HMS Quail (G45): The Destroyer That Fought On for Six Months After She Was Mined

A Destroyer Laid Down at Real Expense

HMS Quail was a Q-class destroyer, ordered from Hawthorn Leslie's yard at Hebburn on 2 April 1940 at a cost of £436,576, laid down on 6 November 1940, launched in June 1942, and commissioned on 7 January 1943 under Lieutenant Commander Robert Fergus Jenks, who had taken command the previous November and would remain her captain for almost the whole of her short operational life. Her motto, rather aptly given what was coming, was "I will be prompt at a signal".

After working-up exercises at Scapa Flow, she was quickly put to serious use, joining convoy WS27 out of the Clyde on 27 February alongside the battleship Malaya and four other destroyers, one portion of the convoy bound for the Middle East around the Cape of Good Hope, the other, KMF10A, for the Mediterranean via Gibraltar, before detaching at Freetown in March for further escort work down to Durban and back.

Screening the Fleet at Sicily

By June 1943, Quail had been assigned to support Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, taking on the demanding job of screening some of the Royal Navy's most valuable capital ships, including the battleships Nelson, Rodney, Warspite and Valiant, along with accompanying carriers and cruisers, against submarine and air attack.

She sailed from Malta on 8 July as part of that screen, and once the Sicily landings were secured she stayed just as busy: bombarding the Italian mainland from the Straits of Messina on 21 August, screening the preliminary bombardment for the Calabrian landings of Operation Baytown on 31 August, joining the bombardment south of Reggio on 2 September, and screening throughout the Salerno landings of Operation Avalanche from 9 to 16 September, when German resistance there proved far stiffer than the planners had hoped. By October she was based at Bari, patrolling the Adriatic, and on 22 October she intercepted and captured an enemy merchant ship, a small, satisfying win not long before her luck ran out.

Struck by a Mine off Bari

Quail's war changed abruptly on 15 November 1943, when, while on patrol in the Adriatic, she struck a mine from a barrage the German submarine U-453 had laid off Bari on 25 October, three weeks earlier almost to the day. The blast tore into her stern, flooding it so badly that her after gun was blown clean off its mounting, and the explosion killed one member of her crew, Donald Murray, from Tolsta on the Isle of Lewis, whose name is still recorded by his home island's own historical society. Jenks stayed in command through the worst of it, only handing Quail over on 8 December once the immediate crisis had passed.

She had in fact been beached south of Bari the day after the explosion, on 16 November, to stop her sinking outright and to let salvage work begin, a stark reminder of just how much of the Mediterranean and Adriatic remained remarkably dangerous water even as Allied forces steadily gained the upper hand ashore.

And then something happened a few miles up the coast that she had a grandstand view of and no part in. Quail lay beached south of Bari through the second half of November, waiting for the tow into the harbour that would let temporary repairs start. On the evening of 2 December 1943 something over a hundred German bombers came in low over the town and sank twenty-eight ships in the port in about half an hour. One of them, the American Liberty ship John Harvey, was carrying two thousand mustard gas bombs that nobody in Bari had been told about, and the casualties from that went on mounting for weeks.

It has been called a second Pearl Harbor, and the full story, including the extraordinary medical consequence that came out of it, is told in the article on HMS St Austell Bay (K634). Quail, already mined and aground and useless, was one of very few ships in the area that night that could not be hurt any further. She was towed into what was left of the harbour later that month.

Six Months of Repairs, and a Final Voyage

What followed was a long, difficult effort to save the ship. Temporary repairs were carried out at Bari between December 1943 and April 1944, after which Quail was moved to Taranto for further work.

In May 1944 she was finally taken under tow, bound for the more substantial repair facilities at Malta where it was hoped she might be restored to full service.

She never arrived. On 18 May 1944, while still under tow, Quail capsized and sank in the Gulf of Taranto, a quiet, almost anticlimactic end for a ship that had survived the initial mining only to lose her final fight against accumulated damage and the strain of a long tow.

The submarine that killed her did not last much longer, and the timing is almost impertinent. U-453 had laid that barrage off Bari on 25 October 1943 and gone on about her business. On 21 May 1944, three days after Quail turned over and went down in the Gulf of Taranto, the destroyers HMS Termagant (R89), HMS Tenacious and the escort destroyer HMS Liddesdale caught her in the Ionian Sea north-east of Cape Spartivento and depth-charged her to the surface.

Almost every man aboard got out alive, which is not how these things usually ended. So the ledger for one mine, laid on a night in October 1943 by a boat that never saw what it hit, reads: one British destroyer sunk after six months of trying to save her, one of her crew killed outright, and a German submarine crew who all went home. Mine warfare does not do proportion.

Found Again, Decades Later

HMS Quail's wreck lay undisturbed on the seabed for nearly sixty years before being located by an Italian diving team on 5 June 2002, her 358-foot hull resting largely intact at a depth of around 90 metres in the Gulf of Taranto, a tangible physical link to a destroyer whose war had taken her from screening battleships off Sicily to a slow, unsuccessful fight to survive her own battle damage.

A Ship That Refused to Go Quietly

There is something truly admirable about a crew and a salvage effort that kept HMS Quail afloat and under repair for six months after a mine strike that might easily have sunk her outright. It rather undercuts her motto, "I will be prompt at a signal", since nothing about those six months in Bari and Taranto could be called prompt, but stubbornness is its own kind of virtue in a warship.

Her eventual loss under tow was a disappointment rather than a defeat, and her earlier service screening some of the Royal Navy's most important ships through one of the war's pivotal invasions stands as a solid, if now largely forgotten, contribution to the Mediterranean campaign.