HMS Snipe (U20): Sabotage, an Antarctic Expedition, and a Landing on Deception Island

Ordered, Cancelled, and Ordered Again

HMS Snipe was built by William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton, though her path to the water was not straightforward: originally ordered from John Brown and Company, that contract was cancelled, and she was re-ordered on 8 December 1942 with construction not beginning until 21 September 1944.

She was launched on 20 December 1945 and commissioned on 9 September 1946, a Modified Black Swan-class sloop that arrived just after the war she had been designed for had ended, and was redesignated a frigate the following year when her pennant changed to F20.

The class is worth a note, because "arrived just after the war" is a sentence that could be written about a great many of her sisters and was very much not true of the rest. The Black Swans and the modified Black Swans were among the most effective escorts Britain built, and they turn up constantly: HMS Starling (U66) sank more submarines than any other ship in the Royal Navy, HMS Black Swan (U57) gave the class its name, and HMS Amethyst (F116) spent a hundred days aground under Chinese guns on the Yangtze. Snipe was ordered, cancelled, reordered and finally laid down in September 1944, by which time the U-boat war she had been designed for was effectively decided. HMS Nereide (U64) has the same story and the same problem in her title.

Sabotage Aboard Her Own Machinery

Snipe's peacetime career began with an unsettling discovery: barely a month after her September 1946 commissioning, two deliberate attempts at sabotage were found aboard, powder packed into the thermometer pocket of a bearing on her starboard turbine. A naval court martial at Devonport the following spring found her commissioned engineer, Frank Albert Luck of East Peckham in Kent, guilty of failing to report the discovery and of making a false report to his own commanding officer, and he was sentenced to be severely reprimanded, an unusual and troubling start for a ship barely out of her first commission, and one that, rather pointedly, never actually named a saboteur at all.

Re-Establishing Britain's Antarctic Bases

It was not Snipe's first trip south. The previous year, in February 1947, she had already carried the Falkland Islands' Governor, Sir Miles Clifford, on a supply run to the newly founded base at Signy Island in the South Orkneys, a base so recently established by its wintering scientists that they promptly named it Clifford House in his honour. In January and February 1948, with tensions rising after Argentina landed her own small flotilla and set up a station on Deception Island, Snipe again transported Clifford on a further Antarctic expedition to reinforce British bases across Graham Land and the South Shetland Islands, part of Britain's postwar effort to maintain a presence first asserted, under the deliberately unrevealing codename Operation Tabarin, during the war itself.

Despite the underlying territorial disputes, her crew had a notably cordial encounter with Argentine naval vessels during the voyage, the two sides exchanging food supplies even as their governments disagreed over sovereignty.

The Operation Named After a Nightclub

Operation Tabarin deserves properly setting out, because it is one of the strangest things the Second World War produced and it is the reason Snipe was in the South Atlantic at all. In 1943, with the Battle of the Atlantic still undecided, Britain quietly sent an expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula to establish permanently occupied bases. The stated justification was denying sheltered anchorages to German raiders, which was thin even at the time. The real purpose was that Argentina had been leaving flags and metal plaques on British-claimed territory, and a plaque is a claim if nobody removes it, whereas a hut with people living in it is very hard to argue with.

It sailed from Britain in November 1943 under James Marr, a Scottish marine biologist who twenty-two years earlier had been one of two King's Scouts chosen to sail with Shackleton in the Quest, and it was named, for reasons nobody has ever satisfactorily explained, after a Paris nightclub. The party sailed in HMS Scoresby and the Falkland Islands Company ship Fitzroy, and on 3 February 1944 established Base B on Deception Island in the buildings of a disused whaling station, five men wintering there under the geologist William Flett. Base A followed at Port Lockroy that same month, after pack ice made the intended site at Hope Bay unreachable, in a prefabricated building they called Bransfield House. Argentine flags were taken down and British ones put up.

What that small, odd, wartime operation turned into is the point. Tabarin became the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, and the Survey became the British Antarctic Survey, which is still the vehicle for Britain's entire scientific presence on the continent eighty years later. Port Lockroy is now a museum and a post office that thousands of people visit every summer. The ships that have carried that work south since, HMS Endurance (A171) and now HMS Protector (A173), are doing a job that a handful of men in a borrowed whaling station invented in 1944.

The Deception Island Incident

By 1952 Snipe had transferred to the Home Fleet. The dispute over Deception Island had already prompted Britain, Argentina and Chile to sign a Tripartite Naval Declaration in 1949, each side agreeing to keep their warships north of the 60th parallel, but by February 1953 patience on all sides had worn thin.

On 15 February that year, Winston Churchill, concerned by Argentina's continuing military presence so close to the Falklands, sent Snipe south from Portsmouth to remove it. She landed a party of just thirteen men, one officer, two corporals and ten Royal Marines, armed with Sten guns, rifles and tear gas, deliberately accompanied by the Falkland Islands' own chief constable so the operation could be presented as a piece of policing rather than an act of war. The two Argentine naval personnel occupying their hut offered no resistance and were searched, arrested and later put ashore at South Georgia to be handed over to an Argentine vessel bound for Buenos Aires on 18 February, while an empty Chilean hut nearby was dismantled at the same time.

Britain lodged formal protests with both governments the following day and repeated an existing offer to refer the whole tangled sovereignty question to the International Court of Justice, an offer both Argentina and Chile turned down within the week. Reporting the affair to the House of Lords, Viscount Samuel warned that any hesitation would see British rights in the Antarctic lost "by default," a notably tense episode in the long-running three-way territorial dispute over the South Shetland Islands and one of the more unusual assignments given to any postwar Royal Navy sloop.

How the Argument Actually Ended

It is worth following the story past the protests, because the whole business was settled within six years and Snipe's landing party is part of the reason. Britain, Argentina and Chile were not the only ones staking claims, and by the middle of the 1950s seven countries had drawn overlapping wedges on the map while the United States and the Soviet Union recognised none of them and reserved the right to claim later. The International Geophysical Year of 1957 and 1958 put scientists from all of those countries on the ice together, mostly getting along, and the awkwardness of arresting one another's meteorologists became increasingly obvious.

The Antarctic Treaty was signed in Washington on 1 December 1959 and came into force in June 1961. It did not resolve a single claim. It froze all of them exactly where they stood, banned military activity and nuclear tests south of 60 degrees, and made the whole continent a place for science and nothing else, which is why the argument Snipe was sent to win has never been settled and has also never come to anything since. She belongs to a very short list of warships that have landed troops on Antarctica, and to the even shorter list of British ships that have arrested anybody there. Another of them is here: HMS Burghead Bay.

Deception Island had the last word anyway. It is not really an island, it is the flooded caldera of an active volcano with a gap in one side, which is what makes the anchorage inside it so good and is why the whalers, and then everybody else, wanted it. On 4 December 1967 it erupted, opening a fissure five kilometres long, and the British base was evacuated the next day. The station was reoccupied a year later and then abandoned for good on 23 February 1969, after floodwater from a subglacial eruption on Mount Pond washed through both the British base and the Chilean one; the men were lifted out by Chilean helicopters the day before. Two governments spent twenty years disputing the ownership of a volcano, and the volcano eventually evicted them both.

Scrapped at Newport

HMS Snipe's operational career wound down through the mid-1950s, and she was eventually placed on the disposal list, arriving in tow at the demolition site in Newport, Wales on 2 August 1960 for scrapping by J. Cashmore, closing out a career defined less by wartime combat than by the strange, cold politics of Antarctic sovereignty.