HMS Bramham (L51): The Ohio Into Malta, the Curacoa, and Sixteen Years as a Greek

Built at Govan

HMS Bramham was ordered from Alexander Stephen and Sons at Govan on 20 December 1939, one of the Type II Hunt Class escort destroyers of the first War Emergency Programme: small, handy ships of about a thousand tons with six 4 inch anti-aircraft guns, built to escort convoys where the bombers were the main danger. She was laid down on 7 April 1941, launched on 29 January 1942 and completed on 16 June that year.

She was the only Royal Navy ship ever to carry the name, which came from the Bramham Moor hunt in Yorkshire, and her badge showed a red fox sitting on the waves. In March 1942, before she was finished, the town of Beverley in the East Riding raised the money to adopt her during its Warship Week.

Her captain for the whole of her Royal Navy career was Lieutenant Edward Baines.

Pedestal

She had only just finished working up with the special escort division at Londonderry when she was picked for Operation Pedestal, the great convoy of fourteen merchant ships from the Clyde to Malta in August 1942. The island was close to starving and its aircraft were almost out of fuel.

Bramham sailed with the troop convoy WS 21 at the end of July and joined Force X, the close escort that was to take the merchant ships all the way through the Sicilian Narrows under the cruisers Nigeria, Kenya, Manchester and Cairo, with fleet destroyers such as Fury and Intrepid.

On 12 August, as the convoy came within reach of the airfields in Sardinia and Sicily, the Deucalion was damaged by bombs and could no longer keep up. Bramham was sent to take her along the inshore route close to the Tunisian coast.

Two bombers found them in the late afternoon and missed, but at twenty to eight in the evening, near the Cani Rocks, two torpedo aircraft came in and hit the Deucalion, and she caught fire and sank.

Bramham picked up her crew and raced to catch up with the convoy, which had meanwhile been savaged that night: Nigeria and Cairo torpedoed by a submarine, the tanker Ohio hit, and the convoy broken up as it went through the Narrows. In the early hours of the 13th, E-boats sank Manchester and four more merchant ships.

The Ohio

At daybreak on the 13th Bramham was astern of the main body with the destroyer Penn and the straggling Port Chalmers, and on the way they picked up the crew of the American Santa Elisa, which had been torpedoed and abandoned.

By then the Ohio, an American-built tanker with a British crew and more than 11,000 tons of fuel the island could not do without, had been hit again by bombers and one of their aircraft had crashed onto her deck. She lay stopped and helpless, and Bramham and Penn stood by her.

That evening Bramham was sent to the Dorset, also stopped, and German bombers came in again and again until dark. Both the Dorset and the Ohio were hit around seven o'clock, and the Dorset sank.

The Ohio stayed afloat. The next morning Ledbury arrived, then the minesweepers from Malta. Her back was broken and her decks were almost awash, so the destroyers could not simply tow her: Bramham and Penn were lashed to her sides to hold her up and steer her, with a minesweeper towing ahead.

At a quarter to eleven on the 14th the enemy bombers made their last attack and the tow parted, but fighters from Malta drove them off, the lines were passed again, and through the rest of that day and the following night the slow procession crept on. On the morning of 15 August, the feast of Santa Marija, the Ohio was brought into Grand Harbour with the crowds cheering on the bastions.

Only five of the fourteen merchant ships reached Malta, but her fuel kept the island's aircraft flying, and Malta held.

Bramham went back to Gibraltar with Penn and Ledbury, and then helped escort the bomb damaged carrier Indomitable home. In September she escorted the fleet oilers for the escorts of the Arctic convoys PQ 18 and QP 14, which earned her a second battle honour.

The Curacoa

On 1 October 1942 Bramham was in the escort of the liner Queen Mary, carrying some ten thousand American soldiers to the Clyde, with the old anti-aircraft cruiser Curacoa and several other destroyers including her sister Cowdray. The next day, off the north coast of Ireland, the liner was zig-zagging at full speed against U-boats and the cruiser was trying to keep station close ahead of her.

The two courses crossed, and the Queen Mary struck the Curacoa almost amidships and cut her in two. The liner was under orders not to stop. The destroyers were sent back for survivors, and of the 439 men in the cruiser only 101 were saved.

A Bomb off Algeria

On 20 October she sailed from Britain with Cowdray and the Polish destroyer Blyskawica in the escort of one of the convoys for Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa, and on 8 November she was with the assault convoys off Oran.

She stayed on the coastal convoys as the army pushed east into Tunisia, and on 20 November, between Philippeville and Bone, a bomb hit her aft beside the after gun mounting, went straight through the ship and exploded in the sea underneath her. An after compartment flooded and she had to be towed into Algiers.

She was patched up there and at Gibraltar, and in February 1943 went into a shipyard on the Tyne for proper repairs.

Themistoklis

While she was there it was decided to give her to the Royal Hellenic Navy, whose sailors had escaped when Greece fell and were fighting on from Alexandria. A Greek crew joined her during the repairs, and in July 1943 she was commissioned as Themistoklis, after the Athenian commander of the victory at Salamis.

By October she was in the Aegean, patrolling the Kasos Strait with Aldenham and her Greek sister Miaoulis to intercept the German invasion convoys bound for Kos, and sailing with the cruiser Carlisle as the Germans fought to take the Dodecanese.

In January 1944 she was off Anzio, and in August she sailed from Naples with five landing ships full of commandos for the islands off the coast of Provence, part of the opening assault of the landings in the south of France.

That autumn she went back to her own waters. On 15 October 1944 she was with the force that brought British troops into Piraeus as the Germans left Greece, and she served on in the Greek destroyer flotilla through the rest of the war and the troubled years that followed.

She was returned to the Royal Navy on 12 December 1959, after more than sixteen years under the Greek flag, and was sold to Greek shipbreakers in June 1960. The other prints of her class are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.