HMS Pathfinder (G10): Pedestal, the Cobalto, U-162 off Trinidad and a Bomb off Ramree Island

Onslaught Renamed

HMS Pathfinder was a P Class destroyer, one of two of the flotilla given to the Hawthorn Leslie yard at Hebburn in October 1939. She was to have been called Onslaught, but the Admiralty tidied up the names of the 2nd Emergency Flotilla so that all eight began with P, and she became Pathfinder instead, while the name Onslaught passed to one of the O Class.

She was laid down on 5 March 1940, launched on 10 April 1941 and completed on 13 April 1942 at a cost of £410,905, without her guns and radios. In March 1942 the people of Kensington in London adopted her.

She was the second Pathfinder. The first, a scout cruiser, has a grim place in history: on 5 September 1914, off St Abb's Head, she became the first warship ever sunk by a self-propelled torpedo fired from a submarine, U-21. The new ship's badge shows a bloodhound.

Her captain was Commander Edward Gibbs, already a holder of the DSO. Her start was not lucky.

On her way north to Scapa Flow she collided with the fleet auxiliary Channel Fisher and had to go to Devonport for repair, where she was fitted with high-frequency direction finding gear to take bearings on U-boat radio signals, and during her work-up her own depth charges opened up splits in her internal bulkheads, which were blamed on poor welding at the yard.

Pedestal

In August 1942 she sailed with the great Malta convoy of Operation Pedestal, fourteen merchant ships escorted by most of the fleet. She was in Force X, the close escort with the cruisers Cairo, Kenya, Nigeria and Manchester and the destroyers Penn, Ithuriel, Bramham and others, which was to take the merchant ships right through the Sicilian Narrows.

The carrier Eagle was sunk by U-73 on the 11th, and in the long day of air attacks that followed her boats picked up a Hurricane pilot from the carrier Indomitable and an Italian airman shot down over the convoy. On the 12th Pathfinder and Ithuriel depth charged the Italian submarine Cobalto and forced her to the surface, where Ithuriel rammed and sank her.

That evening, as the convoy entered the Narrows, the Italian submarine Axum hit the cruisers Cairo and Nigeria and the tanker Ohio with a single salvo of torpedoes. Cairo could not be saved, and Pathfinder sank her with a torpedo.

Through the night Italian and German motor torpedo boats attacked again and again, and on the 13th Pathfinder picked up about 150 survivors of the cruiser Manchester off the Tunisian coast. When the escort turned back, Penn, Bramham and the minesweepers stayed with the surviving merchant ships; five of the fourteen reached Malta, among them the Ohio, whose fuel kept the island fighting.

U-162

At the end of August she, the new Q Class destroyer Quentin and the old destroyer Vimy escorted the battleship Queen Elizabeth, damaged by Italian frogmen at Alexandria, across the Atlantic on her way to Norfolk, Virginia, for repair. On 3 September, off Trinidad, U-162 fired torpedoes at the three destroyers and missed.

After a long hunt they forced her up with depth charges, and according to Mason Vimy finished her off by ramming. Forty-nine of her crew were rescued, and Pathfinder landed the prisoners at Port of Spain the next day.

North Africa and the Atlantic

She was with the Eastern Task Force for the landings at Algiers in November 1942, and stayed at Oran on escort and patrol work. On 2 December she towed the minelayer Manxman, torpedoed off the coast, into Oran, and on 21 December, with Panther, she took about 2,000 soldiers and nurses off the burning troopship Strathallan, torpedoed with about 5,000 people aboard.

In January 1943 she helped bring Illustrious home from Freetown.

That spring she joined the 5th Escort Group in the Western Approaches with the escort carrier Biter and the destroyers Obdurate and Opportune. On 25 April, supporting convoy ONS 4, a Swordfish from Biter found U-203 on the surface, and Pathfinder sank her with depth charges.

In May the group went to the help of the convoys HX 237 and SC 129, both of which came through with light losses while several of the attacking U-boats were sunk.

Sicily, Salerno and the Aegean

She went back to the Mediterranean in the screen of the battleships King George V and Howe for the invasion of Sicily, and during the operations she struck a submerged rock and had to go to Alexandria for a new port propeller.

In August she bombarded the Italian coast near Naples and in Calabria with the cruisers, and in September she was off Salerno and with the escort for the surrendered Italian battleships on their way from Taranto to Malta.

In October 1943 she was sent to the Aegean, where the Germans were retaking the Dodecanese islands from the British garrisons that had landed after the Italian surrender. She escorted the cruisers sweeping for invasion convoys, and ran troops and stores into Leros by night, lying up by day in the Gulf of Doris inside Turkish waters to keep out of reach of the bombers.

On 18 October she landed stores and men at Alinda Bay on Leros, and on the 21st she sailed from Alexandria with Jervis, the Hunt Hurworth and the Greek destroyer Adrias, all crowded with troops and stores for the garrison. On the night of the 22nd, while Pathfinder and Jervis went on to Leros, Hurworth and Adrias were sent off on a diversion and ran into a minefield off Kalymnos.

Hurworth sank, and Adrias was badly damaged. On 3 November she carried soldiers of the King's Royal Rifle Corps from Alexandria to Leros, with so little room on board that their vehicles and Bren carriers had to be left behind.

On 7 November, with Penn, she sank the German decoy ship GA 45 off Crete, and at the end of the month she escorted the cruiser Birmingham, torpedoed off Cyrenaica, back to Alexandria.

Ramree Island

In January 1944 Pathfinder went east with Penn, Petard and Paladin to join the Eastern Fleet at Trincomalee, and spent the year screening the fleet and escorting convoys across the Indian Ocean. Lieutenant Thomas Hallifax took command in December 1943.

At the end of 1944 she joined the naval forces supporting the Fourteenth Army's advance down the Arakan coast of Burma. She covered the landings at Akyab in early January 1945, bombarded the Japanese positions during the assault on Ramree Island on 21 January, and in February landed troops on the island's south-east coast and towed the Australian-manned destroyer Nepal off a sandbank.

On 11 February, off the mouth of a river south of Akyab, Japanese aircraft attacked her and a bomb burst close alongside. The explosion wrecked her starboard engine, damaged her hull and caused heavy leaks and flooding.

Her crew patched her up, and she made Colombo on one engine, but when she was docked and surveyed she was declared a constructive total loss. She was brought home in the summer, laid up at Dartmouth and used as a bombing target in 1947 and 1948, and in November 1948 she arrived at Milford Haven to be broken up.

Her seven battle honours ran from Atlantic 1942-43 and Malta Convoys 1942 to Aegean 1943 and Burma 1944-45.