HMS Whitesand Bay (K633): She Carried the Olympic Flame Before She Carried Shellfire to Korea

Redesignated Mid-Build

HMS Whitesand Bay was built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, originally ordered as the Loch-class frigate Loch Lubnaig before being redesignated as a Bay-class anti-aircraft frigate, launched on 16 December 1944 and completed on 30 July 1945, commissioning under Lieutenant-Commander B. C. Longbottom and joining the Pacific Escort Force for patrol and trade defence duties in the South China Sea.

The redesignation is worth a sentence of explanation. The Loch class were anti-submarine frigates built at speed for the Atlantic, prefabricated in sections in bridge-building and boiler works all over Britain and welded together in the yards. By 1944 the Atlantic was won and the next war was going to be the Pacific, where the threat was not submarines but aircraft, so a batch of hulls already on order were completed to a different specification: twin 4-inch guns, better radar, more anti-aircraft armament, and the accommodation and endurance for the tropics. That is what a Bay class frigate is, and what happened to most of them is in HMS Start Bay. Whitesand Bay was completed on 30 July 1945, seven days before Hiroshima.

Patrolling Against Illegal Immigration to Palestine

Transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet in March 1947, Whitesand Bay was assigned to the difficult and politically sensitive duty of intercepting, boarding and detaining ships carrying illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine, based at Haifa until March 1948, two months before the British Mandate ended.

The Haifa patrol was the least popular duty in the Royal Navy and there is no polite way round it. The ships were stopping ageing, overcrowded merchantmen full of people who had survived the camps, and taking them, usually after a fight and sometimes after deaths, to Cyprus. The people doing the stopping were nineteen-year-old British sailors who had themselves just fought that war. The patrol is described from other decks in HMS Enard Bay (K435) and HMS Cardigan Bay, which had the worst of it, the Exodus.

Carrying the Olympic Flame

In a delightful change of pace from patrol duty, Whitesand Bay carried the Olympic Torch from Corfu to Bari in Italy ahead of the 1948 London Olympics, a charming footnote for a warship more usually engaged in far less ceremonial business.

The Ship That Lit a Boiler From the Olympic Flame

Carried the Olympic Torch from Corfu to Bari is correct and leaves out everything that makes it a story, so here it is properly.

The 1948 Games were the first since Berlin in 1936 and Britain was flat broke, which is why they are still called the Austerity Games. There was no money to build anything, athletes were housed in RAF camps and slept on camp beds, and the British team were given an extra ration allowance normally reserved for dockers. The torch relay from Olympia to Wembley was the one piece of proper ceremony anybody could afford, and it very nearly did not happen, because Greece in July 1948 was in the middle of a civil war. The Greek land leg was cut short at the last minute and the flame was put aboard a Greek destroyer instead.

It came over the side of Whitesand Bay at Corfu at half past one on the afternoon of Sunday 18 July 1948. She sailed for Italy and had it alongside the mole at Bari at half past twelve the next day, where it went ashore to be run through Italy, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg and Belgium by one thousand and fifty-one torch bearers, covering two thousand three hundred and seventy-five kilometres in under nine days and six hours, before crossing the Channel from Calais in a second Royal Navy ship, the escort destroyer HMS Bicester, on the evening of 28 July.

What happened aboard in those twenty-three hours is the good bit. The equipment for carrying the flame arrived as a large unmarked crate containing, in the words of Lieutenant Commander Leonard Clark, the officer in charge of it, various bits and pieces and joining goo but no instructions. His staff worked out the burner between them, and then decided the whole thing looked undignified sitting on a deck, so they turned a yardarm light reflector upside down and made an altar out of it. The Olympic flame crossed the Adriatic on an inverted lamp fitting, guarded by sailors, because nobody had thought to include a manual.

And then somebody had an idea that no other ship in the history of the Games has managed. They lit one of her boilers from the torch. Which is to say that the steam that carried her to Bari was raised, at least in part, from the Olympic flame, and that is either a magnificent piece of ceremony or the most elaborate use of a match in naval history. It is probably both.

