HMS Pheasant (F49): From Sicily to Okinawa, With a Battle Honour from 1807 Thrown In

A Convoy Escort Built in Wartime Haste

HMS Pheasant was a Modified Black Swan-class sloop, part of a family of ships that the Royal Navy came to rely on heavily during the Second World War for exactly the unglamorous, essential job convoy protection demanded: a strong anti-aircraft and anti-submarine armament packed onto a hull that could be built quickly and in reasonable numbers.

She was laid down at Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde on 13 July 1942, launched that December, and commissioned on 12 May 1943, arriving just in time to be thrown straight into the Mediterranean campaign then gathering pace. During Warship Week in 1942, the National Savings campaign that invited communities to adopt a ship in exchange for raising the money to build her, she was adopted by the rural district of Runcorn, then in Cheshire, a civic tie that gave a Clyde-built sloop an unlikely home town on the banks of the Mersey.

Sicily and the Mediterranean Convoys

Pheasant's first taste of action came with Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943, an operation for which she later carried a battle honour.

Through the rest of that year she was heavily engaged in escorting Mediterranean troop convoys such as KMF 18 and MKF 19, shepherding transports carrying soldiers and supplies through waters that remained dangerous long after the initial landings, patrolled by German aircraft and submarines determined to make the Allied build-up in Italy as costly as possible.

Not every hazard came from the enemy. On 13 July 1943, in the thick of the Sicily landings, Pheasant ran herself aground off Tripoli while on escort duty, an embarrassment that put her into a Clyde shipyard for repairs that August, a reminder that a young crew and a brand-new ship could produce their own crises without any help from the Germans at all.

Across the Atlantic and On to the Pacific

By the spring of 1944 Pheasant had moved to the 55th Escort Group and the long haul between Gibraltar and Port Said, taking her turn on the UGS and GUS series that ran between the United States and the Mediterranean alongside substantial American naval forces: UGS 34 in March, GUS 39 in May and UGS 46 in July, hunting for submarines and shepherding merchant shipping across an ocean that, while less lethal than it had been in 1942 and early 1943, still demanded constant vigilance.

What that route was like in May 1944 is best shown by the convoy she was not in. On the evening of the 11th, while Pheasant was somewhere out to the west with GUS 39, the eastbound UGS 40 was attacked off the Algerian coast. She had sixty-five merchant ships in eight columns and seventeen escorts, American, British and French, and two days earlier the whole formation had rehearsed its anti-aircraft barrage against an imaginary torpedo-bomber attack. When the real one came, it was the heaviest concentrated air strike the Luftwaffe threw at any Mediterranean convoy in the second half of the war. Not a single Allied ship was hit. At least nineteen German aircraft were shot down. Admiral Hewitt wrote afterwards that the parts played by the escorts and the convoy attained perfection and would serve as an example to those that followed, which is not the sort of thing admirals usually write down.

Her war then took a considerably longer journey still: she left home waters on 13 January 1945, sailing via the Red Sea and Colombo to join Task Force 57, the British Pacific Fleet's contribution to Operation Iceberg, the invasion of Okinawa, reaching the fleet's forward base at Manus in the Admiralty Islands that March.

From March to May 1945 she flew air defence and replenishment cover over the Sakishima Gunto, the chain of islands the British Pacific Fleet was tasked with neutralising to stop Japanese aircraft using them to reinforce Okinawa, the unglamorous but vital work of keeping the front-line carriers and battleships fuelled and supplied so far from home, at the very end of a war that had by then stretched across three oceans and six years.

Her job out there had a number as well as a name. From 17 March 1945 she and the destroyer HMS Kempenfelt formed Task Unit 112.2.5, responsible for the anti-aircraft defence of the fleet replenishment ships, among them the tankers San Adolpho and San Ambrosio. On the 28th she was covering a replenishment group that included the escort carriers Striker and Speaker, with the sloop Crane, the frigate Findhorn and the destroyers Kempenfelt and Whirlwind. On 6 May she did it again for Ruler, Striker, Chaser and Speaker, with Crane and Whimbrel and the Canadian corvette Woodstock.

This was the Fleet Train, the least celebrated and most necessary invention of the British Pacific Fleet: the tankers, store ships, repair ships and escort carriers that allowed a fleet to keep the sea thousands of miles from any base it owned. The Royal Navy had to put it together more or less from scratch, because it had never before had to fight at that range, and the Americans were politely unconvinced it could. What the carriers of Task Force 57 were doing while Pheasant looked after their fuel is set out in the article on HMS Indefatigable (R10). Pheasant's part was making sure there was something for them to come back to.

