HMS Punjabi (G21): Six Hits at Narvik and a Collision in the Arctic Fog

Built at Greenock

HMS Punjabi was ordered from Scotts at Greenock on 19 June 1936, one of the sixteen Tribal Class destroyers the Royal Navy built in the late 1930s, with her sister Matabele ordered from the same yard on the same day. The Tribals were big ships for destroyers, designed to fight other destroyers with guns rather than to make torpedo attacks: eight 4.7 inch guns in four twin mountings, only four torpedo tubes, and 36 knots.

Punjabi was laid down on 1 October 1936, launched on 18 December 1937 and completed on 29 March 1939, at a contract price of £343,005 before the Admiralty added her guns and wireless. She was the first and only ship of the name, which means a man of the Punjab, and her badge was the head of a soldier of the Punjab Regiment.

She was a Devonport ship, and her first captain was Commander John Lean.

She had barely finished working up with the Home Fleet's Tribal flotilla when, on 1 June 1939, she was sent to Liverpool Bay to join the ships trying to save the new submarine Thetis, which had failed to surface on her trials. The attempt failed and 99 men died.

The First Winter

When war came she was screening the Home Fleet in the North Sea and the North Western Approaches through some of the worst weather the Tribals ever met. On 14 September 1939 she and Tartar were detached at 32 knots from the carrier Ark Royal's group to the steamer Fanad Head, which had signalled that she was being attacked by a U-boat west of the Hebrides.

Two of Ark Royal's Skuas crashed in the attack on the submarine, U-30, which got away after sinking the ship. In October she tried and failed to salvage a German flying boat brought down at sea, and on 2 December she damaged her bows in a collision with the steamer Lairdscrest south of Holy Island and spent the winter under repair at Govan.

In March 1940 she escorted the cruiser Norfolk, damaged by bombs at Scapa Flow, round to the Clyde.

Narvik

In April 1940 the Germans invaded Norway. On 8 April Punjabi was one of the destroyers sent with the battlecruiser Repulse and the cruiser Penelope to help Glowworm, which had signalled that she was in action with a heavy German ship; they were far too late, for Glowworm had already rammed the cruiser Admiral Hipper and gone down.

On 10 April, the day Hunter and Hardy were lost in the First Battle of Narvik, Punjabi was patrolling the approaches with Penelope and Kimberley, and that night two of the surviving German destroyers tried to slip out of the fjord past them before turning back.

Three days later the battleship Warspite led nine destroyers up the Ofotfjord to finish the job, and Punjabi was one of them, alongside her sisters Bedouin, Eskimo and Cossack. In the fight in the narrow waters off Narvik she was hit six times by German destroyer gunfire and disabled, and had to drop out of the fight.

Within an hour her men had her going again and she came back into the battle. Seven of her ship's company were killed and another died of his wounds the next day. All eight German destroyers in the fjord were sunk or scuttled that afternoon.

Punjabi was patched up at Skelfjord in the Lofotens, escorted a tanker home, and went into Devonport for repairs, where one of her twin 4.7 inch mountings was replaced by a twin 4 inch anti-aircraft gun. Her pennant number changed at the same time from F21 to G21.

St Nazaire and the Autumn of 1940

She came out in time for the evacuation of the last British, Polish and civilian refugees from western France in Operation Aerial, going in to St Nazaire on 17 June 1940 and returning on 20 June to bring out Polish troops.

In August she helped bring Hood, Valiant and the carrier Argus home from Gibraltar, and on 1 September she joined the screen that brought the new cruiser Fiji home after she had been torpedoed by U-32 north of Rockall.

On 24 October, patrolling off the Norwegian coast with Somali and Matabele, she helped catch and sink the German weather ship WBS 5, the former trawler Adolf Vinnen, on her way home from the waters north of Iceland; the sinking is often credited to the submarine Seawolf, wrongly.

In November, after the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer had sunk the Jervis Bay and five ships of her convoy, Punjabi was with Hood and the cruisers Naiad and Phoebe as they patrolled off Brest and Lorient in case the raider tried to reach a French port.

In February 1941 Commander Stuart Buss took over, and in March she was in the covering force for the commando raid on the Lofoten Islands, then went into Rosyth for a refit that gave her an early air warning radar set.

The Bismarck and Spitsbergen

In May 1941 she sailed from Scapa Flow in the screen of King George V and the carrier Victorious when the Bismarck broke out. Days of high speed steaming drained the destroyers' tanks, and on 25 May she had to go into Hvalfjord to refuel, so she was not there for the end on 27 May.

In late July she and Tartar screened the cruisers Aurora and Nigeria on a trip to see whether Spitsbergen could be used as a refuelling base for the Arctic convoys; on the way they took off the Norwegians on Bear Island and then swept down the Norwegian coast.

At the end of August she was in Operation Strength, escorting the carrier Argus with Matabele, Somali and the cruiser Shropshire as they carried the Hurricanes and men of an RAF wing to North Russia. Punjabi herself carried RAF personnel.

She lost touch with the others in thick fog off Iceland, found her own way into Seidisfjord to refuel and raced to catch up, and on 7 September the Hurricanes were flown off for the airfield at Vaenga near Murmansk, where their pilots flew alongside the Russians and taught Russian pilots to fly them.

She came home to Scapa on 15 September and spent the autumn in the screen of Victorious as her aircraft struck at shipping off Norway. The photograph at the top of this page was taken in October 1941 as she came into Hvalfjord, from the deck of Bedouin.

The Arctic, 1942

After a winter refit on the Tyne, under Lieutenant Commander John Waldegrave, she was straight back with the Home Fleet. In February 1942 she was with Victorious hunting the German cruiser Prinz Eugen off Norway, and in March she was in the distant cover for the convoys PQ 12 and QP 8 when the battleship Tirpitz came out to attack them.

The Tirpitz turned back, Victorious's torpedo bombers missed her, and Punjabi, searching for the German ships off Bodø, had to come home with her steering gear giving trouble. In April she was in the escort of the homeward convoy QP 10 from Murmansk, under attack from German bombers and U-boats, and brought it in to Reykjavik on 21 April.

The Fog

On 29 April 1942 she sailed from Hvalfjord in the screen of the distant covering force for convoy PQ 15: King George V, the American battleship Washington, Victorious and a mixed force of British and American cruisers and destroyers. On 1 May, in the Norwegian Sea, the visibility suddenly closed in to a thick fog.

Punjabi turned across the battleship's path, and King George V, steaming at speed, struck her on the port side just abaft the engine room and cut her in two.

The after part of the ship sank almost at once. As it went down her ready depth charges exploded, killing men in the water and damaging the battleship's own hull below the waterline.

The fore part stayed afloat a little longer, and the destroyers Martin and Marne came alongside and took off 169 of her men, while another 40 were picked up from the sea. Forty nine were killed.

The survivors went back from Iceland to Scapa Flow in King George V, the ship that had sunk them, with a great gash in her bow. The day after Punjabi went down, the cruiser Edinburgh, crippled defending the returning convoy QP 11, was sunk by her own escorts in the Barents Sea.

Her Sisters

Of the sixteen Tribals built for the Royal Navy, twelve were lost. Afridi and Gurkha went off Norway in 1940, Mashona the day after the Bismarck was sunk, and Matabele, built alongside Punjabi at Greenock, was torpedoed in the Arctic in January 1942 with only two survivors, three and a half months before her sister.

Bedouin, the ship from which the photograph was taken, was sunk in the Mediterranean in June 1942 defending the Harpoon convoy to Malta. The surviving prints of the class are in the Tribal Class destroyers collection.