HMS Aldenham (L22): The Last Royal Navy Destroyer Lost in the Second World War

A Busy Early War

HMS Aldenham was ordered from Cammell Laird at Birkenhead on 4 July 1940, laid down that August, launched on 27 August 1941, and completed on 5 February 1942. A Hunt-class escort destroyer armed with four 4-inch guns, torpedo tubes and a generous depth charge outfit, she was built for exactly the kind of convoy escort and anti-submarine work that would define much of her career.

She was the first ship in the Royal Navy ever to carry the name, and the name itself is a clue to the whole class. The Hunts were called after British packs of hounds rather than after anything remotely nautical, which is how a wartime escort force ended up with Atherstone, Berkeley, Eggesford and Aldenham on the same list. She was a Type III, the last variant, with a twin 4-inch mounting given up to make room for torpedo tubes amidships, on the sound reasoning that a ship working the Channel or the Mediterranean would be fighting other ships at close range rather than shepherding convoys across an ocean. Her sister HMS Albrighton spent the war proving the point in the Channel. Aldenham proved it in the Adriatic.

She got straight into the thick of it. After working up at Scapa Flow, she deployed with Convoy WS 17 on 21 March 1942, and less than a week later, on 27 March, she combined with HMS Leamington, HMS Grove and HMS Volunteer, under Aldenham's own commanding officer Lieutenant H. A. Stuart-Menteth, to depth-charge and sink the German submarine U-587 in the North Atlantic west of Ushant, a remarkably strong early result for a ship barely a month into active service. At the time the attack was logged as inconclusive; it was only confirmed as a kill after the war, once German records could finally be checked against it.

The submarine on the receiving end deserves naming. U-587 was on her second war patrol out of St Nazaire under Kapitänleutnant Ulrich Borcherdt, and she had already sunk five ships totalling more than twenty-three thousand tons. Not one man aboard her survived the attack. WS17, the convoy Aldenham was shepherding at the time, was one of the Winston Specials, the heavily escorted troop convoys that ran round Africa carrying whole formations of the British Army, in this case bound for Freetown. Losing one of those would have cost rather more than a merchant ship.

Years of Mediterranean Convoy Work

Aldenham transited the Suez Canal and joined the 5th Destroyer Flotilla, spending much of 1942 and 1943 escorting no fewer than 14 convoys between Alexandria, Malta and Tobruk, the unglamorous, essential work that kept the Mediterranean Fleet supplied through some of its hardest years.

One episode from that stretch deserves pulling out of the total. In June 1942 she was part of the Malta relief attempt built around Convoy MW11, and on the fifteenth she took 133 survivors off the escort destroyer HMS Airedale, another Hunt, and then sank the wreck of her with a torpedo. It is the same duty an escort captain dreads and cannot delegate. The same operation cost the cruiser HMS Hermione, torpedoed by U-205, and the convoy never reached Malta at all. Fourteen convoys sounds like a tally. It was, more accurately, fourteen chances of that.

The rest of that year and the next fill in the picture. In July 1942, with Rommel at the gates of Egypt, she bombarded Mersa Matruh and El Daba. That September she took part in Operation Agreement, the raid on Tobruk that went comprehensively wrong, and stood by the damaged destroyer HMS Zulu, which sank anyway. In April 1943 came the least heroic entry on her record: she ran herself aground in the Gulf of Sollum and had to be towed back to Alexandria for repairs. In January 1944 she moved to the 22nd Destroyer Flotilla, which is what took her north into the Adriatic.

She went on to support the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, the landings at Salerno that September, Operation Shingle at Anzio, and Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, a notably remarkable run of major Allied amphibious operations for a single ship to take part in over the course of little more than a year.

Into the Adriatic

By late 1944, Aldenham had moved into the Adriatic campaign, where her work took on a more varied character.

The Adriatic campaign is one of the less well known things the Royal Navy did, and it was a strange sort of war. Along the Dalmatian coast the Navy ran a shuttle in support of Tito's Partisans, landing weapons and stores on islands, lifting off wounded, putting raiding parties ashore and shelling German garrisons on request. It was fought among a maze of channels between hundreds of islands, in water that is mostly shallow and everywhere easy to mine, by ships small enough to work inshore. Aldenham was exactly the right size for it, which is another way of saying she was exactly the right size to be caught by it.