A Battle Honour from a Much Older War

Alongside the honours she earned in her own right, for Sicily 1943, the Atlantic 1943 to 1944 and Okinawa 1945, Pheasant also carried Buenos Aires 1807, a battle honour inherited from an earlier ship of the same name that had taken part in the disastrous British invasions of the Rio de la Plata in the Napoleonic era.

It is a quirk of Royal Navy tradition that a modern warship can carry the honours of her predecessors regardless of how many decades, or centuries, separate them, a small but telling reminder that a ship's name in the Royal Navy is treated as a kind of living inheritance rather than a simple label.

What Buenos Aires 1807 Was Actually For

It is worth knowing what she inherited, because it is not a victory. The Pheasant of 1807 was an eighteen-gun Merlin-class sloop launched in 1798, and she was in the River Plate for the second British attempt on Buenos Aires. The naval half of the campaign went well enough: Montevideo fell on 3 February 1807. The military half did not. That July, Lieutenant-General John Whitelocke sent about twelve thousand men into the streets of Buenos Aires in separate columns, and the city took them apart house by house.

Four hundred and one British soldiers were killed, six hundred and forty-nine wounded and one thousand nine hundred and twenty-four taken prisoner. On 7 July Whitelocke signed an armistice agreeing to give up Montevideo as well and leave the River Plate altogether, which undid everything the previous eighteen months had won. He was court-martialled at Chelsea Hospital from January to March 1808, found guilty on almost every charge and sentenced to be cashiered, and the King ordered the sentence read out to every regiment in the service. That is the campaign a sloop of 1798 collected a battle honour for, and it is the honour a sloop of 1943 was still carrying off Okinawa.

There is a gap on the same board that says as much as the entry does. The seventh Pheasant followed a sixth: an M-class destroyer launched by Fairfield in October 1916 and attached to the Grand Fleet at Orkney. On 1 March 1917, west of Hoy, she went onto a mine, probably one of U-80's, and sank almost immediately with Lieutenant Hubert Griffith and all eighty-eight of his men. One body was recovered, Midshipman Reginald Cotter, who lies at Lyness. Hers was the last of the sixty-seven Royal Navy destroyers lost in that war to be accounted for; the Army Sub-Aqua Club found her in eighty-two metres of water on 13 May 1996. There is no honour on the board for her, because the Navy does not award them for being mined.

A Long Wait for the Breaker's Yard

Peace brought the usual anticlimax. Pheasant was reclassified as a frigate in 1947, taking the pennant number F49, by which time she had already been sitting in reserve for a year and where she would stay for the rest of her life, before being placed on the disposal list, sold for breaking on 7 December 1962.

The reserve years are worth stating plainly, because they were most of her life. She was back in British waters in 1946 and paid off into reserve at Portsmouth, and that was effectively the end of her seagoing career three years after she commissioned. She was moved to the Reserve Fleet at Barry in 1954 and lay there for six years, by which point her condition had gone off badly enough that there was no realistic prospect of anybody wanting her back. Nineteen and a half years on the Navy List, three of them at sea.

The photograph above, taken off the Isles of Scilly on 4 January 1963 with a helicopter alongside, looks for all the world like the record of some dramatic rescue, and it is easy to see why. In fact the more mundane explanation fits every known date rather better: by then Pheasant had already been sold for scrap for the best part of a month, and the likeliest explanation is that the helicopter was simply keeping an eye on a dead ship under tow past a notoriously rocky stretch of coast, on her way to the breakers at Troon in Ayrshire, where she arrived eleven days later on 15 January 1963. No record of any rescue by, or of, HMS Pheasant survives in any source checked, so if a dramatic version of this photograph exists, it has not surfaced yet.

Breaking up began on 4 February 1963, she was beached for demolition on 19 June, and the job was finally finished on 12 September 1963, nearly eight months after she first arrived, a suitably unglamorous and rather drawn-out end for a ship whose entire career had been built around unglamorous, essential work.

A Well-Travelled Sloop

Few ships of her size and type could claim to have served meaningfully in three different theatres of the Second World War, from the invasion beaches of Sicily to the Atlantic convoy lanes and finally to the fleet train supporting the British Pacific Fleet at Okinawa.

HMS Pheasant's war was rarely dramatic in the way a destroyer duel or a U-boat kill might be, but it was thoroughly, reliably useful, which is precisely what a convoy escort was built to be.