HMS Mounts Bay (F627): Screening the Incheon Landings, Then Briefly Running Aground Under North Korean Fire

A Long and Interrupted Construction

HMS Mounts Bay was ordered on 25 January 1943 under the name Loch Kilbirnie, and laid down on 23 October 1944 at William Pickersgill and Sons in Southwick, Sunderland, a Bay-class anti-aircraft frigate adapted from the anti-submarine Loch-class design, renamed along the way, like all her Bay-class sisters, after a British bay, in her case Mount's Bay in Cornwall. She was launched on 8 June 1945, but her construction was suspended in 1946 with the war over and the pressing need for more escort vessels gone, and the unfinished hull was relocated to John I. Thornycroft's shipyard at Woolston, Southampton, that March for eventual completion. She was not finished until 11 August 1949, a full four years after her launch, a fairly typical fate for a warship whose usefulness had been rather overtaken by the sudden and welcome end of the Second World War.

A Well-Armed Escort

HMS Mounts Bay displaced 1,600 tons standard and carried a substantial armament for her size, four 4-inch guns in twin mounts, four twin 40mm Bofors mounts and four twin 20mm Oerlikon mounts, along with a Hedgehog anti-submarine projector and depth charges, giving her a versatile mix of anti-aircraft, anti-surface and anti-submarine capability.

She was initially allocated the pennant number K627, redesignated F627 in 1947, and finally commissioned for active service in August 1949, allocated to relieve HMS Amethyst in the Far East.

A Diplomatic Incident Off China

HMS Mounts Bay responded on 2 May 1950 to the seizure of the British merchant vessel Incharran by Nationalist Chinese forces, an incident resolved with the vessel's release, a useful reminder of just how unsettled the waters off China remained in the years immediately following the Chinese Civil War.

Screening the Landings at Incheon

HMS Mounts Bay arrived off Korea on 9 August 1950, relieving HMS Black Swan as escort group flagship, and went on to play a particularly significant role in one of the most celebrated operations of the entire Korean War: from 15 September to 14 October 1950, she screened the amphibious landings at Incheon, General Douglas MacArthur's bold and decisive counter-stroke that transformed the course of the war almost overnight.

It is worth being specific about what everybody thought was wrong with it, because Mounts Bay was sitting in the middle of the problem. The tides in the Yellow Sea at Incheon move by as much as thirty feet. For most of the day the approaches are mud. That reduced the landing to a few hours of high water on a handful of possible dates in the whole month, with no second chance if anything went wrong.

The way in was worse. The approach ran for miles up narrow, shallow, winding channels edged with mudflats, which is precisely the sort of water an enemy mines or blocks with one sunk ship. And at the end of it there was no beach at all: Incheon is a working port, and the troops would have to go over the sea walls, in a city, in daylight, because the tide said so.

Almost every senior American officer who looked at it said no. MacArthur's argument was that all of those objections were the point, because the North Koreans would have made exactly the same list and concluded that nobody would try it. He was right. The landing went in on 15 September and Seoul was back in United Nations hands on the 29th, which turned the war round inside a fortnight. Mounts Bay was on the screen for the whole month of it.

Grounded Under Fire

HMS Mounts Bay shelled North Korean forces building shore emplacements on 23 September 1950, firing 118 rounds from her 4-inch guns, and briefly ran aground during the engagement, though she emerged undamaged and continued her operations, a nerve-wracking moment for any crew but one that ended, fortunately, without lasting consequence.

She deployed to Wonsan the following month, escorting convoys supporting minesweeping operations, and later took part in operations up the Han River alongside sister ships HMS Cardigan Bay and HMS Morecambe Bay, helping keep the approaches to Seoul open to United Nations shipping.

Her luck ran out, briefly, in July 1952. On patrol off Korea's east coast she was struck by a 75mm shell that tore through her side and detonated in one of her messdecks, which by great good fortune happened to be empty at the time. She continued her Korean War deployments through to the conflict's eventual conclusion, later serving off Malaya during the Malayan Emergency as well.

A Second Career as Vasco da Gama

HMS Mounts Bay was decommissioned at Portsmouth in May 1960 and refitted by John I. Thornycroft in Southampton before being transferred to the Portuguese Navy, commissioned as NRP Vasco da Gama on 3 August 1961, just months after the outbreak of Portugal's colonial war in Angola, serving under the Portuguese flag until 1971, a fittingly long second career for a ship that had already proven herself far more useful, and far more battle-tested, than her delayed and interrupted construction might once have suggested.

The name outlived the ship by rather more than the ship outlived her own construction delays: Portugal later gave the name Vasco da Gama to a modern MEKO-class frigate that remains in service today, an entirely different vessel with no connection beyond the name to the old Bay-class frigate that once screened the landings at Incheon.