HMS Gallant (H59): The Destroyer That Lost Her Bow to a Mine Off Malta

Built in Glasgow

HMS Gallant was built by Alexander Stephen and Sons in Glasgow, laid down on 15 September 1934, launched on 26 September 1935, and completed on 25 February 1936, at a cost of £252,920 excluding armament. A G-class destroyer, she displaced 1,350 tons standard, rising to 1,883 tons at deep load, and her Parsons turbines produced 34,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 36 knots.

She carried four 4.7-inch guns, torpedo tubes and depth charge equipment, a well-armed fleet destroyer typical of her generation.

HMS Gallant joined the 1st Destroyer Flotilla of the Mediterranean Fleet upon commissioning, enforcing the Non-Intervention Committee's arms blockade during the Spanish Civil War, rescuing a grounded Spanish merchantman on 20 December 1936 and surviving an attack by a Nationalist aircraft off Cape San Antonio on 6 April 1937.

Rescues in Northern Waters

HMS Gallant transferred to Western Approaches Command at Plymouth when war broke out in September 1939, before moving on to Nore Command at Harwich for patrol and escort duties.

She carried out several notable rescues during this period, saving the crew of the oil tanker British Councillor on 2 February 1940, twelve survivors from the Swedish ship Santos on 25 February, and most of the crew of HMS Kelly after that celebrated destroyer was torpedoed on 9 and 10 May 1940.

That particular rescue is better known than the ship that carried it out. HMS Kelly was Lord Louis Mountbatten's flotilla leader, and when an E-boat torpedoed her in the North Sea she was left burning, listing and without power, with a hole in her side big enough to drive a bus through. Gallant went alongside and took off the great majority of her people. Kelly herself, remarkably, did not sink: she was towed home stern-first over ninety-one hours and was rebuilt, only to be bombed and sunk off Crete a year later. Noel Coward turned the story into the film "In Which We Serve", which is why Kelly is one of the few destroyer names the general public still recognises, and Gallant, who saved most of her crew, is not.

During the Dunkirk evacuation, a near miss from a bomb on 29 May knocked out her steering and caused minor hull and electrical damage, requiring repairs at Hull before she could return to service.

Into the Mediterranean

HMS Gallant arrived at Gibraltar on 30 July 1940, joining Force H and taking part in Operation Hurry, escorting the carrier HMS Argus as she delivered Hawker Hurricane fighters to Malta on 2 August 1940, one of the earliest of the many Malta reinforcement operations that would come to define the Mediterranean war.

Earliest of what is worth spelling out, because Operation Hurry began the single most important thing the Royal Navy did for Malta. The island could not be supplied with fighters by air; the range from Gibraltar was too great and the range from Egypt not much better, and a Hurricane cannot cross the Mediterranean on its own tanks. So the aircraft were loaded onto a carrier, the carrier was escorted to a point from which the fighters could just about reach the island, and they were flown off the deck and told to keep going. Twelve Hurricanes and two Skuas went aboard Argus on the Clyde, she sailed on 20 July 1940, and at a quarter to five on the morning of 2 August, south-west of Sardinia, they went off the bow. All twelve got there and became No. 261 Squadron.

To get twelve aeroplanes to an island, the Navy committed warships from both ends of the Mediterranean, Cunningham's fleet coming west from Alexandria and Somerville's Force H going east from Gibraltar, most of it doing nothing more than making sure the Italians looked somewhere other than at Argus. Gallant was part of the somewhere else. That became the standard shape of the Malta air reinforcement for the next two years, and it did not always work: the next attempt, that November, failed. Later runs used bigger carriers and Spitfires and eventually the American Wasp, and the men who flew them were mostly told where they were going after they were airborne. It kept Malta in the war, and it started with a destroyer screen and a carrier commissioned in 1918 sitting off Sardinia in the small hours.

On 20 October 1940, HMS Gallant, together with her sister ship HMS Griffin and HMS Hotspur, sank the Italian submarine Lafolè east of Gibraltar, a truly solid piece of anti-submarine work.

She transferred to the 14th Destroyer Flotilla at Malta on 10 November and took part in the inconclusive Battle of Cape Spartivento on 27 November during Operation Collar.

A Mine Blows Off Her Bow

HMS Gallant's war changed dramatically at 08:34 on 10 January 1941, some 25 nautical miles southwest of Pantelleria, when she struck a mine during Operation Excess that detonated her forward magazine, following an attack on the convoy by Italian torpedo boats. She was under the command of Lieutenant Commander Cecil Powis Frobisher Brown DSC, who had held her since July 1938. She was not the only ship having a spectacularly bad day: that same afternoon, the very same operation saw HMS Illustrious mauled by some forty Stuka dive bombers of the German Fliegerkorps X, and both crippled ships would end up nursing their wounds in Malta within days of each other.

