of the wider British effort to prevent French warships from falling into German hands or being used against Britain following the armistice, an episode that also saw the much bloodier attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir around the same time. She was recommissioned into the Royal Navy on 29 July 1940 under Lieutenant Commander R. W. Keymer, becoming HMS La Malouine, and went on to fly both the French Tricolore and the British White Ensign throughout her wartime service, a striking visual reminder of her unusual dual heritage and of the thousands of French sailors who continued the fight under Allied colours after their own government had given up.

A Punishing Convoy Schedule

HMS La Malouine spent the rest of 1940 escorting nine separate convoys, and in the course of that work helped rescue 146 survivors from ships sunk by the German submarine U-100, a substantial rescue effort even by the standards of a role that regularly called on corvette crews to pull survivors from freezing water. She escorted a further ten convoys in 1941, taking part in the action that helped sink the Italian submarine Nani, part of the grinding, unglamorous convoy protection work that occupied so much of the Flower-class corvette fleet through the early years of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Surviving Convoy PQ17

HMS La Malouine's most testing moment came in June and July 1942, when she escorted the ill-fated Arctic convoy PQ17 to Murmansk, an operation that has since become one of the most infamous disasters in the entire history of convoy warfare. After the convoy was ordered to scatter in the face of a feared attack by the German battleship Tirpitz, the merchant ships were left dangerously exposed to German U-boats and aircraft, and 25 of the 35 merchant vessels in the convoy were ultimately lost. HMS La Malouine survived the ordeal, one of the escorts that made it through what remains, even by wartime Arctic convoy standards, an especially harrowing and costly episode.

Seeing Out the War

HMS La Malouine continued in active convoy escort service through to the end of the war, taking part in fourteen further convoys in 1944 across both Atlantic and Mediterranean routes, adding to an already exceptionally busy wartime record. She was decommissioned once the fighting ended and scrapped at Gelliswick Bay, Milford Haven, on 22 May 1947, closing out the career of a ship whose service, beginning with the collapse of her original navy and ending with the defeat of the enemy that had caused it, embodied the peculiar and often overlooked contribution of the Free French forces to the Allied war at sea.