Revised 21 January 2024. Click on the images to enlarge.

MV *Empire Elaine* on the Clyde in April-May 1943, being fitted out and painted in preparation for her part in Operation Husky. The 12-pounder gun on her forecastle and 20mm gun above her bridge are visible as well as the heavy-lift derricks for hoisting landing craft (G3816, © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK).

This blog is one of several detailing the experiences of my grandfather, Captain Lawrance Wilfred Gibbins, while he was Second Officer of the British assault ship MV Empire Elaine between November 1942 and November 1944 - encompassing one round voyage of 10,622 miles from the Clyde to West Africa and another of more than 38,000 miles in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Oceans in which she formed part of the assault force for the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, cancelled landings on the Arakan in Burma in early 1944 and the invasion of the south of France in September 1944. As well as being close inshore for both the Sicily and the south of France landings she had been in more than 30 convoys on those two voyages, and been present when ships in the same convoy were sunk by U-boats – as described in this blog. I was fortunate to know my grandfather well and to speak to him about his experiences before his death in 1986.

Empire Elaine was a diesel-powered heavy-lift ship of 7,513 gross tons built in 1942 for the UK Ministry of War Transport (MOWT), the government department founded in 1941 to control all aspects of transport related to the war effort. She was designed as a Landing Ship Carrier (LSC), to transport landing craft and hoist them out for use in seaborne assaults; her three derricks were each capable of lifting 120 tons. She had deck space for 21 Landing Craft Mechanised (LCMs), the largest category of landing craft that could be hoisted in and out of a ship. Each LCM displaced 52 tons and could carry one tank, 60 soldiers or 30 tons of equipment.

British policy was to allocate ships built for the MOWT to merchant shipping companies to manage and crew them. The Clan Line was chosen for Empire Elaine because of their heavy-lift expertise in transporting locomotives to India before the war. The ship’s 15 deck and engineering officers were drawn from Clan Line service, and the 70 ratings were British merchant seamen from the general ‘pool’ – the Indian ‘Lascars’ who were normally employed as ratings by the Clan Line were not used on military service. The crew list of the 88 officers and ratings on the ship for her second voyage survives (BT 281/3583, The National Archives). In addition, there were several ‘Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship’ (DEMS) gunners drawn from the armed forces to assist the merchant seamen gunners in manning the ship’s armament – in the case of Empire Elaine, one 4-inch gun, one 12-pounder and six 20mm Oerlikon guns.

As Second Officer, my grandfather was also the ship’s Gunnery Officer and a watch-keeping officer on the bridge, so was frequently in command of the ship. He was a career merchant navy officer, having begun as an Apprentice with the Clan Line in 1925 and served in the war in two ships prior to Empire Elaine, including seeing action with his gun crew in 1941 as described here. The ship’s master, Captain Ernest Coultas, a veteran of the First World War at sea, had been decorated with the Order of the British Empire (military) and the Lloyd’s War Medal for Bravery at Sea earlier in the war for using his ship Clan Macbean in an attempt to ram a U-boat, saving the day ‘by resolute handling of his unarmed ship, by brilliantly forestalling the enemy’s movements and by courageously holding on his course, and so running into point-blank gunfire from the submarine’, thus forcing the enemy to dive and allowing Clan Macbean to escape (London Gazette, 19 March 1940). Both my grandfather and Coultas had been Royal Naval Reserve Cadets on the School Ship HMS Conway, a former 19th century ship of the line anchored in the Mersey that trained many merchant and Royal Navy officers who went on to serve in the Second World War.

Having carried out her first voyage to West Africa and returned from Takoradi with a mixed cargo including 3,000 tons of manganese ore, Empire Elaine was allocated to special military use in early 1943 in preparation for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily planned for 10 July. The primary record of her involvement in that operation includes my grandfather’s distance log, in which he recorded the 3,333-mile voyage from the Clyde to Sicily; the Ship Movement Card, the official record of merchant ship movements in the war, when normal diary and log-keeping was prohibited (the Cards themselves did not include records of military operations, so Sicily is not mentioned); the Admiralty War Diary; the Naval Operations Orders for the invasion; the Commander-in Chief Mediterranean’s report on Operation Husky; the Canadian Military Headquarters Reports on the operations; and eyewitness accounts of the invasion and the events of the convoys that preceded it. Many of those documents are in the UK, US and Canadian national archives, and are referenced here where cited. The ship was part of ‘Force V’, named after its commander, Rear-Admiral Philip Vian, and was assembled in the Clyde to transport the 1st Canadian Division as well as units of 40 and 41 Commando Royal Marines to their allocated sector off south-east Sicily, known as ‘Bark West.’ The force was divided among three convoys: KMS 18A, comprising eight Tank Landing Ships; KMS 18B, the ‘slow convoy’ containing most of the equipment and transport of the Division; and KMF 18, the ‘fast convoy’ carrying most of the troops in converted liners, with all three convoys being escorted by a large force of warships from the Royal Navy as well as aircraft.

