Let us not forget our safety destroyers, frigates and corvettes who were such a great comfort to us...... MOST of all HMS BLUEBELL

HER STORY
Excerpt from “Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea”.....the date 17th February 1945.
“As we headed out of Kola Inlet, the thermometer on Nairana’s bridge recorded 40 degrees of frost. As we cleared the minefields visibility was down to less than 100yards. This suited the U-boats for their Schnorkels enabling them to stay at periscope depth near the edge of the pack-ice where it was almost impossible to detect them either visually or by radar. It didn’t however suit the Swordfish, as all planes were grounded.
It was now, while the convoy was bereft of air cover, that we suffered a tragic loss.
A little after midday there was a sudden explosion, a sheet of flame and our guardship HMS Bluebell, which had been stationed only a couple of hundred yards on our port quarter, vanished. One moment she was there. Next moment an acoustic torpedo had struck her level with her magazines and she was pulverized in an instant to an acrid column of dust. Out of her ship’s company of more than 120 there was only one survivor. This could so easily have been Nairana.
Then, providentially, the sea mist started to clear. By mid-afternoon our Swordfish were back in the air and the U-boats had lost their opportunity.”

If you keep one eye on the past, you are blind in one eye.
If you ignore the past, you are blind in both eyes.
(Old Russian Saying. )