HMS Panther (G41): Poplar's Destroyer, the Easter Sunday Survivors, Madagascar and a Minute off Scarpanto

A Govan Destroyer for Poplar

HMS Panther was one of the eight destroyers of the P Class, the 2nd Emergency Flotilla, ordered in October 1939. The P Class were built to the same hull as the O Class, but because the Navy was desperately short of anti-aircraft weapons, they were given single 4 inch high-angle guns in place of the usual 4.7s, along with a four-barrelled pom-pom and torpedo tubes.

Panther was laid down by Fairfield at Govan on 15 July 1940, launched on 28 May 1941 and completed on 12 December 1941, at a cost of £404,046 before the Admiralty fitted her weapons and radios.

She was the fifth Panther. The first was a fourth rate of 1703 which won the Navy's oldest honour in the name, Velez Malaga in 1704, and the last before her had been a destroyer sold in 1920. Her badge shows a panther over waves of white and blue.

In March 1942 the people of Poplar in East London adopted her after their Warship Week. Her captain, from her commissioning to the end, was Lieutenant Commander Robert Jocelyn, who held the courtesy title of Viscount Jocelyn.

To Iceland

She worked up at Scapa Flow over Christmas 1941, and on 17 January 1942, with the German battleship Tirpitz reported to be at sea, she sailed with King George V, Rodney, the carrier Victorious and their screen for Hvalfjord in Iceland, ready to meet a breakout into the Atlantic. This photograph shows her arriving there.

The Tirpitz had in fact gone to Trondheim, where she was to lie for most of the war as a threat to the Arctic convoys.

Easter Sunday in the Indian Ocean

In February she escorted the troop convoy WS 16 south with the battleship Malaya and the carrier Eagle, calling at Freetown and St Helena, and in March she brought the new carrier Formidable from Simonstown to Ceylon with her sister Paladin. She joined Admiral Somerville's Eastern Fleet at Colombo on 24 March, just as the Japanese carrier fleet that had attacked Pearl Harbor was moving into the Indian Ocean.

On Easter Sunday, 5 April 1942, Japanese carrier aircraft found the heavy cruisers Dorsetshire and Cornwall south-west of Ceylon and sank them both in minutes. Their survivors spent more than a day in the sea before the cruiser Enterprise, Paladin and Panther found them on the evening of the 6th and picked up more than 1,100 men.

The fleet withdrew to its secret base at Addu Atoll and then to the coast of East Africa.

The Monge

Within a month Panther was part of the invasion of Vichy French Madagascar, Operation Ironclad, sailing from Durban with the carrier Indomitable and Paladin. She escorted the assault convoy into Courrier Bay on 5 May and two days later joined the battleship Ramillies in bombarding the French defences of Diego Suarez, which surrendered soon afterwards.

Early on 8 May, as Indomitable approached the harbour, the French submarine Monge fired a torpedo at her. It missed, and Panther and the destroyer Active hunted the submarine down with depth charges and sank her with all hands.

A Near Miss off Algeria

She came home for a refit on the Clyde and in October sailed for Gibraltar with Rodney and her sister Penn for the landings in North Africa. On 7 November, the day before the landings, Force H was attacked by aircraft off the Algerian coast and a bomb burst close alongside Panther.

Three of her company were killed and ten wounded, fires broke out and her fuel was contaminated by sea water. Limping back towards Gibraltar, at first at only six knots, she sighted a submarine, which fired two torpedoes at her without being seen. She reached Gibraltar on the 8th and was docked for repair.

By December she was back with the flotilla at Oran, and on 21 December, when the troopship Strathallan was torpedoed off the Algerian coast with about 5,000 people aboard, she and Pathfinder took off around 2,000 soldiers and nurses and landed them at Oran. In January 1943 she helped escort the cruiser Ajax, badly damaged by bombs at Bone, to Algiers in tow, and then brought Illustrious home from Freetown.

ONS 5, Sicily and Salerno

In the spring of 1943 she was lent to the Western Approaches, in the 3rd Support Group with Penn, Oribi and Offa, and in late April and early May she helped fight convoys HX 233 and ONS 5 through the U-boat packs in the battles that broke the U-boat offensive in the North Atlantic. Then she went back to the Mediterranean in the screen of Howe and King George V.

During the invasion of Sicily in July the two battleships lay south of Sardinia as a reserve in case the Italian fleet came out, and in August Panther joined the cruisers bombarding the coast of Calabria, shelling Scalea on 14 August with Penn and sinking barges in a convoy on the 19th.

In September she was in the screen when the battleships covered the landing at Taranto and saw the surrendering Italian fleet come in, and on 15 September she screened Warspite and Valiant as they bombarded the German counter-attack at Salerno. The next day Warspite was hit by German glider bombs, and Panther was one of the destroyers that escorted her, in tow of American tugs, to Malta.

Nine October 1943

When Italy surrendered, British forces landed on Kos, Leros and the other Italian-held islands of the Dodecanese, but the Germans reacted quickly, retaking Kos on 3 October. The Royal Navy's destroyers and cruisers, operating far beyond effective fighter cover, tried to stop the German invasion convoys.

On 7 October Panther sailed from Alexandria with the anti-aircraft cruiser Carlisle and her sister Petard to sweep through the Scarpanto Strait, and after a night patrol off Kos they withdrew south on the morning of the 9th.

South of the Scarpanto Strait they were caught by a large formation of Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers. Panther was hit by two bombs and near-missed by four more. She broke in two and sank in less than a minute, east of Karpathos.

Carlisle was hit and disabled and was towed back to Alexandria by the Hunt Rockwood, never to be repaired. Mason gives Panther's dead as 33; the naval casualty list for the day names 36 of her company missing, among them her engineer officer, an Australian reservist and a Maltese stoker.

Viscount Jocelyn survived, and in 1944 he took command of the Q Class destroyer Quality in the Eastern Fleet. Panther had been in commission for less than two years, and in that time she had won seven battle honours, from Diego Suarez to the Aegean.