HMS Sandwich (L12): From Hunting Pirates in China to Hunting U-Boats in the Atlantic

Laid Down at Hawthorn Leslie for Distant Waters

HMS Sandwich was ordered from Hawthorn Leslie and Company of Newcastle in September 1927, laid down the following February, launched that September and commissioned in March 1929, a Bridgewater-class sloop built for exactly the kind of long-range colonial patrol duty the Royal Navy still relied on heavily between the wars.

A Name Older Than Most Battleships

She was ordered under the 1927 programme with one sister, HMS Bridgewater, the pair of them meant as replacements for the Flower class sloops of the First World War, and she went down the ways on 29 September 1928 without any ceremony at all. That is worth putting alongside what she was carrying. She was the sixth major warship of the name, which the Navy first used in 1679 for a Second Rate, most likely after Edward Montagu, first Earl of Sandwich, a soldier who became a general-at-sea and was killed at the Battle of Solebay in 1672.

The battle honours that came with the name go back further than those of most battleships: Beachy Head 1690, Barfleur 1692, Belleisle 1761, Ushant 1778 and St Vincent 1780. The last of those is the Moonlight Battle, fought through the night of 16 January 1780 off Cape St Vincent, where the ninety-gun Sandwich was Admiral Rodney's flagship in the action that broke a Spanish squadron and let him relieve Gibraltar. A hundred and sixty-two years later this Sandwich would be running convoys into Gibraltar herself, which is either a coincidence or the Navy being quietly consistent about what it uses a name for. Her badge was a gold demi-lion joined to a silver ship's stern, and her motto was Fronte leonis, with a lion's face.

A Decade on the China Station

Sandwich deployed to the China Station in 1931, replacing the older sloops Foxglove and Bluebell, and spent the following decade based in Far Eastern waters, protecting British interests during the tense Shanghai Incident of 1932 and taking part in searches for vessels seized by pirates operating along the Chinese coast, the kind of varied, unglamorous colonial policing work that occupied much of the interwar fleet far from home.

The length of that posting takes some absorbing. She was completed on 23 March 1929 and sent straight out east, and she did not see Britain again until Christmas Day 1939: ten years and nine months, a whole commission cycle several times over, spent between Hong Kong, Shanghai and the Chinese coast. She even recommissioned out there, at Hong Kong on 21 March 1939, taking on a new ship's company without ever coming home to do it.

What she did when the war started is the part nobody expects. From Hong Kong she was sent north to take up a war station in the Straits of Tsushima, the channel between Korea and Japan, to intercept German merchant ships trying to slip home across the Pacific. A British sloop was therefore lying in wait in Japanese home waters in the autumn of 1939, two years before Japan came into the war, which is the sort of thing the Royal Navy simply did in 1939 and would not dream of now. She was then recalled, refitted, and sent home the long way round through Singapore, Colombo, Aden and the Suez Canal, sailing from Gibraltar with convoy HG 11 on 18 December and reaching Devonport on Christmas Day.

Home to Fight the Battle of the Atlantic

Sandwich returned to Britain in December 1939 as war loomed ever larger, and from 1940 to 1944 she took on convoy escort duty across some of the Atlantic's most dangerous routes, including the Liverpool to Gibraltar run and the Western Approaches, serving with the 43rd Escort Group in 1941 and later the 38th Escort Group between August 1943 and June 1944, operating on the long haul between Liverpool and Sierra Leone. She got through six different commanding officers along the way, a fair reflection of just how relentless and attritional escort duty could be on both ships and the men who ran them.

Long before she ever laid a glove on a U-boat herself, Sandwich built a genuinely impressive rescue record. In the space of six weeks in the summer of 1940 alone she pulled 49 survivors from the torpedoed tanker San Fernando, 37 from the Norwegian tanker Eli Knudsen, and 42 more from the tanker Athellaird, then went on that November to recover a further 33 men between the freighters King Idwal and Tymeric, both sunk by the same U-boat in the same attack. It was unglamorous, freezing, dangerous work, hauling frightened and often badly injured men out of the Atlantic while still expected to keep station and watch for the very submarine that had put them there in the first place.

The full tally is better than the article of faith. The 49 from San Fernando she shared with HMS Fowey, who was working the same patch of water south of Ireland on 21 June 1940; Eli Knudsen's 37 came aboard the following day; Athellaird's 42 on 2 July, three hundred and fifty miles north-west of Finisterre. Then on 4 August, out of convoy HX 60, she took off the master of the Geraldine Mary and thirty more of his people, which the shorter accounts of her career tend to leave out. Add the November work and she had something close to a hundred and ninety men out of the Atlantic inside five months, in a ship whose entire complement was about a hundred.

The November figure deserves its own sentence, because of what is behind it. U-123 worked over the remains of two dispersed convoys off the Hebrides on 23 November 1940 and Sandwich went round picking up what was left. From King Idwal she took 28 men. From Tymeric she took five, and five was very nearly everybody: of Tymeric's crew of 76, seventy-one were lost. The Swedish steamer Anten was hit in the same series of attacks. It is unglamorous, freezing, dangerous work in anybody's telling, and it is also the closest thing to a good night that particular stretch of ocean offered.

