HMS Anthony (H40): Dunkirk, Lifeboat 12 and Fifty Marines Into Diego Suarez

Built at Greenock

HMS Anthony was ordered from Scotts at Greenock on 6 March 1928, one of the eight A Class destroyers of the 1927 programme, the first full flotilla of new destroyers the Royal Navy had ordered since the end of the First World War. She was laid down on 30 July 1928, launched on 24 April 1929 and commissioned on 14 February 1930, the second ship of a name that goes back to 1417.

Her badge showed the head of St Anthony with a white owl and a gold halo, and her motto translates as "brave under difficulties", which turned out to be a fair description of the next fifteen years. She carried four 4.7 inch guns and eight torpedo tubes and could make 35 knots.

In September 1939 she was at Portland with the 18th Destroyer Flotilla, hunting submarines and escorting convoys in the Channel and the South Western Approaches. In November she moved to the east coast convoys, and in January 1940 she and her sisters Achates and Arrow took the battleship Royal Sovereign part of the way across the Atlantic towards Halifax.

By March she was with the 16th Flotilla at Portsmouth.

Dunkirk

She came out of a refit at Portsmouth on 20 May 1940, just in time. Six days later she was off the beaches for Operation Dynamo, and over the following days she carried more than 3,000 soldiers back across the Channel.

On 30 May a bomb burst close alongside and damaged her, and she was taken in hand at Portsmouth the next day. By the middle of June she was at Harwich on North Sea patrols, and in July she was one of the destroyers watching the coast against invasion.

Lifeboat 12

In September 1940 she joined the 12th Destroyer Flotilla at Greenock for the convoys in the North Western Approaches, and the rescues began. On 25 August she had been among the ships that picked up 55 survivors of the Jamaica Pioneer, sunk by U-100 east of Rockall.

On 1 September she broke away from her escort duty to collect 27 survivors of the Greek steamer Efploia, torpedoed by U-101 north west of Ireland, and sank the wreck with gunfire before rejoining.

The rescue that people remember came on 26 September. The liner City of Benares had been torpedoed by U-48 on the night of 17 September, far out in the Atlantic, with ninety children aboard who were being evacuated to Canada. Most of them died.

One lifeboat had been missed by the rescue ships and had drifted for eight days with its passengers on a few biscuits and sips of water a day. It was sighted by a Sunderland flying boat, and Anthony was sent to find it.

She picked up 42 people, among them six evacuee boys and their escort, Mary Cornish, who had kept them going with stories through the nights in the open boat. Nobody had expected to see any of them again.

In November she joined the 4th Escort Group for the Atlantic convoys. On 29 January 1941, with the slow convoy SC 19 under attack south of Rockall, she picked up 22 survivors of the British King Robert and 30 of the Greek Aikaterini, sunk by U-94 and U-93.

In February she was damaged in an air raid on the Clyde and went into a Glasgow yard for repairs.

Minelayers and the Bismarck

She came out to join the Home Fleet's 3rd Destroyer Flotilla, and that spring she spent much of her time escorting the 1st Minelaying Squadron as it laid the great Northern Barrage across the Denmark Strait and the gap between the Faeroes and Iceland: with Cossack in April, with the cruisers Kenya and Edinburgh and her sister Achates later that month, and again in May.

On 22 May 1941 she sailed from Scapa Flow in the screen of Hood and the new battleship Prince of Wales as Vice Admiral Holland took them north to cut off the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. At two in the afternoon on 23 May, short of fuel, she and Antelope were sent into Hvalfjord in Iceland to refuel, so she was not there the next morning when Hood blew up in the Denmark Strait.

Instead she came back out to meet the damaged Prince of Wales and escorted her into Iceland on 27 May, where the battleship landed her wounded.

Iceland, Spitsbergen and Archangel

In July she sailed for Operation EF, the carrier raid on Kirkenes and Petsamo. On 25 July, off Iceland, Achates struck a mine that wrecked her bow, and Anthony took her in tow and brought her into Seidisfjord.

In August she was part of Force K for Operation Gauntlet, screening the liner Empress of Canada with the cruisers Nigeria and Aurora as they took Canadian troops to Spitsbergen to evacuate the Norwegian and Russian mining settlements and destroy the coal stocks and installations there.

At the end of September she sailed with PQ 1, the first of the numbered Arctic convoys to Russia, and came back with QP 1 shepherding the fleet tanker Black Ranger. Then came an unusual job.