That day is one of the genuine turning points of the Mediterranean war, and it is worth explaining why. Until January 1941 the opposition at sea had been Italian, and the Royal Navy had had much the better of it. What changed on 10 January was that Fliegerkorps X, a Luftwaffe formation trained and equipped specifically for attacking ships, had arrived in Sicily from Norway. Their first serious operation was against Operation Excess, and they went straight for Illustrious: six hits in a few minutes, 126 of her people killed and 91 wounded, and only her armoured flight deck kept her afloat at all. From that morning the central Mediterranean was a different sea. Gallant was mined the same morning, some twenty-five miles from Pantelleria, and both ships limped into the same harbour, which then became the target.

The explosion blew the entire bow off the ship, killing 58 of her crew and injuring a further 15, a devastating single loss for a destroyer whose crew numbered only a couple of hundred men. HMS Mohawk took the crippled destroyer under tow, hauling her stern-first all the way to Malta, where she was beached in Grand Harbour below the bastions of Floriana for emergency repairs, a remarkably difficult feat of seamanship given how badly damaged HMS Gallant had been.

The figure deserves a footnote, because the sources do not agree on it and the men are worth counting properly. The casualty list compiled from the Malta records names fifty-seven men killed on 10 January and one more the following day. Other accounts give fifty-nine killed and twenty-five wounded, several of the wounded dying afterwards, and one puts the total nearer seventy. The number in the middle of that range is the one usually printed. What is not in dispute is that between a quarter and a third of a small ship's company died in a single explosion, most of them instantly, most of them in the part of the ship that was no longer attached to the rest of it when the smoke cleared.

Finished Off by Air Raid

Repairs to HMS Gallant progressed only slowly at Malta, a dockyard itself under constant and increasingly heavy air attack throughout 1941 and into 1942. On 5 April 1942, she was extensively damaged by bomb splinters during an air raid on Valletta, and had to be deliberately beached at Pinto's Wharf to prevent her sinking outright.

With the damage now compounding an already crippled hull, HMS Gallant was formally declared a constructive total loss, and what equipment could still be salvaged was stripped from the wreck.

The word slowly in that sentence is carrying an enormous amount. Malta between January and July 1942 endured the heaviest sustained bombing anywhere in the war: 154 days and nights of it, something in the order of 6,700 tons of bombs, and only one twenty-four-hour period in the whole seven months in which nothing fell on the island. April 1942 was the worst month of all. The dockyard men repairing Gallant were working on a crippled destroyer in the middle of that, on an island that was running out of food, fuel and anti-aircraft ammunition, and going home at night to whatever was left of their houses. On 15 April 1942, ten days after the raid that finished Gallant, King George VI awarded the George Cross to the people of Malta, the only time it has ever been given to an entire population.

The End

The hulk of HMS Gallant was finally put to one last practical use, expended as a blockship at St Paul's Island in September 1943, before the wreck was eventually broken up in 1953, closing out the story of a destroyer whose active fighting career had ended not with a dramatic final battle, but with a mine strike that cost 58 lives in a single, brutal instant, followed by years spent as a crippled hulk in an already devastated dockyard.

Her final use is worth explaining, because it is a real job rather than a tidy way of disposing of a hulk. A blockship is a vessel deliberately sunk in a channel or an anchorage entrance, either to close it to an enemy or, more usefully, to make a breakwater where none exists: a line of sunken hulls takes the sea out of an exposed anchorage and lets small craft work in shelter. It is what was done with the Gooseberries off the Normandy beaches in 1944 and what was done with Gallant at St Paul's Island in September 1943, by which time Sicily had fallen and Malta had turned from a besieged island into a forward base for the invasion of Italy. The ship that had been mined trying to keep Malta supplied ended up as part of the harbour infrastructure of the offensive that relieved it.

Set her alongside her sisters and the scale of it becomes clear. Nine G-class destroyers were built, Grenville as the leader and Gallant, Garland, Gipsy, Glowworm, Grafton, Grenade, Greyhound and Griffin, all launched between 1935 and 1936, and the war went through them like a scythe. Gipsy was mined off Harwich on 21 November 1939, torn clean in two by a magnetic mine a German seaplane had dropped in the approaches a few hours earlier. Grenville was mined east of the Kentish Knock on 19 January 1940 and seventy-seven men went down with her. Glowworm was sunk on 8 April 1940 after turning and ramming the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, an act that earned her captain a posthumous Victoria Cross on the evidence of the Germans who had sunk him.

Then Dunkirk took two more on the same day. HMS Grafton (H89) was torpedoed by U-62 and HMS Grenade (H86) was bombed, both on 29 May 1940. Greyhound was caught by Stukas off Crete on 22 May 1941. Gallant was mined that January. That is six of the nine gone or finished within twenty months of the outbreak of war, and every one of them a modern ship less than five years old.

Of the remaining three, Griffin was handed to the Royal Canadian Navy in 1943 and renamed HMCS Ottawa, taking the name of a ship the Canadians had already lost, and HMS Garland (H37) went to the Polish Navy in May 1940 and fought the rest of the war under Polish colours. So the class that produced Glowworm's Victoria Cross, that lost two ships in one afternoon off Dunkirk, and that pulled most of Mountbatten's crew out of a burning Kelly, was effectively finished by the middle of 1941 and finished off entirely by being given away. Gallant was neither the first nor the last of them, and she is the one who left her bow on the seabed south-west of Pantelleria.