HMS Terpsichore (R33): A Samurai Sword at the End of the War

Built at Dumbarton

HMS Terpsichore was ordered under the War Emergency Programme in March 1941, laid down that November by William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton, launched on 17 June 1943 and completed on 20 January 1944, a T-class destroyer that would go on to see action across two oceans within the space of a single year.

The name is one of the Navy's better oddities. Terpsichore is the Greek muse of dance and chorus, which makes this the only warship in the fleet named after a minor deity of ballroom activity, and it puts her in unexpected company with the trawler HMS Tango and the nineteen other Dance-class ships named after quicksteps and mazurkas. The Admiralty had a run of it in those years. Sailors, predictably, did not attempt the Greek: she was Terpsy throughout her service.

Supporting the Invasion of Southern France

After working up with the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, Terpsichore transferred to the Mediterranean in February 1944, taking part in escort and support operations in the Adriatic before joining the Alpha Gunfire Support Group alongside the cruisers Orion, Aurora, Ajax and Black Prince for the landings of Operation Dragoon in southern France that August.

The gunfire support group she joined for Dragoon is worth a glance for the company alone. Three of the cruisers she was screening are worth naming: HMS Ajax (22), which had cornered the Graf Spee at the River Plate five years earlier, and HMS Black Prince (81), which would follow the same route east to the Pacific that Terpsichore did. Dragoon itself is the invasion nobody remembers, launched into the south of France ten weeks after Normandy, and it worked so well and so quickly that it has been almost entirely written out of the popular history of 1944.

Sinking U-407 off Crete

On 19 September 1944, Terpsichore took part in sinking the German submarine U-407 alongside HMS Troubridge and the Polish destroyer ORP Garland, north of Crete, rescuing forty-seven of the submarine's crew from the water afterward, a properly significant confirmed kill for the destroyer's growing record.

The Last Submarine Sunk in the Mediterranean

That kill is a more significant entry than the article suggests, because U-407 was the last enemy submarine sunk in the Mediterranean in the entire war. The German boats had been fighting in that sea since 1941, had sunk two aircraft carriers, two battleships and a great deal else, and had been squeezed steadily into a smaller and smaller corner of it as the airfields and the bases went; by the autumn of 1944 there were only a handful left and no way home for any of them, since the Strait of Gibraltar could not be passed westward. U-407 was the end of the line.

She was worth catching. Across eleven war patrols she had sunk three merchant ships and damaged two warships, the most notable being the cruiser HMS Newfoundland, which she torpedoed off Sicily in July 1943 and whose rudder she blew clean off; Newfoundland got herself away steering on her propellers alone at twenty-two knots, which is a considerable piece of seamanship. The hunt that finished U-407 on 19 September 1944 was an allied affair in the fullest sense: Terpsichore and HMS Troubridge (R00), the Polish-manned ORP Garland, and the Hunt-class escorts Brecon and Zetland in support, working south of Milos.

Five of her fifty-three men were lost. The rest came out of the water into the ships that had just sunk them, which by that stage of the war in that sea was more or less standard: everybody involved knew the campaign was over and there was nothing to be gained by anybody drowning for it.

The Aegean Campaign

That autumn, Terpsichore deployed with the British Aegean Force to support the reclamation of the Aegean islands and the Greek mainland, carrying out interception missions and gunfire support as German forces withdrew from the region.

Escorting the Americans Into Tokyo Bay

Following a refit at Devonport, Terpsichore transited to Australia in 1945 to join the British Pacific Fleet, taking part in operations against Truk and screening and bombardment missions near Japan itself. Under Commander R. T. White, she was chosen to lead the destroyer escort of the American battleship USS Mississippi into Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender, and Commander White personally received a surrendered Samurai sword from Japanese forces, a striking and particularly memorable moment to close out her wartime service.

One footnote about her captain is worth adding, with a caveat attached. The Commander R T White who took her into Tokyo Bay and was handed a Japanese sword is very probably Richard Taylor White, who as a lieutenant commander had sunk U-41 south-west of Ireland in the destroyer HMS Antelope in February 1940, in the first winter of the war. The records do not put the two commands side by side in so many words, so it is offered as a strong likelihood rather than a certainty; but if it is the same officer, then one man sank a U-boat in the fifth month of the war and accepted a surrender in the last, which is about as complete a span of the thing as anybody managed.

A Second Career, and Scrapping

Terpsichore returned to Britain in 1946 and spent several years in reserve before conversion to a Type 16 anti-submarine frigate in 1953, taking on the new pennant F19. After further spells in reserve, she was finally sold for scrap, arriving at Troon on 17 May 1966, closing out the career of a destroyer whose final wartime act had been so notably unusual.