HMS Tetcott (L99): From a Collision at Scapa Flow to Three Italian Landings

Adopted by Watchet and Williton

HMS Tetcott was completed on 11 December 1941, a Hunt-class Type II destroyer named for the village of Tetcott and its local hunt, and adopted by the Somerset towns of Watchet and Williton during Warships Week in 1942, part of the wartime scheme that saw communities across Britain raise funds to sponsor individual ships.

The Type II in her description conceals one of the odder episodes in British naval architecture. The Hunt class was designed in a hurry in 1939 as a cheap escort destroyer, and the first of them, HMS Atherstone, went into the water in 1940 carrying rather more armament than her hull could safely support. The error was in the calculations: a genuine mistake in the stability figures, discovered only once there was a ship afloat to measure. The fix was to take a twin 4-inch mounting off every ship of the first batch and put ballast in the bottom instead. The Type II, which is what Tetcott is, was the redesign: a beamier hull, three feet wider, which could carry the armament the class had been meant to have all along. Seventy-two of them were built and they did an enormous amount of the war's dullest and most necessary work.

A Rocky Start

Tetcott's early service got off to a bruising start when she collided with HMS Heartsease on 23 December 1941, shortly after arriving at Scapa Flow, requiring repairs before she could resume active service that March, a common enough hazard for a newly commissioned destroyer still finding her feet.

Forcing U-372 to the Surface

On 4 August 1942, Tetcott joined HMS Sikh and HMS Zulu in attacking the German submarine U-372, forcing her to the surface and resulting in the rescue of sixteen German crew members along with a Lebanese civilian who had been aboard, a successful joint action against a submarine that had been operating in the eastern Mediterranean.

What U-372 Had Done Five Weeks Earlier

That August action reads like a routine anti-submarine success and it was nothing of the kind. On the morning of 30 June 1942, off Alexandria, U-372 had put a torpedo into HMS Medway. Medway was not a warship in any ordinary sense: she was the submarine depot ship of the 1st Submarine Flotilla, a floating base carrying the workshops, the stores, the spare crews and the spare torpedoes for every British submarine operating in the eastern Mediterranean, and she was on passage to Haifa with the flotilla commander aboard and an escort of a cruiser and seven destroyers around her. She went down anyway.

Thirty men were killed, seventeen of them submariners. Ninety spare torpedoes went with her, of which forty-seven bobbed back to the surface and were fished out of the sea, which is an image worth holding on to. Everything else, the machine shops, the stores, the accumulated equipment of a flotilla, was gone. A depot ship had to be found from Malta to replace her and renamed Medway II, and the submarine campaign in the eastern Mediterranean was set back by months at exactly the moment when Malta was starving and every torpedo mattered. Sinking U-372 five weeks later was not a routine success. It was a debt being settled.

The action itself is told from another of the ships involved in HMS Sikh (L82), who was sunk off Tobruk herself six weeks after it. As for the Lebanese civilian pulled out of the water with the German crew, no source explains what he was doing aboard a U-boat in the eastern Mediterranean, and the most likely answer is the dullest one: a pilot or an interpreter picked up for a landing operation on a coast the Germans did not know. It is the sort of loose end the records leave everywhere.

Three Italian Landings

Tetcott went on to support three of the most significant Allied landings of the entire Italian campaign: Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, in July 1943; Operation Avalanche, the landing at Salerno, that September; and Operation Shingle, the landing at Anzio, in January 1944, alongside her broader convoy escort duties across the Mediterranean, taking in visits to Malta, Naples and Southern France.

Three opposed landings in seven months is a great deal of a particular kind of work, and it is worth saying what an escort destroyer actually did at one. She is not there to bombard, mostly; she is there to shepherd landing ships across in convoy, to lie off the beach through the first days as an anti-aircraft and anti-submarine screen for a mass of stationary shipping that cannot manoeuvre, and to be shot at instead of the transports. Salerno and Anzio were both worse than expected and both turned into weeks of that. HMS Blackmore (L43) and HMS Brave (J305) were doing the same job alongside her.

Reserve, and the Breakers' Yard

HMS Tetcott was placed in reserve on 17 January 1946 and mothballed at Barrow-in-Furness, eventually being downgraded to hulk status before being transferred to BISCO for scrapping in August 1956, closing out a career that had taken her from a bruising collision at Scapa Flow to some of the most consequential amphibious operations of the entire war.