HMS Blankney (L30): Two U-Boats for Convoy HG 76, Harpoon and Gold Beach

Built at Clydebank

HMS Blankney was ordered from John Brown at Clydebank on 4 September 1939, the day after war was declared, as one of the Type II Hunt Class escort destroyers of the first War Emergency Programme. She was named after the Blankney hunt in Lincolnshire, and her badge was a griffin's head in front of two crossed hunting horns.

She was laid down on 17 May 1940, launched on 19 December that year and completed on 11 April 1941, the first ship of the name. Her first captain, Lieutenant Commander Philip Powlett, commanded her for two years, and by the time he left her in March 1943 he had been awarded the DSO twice.

In February 1942 the town of Nantwich in Cheshire adopted her.

She started on the Atlantic convoys in the Irish Sea Escort Force and the North Western Approaches. In September 1941 she was in the escort of the troop convoy that carried the Halberd supply operation for Malta out to Gibraltar, in company with the battleship Prince of Wales.

HG 76

In December she took a cargo of RAF stores out to Gibraltar with the 20th Escort Group, and on 14 December sailed with the homeward convoy HG 76, 32 merchant ships escorted by Commander Johnnie Walker's 36th Escort Group in the sloop Stork, with the little escort carrier Audacity. It became one of the most famous convoy battles of the war.

On 17 December a Martlet from Audacity spotted U-131 on the surface north east of Madeira. The pilot attacked and was shot down and killed, and Blankney, Exmoor, Stanley, Stork and the corvette Pentstemon closed in and finished the U-boat with depth charges and gunfire.

The next morning Stanley sighted U-434 on the surface six miles off. The U-boat dived, but Blankney got a firm asdic contact and made three quick depth charge attacks, so badly damaging her that she came up and her crew abandoned her before she sank.

Mason's record adds that Blankney rammed her as she surfaced and damaged her own bow. She went back to Gibraltar full of German prisoners and went into the dockyard for repairs.

The convoy went on to lose Audacity, Stanley and two merchant ships, but five U-boats were sunk around it, and HG 76 came to be seen as the first real victory of the escorts.

Spitfires for Malta

Repaired, she joined the destroyers at Gibraltar, and in February and March 1942 she screened the carriers Eagle and Argus with Anthony and the others of Force H as they flew off the first Spitfires for Malta.

In April she was moved to the Home Fleet's 6th Flotilla, and on 2 May she was sent to bring King George V home from Iceland with her bow torn open, after the battleship had run down the destroyer Punjabi in fog the day before. Later that month she screened the heavy ships covering the Arctic convoy PQ 16.

Harpoon

In June she was lent back to the Mediterranean for Operation Harpoon, the convoy of six merchant ships from Gibraltar to Malta that sailed at the same time as Vigorous from Alexandria. When the heavy ships turned back at the entrance to the Sicilian Narrows, she went on with Force X, the close escort, under the anti-aircraft cruiser Cairo.

On the morning of 15 June, south of Pantelleria, two Italian cruisers and their destroyers came out to attack the convoy, while German and Italian bombers came in from Sicily. The destroyers went out to meet the cruisers, and Bedouin was disabled and later sunk; four of the six merchant ships were lost.

Only two reached Malta, and on the approaches to Grand Harbour the Polish destroyer Kujawiak was mined and sunk, and Badsworth and Matchless were damaged by mines. Blankney came back to Gibraltar with the survivors of Force X.

PQ 17 and Murmansk

In July she was in the screen of Duke of York, the American battleship Washington, the carrier Victorious and the cruiser Nigeria as they gave distant cover to PQ 17, and she went back to Scapa with them when the Admiralty ordered the convoy to scatter and the U-boats and bombers fell on its ships one by one.

Later that month she and three other destroyers carried a cargo of fresh ammunition up to Murmansk for the escorts there, arriving on 24 July. On 30 July she was damaged in a collision at Murmansk and spent August under repair in North Russia, and in September she came home with the return convoy QP 14.

That winter she gave local escort from Loch Ewe to the Russian convoys JW 51A, JW 51B, JW 52 and the returning RA 51 and RA 52; she had left JW 51B on Christmas Day, a week before its escorts fought off the Hipper and Lützow in the Battle of the Barents Sea, where Achates was lost.

Sicily and Salerno

In March 1943 Lieutenant Commander Douglas Bromley took over, and that June she went to Gibraltar for the invasion of Sicily, sailing from Bone with the assault convoy KMF 18. On 10 July she was off the Bark beaches at the south eastern corner of the island, and with her sister Puckeridge she shelled the coastal batteries behind Bark East.

On 13 July she collided with her sister Brissenden while hunting a submarine, but stayed in action. In September she escorted the convoy FSS 1 from Bizerta to Salerno and gave gunfire support and patrolled off the beachhead with the destroyers of the northern attack force.

U-450 and U-371

In 1944 she was on the convoys between North Africa and Italy, and she shared in two more U-boat kills. On 10 March, south of Ostia and close to the Anzio beachhead, she and her sisters Blencathra, Brecon and Exmoor, with the American destroyer Madison, hunted down U-450 with depth charges.

On the night of 2 May U-371 was caught on the surface off Djidjelli on the Algerian coast, charging her batteries. For more than a day American and French escorts, Blankney and aircraft hunted her, and before she was finished she torpedoed and damaged the American destroyer escort Menges and the French Sénégalais.

On 4 May she was forced to the surface and sunk, and most of her crew were taken prisoner.

Gold Beach

She came home straight away for the invasion of Normandy, joining the 1st Destroyer Flotilla at Portsmouth under Lieutenant Bernard Brown. On 5 June she sailed from the Solent in charge of convoy G 15, ten infantry landing craft and two rescue craft bound for Gold Beach, and on D-Day she was one of the bombarding ships off the beach.

She stayed off the beachheads and on the Channel convoys until the autumn, then went to Liverpool for a refit. In January 1945 she joined the 21st Destroyer Flotilla at Sheerness, hunting E-boats and the German midget submarines that were trying to attack the convoys and lay mines in the Thames estuary.

A Badge at Simonstown

In June 1945 she was nominated for the Eastern Fleet and sailed for South Africa, where she went into the Selborne dry dock at Simonstown on 20 August, a few days after the Japanese surrender. Her crew painted her badge on the dock wall, as ships' companies did there, and it can still be seen.

She came home to pay off into reserve at Devonport in May 1946, was refitted in 1948 and laid up at Sheerness and then Hartlepool. She was placed on the disposal list in October 1958, sold for scrap, and arrived in tow at Hughes Bolckow's yard at Blyth on 9 March 1959. The other prints of her class are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.