On its departure from the Clyde on 18 June, KMS 18B comprised 20 transport ships, including Empire Elaine, and 8 escorts - a frigate, a cutter and six corvettes, to be replaced by a force of destroyers once the convoy had passed Gibraltar. The convoy sailing order shows that Empire Elaine sailed immediately behind Devis, which carried the convoy commodore as well as Canadian troops and equipment. The Force V Naval Operations Orders for KMS 18B specified a cruising speed of 9 knots and a distance of three cables – 600 yards - between ships in the columns, and stated that ‘No merchant ship is to leave her place in the convoy for rescue work. H.M. ships will be ordered to carry out this duty.’ (p 9, para 44).

A page in the Force V Naval Operations Orders showing the sailing order of the convoy, with *Empire Elaine* in position 46 immediately behind the convoy commodore’s flagship, *Devis* (DEFE 2/271, The National Archives).

One of a series of maps in the Force V Naval Operations Orders predicting the location of convoy KMS 18 as it neared Sicily - in this case very closely predicting her position off Algiers on D-5 (5 July) when she was attacked by U-593, resulting in … — A chart in the Force V Naval Operations Orders predicting the location of convoy KMS 18B as it neared Sicily - including its position just beyond Algiers where on D-5 (5 July) she was attacked by U-593, resulting in the loss of *Devis* (DEFE 2/271, The National Archives).

KMS 18B proceeded without incident until it had passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and reached the north African coast just beyond Algiers, when at 2047 hours on 4 July, U-409 fired a single torpedo and hit City of Venice, which caught fire and sank at 0530 the following morning. Of the 302 Canadian troops on board and 80 crew, 22 died, almost all of them - including the ship’s captain and the Canadian commanding officer – when their lifeboat capsized and they were caught between the wreck and the rescue vessel. A little under an hour after that first attack, a second U boat, U-375, fired a spread of four torpedoes at the convoy and struck St Essylt, which caught fire and sank a few minutes after City of Venice, at 0545 the following morning. Four lives were lost among the 401 soldiers and crew on board. U-409 was sunk seven days later north-west of Algiers, with 11 crew killed, and U-375 was sunk with all hands eighteen days after that to the north-west of Malta.

In his Second World War novel Chains (1984), Douglas Scott presents a fictional account of KMS 18B based on his experiences as an officer on Fort Stager, the ship immediately astern of Empire Elaine in the convoy. He describes in graphic detail scenes of horror as St Essylt caught fire, including a burning man falling from the bridge. The sinking of the third ship to be torpedoed that day, Devis, involved the greatest loss of life is extensively documented (including survivor reports in ADM 199/2145 in The National Archives, and the Canadian Military Headquarters Report No 126 of 24 November 1944 on the leadup to Canadian operations in Sicily). As well as landing craft, vehicles, artillery, ammunition and other stores, Devis carried 35 British troops and 12 officers and 252 other ranks from several units of the Canadian army, commanded by Major Douglas S. Harkness, Royal Canadian Artillery. His account in the CNHQ report is the most detailed eyewitness account in the official records:

At approx 1545 hours, 5 July 43, the ship was struck by a torpedo just aft of amidships. The explosion was immediately beneath the OR’s Mess Decks, and blew the body of one man up on the bridge, and two more on the boat deck, as well as the rear end of a truck, etc. Fire broke out immediately, and within 3 - 4 minutes the fore part of the ship was cut off from the aft part. Explosions of ammunition were continuous.

