HMS Whimbrel (U29): The Last Survivor of the Battle of the Atlantic

Built on the Clyde

HMS Whimbrel was laid down by Yarrow Shipbuilders in Glasgow on 31 October 1941, launched on 25 August 1942 and commissioned on 13 January 1943, a Black Swan-class sloop built for the demanding, unglamorous work of convoy escort and anti-submarine warfare in the Atlantic.

She Was One of Walker's

The single most important fact about her war is easy to miss, and it is this: from February 1943 she belonged to the 2nd Escort Group at Liverpool, under Captain Frederic Walker.

That is not a detail. The 2nd Escort Group was the most effective anti-submarine unit of the war in any navy, and it worked because Walker had thrown away the rulebook. Escorts were supposed to stay with the convoy; Walker's ships hunted in packs of their own, held a submerged U-boat on asdic for as long as it took, sometimes twelve or fifteen hours, and simply waited for the air to run out. What he was really doing was reversing the psychology of the thing. The hunter became the hunted, and the U-boat crews knew which group they were dealing with. The method, and the man, are set out in HMS Starling (U66) and HMS Kite (U87).

Whimbrel is not credited with a U-boat of her own, and that is worth saying plainly rather than glossing over. She was in the group operation in May 1944 in which U-473 was destroyed off the south-west of Ireland, but the Admiralty gave the credit to Starling, Wren and Wild Goose. What she has instead is the thing the escorts were actually for. Every convoy she was with arrived.

The class she belonged to, and why sloops turned out to be the best convoy escorts Britain built, is in HMS Black Swan (U57). She was adopted, incidentally, not by a great city but by Hornsea, a small seaside town on the Holderness coast of the East Riding, which raised the money for her in Warship Week and then had a real ship of its own for the rest of the war.

Six Battle Honours

Whimbrel went on to earn an extraordinary six battle honours across the war: Sicily in 1943, the Atlantic through 1943 and 1944, Normandy and the English Channel in 1944, the Arctic that same year, and finally Okinawa in 1945, a truly remarkable geographic spread for a single modest sloop, and a real testament to how hard-worked these escort vessels were throughout the conflict.

Convoy JW58

The Arctic 1944 honour is doing a great deal of quiet work, because it stands for what may be the single most successful convoy operation of the entire war.

JW58 left Loch Ewe on 27 March 1944 with forty-seven merchant ships, picking up three more from Iceland on the way. Whimbrel joined on the 29th, with Starling, Wild Goose, Magpie and Wren, the whole 2nd Escort Group put onto a Russian convoy, together with the destroyers of the 8th Group and two escort carriers. The Germans threw everything at it: U-boat packs, shadowing aircraft, torpedo bombers, in a stretch of sea where there is no darkness in late March to hide in and the water is cold enough to kill a man in three minutes.

Not one merchant ship was lost. Three U-boats were sunk and six German aircraft were shot down. After four years in which Arctic convoys had been a byword for slaughter, the escorts had simply become better at it than the enemy, and JW58 is where that became obvious. The carriers that flew the fighters are described in HMS Activity (D94) and HMS Tracker (D24).

Ten weeks later she was off the Normandy beaches, having escorted a convoy of pre-loaded American divisions from the Bristol Channel round to the Solent and then across. Between the Kola Inlet in April and the Normandy beachhead in June there is about three thousand miles and roughly forty degrees of latitude, and she did it in a ship of thirteen hundred tons with a top speed of twenty knots.

Present at Japan's Surrender

Redeployed to the Pacific in 1945, Whimbrel was present at Japan's formal surrender, adding one more remarkable credential to an already exceptional wartime record, before returning home as the war drew to its close.

The Two Sloops in Tokyo Bay

Present at Japan's formal surrender is a claim worth checking, because a great many ships say it and rather fewer were there. She was.

The American list of ships in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 records two Royal Navy sloops, and she is one of them: HMS Crane and HMS Whimbrel, anchored among the battleships and carriers of two navies while the Japanese delegation went aboard Missouri. Crane's own account is in HMS Crane (U23).

She had got there the hard way, by way of Malta, Colombo, Sydney and Manus in the Admiralty Islands, and she spent the Okinawa campaign as anti-aircraft protection for the Fleet Train. The Fleet Train was the least celebrated and most indispensable thing the British Pacific Fleet had: the tankers, store ships and repair vessels that let a fleet operate eight thousand miles from a dockyard. Guarding it against kamikazes was, once again, precisely the sort of job that produces no headlines and decides campaigns.

So a ship built on the Clyde to shepherd merchantmen across the North Atlantic finished the war anchored off Yokohama, having in twenty months collected battle honours for Sicily, the Atlantic, Normandy, the Channel, the Arctic and Okinawa. Six. HMS Belfast, who sits on the Thames and receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, has four.

Sold to Egypt

In November 1949, the Royal Navy sold Whimbrel to Egypt, where she was renamed El Malek Farouq and later Tariq in 1954, remaining in Egyptian naval custody ever since, most recently laid up at Alexandria as a training vessel.

Farouq, and Then Tariq

The two Egyptian names between them tell the story of a revolution, and the second one is quietly very funny.

She went out in November 1949 as El Malek Farouq, King Farouk, and for three years she was the Egyptian navy's flagship in name as well as fact. In July 1952 the Free Officers deposed Farouk and put him on his yacht for Italy. A warship named after a deposed king is an awkward object, and in 1954 she was renamed Tariq.

Tariq is Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Berber commander who crossed from Africa in 711 and began the Muslim conquest of Spain. He landed at a rock which has been called Jabal Tariq, the mountain of Tariq, ever since, a name the English have spent thirteen centuries mangling into Gibraltar. So a British sloop that had spent her war going in and out of Gibraltar spent her second career under the name of the man Gibraltar is named after, in the service of a country that had just thrown the British out. Nobody planned that.

A Campaign to Bring Her Home

A preservation campaign launched in 2006 sought to return Whimbrel to Liverpool as a memorial to the Battle of the Atlantic, and by 2016 Egypt's navy had reportedly offered the ship to the National Museum of the Royal Navy for £725,000, though negotiations have proven difficult.

She is widely believed to be the last surviving Royal Navy warship that actually fought in the Battle of the Atlantic, making the effort to bring her home a matter of real historical significance for anyone who values that campaign's memory.

Where She Actually Is

Laid up at Alexandria as a training vessel is out of date, and the current position is worth knowing for anyone who has ever put a pound into the campaign.

She was a pierside training and accommodation ship into the 2010s and appears to have been in that role until at least 2016. She has since come out of the water. She now sits on the hard at the Western Shipyard in Alexandria, and she was still there, and still recognisably a Black Swan, in satellite imagery examined in January 2026. That is better news than it sounds. A hull out of the water and unattended is a hull that has not yet been cut up, and several people who track her had assumed the worst.

The money is the whole problem and always has been. The original Liverpool plan, from about 2002, was to buy her, make her fit to tow, get her home and restore her at Canning Dock, which had been her wartime base, at a cost then estimated at two to three million pounds. The reported £725,000 asking price in 2016 was only the first line of that bill. Egypt indicated in October 2021 that she was being retired and that a sale might be possible. Nothing has been concluded.

It is worth being precise about what would be lost. Britain preserves plenty of the Second World War at sea, but almost none of the Atlantic. HMS Wellington survives on the Embankment and is the only escort of that campaign afloat in this country. Whimbrel is the other one, and she is on a slipway two and a half thousand miles away, owned by somebody else, in a condition nobody has properly surveyed in years. Thirty-seven Black Swans were built between 1939 and 1945. She is the only one left.