HMS Termagant (R89): A Wolf Pack of One in the Aegean

The Build: Dumbarton

HMS Termagant was built by William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton, laid down on 25 November 1941, launched on 22 March 1943 and completed that October, a T-class destroyer armed with four 4.7-inch guns and two quadruple torpedo tube mounts, built for exactly the kind of hard, varied fighting she would go on to see.

The name is worth a moment because it is one of the strangest in the Navy List. A termagant is a violent, quarrelsome, overbearing woman, and the word arrives in English by an improbable route: Tervagant was a wholly imaginary deity that medieval European writers believed Muslims worshipped, a figure who appears in the Chanson de Roland and then turns up in English mystery plays as a ranting stage villain in outlandish costume. By Shakespeare's time to out-Herod Termagant meant to overact, and the word had drifted onto the sort of person who shouts. The Admiralty, in the eighteenth century, decided that this was an excellent thing to call a warship, and has used it seven times.

The Arctic Convoys

After working up at Scapa Flow, Termagant formed part of the local escort for the Arctic convoy JW54A, covering the initial leg of the journey between 15 and 18 November 1943 before being relieved by ocean escorts, a brief but bitterly cold introduction to active service.

Forcing a U-Boat to the Surface

Arriving at Alexandria in January 1944 to join the 24th Destroyer Flotilla, Termagant took part in shelling operations against Vela Luka in Croatia and Bar in Montenegro, before helping hunt the German submarine U-453 after it attacked a convoy that May.

Making contact on 20 May, Termagant and two other destroyers forced the submarine to the surface the following morning and sank her by gunfire, a satisfying and hard-earned kill.

Thirty Hours After U-453

The hunt for U-453 deserves setting out properly, because it is a textbook example of what killing a submarine actually took by 1944, and it was not quick. On 19 May she attacked a convoy off the heel of Italy and sank the merchant ship Fort Missanabie. Termagant, her sister Tenacious and the Hunt-class escort destroyer Liddesdale were sent after her. They regained contact on the 20th and then simply would not let go: attack after attack through the afternoon, the evening and the whole of the night, working in relays so that one ship held the asdic contact while another ran in, for something over thirty hours in total.

Her captain finally brought her up at first light on 21 May, north-east of Cape Spartivento, because there was nothing else left to do; the three destroyers opened fire and she went down. And then the thing that makes the story worth telling happened: every single one of the forty-three men aboard her got out alive and was picked up by the ships that had spent the previous day and night trying to kill them. That is an extremely rare outcome. Most U-boats sunk in 1944 went down with everybody in them, and a good many were sunk without their attackers ever being certain they had hit anything at all.

Four Ships Sunk in the Aegean

Termagant supported Operation Dragoon, the invasion of Southern France, in August 1944, before turning her attention to the Aegean that autumn, where German forces were desperately trying to evacuate.

On 7 October, working with HMS Tuscan, she intercepted a German convoy in the Gulf of Salonica, sinking the torpedo boat TA37, the submarine chaser UJ210 and the patrol boat GK32 in a single decisive action, before sinking the torpedo boat TA18 off Volos on 19 October, an extraordinarily productive fortnight even by the standards of a hard-fighting war.

One Night in the Gulf of Salonica

The 7 October action is the best night's work in her record and it usually goes past in a list, so it is worth slowing down. By the autumn of 1944 the German position in Greece had collapsed and the garrisons of the islands and the mainland were trying to get out northwards, which meant convoys of small craft creeping along the coast at night. Termagant and HMS Tuscan caught one of them in the Gulf of Salonica and destroyed it entirely: the torpedo boat TA37, the submarine chaser UJ210 and the patrol boat GK32, all three in a single engagement, followed twelve days later by TA18 off Volos.

Four enemy warships sunk in under a fortnight by one destroyer is a rate of return almost nobody in the Royal Navy matched at any point in the war, and it happened in a campaign that has left almost no mark on the popular memory of it. What that campaign was, and why the eastern Mediterranean in 1944 was such a strange and dangerous place to fight, is set out in HMS Teazer (F23), another T-class destroyer doing the same work in the same water.

Okinawa, Truk, and Tokyo Bay

After a refit at Portsmouth, Termagant sailed for the Pacific under a new pennant, D47, supporting British Pacific Fleet carriers during the Okinawa operations of May 1945 and escorting HMS Implacable during the strike on Truk Atoll that June. She remained on station through July and was present at the signing of the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945, a fitting close to an exceptionally active war.

A Second Career, and Scrapping

Converted to a Type 16 anti-submarine frigate in 1951 and recommissioned as F189, Termagant went on to serve as a target ship with the 3rd Submarine Flotilla and took part in the 1953 Coronation Fleet Review, before returning to reserve in 1957. She was finally sold for scrapping in 1965 to Arnott Young at Dalmuir, closing out the career of one of the more successful destroyers of the entire war.