After organising a rescue party to pull out men - some of them ‘very badly’ burned - from the mess deck, and after all personnel aft were overboard, Major Harkness himself left the ship, which sank some three minutes later at 1605, twenty minutes after the torpedo had struck. Another army officer, Captain W.G. Wells of the Royal 22e Regiment, organised similar rescue work in the fore part of the ship. Another eyewitness report from a soldier in the water described feeling the percussive effects of depth-charging as the escorts attempted to locate the U-Boat. German records show this to have been U-593, which had fired two spreads of two torpedoes each at the convoy; she escaped that day but was to be sunk by destroyers two months later, her entire crew surviving and being taken into captivity.

Empire Elaine was only two minutes behind Devis – 600 yards – and would have had no time to take more than minimal evasive action or to help, which was strictly forbidden under convoy orders. Several hours after the torpedoing all of the survivors from Devis had been picked up by the convoy escorts and were taken by a destroyer to Bougie, Tunisia, where those who were uninjured were partially re-equipped and sent on to Sicily, rejoining the Canadian assault force on D+3 (13 July) - by which time the division had progressed inland from its landing point near the south-east tip of Sicily. For their part in the rescue Major Harkness received the George Medal and Captain Wells an MBE, and the ship’s Master and Chief Officer the OBE and MBE respectively. The 52 Canadian soldiers who died on Devis and those from St Essylt and City of Venice were the first of almost 6,000 Canadian troops to be killed in the Italian campaign over the following 19 months, before the 1st Canadian Division was withdrawn in February 1945 and redeployed to north-west Europe. (Remarkably, all of the other ships in convoy KMS 18B were to survive the war except Fort Buckingham, sunk by U-188 north-west of the Maldives on 20 January 1944 with the loss of 38 crew).

As well as the primary sources noted above, an article on the convoy attack that can be read in full online is T. Robert Fowler’s ‘Valour at Sea: the sinking of MV Devis, July 1943’ in Canadian Military History, Vol. 7 [1998], Iss. 3, Art. 9.

Early morning view on 10 July of one of the assault convoys approaching Sicily, showing the tail-end of the rough seas which had hampered progress during the previous day (Admiralty Official Collection, Imperial War Museum A 18096). — An evening view on 9 July of one of the assault convoys making towards Sicily, showing the rough seas that had hampered progress on the day before the invasion. The photographer was Lt F.G. Roper, RN on the destroyer HMS *Nubian*, which was with convoy MWF 36 approaching the ‘Acid’ sectors just south of Syracuse (Imperial War Museum, © IWM A 18096).

The Canadian and British assault areas showing Bark West.

The remaining ships of KMS 18B carried on east, reaching a point some 70 miles south-west of Malta where they met up on 9 July (D-1) with the fast convoy KMF 18. Five ships from KMS 18B then joined KMF 18 to make up the initial assault force for Bark West, an area of beaches between two and seven miles east of Cape Passero at the south-eastern tip of Sicily that had been allocated to the 1st Canadian Division. Further west, the US assault was to take place around Gela, while British troops from 8th Army were to land on the east coast south of Syracuse.

Empire Elaine was one of the ships to join KMF 18 for the assault. The weather on 9 July was poor, with a Force 7 gale having sprung up from the north-west and causing problems for the hundreds of ships that were assembled for the invasion. The convoy formed into two columns as it headed towards ‘Sugar’ and ‘Roger’ sectors, the objectives respectively of the 2nd and the 1st Brigades of the 1st Canadian Division. A force of Royal Marines from 40 and 41 Commando were also to be landed at the west end of ‘Sugar.’ The ships reached their initial anchoring point just after midnight on 10 July, with the slow convoy coming up behind. The role of Empire Elaine was to hoist out her LCMs, which would then go to other ships to be laden with equipment and men to be taken ashore. Despite an expectation of U-Boat and air attack as well as minefields, no ships of V Force were lost in the assault and the landings met only limited resistance from the Italian defenders, who mostly surrendered. By the end of the day more than 17,000 troops and 400 vehicles had been put ashore in Bark West, at a cost of fewer than 80 casualties – making it one of the most successful amphibious operations of the Second World War.

Part of the account by the Senior Naval Officer Landings (S) responsible for Bark West, noting HMS *Roberts* opening fire and *Empire Elaine* having offloaded landing craft in the early morning of 10 July (Report of the Operations for the Invasion of Sicily, Commander in Chief Mediterranean).