Six Captains and a Town in Kent

Those six commanding officers are worth naming, because the order they come in is the story of the wartime navy in miniature. Commander Horace Bayliss took her in April 1939 and Commander Morgan Yeatman had her through the rescue summer of 1940. Lieutenant Commander Ronald Gervers followed, and all three were regular Royal Navy. Then came Lieutenant Commander Harold Hill of the Royal Naval Reserve, who had her for the U-boat, then Lieutenant Commander Alfred Clemence, also RNR, and finally, from December 1944, Lieutenant John Culverwell of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Regular, reserve, volunteer reserve, in that order, as the professional officer corps was spread thinner and thinner across a fleet that had quadrupled.

She also acquired a town. In March 1942 the civil community of Sandwich in Kent adopted her, after the sort of Warship Week National Savings campaign that had small English towns raising money against the notional cost of a named warship and then writing to her ship's company for the rest of the war. Whether anybody in Sandwich knew their sloop had spent the previous decade chasing pirates in the South China Sea is not recorded. She was refitted at Belfast at about the same time, coming out with Type 271 radar and, unusually, an entirely new ship's company: the whole crew was exchanged during the refit.

Sinking U-213

Sandwich's convoy escort work produced a genuine combat success on 31 July 1942, while escorting convoy OS 35 east of the Azores. Working alongside the sloops HMS Erne and HMS Rochester, and under the command of Lieutenant Commander Harold Hill, she took part in a coordinated depth-charge attack that sent the German submarine U-213 to the bottom with the loss of all 50 of her crew, including her captain, Oberleutnant zur See Amelung von Varendorff. It was a confirmed kill that stands as the clearest measure of her wartime contribution to the long, grinding campaign against the U-boat threat in the Atlantic, and a rather different way of meeting a submarine's crew than the one she was used to.

The man in command of U-213 was not a stranger to the Royal Navy. Amelung von Varendorff had been Gunther Prien's second watch officer in U-47 on the night of 14 October 1939, when she got into Scapa Flow and sank HMS Royal Oak (08) at her moorings, and he was promoted the week afterwards. He left the boat early in 1941 to train for a command of his own, which is the only reason he was not aboard that March when Prien and every man in U-47 disappeared. His opposite number in the same control room, first watch officer Engelbert Endrass, was killed by a British escort in December 1941, an account of which is in HMS Samphire (K128). There is a symmetry to it that Sandwich would have appreciated if anybody aboard had known: her own great rescue summer of 1940 was spent fishing men out of the water after a wolfpack operation the Germans had codenamed, of all things, Prien.

The boat had a stranger secret than her captain. U-213 sailed from Lorient on 25 April 1942, crossed the Atlantic, and on 14 May made a landfall at Great Salmon River, about ten miles east of the village of St Martins on the north shore of the Bay of Fundy, in New Brunswick. There she put a man ashore: Lieutenant M A Langbein of the Abwehr, sent to watch and report the sailing of convoys out of Halifax, travelling as Alfred Haskins of Toronto. It was one of very few German agent landings in Canada in the whole war.

What Langbein did next is one of the better anticlimaxes of the Second World War. He buried his radio transmitter on the beach, walked into St Martins, bought some things in the village store, got a lift to Saint John, took the train to Montreal and then settled quietly in Ottawa, where he lived on his Abwehr expenses for the next two and a half years and reported absolutely nothing to anybody. When the money finally ran out late in 1944 he turned himself in. A jury acquitted him, on the reasonable ground that he had never actually done anything. His transmitter, as far as anyone knows, is still on the beach.

Sandwich, Erne and Rochester knew none of this on 31 July. They were a settled group by then, the three of them having worked together in the 43rd Escort Group since the spring, which is a large part of why the attack came off. The boat they killed was a Type VIID minelayer, an awkward compromise of a design that only six were built of, and the detail of how three sloops broke her up is set out in HMS Erne (U03).

Escorting the Landings, Then the Long Freetown Run

Three months after the U-boat she was back in Belfast having 20mm Oerlikons fitted, and on 26 October 1942 she sailed as escort to military convoy KMS 2, one of the streams of shipping carrying the Allied landings into French North Africa. She detached at Gibraltar on 10 November, the day after the landings, and spent the rest of the year working local convoys in the western Mediterranean in support of them. That is where the second of her modern battle honours comes from, North Africa 1942, sitting on the same board as Beachy Head and Barfleur.

The last two years were the least glamorous of all. After a Tyne refit in the spring of 1943 she joined the 38th Escort Group and went south, and from September 1943 to May 1944 she was based at Freetown in Sierra Leone, escorting the OS convoys down and the SL convoys back, which is eight months of tropical heat, a fifteen-year-old hull and no enemy to speak of. By June 1944 her machinery and hull needed surveying, and the Navy had run out of things to ask of her.

A Murky and Possibly Tragic Postwar Fate

She did get her refit, at Brindisi, between July and October 1944, and went on to Gibraltar in November for the work to be finished. It never was. She spent December being surveyed while the Admiralty decided whether a fifteen-year-old sloop was worth any more of its money, paid off in January 1945, and went to Bizerte the following month to be laid up, where she was sold in January 1946 for £3,050. The sale reportedly came with half an eye on converting her for mercantile use, but that plan was itself abandoned and she went for scrap instead, an unremarkable end for a ship that had spent the previous decade and a half chasing pirates off China and U-boats off the Azores.

A Sloop That Served Two Very Different Wars

HMS Sandwich's career spans two truly distinct chapters of Royal Navy history: a decade of colonial policing in the Far East, followed by a hard-fought Battle of the Atlantic in which she pulled well over a hundred men from the sea before finally accounting for an enemy submarine herself, a combination that captures just how varied the demands placed on a single sloop's crew could be across a career spanning less than two decades.