HMS Janus (F53): A Month Old When the War Began, Lost Off Anzio

Trials Off the Tyne

HMS Janus was ordered from Swan Hunter at Wallsend in March 1937, laid down that September and launched on 10 November 1938. She was one of the eight J-class destroyers, the first British destroyers built with a single funnel and a hull designed around longitudinal framing, which made them stronger and quicker to build than anything before them.

The photograph at the top of this page is the builder's own, taken on her contractor's sea trials on 5 August 1939 with the yard's caption printed along the bottom, and she is going flat out.

She was completed that same day and commissioned into the 7th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet under Lieutenant Commander John Tothill, who would command her, apart from a fortnight in 1940, for the next three years. She was a month old when war was declared.

Her first job of the war, on 6 September, was to see the ship carrying the British Ambassador home from Berlin safely across the North Sea, which is about as precise a marker of where one era ended and another began as a destroyer could be given.

Wigan adopted her in a Warship Week in November 1941. By then she had already been in more battles than most ships of the war would see in the whole of it.

Norway and Holland

Her first winter was the North Sea and the Channel: convoys, collisions, and the endless business of standing by other people's damaged ships. In February 1940 she went to the destroyer Jackal after a collision with a Swedish steamer, picked up survivors and saw her into the Tyne, and a month later stood by her own flotilla leader Jervis after another.

In April the Germans went into Norway. Janus screened the cruiser HMS Suffolk when she bombarded Stavanger airfield and was then bombed half to death on the way home, and saw her back.

On 30 April she was at Namsos when the sloop Bittern was set on fire by bombing in the harbour, took off her survivors, and then put a torpedo into her so the Germans would not have her. Bittern's own article, HMS Bittern (L07), tells what that wreck is still doing to the fjord.

In May she was off the Hook of Holland, landing and evacuating troops as the Netherlands fell, and when the old destroyer Versatile was crippled by bombing she took her in tow and brought her back across the North Sea. That tow is told from the other end of the rope in HMS Versatile (I32).

The Mediterranean

In mid-May 1940 the flotilla was sent to the Mediterranean, and Janus reached Alexandria at the end of the month and joined the 14th Destroyer Flotilla under Captain Philip Mack. On the voyage out her pennant number was changed from F53 to G53, for no better reason than that it read more clearly in a signal.

She was at the Battle of Calabria on 9 July 1940, the first fleet action against the Italian navy, and at Cape Matapan in March 1941, when the fleet caught three Italian heavy cruisers at night and sank the lot. In April she was with the flotilla working from Malta against the convoys to North Africa, the operation in which HMS Mohawk (F31) was sunk; Mohawk's article tells that night in full.

Ten days later, patrolling off Tripoli, Janus sank the Italian naval auxiliary Egreo on her own.

In May the Germans came to Crete by air and by sea. On the night of 21 May Janus was with Force D when it caught the convoy of commandeered caiques carrying German mountain troops towards the island, and ten of them were sunk. It was one of the few nights of that campaign on which the Navy had things its own way.

A week later the campaign was lost and she was going back the other way: on 28 May she sailed from Alexandria with Jervis and Hasty to lift soldiers off the beach at Sphakia on the south coast of the island, the last stage of the evacuation, under air attack all the way there and all the way back.

Off Sidon

Three weeks later the British went into Vichy French Syria, and on 9 June 1941 Janus met the two big French destroyers Valmy and Guépard off Sidon. They were faster, more heavily armed and very well handled, and in a short, sharp action they hit her several times; accounts give three hits or five.

One shell burst in a boiler room and another wrecked her bridge, and by one account every man on it except Tothill himself was killed or wounded. Thirteen of her men died and thirteen more were hurt, and she was left stopped and burning under the guns of ships of a country that, a year earlier, had been Britain's ally.

The destroyer Kimberley came back for her and towed her clear, and she was taken on to Haifa and then Suez. There was no dock in the eastern Mediterranean free to repair her, so she went down the Red Sea and round the east coast of Africa, by way of Mombasa and Durban, to Simonstown.

She was docked there in August 1941 and stripped to the bone: rudder, forward boiler, after torpedo tubes and gun mountings all came out. She was out of the war for the best part of a year, and the South African yard sent her back in the spring of 1942 essentially rebuilt.

A Mine, and the Long Way Home

She was back with the flotilla at Alexandria in April 1942. On 4 June she set off an acoustic mine, and the damage was bad enough that she missed the Vigorous convoy to Malta that month and everything else that summer.

Surveyed at Suez, she was judged beyond local repair, and in November she sailed for Britain the long way, round the Cape of Good Hope, reaching the Tyne at the end of January 1943. She was repaired on the river she had been built on.

That autumn she worked up with the Home Fleet, went north to Spitsbergen with the battleship Anson, and in December sailed south again to rejoin the 14th Flotilla, arriving on Boxing Day.

Anzio

In January 1944 the Allies tried to get round the German line in Italy by landing behind it at Anzio. Janus bombarded the Adriatic coast that month, then went with the Northern Attack Force for the landings on 22 January and gave gunfire support to the troops going ashore.

She and Jervis between them fired more than five hundred rounds of 4.7-inch in the first two days, answering calls for fire from the troops ashore as the beachhead was pushed out.

At dusk the next day, 23 January, German aircraft came in over the anchorage. Janus was hit forward, the explosion set off her magazine, and she broke apart and sank in about twenty minutes. Accounts genuinely disagree on what hit her.

The loss list kept at the time records an aircraft torpedo from a Heinkel 111; other records describe one of the new German radio-guided glide bombs. Her flotilla leader HMS Jervis was hit by a guided bomb in the same attack and lost her bow, and Jervis's article tells what those weapons were.

About 160 of her ship's company of some 240 were killed, among them her captain, Lieutenant Commander William Morrison. Some eighty were picked up by the destroyer Laforey, by Jervis, down by the head herself, and by the small craft working off the beaches.

Janus had been at war from her fourth week in commission until her last day, and she lay at the bottom off Anzio within sight of the beach she had been there to protect.

Four and a Half Years

There is no single famous action that belongs to Janus. What belongs to her is the sheer amount of it: the North Sea, Norway, Holland, Calabria, Matapan, Crete, Syria, Malta, the Arctic and Anzio, with two long repairs in between, one of them by way of Simonstown.

Of the eight J-class destroyers, six were sunk, and she was one of them.

The builder's photograph at the top of the page was taken four weeks before any of it began. She is very new, going very fast, and has a bone in her teeth. It is a good way to remember her.