The monitor, HMS *Abercrombie* firing her 15 inch guns on 12 July 1943 in support of the US landings to the west near Gela (80-G-74836, National Museum of the U.S. Navy).

One of my grandfather’s memories of that day was of a monitor close to the Empire Elaine firing its shells overhead, and of the enormous noise and percussive blast. The monitor off Bark West was HMS Roberts, one of three Royal Navy monitors deployed with the invasion forces – one of the others, HMS Abercrombie, supported the American landings further to the west, and the other, HMS Erebus, the British landings south of Syracuse. They were floating batteries, with a shallow draught and wide beam, each mounting a twin 15-inch gun turret on a high barbette to maximise the range to 20 miles or more. HMS Roberts had sailed with KMF 18 from the Clyde, and in the final run-in of the convoy to Bark West was at the head of one of the two columns of ships. The fire report for HMS Roberts, preserved in the Naval Force East ship’s bombardment reports for that sector (DEFE 2/271, The National Archives), shows that she opened fire at 0510 with ten rounds against an Italian shore battery, firing four rounds again at the same battery at 0540 and silencing it.

The report of the Senior Naval Officer Landing (S) for Bark West, reproduced in part here, mentions Empire Elaine a few entries after recording HMS Roberts opening fire at 0510. My grandfather’s experience is mirrored by several other accounts from men on nearby vessels. In his memoir Merchantman Rearmed (1949: 207-8), Captain David Bone of the Circassia, a liner converted to a Landing Ship Infantry (LCI) that sailed at the head of the other column, described the shock of the first salvo as ‘wounding and painful and the blast like whiplash.’ His account is reproduced in full here. Another comes from the Canadian author Farley Mowat, then a subaltern in the 48th Highlanders of Canada, who had sailed to Sicily in the Derbyshire - another of the LCIs of Force V - and experienced the blast from HMS Roberts as he was going ashore in a landing craft: ‘Four incandescent spheres burst from her suddenly-revealed grey bulk - four suns ... that seemed to ignite the whole arc of the southern horizon in flickering red and yellow lightning … It took perhaps three seconds for the sound to hit us and then we were cowering behind the gunwales, hands over ears, as cataclysmic thunder overwhelmed our world (And No Birds Sang, 1979: 74). Another soldier going ashore in a landing craft, Sergeant Jock Gibson of the Seaforth Highlanders, described the noise of the shells from Roberts firing overhead as ‘like freight trains’, and Captain Ian Hodson of the Royal Canadian Regiment ‘could follow the shells going inland. The noise was tremendous and the blast made our DUKWs settle in the water and then surge forward. Somewhat frightening!’ (quoted in Zuehlke, M., Operation Husky: the Canadian invasion of Sicily, July 10-August 7, 1943, 2009: 111, 115).

15 inch gun from HMS *Roberts* and shell outside the Imperial War Museum, London (photo: David Gibbins).

One of the 15-inch guns from HMS Roberts, formerly on the First World War-era battleship HMS Resolution and mounted on Roberts as a replacement gun in 1944, was installed in 1968 outside the front entrance of the Imperial War Museum in London along with a gun formerly on the battleship HMS Ramillies. The gun is therefore not one of those in action off Sicily, but is identical. These are the only two surviving 15 inch guns on land out of the 186 manufactured in 1912-18, though 32 lie on the seafloor - in the Second World War wrecks of HMS Royal Oak, HMS Hood, HMS Repulse, HMS Barham and HMS Terror.

After offloading her landing craft, Empire Elaine detached from Force V and sailed towards Syracuse, within sight of the cliffs of Penisola della Maddalena where I was to excavate the Plemmirio Roman shipwreck in 1983-7 – prompting my grandfather to tell me about his experiences off Sicily when I showed him images of the site. The waters near Syracuse on 10 July were under air attack, with the hospital ship HMHS Talamba being sunk and other ships damaged. On 11 July Empire Elaine sailed in convoy with Orestes and Empire Confidence away from Sicily to Sousse in Tunisia and then to Tripoli in Libya, from which she made her way through the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean in preparation for the landings in Burma described in my blog here.

Note

Several of the documents illustrated in this blog are sourced to Fold3, a pay-to-view service that reproduces documents also available online for free from the US National Archives (though less easily searched).