HMS Paladin (F169): The Destroyer That Rammed a Submarine and Lived to Become a Frigate

A Destroyer for a World War

HMS Paladin began life as a P-class destroyer, laid down by John Brown & Company at Clydebank on 22 July 1940, launched on 11 June 1941 and completed that December.

At 345 feet long, displacing around 1,550 tons standard and capable of nearly 37 knots, she was a fast, well-armed fleet destroyer of a class ordered in some numbers to replace the heavy losses the Royal Navy's destroyer flotillas had already suffered by the early years of the war.

She was built for exactly the sort of work she was about to get: escort duty, gunnery duels, and the unglamorous, unrelenting business of keeping other ships alive, which by 1942 meant a posting about as far from Clydebank as the Navy could send her. Command went to Commander Anthony Follett Pugsley, who would stay with her through the Indian Ocean rescue and the Madagascar landings before handing over in January 1943.

Rescue in the Indian Ocean

Paladin left Greenock in February 1942 bound for Ceylon, arriving at Colombo that March, and was quickly thrown into the deep end.

Japan's rampaging carrier fleet, fresh from Pearl Harbor and its sweep through South East Asia, turned its attention to the Indian Ocean that spring, and on 5 April 1942 dive bombers caught the heavy cruisers HMS Cornwall and HMS Dorsetshire at sea and sank them both within minutes of each other.

Paladin, together with HMS Panther, was sent to the scene, and between them the two destroyers pulled 1,122 survivors from waters that were, by all accounts, thick with sharks and burning fuel oil. It was a rescue on a scale that says as much about the discipline of the men doing the swimming, keeping formation and waiting their turn, as it does about the ships doing the picking up.

The following month Paladin took part in Operation Ironclad, the invasion of Vichy French Madagascar at Diego Suarez, an action fought to deny the strategically placed island to the Japanese and one for which she later carried a battle honour.

The Mediterranean: U-boats, Torpedo Boats and Sicily

By June 1942 Paladin had moved to Alexandria and into the thick of the Mediterranean war, escorting convoys and carrying out shore bombardments along a coastline that saw more than its share of both.

In February 1943, now under Lieutenant Commander Lawrence St George Rich, she helped run down and depth-charge the German submarine U-205 off Derna, with a South African Air Force Bisley bomber lending a hand from the air. A boarding party went across before the U-boat could be scuttled and recovered codebooks and other confidential documents, the unglamorous but often decisive work of naval intelligence gathering. Eight of U-205's crew were killed and 42 were pulled out as prisoners, and the wreck itself refused to go quietly even then, foundering a few hours later while under tow by the corvette HMS Gloxinia, a faintly farcical postscript to what had otherwise been a textbook interception.

That boarding party deserves its context, because Paladin's was not the first and the ship she would later hunt I-27 alongside had done the same thing four months earlier at a very much higher price. On 30 October 1942, off Port Said, HMS Petard and several other ships forced the German submarine U-559 to the surface. Lieutenant Anthony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier stripped off, swam across to her, climbed down inside and began breaking open cabinets, passing what they found up through the conning tower to Tommy Brown, a NAAFI canteen assistant who had come across in the boat and who turned out to be sixteen years old.

What they handed up was the Short Signal Book and the Short Weather Cipher. Then U-559 took a sudden rush of water and went down with Fasson and Grazier still inside her. Brown came out of the conning tower as she sank and lived. The other two were never recovered.

Those documents went to Bletchley Park, and on 13 December 1942 the codebreakers broke back into Shark, the four-rotor naval Enigma the U-boat arm had adopted the previous February and which had left Atlantic convoy traffic effectively blind for ten months. Fasson and Grazier were given posthumous George Crosses and Brown the George Medal. It is not a great exaggeration to say that two men who drowned inside a sinking submarine off Egypt did more for the Battle of the Atlantic than most squadrons managed in a year.

Which is the frame for what Paladin's people did to U-205 the following February. By then everybody in the Mediterranean understood exactly what a set of German codebooks was worth, and exactly what it had cost to find out, and a boarding party went across anyway before she could be scuttled.

