HMS Petard (G56): The Enigma from U-559, the Uarsciek and I-27, and Three Axis Navies

Persistent Becomes Petard

HMS Petard came from the Vickers-Armstrongs order book for the P Class in October 1939 and laid down at the High Walker yard on Boxing Day that year, alongside her sisters Penn and Porcupine. She was to have been called Persistent, but the flotilla's names were changed so that all eight began with P, and she was launched as Petard on 27 March 1941.

A petard was a small bomb used to blow in a gate, and the first ship of the name had been a destroyer at Jutland. She was completed on 15 June 1942 for £408,200, not counting her guns, and the people of Paddington in London adopted her after their Warship Week.

Her first captain was Lieutenant Commander Mark Thornton. After working up at Scapa Flow she sailed at the end of July 1942 with the troop convoy WS 21, all the way round the Cape of Good Hope with the old cruiser Hawkins, and up the east coast of Africa to Aden and Suez.

She reached Alexandria on 22 September and joined the 12th Destroyer Flotilla of the Mediterranean Fleet, a month before the Battle of El Alamein.

U-559

On 30 October 1942 an RAF Wellesley of No. 47 Squadron reported a U-boat about seventy miles north of the Nile Delta, and Petard sailed from Port Said with the destroyer Pakenham and the Hunts Dulverton and Hurworth to relieve the destroyer Hero, which had made contact.

The five ships hunted U-559 with depth charges through the afternoon and evening, and after nightfall, badly damaged, she was forced to the surface close to Petard. The destroyer opened fire with her guns, and the U-boat's crew abandoned ship. They had opened the vents, and she was going down.

Petard's first lieutenant, Lieutenant Tony Fasson, and Able Seaman Colin Grazier stripped off, swam across and climbed down through the conning tower into the flooding U-boat. In the darkness and the rising water they passed up code books, documents and parts of the Enigma machine to Tommy Brown, a canteen assistant of the NAAFI who had followed them across.

Brown was sixteen and had lied about his age to go to sea. He made three trips from the conning tower to the ship's whaler alongside, carrying the papers to safety. Then U-559 suddenly sank, taking Fasson and Grazier down with her. Brown escaped as she went.

The papers were rushed to Haifa and then to Bletchley Park. Among them were the current editions of the U-boats' short weather cipher and short signal books, and they helped the codebreakers break back into the U-boat Enigma at the end of 1942, after ten months in which they had been unable to read it.

With the U-boat signals readable again, the Admiralty could route the Atlantic convoys of 1943 away from the waiting packs, and many thousands of seamen's lives were saved. Fasson and Grazier were awarded the George Cross after their deaths, and Brown the George Medal.

He came home and was killed in a fire at his family's home in North Shields in 1945.

Malta and the Uarsciek

In November Petard was with the escort of convoy MW 13 to Malta, the first in many months to reach the island without loss, and when the cruiser Arethusa was hit by an aerial torpedo and set on fire, Petard took her in tow stern first and brought her back towards Alexandria.

In December she escorted MW 14, the last of the Malta relief convoys, and on 15 December, south of Malta, with the Greek destroyer Vasilissa Olga, she depth charged the Italian submarine Uarsciek to the surface. Petard damaged her bow colliding with the submarine, but her boarding party went across and recovered papers that included details of Italian minefields.

The submarine sank under tow. Petard now had a German and an Italian submarine to her credit.

The Strike Force

In the spring of 1943, under Lieutenant Commander Rupert Egan, she was based at Malta with the destroyers hunting the Axis supply convoys to Tunisia. On 30 April she and Nubian sank the transport Fauna, and on 4 May, off Kelibia, with Nubian and Paladin, she sank the Italian torpedo boat Perseo and the transport Campobasso.

In May she patrolled off Cape Bon to stop the German and Italian armies escaping from Tunisia, and in June she bombarded Pantelleria before its surrender. On 17 July, a week into the invasion of Sicily, she carried General Eisenhower to see the beaches, and later that day she was with Warspite when the old battleship bombarded Catania.

Off Salerno on 15 September she was hit by a shell from the barrage put up by the Allied ships against German aircraft, and two of her company were killed. In October she went to the Aegean.

On 9 October she was with the cruiser Carlisle and her sister Panther when Stukas sank Panther and crippled Carlisle off Scarpanto, and she searched for Panther's survivors. On 24 October, carrying troops for Leros, she was in company with Eclipse when Eclipse hit a mine off Kalymnos and sank, and Petard picked up 42 survivors.

On 11 November she towed the Hunt Class Rockwood, crippled by a German glider bomb, into Turkish waters.

I-27

In January 1944 Petard went east with Penn, Paladin and Pathfinder to join the Eastern Fleet. On 5 February she sailed from Kilindini in East Africa with the convoy KR 8, five troopships bound for Colombo, escorted by Hawkins and Paladin.

On 12 February, near the Maldives, the Japanese submarine I-27 torpedoed the troopship Khedive Ismail, which was carrying army and naval personnel, among them nurses and Wrens. She sank in about two minutes, and almost 1,300 people died.

Egan had the hardest decision any captain could face. The submarine was beneath the survivors, and the rules required him to attack. Petard's depth charges brought I-27 to the surface, but they killed some of the people in the water.

The submarine was engaged by both destroyers' guns; Paladin, ordered to ram, was told too late not to and was badly holed by the submarine's hydroplane. Her gunfire could not finish the submarine off, so Petard fired her torpedoes. Six missed. The seventh hit, and I-27 blew up and sank.

Petard then took Paladin in tow to Addu Atoll. She was now the only Allied warship to have sunk a German, an Italian and a Japanese submarine.

A Type 16 Frigate

After a long refit at Portsmouth, in which she was given twin 4 inch mountings and a lattice mast, she went back east in 1945 and was at Penang when the Japanese surrendered there on 2 September and at the landings on the Morib beaches in Malaya a week later. She came home in May 1946 and was laid up.

In 1953 she was taken in hand at Belfast and rebuilt as a Type 16 anti-submarine frigate, a limited and relatively cheap conversion for anti-submarine work, but she spent most of the next years in reserve, apart from a spell in the local flotilla at Plymouth in 1960 and 1961. She was sold in May 1967 and broken up at Bo'ness on the Firth of Forth.

Her battle honours were Mediterranean 1942-43, Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943 and Aegean 1943, but she is remembered above all for the night off Port Said when two of her men gave their lives for a handful of code books.