In 1938, the Australian Commonwealth Naval Board identified a gap in its fleet: it needed a vessel capable of both anti-submarine and mine-warfare duties that could be built quickly by local shipyards. The initial concept -- a 500-ton, 10-knot local defense vessel -- evolved through a cancelled prototype into something considerably more ambitious. At 680 tons, with a top speed of 15.5 knots, a range of 2,850 nautical miles, a 4-inch gun, asdic submarine detection gear, and the ability to swap between depth charges and minesweeping equipment, the resulting design was closer to a sloop than the modest patrol craft originally envisioned. The Royal Australian Navy designated them "Australian Minesweepers" to conceal their anti-submarine capability, but everyone called them corvettes. Sixty were built during the war: thirty-six for the RAN, twenty on British Admiralty order but crewed by Australians, and four for the Royal Indian Navy. Ipswich, named for the Queensland city, was one of the Admiralty twenty.

Ipswich spent her first year as a convoy escort in Australian waters before being assigned to the British Eastern Fleet in November 1942. For the next two years she worked the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, with a five-month detour to the Mediterranean in 1943. Off Syracuse on July 25, 1943, her gunners shot down a twin-engined bomber -- one of five battle honours she would accumulate, alongside "Pacific 1942," "Indian Ocean 1942-45," "East Indies 1944," and "Okinawa 1945." In February 1944, working with HMAS Launceston and the Indian Navy's HMIS Jumna, she helped hunt down and sink the Japanese submarine Ro-110 in the Bay of Bengal. By war's end she had crossed enough ocean to have circumnavigated the globe several times over. When the surrender ceremony convened in Tokyo Bay, Ipswich was there among the minesweepers -- small, salt-worn, and present for history.

The RAN paid Ipswich off on July 5, 1946, and transferred her to the Royal Netherlands Navy, which renamed her HNLMS Morotai -- after the island where Allied forces had staged operations during the war. The Dutch operated her in the turbulent waters of the East Indies during the Indonesian independence struggle. In 1949, as the Netherlands recognized Indonesian sovereignty, Morotai was transferred again, this time to the Indonesian Navy, where she became KRI Hang Tuah. Three nations, three names, three flags -- but the same riveted hull that had been laid down in a Queensland shipyard during the anxious months of 1940. By 1958, Hang Tuah was patrolling the coast of Borneo for a government that powerful interests in Washington wanted removed.

On April 28, 1958, a Douglas B-26 Invader appeared over Balikpapan in southern Borneo. It was painted black and carried no markings. The aircraft struck KRI Hang Tuah with bombs, and the old corvette that had survived five theaters of World War II went to the bottom off the harbor where Australian troops had stormed ashore thirteen years earlier. Eighteen of her Indonesian crew were killed and twenty-eight wounded. The co-pilot was Colonel Muharto of the Permesta rebel movement's insurgent air force, but the aircraft, its munitions, and its pilot came from somewhere else entirely. The pilot was William H. Beale, a former U.S. Army Air Forces lieutenant colonel, then employed by Civil Air Transport -- a Taiwan-based front organization for the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was running a covert campaign to destabilize President Sukarno's government, and targeting ships off Balikpapan was part of the plan. Three weeks later, Indonesian forces shot down another Permesta B-26 and captured its CIA pilot, Allen Pope, blowing the operation's cover.

The wreck of KRI Hang Tuah -- once HNLMS Morotai, once HMAS Ipswich -- lies near the entrance to Balikpapan harbour, in waters where oil tankers still come and go. She was one of sixty corvettes built to fight a desperate war, and she outlasted most of her sisters only to be destroyed by an ally of the nation that built her, in a covert operation that neither government would publicly acknowledge for years. Her story traces the arc of twentieth-century geopolitics in miniature: built by colonial Australia for imperial Britain, handed to the Netherlands as European empires contracted, then given to a newly independent Indonesia whose sovereignty the United States would secretly work to undermine. Five battle honours, three flags, and a final resting place in the warm shallow waters off Borneo.