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.

The French order is worth a word, because it is the least likely part of the story. By 1939 the Marine Nationale had concluded that it needed exactly what the Royal Navy had concluded it needed, a cheap escort that a merchant yard could turn out quickly, and it went to the same place for it: Smith's Dock on the Tees, whose whale catcher Southern Pride was the ancestor of every Flower-class corvette ever built. Her name means, roughly, the girl from Saint-Malo, which is a proper French corvette's name and stayed with her for the whole of a career spent entirely under British colours. She was not the only one. HMS Alisma began the same way, and her story is told in the article on HMS Alisma (K185). Where the design came from, and why a ship built to chase whales turned out to be adequate for chasing submarines, is set out in the article on HMS Abelia (K184).

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 Operation Grasp, the codename for the wider British seizure of French warships already sitting in British, Gibraltar, Maltese and Singaporean ports at the moment of France's capitulation, an altogether tidier affair than the much bloodier attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir carried out that very same day. She was recommissioned into the Royal Navy on 29 July 1940 under Lieutenant Commander R. W. Keymer, becoming HMS La Malouine in name as well as in ownership; she flew the Tricolore on occasion alongside the White Ensign, but she was crewed by the Royal Navy from that day to the end of the war.

Operation Grasp was larger and messier than the phrase suggests. French warships were boarded and taken at Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth and Dundee, and at Gibraltar, Malta and Singapore, on the morning of 3 July 1940, and in most places it went off exactly as intended: a boarding party at first light, a short conversation, and a ship changing hands without a shot. In one place it did not. Aboard the enormous French submarine Surcouf at Plymouth, a French officer produced a concealed pistol and shot the two officers leading the British party, Commander Denis Sprague and Lieutenant Griffiths, both of whom died; a French engineer was bayonetted and the submarine's doctor shot the seaman who did it. Four men killed in a few seconds between allies who had been fighting the same enemy a fortnight earlier. Set against the 1,297 French sailors killed at Mers-el-Kebir the same day it is a footnote, and it is also the reason the seizures in home ports are not quite the bloodless affair they are usually described as.

One popular detail about her deserves correcting, because it is repeated everywhere and it is not right. La Malouine is often described as a French ship flying two flags, and she is sometimes called a Free French corvette. She was neither. She had been completed for the Marine Nationale and she kept the French name, and she flew the Tricolore on occasion out of courtesy to where she had come from, but she never had a French crew. The standard line in the Flower-class references is blunter than that: she never saw a French sailor. Her commanding officers were Lieutenant Commander Ronald Keymer from August 1940, then Vivian Bidwell, William Ives and Christopher Pawley, all of them Royal Navy, Royal Naval Reserve or Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. The Free French did take corvettes to sea, and did so with distinction on the Arctic run in ships like Roselys and Aconit, but that is a different story and this ship is not part of it. What she does represent is stranger and rather more interesting: a warship that spent five years fighting under a name and a flag belonging to a navy that never once put a man aboard her.

A Punishing Convoy Schedule

HMS La Malouine spent the rest of 1940 escorting nine separate convoys, among them convoy HX72 out of Halifax, Nova Scotia at the end of September, one of the largest convoy battles fought up to that point in the war, in which eleven merchant ships were sunk and three more damaged in a concentrated U-boat attack. La Malouine herself pulled 146 survivors from the water, taken from the Canonesa, Dalcairn, Empire Airman and Frederick S. Fales, all four 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.

HX 72 deserves a fuller account, because it was one of the nights that taught the Royal Navy how bad the Atlantic was about to get. The convoy was set upon between 21 and 22 September 1940 by a concentration of U-boats that happened to include the three most celebrated captains in the German service, Günther Prien, Otto Kretschmer and Joachim Schepke, and the results were catastrophic: eleven ships sunk and three more damaged in about thirty hours. Prien in U-47 shared in one and Kretschmer in U-99 accounted for three. Joachim Schepke in U-100 sank seven, all of them at night, on the surface, inside the convoy, and was never detected by the escorts at all. Four of Schepke's seven were the ships La Malouine went alongside afterwards: the Canonesa, the Dalcairn, the tanker Frederick S. Fales and the Empire Airman. The escort had no radar worth the name, no coordinated night tactics and no answer to a submarine that stayed on the surface, and it took another two years to develop all three. What became of Schepke and Kretschmer is described in the article on HMS Camellia.

