HMS Quentin (G78): Southwark's Destroyer, U-162 off Trinidad, the Dessie and Force Q at Skerki Bank

A Q Class Destroyer from Cowes

HMS Quentin was a Q Class destroyer, one of the third flotilla of War Emergency destroyers ordered in the spring of 1940. Her builders were J.

Samuel White at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, who laid her keel on 25 September 1940, launched her on 5 November 1941 and completed her on 15 April 1942, at a cost of £436,844 before her guns and wireless were fitted. She was the first ship of the Royal Navy to carry the name.

She carried four 4.7 inch guns, a set of torpedo tubes and depth charges. Her badge was a black boar's head on a white field, and during Warship Week in March 1942, while she was still fitting out, she was adopted by the people of Southwark in London.

Her captain for the whole of her short life was Lieutenant Commander Allan Noble.

The photograph was taken in Plymouth Sound in 1942, with her anchor down and her cable running from the forecastle, in a bold scheme of disruptive camouflage. The day after she commissioned she sailed from Plymouth for the Clyde, and then worked up at Scapa Flow with the Home Fleet.

Troopships and Pedestal

Her first operation was a long one. In June 1942 she sailed as part of the escort of WS 19P, a convoy of more than twenty troopships carrying men round the Cape to the Middle East, with the battleships Nelson and Rodney, and came back north with them.

In August the same battleships, with Quentin and her flotilla mates Pathfinder and Penn, formed part of the screen for Operation Pedestal, the great convoy fought through to Malta. Quentin stayed with Force Z, the battleships and carriers that covered the convoy as far as the approaches to the Sicilian Narrows, and on 11 August she was in the screen when U-73 torpedoed and sank the carrier Eagle.

Through the next day the force was under air and submarine attack, and in the evening it turned back for Gibraltar while the convoy went on through the Narrows.

U-162 off Trinidad

From Gibraltar she was sent south to Freetown, and then out into the Atlantic to escort Queen Elizabeth, which was on her way to an American dockyard to finish repairs after the Italian human torpedo attack at Alexandria. Quentin, Pathfinder and the old destroyer Vimy were then detached across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, where the U-boats were sinking tankers in great numbers.

On 3 September 1942, north-east of Trinidad, the three destroyers found U-162, which had hit fourteen Allied ships on her three patrols, and sank her with depth charges. Only two of her men were lost. Forty-nine survivors, including her captain, Jürgen Wattenberg, were taken prisoner.

After refuelling at Port of Spain, Quentin and Pathfinder brought a group of seven tankers back across the Atlantic to Freetown.

Operation Torch

In October she came home to the Clyde and then sailed again for Gibraltar with the Home Fleet ships detached to Force H for Operation Torch, the Allied landings in French North Africa. On the way, in the early hours of 10 November, the destroyer Martin was torpedoed by U-431 and blew up with the loss of 161 men; Quentin picked up the only survivors, four officers and 59 ratings.

She then screened the cruisers Argonaut, Aurora, Charybdis and Scylla off Oran, and later in the month helped Milne, Quality and the Australian-manned Quiberon bring the troop convoy KMF 3 into Oran.

Force Q and the Dessie

On 18 November she joined Force Q, the cruisers Aurora, Argonaut and Sirius and the destroyers Quentin and Quiberon, based at Bone, the nearest Allied harbour to the sea route between Sicily and Tunisia. On 28 November an aircraft reported a submarine near the port.

Quentin sailed at noon, found the contact on her Asdic within the hour, and with Quiberon spent the afternoon attacking it. Her last pattern of ten depth charges went down at 1533. The submarine was the Italian Dessiè, and she was lost with all hands.

Coming back to Bone, Quentin found the harbour under heavy air attack. The destroyer Ithuriel had been badly damaged by bombs, and Quentin helped to tow her clear of the harbour and beach her.

Skerki Bank

At five in the afternoon of 1 December Force Q sailed again, under Rear Admiral Harcourt in Aurora, to catch an Axis convoy bound from Palermo for Bizerta: four merchant ships carrying troops, vehicles and ammunition, escorted by three Italian destroyers and two torpedo boats. Using their radar, the British ships found the convoy north of Cape Bon after midnight and fell on it in the dark near the Skerki Bank.

In less than an hour all four merchant ships and the destroyer Folgore were sunk and two more of the escorts badly damaged. Not one British ship was hit. It was one of the most complete night actions of the war, and the convoy's loss was a heavy blow to the Axis armies fighting in Tunisia.

The Loss of Quentin

The Luftwaffe came after Force Q at first light. At 0636 on 2 December, about fifty miles from the Algerian coast and in the half light before dawn, Quentin was hit.

Her company believed she had been struck by an aerial torpedo, and that is how the Admiralty recorded her loss, but the German air force reports studied since the war show that Junkers 88 bombers of KG 54 put a 500 kilogram bomb into her side and left her dead in the water, while the Italian torpedo bombers once credited with her did not arrive for another two hours. Either way the damage was fatal.

Quiberon came alongside under air attack, herself shaken by near misses, and took off the survivors, and Quentin sank four minutes after she was hit. Twenty of her company were killed.

She had been in commission for less than eight months. In that time she had helped sink a German and an Italian submarine, saved the survivors of Martin and shared in one of the Royal Navy's most crushing night victories.

Her battle honours were Atlantic 1942, Mediterranean 1942, Malta Convoys 1942 and North Africa 1942, and no ship has carried her name since.