HMS Garland (H37): Loaned to Poland on the Anniversary of Its Constitution

Constructed at Govan

HMS Garland was ordered on 5 March 1934 from Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering at Govan, laid down on 22 August that year, launched on 24 October 1935, and completed on 3 March 1936, at a cost of £250,664 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 a substantial depth charge fit, eventually increased to 44 charges by mid-1940 as anti-submarine tactics evolved.

HMS Garland joined the 1st Destroyer Flotilla of the Mediterranean Fleet upon commissioning, and during the Spanish Civil War took part in the evacuation of British and foreign nationals from Barcelona, alongside enforcing the Non-Intervention Committee's arms blockade between 1937 and 1938.

An Early Mishap and a Symbolic Transfer

HMS Garland suffered a serious accident of her own making on 17 September 1939, while escorting a convoy to Malta, when some of her own depth charges detonated prematurely, severely damaging her aft section.

Temporary repairs were carried out at Alexandria, with permanent repairs running from 11 October 1939 to 8 May 1940 at Malta, a remarkably lengthy period out of action for a ship still very early in her wartime career.

HMS Garland was loaned to the Polish Navy on 3 May 1940, deliberately timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 1791 Polish Constitution, a properly thoughtful piece of symbolism at a moment when Poland itself had already fallen under German and Soviet occupation and the Polish Navy's exiled ships and crews represented one of the few remaining ways the country could continue contributing directly to the Allied war effort.

The date chosen was not a piece of vague goodwill; it was about as pointed as diplomacy gets. The Constitution of 3 May 1791 is generally reckoned the first codified national constitution in Europe and the second in the world, after the American one, and Poland is the only country that celebrates a constitution its neighbours destroyed within four years of its being written. Handing a Polish crew a British destroyer on that anniversary, in the spring of 1940, with Poland partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union and its government sitting in exile, was a statement that the Polish state still existed and was still fighting. It cost Britain the loan of one G-class destroyer and it was worth a great deal more than that.

She became ORP Garland, and began Mediterranean operations under Polish colours and largely Polish crews.

The Polish Navy she joined had been in Britain since before the war began, by design. In the last days of August 1939 the Polish high command, correctly concluding that its ships would be destroyed in the Baltic within days and could do nothing useful there, issued the codeword Peking; the destroyers Blyskawica, Grom and Burza sailed from Gdynia on 30 August and reached Scotland on 1 September, the day Germany invaded. It is one of the few decisions any Polish commander got entirely right that autumn. Those three ships, and the submarines and later the loaned British ships that joined them, fought under Polish colours for the whole war, and their crews spent six years fighting for a country they had left and would mostly never see again. What happened to two of the cruisers lent to them is set out in the articles on HMS Dragon (D35) and HMS Danae (D44).

Storms, Malta Convoys and a Devastating Bomb

ORP Garland was lightly damaged by Italian aircraft during Operation Hats on 31 August 1940, while escorting a convoy to Malta, and suffered further damage on 13 November that year, badly battered by a storm while escorting the battleship HMS Revenge, an incident in which two men were lost overboard, a grim reminder that the sea itself could prove just as dangerous as any enemy action.

She escorted a large convoy to Malta during Operation Halberd in September 1941, working alongside the Polish destroyer ORP Piorun.

ORP Garland's most devastating action came far to the north, during the Arctic convoy PQ 16 in May 1942. She had sailed from Iceland on 21 May under the command of Lieutenant Commander Henryk Eibel, who had taken charge of the ship that January, into the endless daylight of the Arctic summer that made air attack, rather than the U-boat, the convoy's principal enemy.

On 27 May, south of Bear Island, a Junkers Ju 88 bomber dropped a bomb just 10 yards off her starboard side, and the resulting explosion killed 22 of her crew and wounded 37 more, decimating the gun crews manning her 'A' and 'B' turrets along with her starboard Oerlikon and machine gun positions, a particularly catastrophic single strike for a destroyer of her size. Her hull came away so thoroughly peppered with shrapnel holes that her crew took to calling her 'HMS Pepperpot', while the ship's surgeon, Lieutenant W. Zabron, operated almost non-stop for over thirty hours on the wardroom table to save as many of the wounded as he could. Garland fought off eight further air attacks before finally reaching Murmansk on 29 May.

Temporary repairs took over a month, and permanent repairs were not completed until 21 September 1942, a long recovery from what had been one of the costliest single incidents in her entire wartime career. Five of her crew were subsequently awarded the Virtuti Militari, Poland's highest decoration for gallantry, alongside further Polish Crosses of Valour and British commendations for their conduct that day.

