HMS Samphire (K128): The Corvette That Sank a U-Boat Before Being Sunk by a Submarine of Her Own

Built for the Convoy War

HMS Samphire was a Flower-class corvette ordered on 25 July 1939 and built by Smiths Dock Company at South Bank-on-Tees, though her keel was not laid until December 1940 and she was not launched until April 1941, a slower build than the six or seven weeks some later Flowers managed once the yards had the pattern down cold. She commissioned into Royal Navy service on 30 June 1941 and was assigned to the 36th Escort Group, one of the first Royal Navy formations built specifically around aggressive, coordinated U-boat hunting under Commander Frederic John "Johnnie" Walker, taking on the demanding, essential work of escorting convoys between Liverpool and the Mediterranean during one of the most dangerous periods of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Samphire is a plant, as every ship of the class was, and this one came with the best epigraph a convoy escort could reasonably ask for. In King Lear, Edgar stands on the cliff above Dover and describes the figure working the rock face far below him: half way down hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade. The Admiralty got through the best part of three hundred of these names between 1939 and 1943, from Abelia to Zinnia, and the joke wore thin remarkably quickly with the men who had to serve in the ships. How the Navy came to name its escorts after the herbaceous border is set out in HMS Abelia (K184).

Command went to Lieutenant Commander Frederick Thomas Renny, DSC, RNR, a few weeks before she commissioned, and he never handed it on. Renny commanded Samphire for the whole of her working life, through convoy duty, a share in sinking a U-boat and, ultimately, the action that killed him.

Not the Glamorous End of Convoy Work

Samphire's first job, in July 1941, was the fairly modest business of escorting convoy OG 70 out into the Atlantic. Her second, that September, was rather less dignified still: while Operation Halberd sent three battleships, the carrier Ark Royal and a screen of cruisers and destroyers fighting a convoy through to Malta against everything the Italian air force and navy could throw at it, Samphire's own contribution was shepherding the 26th Motor Launch Flotilla safely across to Gibraltar, a useful job certainly, but not exactly one for the history books alongside Nelson, Rodney and Prince of Wales.

Helping Sink U-567

That December, while defending convoy HG 76 on its run home from Gibraltar, Samphire played a direct part in destroying the German submarine U-567 in the North Atlantic, northeast of the Azores, working alongside the sloop HMS Deptford. Deptford spotted a U-boat on the surface at night and went in with depth charges; nobody aboard either escort could actually confirm a kill at the time, and it was only postwar analysis of German records that credited them with U-567 and all 47 of her crew, on 21 December 1941, one of four U-boats Walker's group would account for during that single convoy battle, a tally that helped build his reputation as the most effective U-boat hunter the Royal Navy produced.

Among those lost was U-567's captain, Kapitänleutnant Engelbert Endrass, one of the more celebrated U-boat aces of the early war and a man with a genuinely notorious entry already on his record: as first watch officer aboard U-47 under Günther Prien, he had helped pilot her into Scapa Flow in October 1939 for the raid that sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak at her own anchorage. Barely two months into his first solo command, Endrass went down with U-567 off the Azores, sunk by a small British corvette he almost certainly never saw coming.

The wider battle for HG 76 was one of the turning points of the Atlantic war and it is told properly elsewhere here rather than repeated. HMS Stork (L81) was Walker's own sloop and rammed U-574 during the same running fight, and HMS Convolvulus (K45) had been in the screen alongside Samphire from the group's first day. Four U-boats were destroyed and only two of the convoy's thirty-two merchant ships lost, though the escorts paid for it with the destroyer Stanley and the escort carrier Audacity. The Admiralty thought enough of Walker's methods to adopt them fleet-wide, and Walker himself went on to HMS Starling (U66) and the most productive U-boat hunting career the Royal Navy has ever had.

A Dozen Runs to Gibraltar

The U-567 night is the part of Samphire's war that gets written down, so it is worth setting out what the rest of it consisted of, because the answer is a metronome. OG 70 out to Gibraltar and HG 71 home in the summer of 1941; OG 76 and then OG 77 out again in the autumn; HG 76 home in December; OG 78 out and HG 78 back in the new year; OG 80 out in February 1942. She then drops off the convoy lists altogether between March and July, and reappears for OG 86, HG 86, OG 88 and HG 88, the last of them ending on 7 September 1942. A dozen convoy passages in fourteen months, up and down the same stretch of the Western Approaches, in a ship of under a thousand tons that was wet, cramped, and in any kind of sea inclined to roll her gunwales under. On almost every one of those crossings nothing whatever happened, which was of course the entire object of the exercise.