The rescue figures are worth adding up, because they say more about what a corvette actually was than any number of convoy tallies. On 22 September 1940 she took sixty-two men off the Canonesa, forty-eight off the Dalcairn and thirty-two off the Frederick S. Fales, and four more from the Empire Airman the following day. On 5 August 1941 she picked up fifty-nine survivors from the merchant Kumasian. On 9 July 1942, twenty miles off the coast of Novaya Zemlya, she took thirty men out of the boats of the American ship John Witherspoon, torpedoed by U-255. That is two hundred and thirty-five people pulled from the sea by a single ship of just over nine hundred tons whose own complement was around eighty-five. On the night of 22 September 1940 she had roughly twice as many rescued merchant seamen aboard as she had crew, in a hull about two hundred feet long, still in the middle of a convoy under attack.

She escorted a further ten convoys in 1941, through the same 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.

The Nani, it should be said, is a shakier claim than it looks. The Italian submarine, a Marcello-class boat under Capitano di Corvetta Gioacchino Polizzi, disappeared with all fifty-six aboard in early January 1941 after five war patrols in which she had sunk the armed trawler HMS Kingston Sapphire and a Swedish freighter. The attack usually credited with her destruction was made by HMS Anemone on 7 January, south of Iceland, and uboat.net now records that attribution with a caveat: it is doubtful, because Nani was expected to be operating a good deal further south than the position of the attack. Whatever happened to her, La Malouine is not among the ships credited, and the honest version is that a boat went missing in the North Atlantic that winter and nobody has ever been certain who or what accounted for her. It is a more typical outcome than the tidy version.

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 24 of the 35 merchant vessels in the convoy were ultimately lost, only 11 reaching Arkhangelsk.

What she actually did after the scatter signal is the part of her war worth knowing. The order of 4 July 1942 dispersed thirty-five merchant ships across the Barents Sea with instructions to make for Russian ports independently, and it left the close escort, four corvettes among them, with no convoy to escort and a very large number of people about to be in the water. La Malouine went east and north towards Novaya Zemlya, where the surviving merchant ships and lifeboats were making for the same shelter, and on 9 July she found the boats of the John Witherspoon. Ships gathered in the Matochkin Strait, the channel that cuts Novaya Zemlya in two, and those that got into the ice had themselves painted white to hide from the German patrol aircraft quartering the sea outside. From there a remnant convoy was assembled, reinforced by the anti-aircraft ship Pozarica, the corvette Dianella, three minesweepers and eventually two Soviet destroyers, and it reached Archangel on 24 July, three weeks after the scatter.

The cost is easier to state than to absorb. Of thirty-five merchant ships that sailed, twenty-four were sunk and eleven reached Arkhangelsk, and a hundred and fifty-three merchant seamen were killed, the heaviest loss suffered by any British convoy of the war. Not one of the escorts was lost, which is the detail that made the whole thing so unbearable for the men who had been ordered to leave: the convoy was destroyed and its escort came home intact, because the escort had been told to go. The wider story, and the argument about who gave the order and why, is set out in the articles on HMS Bergamot (K189) and HMS Avenger (D14). What belongs to La Malouine is the smaller and more useful fact that she came back with thirty men aboard who would otherwise have died in the Barents Sea.

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 began with the collapse of the navy she had been built for and ended with the defeat of the enemy that had caused it, fought from first to last under a French name and a British crew.

She never went back to France, and the reason is prosaic rather than political. When the war ended the Marine Nationale was rebuilding around ships of its own, and a five-year-old Flower with a British crew, a British refit history and five hard Atlantic and Arctic winters behind her was not on anybody's list. Four officers had commanded her across those five years: Keymer, Bidwell, Ives and Pawley, none of whom is remembered for anything else and all of whom took a very small ship into the North Atlantic and the Barents Sea and brought her home again. That is the whole of it. She sank nothing, she was never seriously damaged, and she pulled two hundred and thirty-five men out of the sea, which is a better return than most.