On 2 November 1944, under Commander James Farrant, she intercepted and seized the German hospital ship Bonn, the former Yugoslav steamer Sumadija, as it returned from Sibenik; a search found she was carrying German servicemen who did not appear to be in any need of medical care, and Bonn was declared a war prize, impounded at Bari with her soldiers and crew interned at the Grumo POW camp.

On 9 December 1944 Aldenham bombarded German positions on Rab Island alongside HMS Atherstone, continuing the same pattern of steady, aggressive coastal operations, carried out in close support of the Yugoslav Partisans, that had characterised much of her Mediterranean service.

Lost to a Mine

Aldenham's war ended just five days later. On 14 December 1944, returning from a bombardment mission against targets on Pag and near Karlobag on the mainland, carried out in support of the Yugoslav Partisans, at around half past three in the afternoon she struck a mine that exploded beneath her engine room between the islands of Planik and Olib in the Adriatic Sea.

The explosion broke the ship in two; her bow sank quickly, followed shortly after by the stern.

In total, 126 of her crew were killed, along with two Yugoslav partisans who had been aboard, while 63 survivors, including her commanding officer, Commander James Farrant, were pulled from the water. The wreck site has since been declared a British war grave.

It was a bitter loss made more poignant by its timing: Aldenham holds the grim distinction of being the last Royal Navy destroyer lost in the entire Second World War, sunk with the war in Europe barely five months from its end, after a career that had already taken her through some of the conflict's most significant Mediterranean operations.

Rediscovered Decades Later

Aldenham's wreck was located by Yugoslav Navy specialists in 1974, though it would be years before her full story underwater was pieced together.

The Wreck Diving Society found her 30-metre bow section between 1999 and 2000, lying on its side and partly buried in mud in visibility of barely half a metre to three metres, and located the stern, lying upside down some 700 metres away, during a fourteen-day expedition off Pag in August 2000, its propellers and helm resting at 67 metres.

Divers later left a bronze plaque on the seabed beneath the hull in memory of her lost crew, finally allowing historians to confirm the exact circumstances of how the ship that had survived Sicily, Salerno and Anzio was ultimately broken apart by a single unseen mine in the closing months of the war.

Eighty-six Hunts were completed in the end, which makes them the most numerous escort destroyers Britain ever built, and fourteen of them were handed to allied navies before the war was over: seven to the Greeks, three to the Free Poles, three to Norway and one to the Free French. It is what happened to some of them afterwards, though, that produced the strangest career in the class, and it is worth setting beside Aldenham's own.

HMS Mendip was a Type I, laid down on the Tyne in August 1939 and completed in October 1940, a few months before Aldenham. She survived the war. In 1947 she was sold to Nationalist China and renamed Lin Fu, then seized before she could be delivered, and resold in 1949 to Egypt; in 1951 she was renamed Ibrahim el Awal. On 30 October 1956, during the Suez crisis, she was sent to bombard the coastal oil installations at Haifa, and on the morning of the 31st she did exactly that, using the same four 4-inch guns she had been built with sixteen years earlier. She was caught the same day and captured, and was commissioned into the Israeli Navy as INS Haifa.

She served under that flag until 1968 and was eventually expended as a target, sunk by an Israeli Gabriel anti-ship missile, a weapon nobody had conceived of when her keel went down. So a British escort destroyer built to fight U-boats in the Channel ended up shelling an Israeli city under an Egyptian ensign, being taken by the navy she had just attacked, serving twelve years in it, and finally being destroyed by a guided missile fired from one of her own successors.

Set that against Aldenham, who lies in two pieces on the bottom of the Adriatic and has done since a December afternoon in 1944, with a hundred and twenty-eight of her people and a bronze plaque left on the seabed by divers. Two ships from the same class and the same programme, one of which went through four owners and three names and was shot at by everybody, and one of which never left the war she was built for. There is no obvious moral. There is only the observation that of the two, the one that stayed where she fell is the one anybody visits.