Standing By a Damaged American Ship

By October 1942, Samphire was screening the assault convoys KMS 1 and KMF 1 carrying the invasion force for Operation Torch, then took part in Operation Perpetual, the landings at Bougie in Algeria, the same stretch of coast where her own war would end barely two months later. During the landings, on the night of 8 to 9 November 1942, Samphire provided protective escort to the American transport USS Leedstown after Junkers 88s had already put a torpedo into her stern; the German submarine U-331 then finished the job with two more, and Leedstown went down bow-first off the Algerian coast, though brisk work getting men off meant only eight of her more than 500 crew and troops were lost. Samphire stood by and helped fend off the air attacks that came in between, exactly the kind of dangerous, unglamorous protective work that convoy escorts performed constantly but rarely received recognition for.

The detail the records add is that she did it alone. On the morning of 9 November the rest of the convoy went on to Algiers and Samphire was left standing by the crippled American transport by herself, one corvette and one immobilised ship on an open coast in daylight. When the Junkers came back at five minutes to one that afternoon she shot one of them down. She got Leedstown as far as an anchorage off Cape Matifou before U-331 found her there and two more torpedoes settled it. The National Archives still hold an Admiralty file of awards to Samphire's people for their part in Torch, which is the sort of paperwork that follows a day like that one.

There is a coincidence buried in that afternoon worth pulling out. Eleven months earlier Samphire had helped kill Engelbert Endrass, the officer who had helped navigate U-47 into Scapa Flow to sink HMS Royal Oak (08). Now she was watching a ship die under the torpedoes of U-331, whose commander Hans-Diedrich von Tiesenhausen had fired four at HMS Barham (04) off the Egyptian coast in November 1941, put three of them into her, and blown a battleship apart in front of a running newsreel camera. Those two boats between them account for both of the British battleships lost to submarine attack in the entire war, and one small corvette out of a yard on the Tees crossed the wake of both of them inside twelve months. U-331 did not outlast the encounter by much: Albacores from HMS Formidable (67) sank her north of Algiers on 17 November, eight days later.

The Coastal Run to Bone

Her last ten weeks were spent on the shortest and nastiest route she ever worked. Torch had handed the Allies Algiers but not Tunisia, so everything the First Army needed had to be carried east along the Algerian coast in small local convoys, lettered TE going east and ET coming back, under an air umbrella that was thin and well within reach of a Luftwaffe that was not. Samphire ran TE 9 and ET 6 in the middle of December 1942, then KMS 5G and ET 7 across Christmas, then TE 14 in the last week of January. A few days out, a few days back, along a coastline the enemy could reach easily and the fighters mostly could not.

One of that run's casualties was the merchant ship Edencrag, torpedoed by U-443 west of Algiers on 14 December 1942 while Samphire was working convoy TE 9. Samphire picked up nine of her people, another rescue on a record that by the end was very largely made up of them.

Lost Off Bougie

Samphire's own war ended on 30 January 1943, torpedoed and sunk at position 36°56'N, 5°40'E by the Italian submarine Platino, under Lieutenant Commander Patrelli Campagnano, while escorting convoy TE-14 off Bougie, Algeria, during the ongoing North African campaign, the same stretch of coast she had helped secure during the Perpetual landings barely two months earlier.

The loss was a heavy one: her captain, Lieutenant Commander Renny, the only commanding officer Samphire ever had, went down along with two other officers and forty-two of her crew. The destroyer HMS Zetland reached the scene after a twenty-minute Asdic search for the submarine and found men still in the water calling out in the dark; her boat could reach only four of them in time, and those survivors were landed at Bone. It was a devastating toll for a relatively small ship and a sobering reminder that even vessels with a strong record of protecting others remained constantly vulnerable themselves.

Platino was an Acciaio-class boat that had been in service barely sixteen months, and her captain took the two ships in his periscope for destroyers. He fired a spread of four. Two of them hit, and a corvette of under a thousand tons struck by two torpedoes does not stay up long enough for anybody to do a great deal about it. Forty-five of a ship's company of eighty-five were lost. Renny went with her, and so did Temporary Lieutenant R J Murray and Temporary Sub-Lieutenant G C Abbott, both RNVR. The Admiralty casualty file and the senior officer's report of proceedings for convoy TE 14, written up on 3 February 1943, are both still at Kew.

Platino herself came through the war, which is not how these stories usually finish. After the Italian armistice she was employed on nothing but exercises with surface ships, working out of Naples, Brindisi and Taranto on the other side of the argument, and she was struck off and broken up in 1948 under the terms of the peace treaty.

A Corvette Remembered for Both Sides of Her Story

HMS Samphire's short career captures both the promise and the peril of convoy escort work during the Battle of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean campaign: a humble corvette that helped account for a U-boat ace who already had a battleship to his name, screened the very invasion coast she would later be lost defending, and saved lives from torpedoed vessels on more than one occasion, before being claimed herself by exactly the kind of underwater attack she had spent her service guarding against.

The men lost with her deserve to be remembered alongside the successes she achieved in her brief but consequential wartime career.