HMS Opossum (U33): From Rescuing Downed Airmen to Shelling Targets in Korea

Commissioned Just in Time for the Pacific

HMS Opossum was ordered on 12 August 1941 from William Denny and Brothers in Dumbarton, laid down on 28 July 1943, launched on 30 November 1944 and commissioned on 16 June 1945, a Modified Black Swan-class sloop that reached service just as the war against Japan was entering its final weeks, joining the British Pacific Fleet by that August. She was built with that particular war in mind: Brown/Denny stabilisers for a steadier gunnery platform, her original Oerlikons swapped for punchier 40mm Bofors guns with added splinter protection, and a full radar suite of aircraft-search, surface-search and gunnery sets, the whole arrangement adjusted specifically with the kamikaze threat off Japan in mind.

Rescuing a Downed Bomber Crew

HMS Opossum, under her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander William Francis Hollins, carried out a particularly valuable piece of lifesaving work on 10 May 1946, rescuing eight survivors from a Royal Australian Air Force Liberator bomber that had crashed some 75 nautical miles south of Mindanao in the Philippines, a rescue that, whatever the wider strategic picture, mattered enormously to the eight men who owed their survival to it.

Between Sydney and Portsmouth

HMS Opossum underwent a refit at Sydney in the middle of 1946 and served with the 1st Escort Flotilla afterward, before returning to reserve at Portsmouth in November 1947, her pennant number changed from U33 to F33 that same year, a quiet interlude between the intensity of her brief wartime commission and the further active service still to come.

Shelling Targets Near Haeju

HMS Opossum refitted at Chatham in early 1952 and rejoined the 3rd Frigate Squadron in the Far East, taking part in Korean War operations that included shelling targets near Haeju on 16 January 1953, alongside anti-submarine patrol duties, an active combat role for a sloop originally built in the final months of an entirely different war. An Imperial War Museum photograph from that Korean posting captures the quieter side of the job just as well as any gunnery report: a lone seaman on Opossum's deck, simply looking out over the icy waters off Korea's west coast.

Into the Malayan Emergency

HMS Opossum went on to take part in operations during the Malayan Emergency, shelling suspected Communist positions in July 1954, part of the long, grinding counter-insurgency campaign the British fought against Communist guerrillas in Malaya through the 1950s. In November 1955 she joined HMS Comus, Concord, Cossack and Newcastle for Operation NASSAU off Kuala Langat, one of the more notable naval gunfire support actions of the entire Emergency, and a useful reminder of just how far a warship's peacetime work could still stray from a peaceful one. She recommissioned at Singapore with an entirely new crew on 27 June 1957, continuing her Far East service.

Operation Nassau deserves its arithmetic, because it is one of the most instructive sums in the history of counter-insurgency. The plan was straightforward. The Kuala Langat swamp was believed to hold a group of guerrillas; the swamp would therefore be shelled and bombed continuously, day and night, until they were driven out of it into ambushes laid around the edges. The guerrillas, who lived there, declined to be driven anywhere and settled in to wait.

So the bombardment went on. Over the course of the operation the security forces put something like sixty thousand artillery shells, thirty thousand mortar bombs and two thousand aircraft bombs into that swamp, with warships adding their own weight of 4-inch and 6-inch fire from the sea. The result, at the end of all of it, was thirty-five guerrillas killed or captured. Somebody afterwards worked out that each one had cost roughly fifteen hundred man-days of patrolling or lying in ambush.

And it was written up as a success, which takes some getting used to, though the argument for it is not silly: the Emergency was in fact won, over twelve years, largely by wearing the insurgency down until it had nowhere left to be. Nassau is the case people reach for when they want to argue about whether firepower can be made to substitute for patience. There is an academic study of the naval end of it titled, quite properly, "A Sledgehammer to Crack a Nut?". Whatever the answer, a sloop finished in 1945 with her armament specifically rearranged to shoot down kamikazes off Japan spent part of 1955 dropping shells into a Malayan swamp.

A Final Posting to the South Atlantic

HMS Opossum departed the 3rd Frigate Squadron in late 1957, arriving back in Britain that January, before joining the 7th Frigate Squadron for South Atlantic Station duty, a rather quieter final active posting after years spent in some of the most operationally demanding waters in the world.

She paid off into reserve at Devonport in 1959 and was sold for scrap, arriving at the breakers' yard on 26 April 1960, closing out the career of a sloop whose service had ranged from wartime rescue work in the Pacific to active combat operations in two separate Asian conflicts.