HMS Blean (L47): Four Months From Commissioning to the Bottom off Oran

Built on the Tyne

HMS Blean was built by Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn on the Tyne, one of the Type III Hunt Class escort destroyers of the 1940 War Emergency Programme. The Hunts were small, quickly built ships of about a thousand tons, designed to escort convoys along the coast and in the narrow seas where the bombers and E-boats were the danger.

The Type IIIs gave up one of the three twin 4 inch gun mountings of the earlier ships to make room for two torpedo tubes, so that they could fight as destroyers when they had to. Blean was laid down on 22 February 1941, launched on 15 January 1942 and completed on 23 August 1942, the first and only Royal Navy ship of the name.

Like the rest of her class she took her name from a hunt, in her case the Blean beagles, which hunted the old woodland of the Blean north of Canterbury. Her badge combined a gold battleaxe and a white hunting horn.

That February, before she was even launched, the towns of Reigate and Horley in Surrey had adopted her during their Warship Week savings campaign. Her captain was Lieutenant Norman Parker, who had joined her in July while she was fitting out.

Scapa Flow

She went north to Scapa Flow to work up with the Home Fleet, and on 9 September she sailed from the Clyde for the Orkneys in company with her sister Puckeridge and the Greek escort destroyer Kanaris, after the old carrier Furious had finished her flying exercises.

For the next few weeks she was learning her business in the hardest school there was, screening the battleships of the Home Fleet as they exercised in the waters around the Orkneys: the new Howe in her night and gunnery practices, Rodney and the carrier Victorious on their passage from the Firth of Forth on 20 September and Rodney again round to Loch Ewe two days later, and Duke of York and Howe in early October.

Then she went south for the convoys on the east coast, where her first battle honour, North Sea 1942, was earned. In October she was under repair in a Thames shipyard, and she was nominated for the Mediterranean.

Operation Torch

The Allies were about to invade French North Africa. On 30 October Blean sailed from Britain in the escort of KX 5, one of the advance convoys for Operation Torch, and on 2 November she reached Gibraltar and joined Destroyer Division 58. On 8 November American and British troops landed at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers.

For the next five weeks Blean was on the inshore escort work along the Algerian coast, shepherding the follow-up convoys and coastal shipping between Gibraltar and the newly captured ports, while U-boats gathered at the western end of the Mediterranean and German torpedo bombers flew out from Sardinia and Sicily.

In those weeks the U-boats and aircraft sank the escort carrier Avenger, a string of troopships and transports, and several escorts. Blean's second battle honour, North Africa 1942, came from this work.

The photograph at the top of this page, taken in a busy harbour during her few months in service, shows her with a barrage balloon flying from her mast against low flying aircraft.

U-443

On 10 December she sailed with the destroyer Wishart in the escort of MKF 4, a fast convoy of empty troopships going home from the North African ports to Britain. The next afternoon, about sixty miles west of Oran, U-443 was waiting for them.

Her commander, Oberleutnant Konstantin von Puttkamer, had commissioned her new only that April. At twenty five past four he fired at Blean and hit her. Two minutes later he fired again, at what he thought was a steamer in the convoy, and that torpedo hit Blean as well, so that she was struck once forward and once aft.

She went down by the stern in four minutes, too fast for many of the men below to get out. Wishart, under Commander H G Scott, came back and picked up eight officers and 86 ratings from the water, and 89 of her ship's company of 183 were lost. She had been in commission for just over a hundred days.

U-443 did not last much longer. On 23 February 1943 she was caught north west of Algiers by three of Blean's sisters, Bicester, Lamerton and Wheatland, and sunk with depth charges with all 48 of her crew.

Her Sisters

Many of the Hunts went out to North Africa at the same time as Blean and stayed in the Mediterranean for the rest of the war, in the convoys to Malta and Italy and the landings in Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and the south of France. Her sisters Belvoir and Blankney, whose stories are told elsewhere on this site, both lived to see the end of the war.

Blean is remembered with the other men lost at sea on the naval memorials at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth, according to the port each man belonged to. The other prints of her class are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.