HMS Snowflake (K211): The Corvette at the Turning Point of the Atlantic

Built by Smith's Dock

HMS Snowflake was built by Smith's Dock Company, ordered on 3 August 1940, with construction beginning the following May, launched on 22 August 1941 and commissioned on 2 November that year, a Flower-class corvette destined for the unglamorous, exhausting work of convoy escort that defined the Battle of the Atlantic.

Six Torpedoes and Ten Attacks

Snowflake's defining moment came during Convoy ONS 5 in April and May 1943, one of the largest and most consequential convoy battles of the entire war. She remained continuously in action, engaging U-boat contact after U-boat contact and recording ten separate anti-submarine attacks during the running battle. At one point the submarine U-532 fired six torpedoes at her, the closest passing a mere twenty yards away, a narrow escape that gives some sense of just how close and desperate this fighting had become.

Two U-Boats Sunk in a Fortnight

On 6 May 1943, working alongside HMS Sunflower, Snowflake helped engage the German submarine U-125, which was subsequently scuttled by her own crew. Less than two weeks later, on 19 May, she joined HMS Duncan in sinking U-381 through a coordinated depth charge attack, and on 14 May she had already helped damage both U-304 and U-636, a remarkable run of successful actions that made her one of the more effective escorts of the entire ONS 5 battle, widely regarded by historians as a genuine turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic.

From Warship to Weather Ship

With the war won, Snowflake was converted in 1947 for a very different purpose, serving as a weather ship, using her small, seaworthy hull to gather meteorological data in the same Atlantic waters where she had once hunted submarines. She was eventually broken up in Dublin in 1962, closing out a career that had taken her from the sharpest edge of the Atlantic convoy war to the quieter, equally essential work of watching the weather.