Two months later, on 16 April 1943, Paladin helped sink the Italian torpedo boats Cigno and Cassiopea, and that summer she supported Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. When Italy changed sides that September, she served briefly as headquarters ship at Taranto during Operation Slapstick, before returning to bombardment duties off the Italian coast.

Rammed a Submarine, and Nearly Didn't Come Back

Paladin's most dramatic moment came in the Indian Ocean rather than the Mediterranean. On 12 February 1944, the Japanese submarine I-27 put two torpedoes into the troopship Khedive Ismail off the Maldives; the ship went down in around two minutes, and of the 1,511 service personnel aboard, including a large contingent of Royal Navy and WRNS ratings and a party of army nursing sisters, only 208 men and six women survived. It remains the Commonwealth's heaviest single loss of servicewomen of the entire war.

Paladin and her partner HMS Petard hunted I-27 down and, when she surfaced under gunfire, Paladin's captain, Lieutenant Edward Anthony Savile Bailey, turned in to ram her outright. A signal from Petard ordered him to break off, and he tried to haul away, but not quite fast enough: Paladin's side still caught the submarine's foreplane a glancing blow, tearing an eighty-foot gash below her own waterline in the process, a serious enough wound that would have sunk a less determined ship. I-27 herself proved almost as stubborn, shrugging off six torpedoes from Petard before a seventh, fired two and a half hours into the engagement, finally blew her in half with the loss of her entire crew.

She survived, was patched up, and went straight back to work supporting the Burma campaign through 1944 and 1945, taking part in landings at Cheduba Island, the assault on Ramree Island, the Rangoon landings of Operation Dracula, and mine-clearance work in Operation Livery as the war in the Far East wound towards its close.

For her wartime service she earned the battle honours Diego Suarez 1942, Mediterranean 1943, Sicily 1943 and Burma 1944 to 1945, a list that covers rather more ocean than most destroyers manage in a career.

From Reserve to Rebirth as a Frigate

Peace, when it came, was something of an anticlimax. Paladin arrived at Portsmouth in November 1945 and went into reserve, briefly serving as a submarine target ship in 1946 before being laid up at Harwich the following year.

Rather than being scrapped, as so many of her wartime contemporaries were, she was earmarked for a second life.

Refitted at Chatham in 1951, she then underwent a much more thorough transformation at Rosyth between 1953 and 1954, emerging as a Type 16 anti-submarine frigate under the new pennant F169, the first of her class to go through the conversion, which meant Rosyth's dockyard workers were still finding out what worked as they went.

Her old destroyer gun armament was stripped out in favour of a single 4-inch mount, a battery of 40mm Bofors guns, two Squid anti-submarine mortars and a quadruple torpedo tube mount, backed by a suite of modern radar and sonar sets, a fair reflection of how thoroughly naval priorities had shifted from surface gunnery to hunting submarines in the early Cold War.

Minelayer, Royal Escort, and Retirement

Paladin's frigate career took one more unexpected turn in 1957, when she was converted again, this time into a minelayer capable of carrying thirty mines.

She recommissioned in January 1958 as part of the Nore Local Squadron, spent time on fishery protection patrols off Iceland during the tense years of the early Cod Wars, and had at least one moment of ceremonial glamour, escorting the royal yacht Britannia to the Netherlands in March 1958, and, that May, firing a 21-gun salute as she and two other frigates relieved the French destroyer Jaureguiberry of escort duty outside French territorial waters, a small ceremonial handover of the kind that quietly defines what a minelayer converted from a wartime destroyer does with her retirement.

It was a fittingly varied final act for a ship that had already been a destroyer, a rescue vessel, a submarine-rammer, a frigate and now a minelayer, all under the same hull number.

The end, when it came, was unremarkable. Placed on the disposal list in 1961, Paladin was towed to Dunston on the Tyne, arriving on 22 October 1962 to be broken up by Clayton and Davie.

It was a quiet finish for a ship whose war record, from the survivors pulled from the Indian Ocean to the submarine she rammed and the campaigns from Madagascar to Burma, ranks among the more eventful of any Royal Navy destroyer of her generation, and whose postwar second act as a frigate and minelayer was, remarkably, almost as varied as the war that came before it.

Few ships get to be quite so many different things across one working life; fewer still survive an eighty-foot hole below the waterline to enjoy the privilege.