HMS Teazer (F23): From the Aegean to Tokyo Bay, and a Starring Film Role

Into the Mediterranean

HMS Teazer completed builder's trials in September 1943 and joined the 24th Destroyer Flotilla, a T-class destroyer that, after working-up exercises at Scapa Flow, deployed to the Mediterranean, where she supported British X Corps operations in the Minturno sector during the hard-fought Italian campaign of November 1943.

Sinking a Submarine Chaser in the Aegean

In July 1944, Teazer came under American command to support the Operation Dragoon landings in southern France, before returning to the eastern Mediterranean, where during the Allied withdrawal from the Aegean Sea that year she sank the transport ship KT Erpel and the submarine chaser UJ2171 near Cape Spatha, a notably productive combat record for a single destroyer in a theatre often overshadowed by the fighting further west.

The Forgotten War in the Aegean

Those two sinkings come out of a campaign almost nobody has heard of, and it is worth setting out. When Italy changed sides in September 1943 the Germans moved fast to take over the Italian garrisons in the Dodecanese and on Crete, and a British attempt to get there first ended in the disaster at Leros. That left a German position in the eastern Mediterranean which could not be reached by land at all: dozens of islands, each with a garrison, each of which had to be fed, supplied and eventually taken off entirely by sea.

What that produced was a small, vicious and very unglamorous naval war fought almost entirely at night in small ships. The Germans moved their traffic in caiques, requisitioned schooners, ferry barges and converted trawlers, hugging the coast and hiding up in coves by day; the Royal Navy sent destroyers, motor torpedo boats and gunboats in among the islands to find them, in confined water, largely uncharted, within range of shore batteries and airfields. KT Erpel was one of those ferry transports and UJ2171 a converted submarine chaser, and Cape Spatha is the north-western tip of Crete. HMS Termagant (R89) describes the same campaign from another T-class destroyer, and it gives a fair idea of how strange the whole business was.

Screening Carriers Off Japan

Following a refit, Teazer joined Task Force 57 and later Task Force 37 in May 1945, providing escort for the Royal Navy carriers conducting air raids on the Japanese home islands, dangerous work at the very sharp end of the Pacific War's final months. She was present in Tokyo Bay for the formal Japanese surrender ceremony on 2 September 1945, a historic conclusion to her wartime service.

A New Role as a Training Frigate

After several years in reserve at Devonport, Teazer was converted between 1953 and 1954 by Mountstuart Dry Docks in Cardiff into a Type 16 fast anti-submarine frigate, and by January 1959 had taken her place in the 2nd Training Squadron, replacing HMS Grenville in training the next generation of Royal Navy sailors.

The conversion she came back as is worth a word too. Britain finished the war with a large number of emergency-programme destroyers that were too new to scrap and too lightly built to modernise properly, and the Soviet submarine fleet that had to be countered was growing fast. The answer was two conversions: the Type 15, an expensive full rebuild with a new superstructure, and the Type 16, a cheap utility job that kept most of the original ship and simply stripped out the torpedo tubes and half the guns to make room for anti-submarine mortars. Teazer is a Type 16, and what that involved is set out in HMS Paladin (F169).

A Star of Stage and Screen

In a truly unusual footnote to her career, Teazer appeared in the 1957 film Yangtse Incident, dramatising the real-life escape of HMS Amethyst from Chinese Communist forces, and was later referenced in the television series Doctor Who as the assigned vessel of the companion character Ben Jackson, a small but charming piece of cultural trivia for a working Royal Navy frigate.

The Film That Sank Its Own Star

The film is worth more than a footnote, because what happened during the making of it is better than anything in the script. Yangtse Incident was shot in 1956 with the real HMS Amethyst playing herself, which was possible only because she was still afloat and about to be disposed of. During filming a special effects charge intended to simulate a shell hit was made rather too enthusiastically, blew an actual hole in her hull and flooded her engine room. Amethyst was towed away and sold for scrap, and the sloop HMS Magpie, her sister, stood in for all the remaining sailing and gunnery shots. The ship at the centre of one of the Royal Navy's most famous escapes was therefore finished off by a film crew. Her own account is in HMS Amethyst (F116).

The Doctor Who connection is a smaller pleasure but a real one. Ben Jackson, who joined the programme in 1966 and travelled with both the first and second Doctors, was written as a serving able seaman of the Royal Navy, and the ship named on his paybook was HMS Teazer. Whoever wrote that had evidently looked at a Navy List rather than making a name up, which for a 1960s television script is a considerably higher standard of research than the genre usually managed. The ship had been on the disposal list for five years by then and would be broken up before the character left the series.

Scrapped in Scotland

HMS Teazer was placed on the disposal list in September 1961 and sold to Arnott Young at Dalmuir for scrapping, arriving there on 7 August 1965, closing out a career that had taken her from combat in the Aegean and the Pacific to an unlikely brush with popular culture.