She and the destroyer Norman embarked a delegation from the Trades Union Congress and carried it to Archangel, landing the delegates on 12 October and waiting for them to finish their business before bringing them home to Scapa Flow on 2 November. She went to the Humber for a refit.

Gibraltar and Malta's Spitfires

In January 1942 she was sent south to the destroyers at Gibraltar. On the way out with a troop convoy, on 16 January, the transport Llangibby Castle was torpedoed by U-402 and lost her rudder, and Anthony was detached to stand by her as she steered on her engines for the Azores.

In February and March she screened the old carriers Eagle and Argus as they flew off the first Spitfires for Malta. The first attempt was abandoned when the long range fuel tanks fitted to the aircraft turned out to be the wrong ones, and the later sorties got through.

Fifty Marines Into Diego Suarez

In April she went south again with the escort of the troop convoys for Operation Ironclad, the British landing in Madagascar to stop the Vichy French island falling to the Japanese, fuelling at St Helena on the way. On 4 May, the night before the landings, she worked with Laforey and Lightning laying the marker buoys that guided the convoy into the narrow channel to the landing beaches.

The army's advance on the naval base at Antsirane was then held up by the French defences. On the afternoon of 6 May Rear Admiral Syfret decided to try something bolder.

Fifty Royal Marines from the battleship Ramillies were put aboard Anthony, and at half past three she sailed at full speed round the northern tip of the island. That evening, after dark, she ran in past the harbour defences, went alongside the quay at Antsirane under fire and put the Marines ashore behind the French lines.

They caused a disturbance in the town out of all proportion to their numbers, and the next day Diego Suarez surrendered. When Anthony came back out to the fleet the ships cheered her.

Indian Ocean and New York

She stayed in the Indian Ocean with the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla of the Eastern Fleet through the summer, and was docked at Simonstown at the end of August. In September she and Duncan escorted Royal Sovereign west towards Philadelphia, where the battleship was to be repaired; Anthony was diverted into New York on 22 October and sailed in the escort of an American troop convoy bound for the North African landings.

She came home in November with the cruiser Shropshire and spent the winter in a Thames shipyard. The photograph at the top of this page was taken in March 1943, when she had just come out of that refit.

Gibraltar and U-761

Under Lieutenant Commander John Wallace she went back to Gibraltar and the 13th Destroyer Flotilla in the spring of 1943. In July she was in the escort of the convoys for the landings in Sicily, patrolling off the beachhead, and that autumn she was escorting convoys and heavy ships through the western Mediterranean.

In November she was in the screen that brought Renown into Algiers, and later that month she left the convoy KMF 26 only a day before German aircraft sank the troopship Rohna with a glider bomb, killing more than a thousand men.

On 24 February 1944 U-761 tried to slip through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. American Catalinas fitted with a new magnetic detector picked her up under water, aircraft attacked her, and Anthony and Wishart hunted her with depth charges until she was forced to the surface north of Tangier and scuttled.

Forty nine of her men were rescued, one of whom later died in hospital at Gibraltar. It was the first time a U-boat had been found by magnetic detection. In May Anthony was rearmed as an anti-submarine escort, keeping only two of her four guns.

The Channel and the Leopoldville

In September 1944 she came home for the Channel convoys, by then commanded, fittingly, by Lieutenant Anthony Leach. On Christmas Eve she was in the escort of the Belgian troopship Leopoldville, carrying American soldiers from Southampton to Cherbourg, when U-486 got past the screen and torpedoed her five miles from the French coast.

The ship sank in the dark with the loss of 819 lives, most of them young American infantrymen, one of the worst troopship disasters of the war.

Target Ship

In March 1945 she was withdrawn from operations and converted into an air target ship, on which young pilots of the Fleet Air Arm and RAF practised recognising and attacking warships in the Irish Sea, and she kept at it until January 1946. She was put on the disposal list that spring, but her sale was deferred and she was used for damage control trials until February 1948.

She was then sold for breaking up and arrived at Troon in May 1948.

She had outlived most of her flotilla. Acasta and Ardent were sunk with the carrier Glorious off Norway in June 1940, and Achates, the ship she had towed into Seidisfjord, went down defending a convoy in the Barents Sea at the end of 1942. The other prints of the class are in the A Class destroyers collection.