HMS Picotee (K63): Lost Without a Trace South of Iceland

A Corvette Built for the Atlantic's Meanest Weather

HMS Picotee was one of the Flower-class corvettes, the small, hardy, uncomfortable ships that did more than perhaps any other single class to keep Britain fed and supplied during the darkest years of the Battle of the Atlantic. Built at Harland and Wolff's yard in Belfast, she was launched on 21 March 1940 and completed that September, entering service at a moment when the U-boat threat to Britain's convoy lifelines was becoming a matter of national survival.

A Year of Convoy Work

Through the winter of 1940 and into 1941, Picotee did the grinding, essential work her class existed for, escorting one Atlantic convoy after another through some of the roughest and most dangerous waters in the world. She joined convoy HX 93 in December 1940, escorted SC 16 to Liverpool at the turn of the year, took SL 63 home in February 1941, brought SC 25 in that March, and saw HX 122 partway across in April and May. It was unglamorous, exhausting work, weeks at a time in a small, heavily rolling ship, watching for the telltale signs of a U-boat while trying to keep a straggling convoy of merchantmen together in filthy North Atlantic weather.

The Night She Did Not Come Back

On 11 August 1941, Picotee was escorting convoy ONS-4 south of Iceland when reports came in of a U-boat in the vicinity. Under the command of Lieutenant Ronald Arthur Harrison, she left the convoy at around ten that evening to investigate. Just after 1:50am on 12 August, lookouts aboard the merchant ships watched her steam across the convoy at full speed before vanishing into the darkness. Minutes later came the sound of depth charges exploding somewhere out in the night. Picotee was never seen again.

What happened to her was not immediately clear. Some of the merchant ship officers who had been watching reported a large cloud of smoke, the sound of escaping steam, and a corvette's bow rising sharply out of the water, along with a series of dull thuds rather than any single, obvious explosion. It was only after the war, when captured German U-boat logs were examined, that the full picture emerged: the submarine U-568, under Kapitänleutnant Preuss, had torpedoed Picotee, striking her amidships just below the bridge. She broke apart and sank almost immediately, with some of her own depth charges detonating as she went down. All 66 of her crew, five officers and sixty-one ratings, were lost. There were no survivors.

A Loss Felt, and Finally Understood

For the families of Picotee's crew, the initial uncertainty over exactly what had happened to the ship must have made an already unbearable loss harder still to comprehend. It took the recovery and translation of enemy war diaries, years after the fact, to establish with any confidence what those watching sailors on the convoy had witnessed that night: a single well-aimed torpedo, a corvette's crew given no time at all to escape, and a loss that was total and immediate rather than the slow, fighting battle for survival that at least gives some ships and some crews a chance.

Remembering a Corvette and Her Crew

HMS Picotee's career lasted less than a year, but in that time she carried out exactly the duty her class was built for, shepherding convoy after convoy safely across some of the most contested waters of the war. Her loss, sudden and total, stands as a stark reminder of just how unforgiving that duty could be, and of the sixty-six men who never came home from it.