Six Tours Off Korea

After deployments to the West Indies and Far East Fleet, Whitesand Bay was sent to Korean waters in August 1950, going on to complete six operational tours supporting United Nations forces: deception operations at Kunsan and blockade duties between August and December 1950, a second tour off Wonsan in mid-1951, a third focused on the Han River and Haeju estuary that autumn and winter, a fourth on west coast blockade duty in 1952, and two further tours in 1953, the last of which ran through to the Armistice on 27 July.

Poundforce, and Being Noticed on Purpose

Deception operations at Kunsan is the flattest possible description of one of the odder small operations of the Korean War, and she was the ship that did it.

By September 1950 the United Nations force in Korea was penned into the Pusan perimeter in the far south-east corner of the country and losing. MacArthur's answer was Inchon: an amphibious landing two hundred miles behind the North Korean army, at a port with a thirty-foot tide, mudflats and a single approach channel, which every senior officer who looked at it said was impossible. The entire plan depended on the North Koreans not being ready, so an elaborate effort was made to convince them the landing was coming at Kunsan instead, a hundred and five miles further south. Airfields and bridges round Kunsan were bombed for a week in exactly the pattern that precedes an invasion.

The last act of the deception was a raid, and Whitesand Bay carried it. Aboard her were fourteen Royal Marines under Lieutenant E G D Pounds, a scratch party of volunteers drawn from ships' detachments and known to everybody as Poundforce, together with an American raiding element. They would shortly be absorbed into 41 Independent Commando, which spent the rest of the war raiding that coast. On the night of 12 and 13 September they went ashore on the docks at Kunsan with instructions that reverse every normal rule of special operations: make a noise, be seen, be remembered. Her log records it with magnificent economy as landing and re-embarking combined USMC and RM Commando landings at Kusan.

Two days later the landing went in at Inchon, against defences that had not been reinforced, and the Korean War turned round inside a fortnight. What that looked like from a sister ship is in HMS Mounts Bay (F627).

Why the Han River Was the Worst Job on the Coast

A third tour focused on the Han River and Haeju estuary sounds like the quietest line in her record and was the most dangerous water on the west coast.

The Han estuary is where the tidal range on that coast reaches its extreme: something over thirty feet, among the largest in the world, running through a maze of shifting mud banks and narrow channels. A frigate working in there is committed. There is no room to manoeuvre, the water she came in on will not be there in six hours, the charts were largely Japanese and out of date, and the north bank of the estuary was North Korean and mined and had guns on it.

The job was to keep the islands in the estuary in friendly hands, support the guerrilla and intelligence parties operating off them, stop the coastal junk traffic and shell anything worth shelling, and to do it within a few hundred yards of an enemy shore, aground half the time by intention, for weeks. There is no battle honour that captures that. Another frigate that worked the same water has her account in HMS St Brides Bay (F600).

Paid Off at Portsmouth

HMS Whitesand Bay returned to Portsmouth on 24 August 1954, was paid off that December and sold for scrap in 1955, her crew transferring to HMS Loch Killisport at Chatham Dockyard, closing out the career of a frigate whose service had ranged from the Adriatic's Olympic waters to the shellfire of the Han River.

Sold for scrap in 1955 at ten years old looks like waste and was arithmetic. She had been built as a wartime emergency ship, welded together fast out of prefabricated sections and never intended for a long peacetime life, and by 1955 she had spent five of her ten years working hard in the tropics and off Korea. The Royal Navy had more hulls than it had sailors, and the new Type 12s were coming. Her people simply walked across a dockyard and took over HMS Loch Killisport, which is the Loch class ship she was very nearly built as in the first place.

It is a strange ten years to sum up. She was finished a week before the atomic bomb, spent a year stopping refugee ships off Haifa, carried the Olympic flame across the Adriatic on an upturned lamp reflector, put fourteen Royal Marines ashore in Korea with orders to be conspicuous, and then went to the breakers before her tenth birthday.