The circumstances that made PQ 16 so lethal are worth spelling out. In late May, north of the Arctic Circle, the sun does not set. There is no night to hide in, no darkness to close up under, and no rest: the convoy is visible for twenty-four hours a day for a week, within reach of German airfields in northern Norway, and the crews stand to their guns until they cannot stand. Air attack, not the U-boat, was the killer on that run, and PQ 16 absorbed the heaviest sustained air effort the Luftwaffe had yet made against an Arctic convoy. A near miss ten yards from the starboard side is, in effect, a large bomb going off in the water alongside a lightly built destroyer with her upper-deck weapons manned; the blast and splinters swept her forward gun positions clean. Twenty-two men were killed and thirty-seven wounded out of a ship's company of about 145.

The detail about the surgeon deserves not to be passed over. Lieutenant Zabron was the only doctor aboard, working on a wardroom table in a ship still under air attack and still steaming, with thirty-seven wounded men and no possibility of transferring any of them anywhere; the nearest hospital was Murmansk, two days away and itself being bombed. He operated for over thirty hours. That is the practical reality behind a phrase like "wounded 37 more" in almost every account of a warship being hit, and it happened, in one form or another, aboard hundreds of ships.

A U-Boat Kill Off Santorini

ORP Garland returned to particularly effective service later in the war, taking part in the sinking of the German submarine U-407 off Santorini on 19 September 1944, working alongside two other British destroyers, a satisfying confirmed kill after the punishing losses she had absorbed at PQ 16 two years earlier.

The boat she helped kill had a name in Britain too. U-407 was a Type VIIC working out of the German Mediterranean flotilla, and ten months before Garland caught her she had put a torpedo into the keel of the cruiser HMS Birmingham off the coast of Cyrenaica, killing twenty-seven of her people and taking a twelve-gun cruiser out of the war for a year. A Polish-manned British destroyer, three British destroyers of the same flotilla and one Aegean afternoon settled that account on 19 September 1944.

Postwar Service and a Second Navy

Following Germany's surrender in May 1945, ORP Garland transported emergency supplies to Belgium and the Netherlands, and took part in Operation Deadlight, the scuttling of captured German U-boats, before being paid off in July 1946 as the loan arrangement with the Polish Navy wound down.

What happened to her people afterwards is the part of this story that is genuinely hard. Poland had been fought for, and Poland had been given away: the settlements reached at Yalta and Potsdam left the country under a communist government installed by the Soviet Union, the same power that had invaded it from the east in 1939. In March 1946 the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, formally urged the Polish forces in the West to go home. Around 105,000 did. Roughly 123,000 did not, and stayed in Britain, many of them because going back would have meant arrest. Garland was handed to the Royal Navy, sold to the Netherlands for £9,000 and renamed; her crew scattered across a country most of them had first seen as refugees, and the navy they had served in ceased to exist.

There was one more insult still to come, and it is the one that is remembered in Polish households to this day. On 8 June 1946 Britain held its Victory Celebration in London, a parade of the Allied forces through the capital. More than two hundred thousand Poles had served under British command: 303 Squadron in the Battle of Britain, the II Corps at Monte Cassino, the 1st Armoured Division at Falaise and Breda, the ships and the submarines and the crews of vessels like this one. The Polish Armed Forces in the West were not invited.

The reason was the same reason Bevin was urging them to go home: Britain had recognised the government in Warsaw, and inviting soldiers loyal to the government in London would have annoyed Stalin. After protests in Parliament and from within the Royal Air Force itself, an offer was eventually made to twenty-five Polish fighter pilots who had flown in the Battle of Britain. They turned it down, because the rest of the Polish forces had not been asked. No Polish contingent marched.

Garland was still in commission that June, six weeks from paying off, having spent six years fighting under a flag that no longer had a country behind it. Her people had been bombed at Bear Island, had buried twenty-two of their own, and had been decorated by a government that Britain had just stopped recognising. They watched the victory parade from the pavement, if they watched it at all.

She was sold to the Royal Netherlands Navy on 14 November 1946 for £9,000, initially serving as a school ship before being refurbished in 1948 as an anti-submarine training vessel and renamed HNLMS Marnix on 16 January 1950.

Reclassified as a frigate in 1952, she was finally decommissioned on 31 January 1964 and subsequently scrapped, closing out a notably international career that had carried her through Royal Navy, Polish and Dutch service across nearly three decades.