HMS Penn (G77): Camberwell's Destroyer, the Ohio into Grand Harbour and the Battle for Leros

Laid Down on Boxing Day

HMS Penn was one of the eight ships of the P Class, and was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at High Walker on the Tyne, where her keel was laid on Boxing Day 1939, the same day as those of her sisters Petard and Porcupine. She was launched on 12 February 1941 and commissioned on 10 February 1942, at a cost of £408,200 without her weapons and radios.

She was the second Penn, after a destroyer of the First World War, and her badge carried a black demi lion with a gold ducal coronet. In March 1942, after its Warship Week, the London borough of Camberwell adopted her.

Her captain was Lieutenant Commander James Swain, who had stood by her while she was fitting out and would command her for more than two and a half years. Her start was delayed by damage on her sea trials, and she did not reach Scapa Flow until 19 April 1942.

In June and July she screened the battleships Rodney and Nelson as they covered the troop convoys heading south.

Pedestal and the Ohio

In August 1942 she sailed with Operation Pedestal, the convoy of fourteen merchant ships that the Navy set out to fight through to Malta at almost any cost. Her place was in Force X, the cruisers and destroyers detailed to stay with the convoy all the way to Malta, alongside Kenya, Pathfinder, Ithuriel and the Hunt Class Bramham.

On 12 August, as the attacks from the air grew heavier, she and Bramham picked up survivors from the Empire Hope, bombed and set on fire. That night the Italian submarine Axum torpedoed two cruisers and the tanker Ohio, the ship whose 11,000 tons of fuel the island most needed, and in the confusion the convoy broke up.

The next morning Penn was astern of the main body with Bramham, and they picked up the crew of the American Santa Elisa, torpedoed and abandoned. By then the Ohio had been hit again and again, and her crew had been taken off. Penn tried to take her in tow, but the attempt had to be given up under air attack.

On the 14th, with the Ledbury and the minesweepers from Malta, Penn and Bramham tried again. The Ohio's back was broken and her decks were almost awash, so the two destroyers were lashed to her sides to keep her afloat and steer her, while the minesweeper Rye towed ahead.

Inching along at a few knots under air attack, they brought her into Grand Harbour on the morning of 15 August, the feast of Santa Marija, to the cheers of the crowds on the bastions. Her fuel kept Malta's aircraft flying through the autumn.

The Partridge and the Strathallan

In October Penn sailed for Gibraltar with Rodney and Panther for the landings in North Africa, and stayed in the western Mediterranean with the flotilla. On 18 December her sister Partridge was torpedoed by U-565 west of Oran, and Penn rescued 173 of her crew.

Three days later she was one of the destroyers that stood by the Strathallan, a troopship carrying some 5,000 soldiers and nurses, after a U-boat torpedoed her north of Oran; almost all of them were saved.

In January 1943 she carried a party of Wrens from Gibraltar to Algiers to join the Allied naval staff, and helped escort Illustrious home from Freetown. That spring she crossed to Londonderry to reinforce the Atlantic escorts, sailing in the 3rd Support Group with Panther, Offa, Oribi and Impulsive.

In April the group supported convoy HX 233 through the U-boats, and at the start of May, after a passage delayed by fog off Newfoundland, she joined the defence of convoy ONS 5 in the battle that marked the turning point of the Atlantic war.

Sicily, Calabria and Salerno

She went back to the Mediterranean in June 1943 with the battleships King George V and Howe, which lay south of Sardinia during the invasion of Sicily in case the Italian fleet came out.

In August, working from Bizerta, she fired on the Calabrian coast at Scalea with Panther and sinking barges in a supply convoy, and in September she saw the Italian fleet surrender at Taranto and screened Warspite and Valiant off Salerno. When Warspite was crippled by glider bombs on 16 September, Penn helped escort her to Malta.

Leros

In October 1943 Penn went east with Petard to join Panther in the Aegean, where British garrisons put ashore after the Italian armistice were fighting to hold the Dodecanese. Panther was sunk within days. Penn spent the next two months on night raids and supply runs, laying up by day in Turkish waters.

On the night of 17 October, off Kalymnos, her group sank the German submarine chaser UJ 2109, the former British minesweeper Widnes captured at Crete in 1941, and the next day she and Jervis finished off the wreck of the transport Trapani. She ran troops of the King's Royal Rifle Corps into Leros in early November, and on the 7th she and Pathfinder sent the German Q-ship GA 45 to the bottom off Crete.

When the Germans invaded Leros on 12 November, Penn went in with the Hunts Aldenham and Blencathra to support the garrison. On the 15th the three destroyers bombarded German troops on the neck of land at Alinda Bay in support of the Royal West Kents, and Penn was hit by fire from the shore, though with little damage.

The next day she lay up in Turkish waters and took on board wounded soldiers brought out from Leros in small craft. The island fell on 16 November, and in December Penn escorted the Greek destroyer Adrias, badly damaged by a mine, to Alexandria.

The Eastern Fleet

The new year took her east to Ceylon, where she arrived with Petard, Pathfinder and Paladin to join the Eastern Fleet. She screened the fleet for the carrier strikes on Sabang in April and on the oil refineries at Soerabaya in Java in May, refuelling in Exmouth Gulf in Western Australia on the way.

After a refit at Chatham at the end of 1944 she went back to Ceylon in March 1945 and joined the bombardment of Car Nicobar and Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. In May she was with the force at sea when destroyers sank the Japanese cruiser Haguro in the Malacca Strait, and in June she and Paladin sank a Japanese landing craft south-west of Sumatra.

In September she was at Penang for the re-occupation of Malaya.

After the war she was used as an air target ship at Singapore to train aircrew, and then as a target for the 4th Submarine Flotilla, before coming home at the end of 1947. She was used for damage control trials at Portland and was broken up at Troon in 1950.

She had earned eight battle honours: Malta Convoys 1942, for the Ohio above all, and Atlantic, North Africa, Mediterranean, Sicily, Salerno, Aegean and Burma.