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.

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 she helped detect and depth-charge the German submarine U-205; a boarding party went across before the U-boat sank and recovered codebooks, the unglamorous but often decisive work of naval intelligence gathering. 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. In February 1944, after the Japanese submarine I-27 had sunk the troopship Khedive Ismail with heavy loss of life, Paladin attempted to ram the submarine to finish her off. The manoeuvre worked, after a fashion: I-27 was destroyed, but Paladin came away with an eighty-foot gash torn in her own hull, a serious enough wound that would have sunk a less determined ship. 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. 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 firing a 21-gun salute that May. 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.