HMS Thanet (H29): Lost at the Battle of Endau

Launched Six Days Before the Armistice

HMS Thanet was ordered from Hawthorn Leslie and Company at Hebburn in July 1917, laid down that December and launched on 5 November 1918, just six days before the guns of the First World War finally fell silent. She entered service the following August, initially used to trial an early flying-off platform for aircraft, a small experimental role at the dawn of naval aviation.

It is worth registering quite how old she was. Thanet was one of the Admiralty S class, the last big group of destroyers ordered for the First World War, of which sixty-seven were built; she was launched six days before the Armistice and was already twenty-three years old when the Japanese came south. A destroyer of 1918 has no radar, no anti-aircraft armament worth the name, coal-era ideas about damage control and machinery that has been worked hard for two decades. There were still a handful of them in commission in 1942 because the Far East was where the Navy sent the ships it could not use anywhere else, and that in turn is most of the story of what happened at Singapore. Her sister HMS Scout (H51), who came out of Hong Kong with her, is here too.

Two Decades on the China Station

Through the 1930s, Thanet served with the Local Destroyer Flotilla of the China Station, based at Hong Kong, maintaining a steady British naval presence in Far Eastern waters.

When war broke out in September 1939, she was still at Hong Kong, conducting patrols and intercepting German merchant vessels, before a brief conversion to minelaying duties that October saw her help lay defensive minefields in the Lantau Channel.

Evacuating Hong Kong

Following Japan's entry into the war in December 1941, Thanet and her sister ship HMS Scout evacuated Hong Kong on 8 December, reaching Singapore five days later to join the Eastern Fleet as the Japanese invasion of Malaya gathered pace.

The Battle of Endau

On the night of 26 to 27 January 1942, Thanet and the Australian destroyer HMAS Vampire were sent to intercept a Japanese troop convoy off Endau, only to encounter a far superior Japanese covering force. Thanet was struck in the engine room, disabled, and began to sink. Twelve of her crew were killed in the action.

Two Old Destroyers Against a Cruiser Squadron

The odds at Endau are the thing the bare account never conveys. Thanet and the Australian destroyer Vampire, an even older ship of 1917, were sent to attack a Japanese landing convoy on the Malayan east coast in the dark. What was actually waiting behind the transports was the light cruiser Sendai, six Fubuki-class destroyers, which were among the best destroyers in the world at that date and half Thanet's age, five minesweepers and half a dozen smaller vessels. Two elderly British boats went in against that, at close range, in the middle of the night.

They fired torpedoes and missed, and then the Japanese found the range. A shell into Thanet's engine room stopped her, and once stopped in front of a cruiser and six destroyers she had perhaps a quarter of an hour left. Vampire was untouched, could do nothing whatever to help and got away to Singapore, which was the only sane decision available to her captain and cannot have felt like it. Thanet went down. It was the last occasion on which the Royal Navy attempted to interfere with Japanese shipping moving down that coast, and three weeks later Singapore surrendered.

Sixty-five of her people got ashore, and their walk back is a story in itself: Lieutenant Commander Davies, four other officers and sixty-one ratings made their way overland through Japanese-held Johore to Singapore, picking up shot-down Australian aircrew as they went, only to arrive at a city that had a fortnight left.

Sixty-five of her survivors made their way overland to Singapore, while a separate group of thirty-one was recovered by the Japanese destroyer Shirayuki; thirty of these men were later handed to Japanese troops and executed, a war crime that stands among the darker episodes of the entire Malayan campaign.

What happened to the other thirty-one is documented and it is worth being specific, because vagueness here does the dead no service. They were picked up from the water by the Japanese destroyer Shirayuki, which is to say by the navy, and were treated correctly aboard her. The following day thirty of them were landed at Endau and handed over to the army. They were never seen again. The reason generally given, and it is the one the Australian naval historians record, is that at almost exactly the hour of the sea action the Australian 2/18th Battalion had ambushed a Japanese column ashore near Endau and inflicted heavy casualties, and the prisoners were killed in reprisal for it. Thirty men who had survived a night action and a sinking were murdered because of something that happened on land, in another engagement, that they knew nothing about.

Remembering Her Crew

HMS Thanet's loss at Endau came at one of the bleakest moments of the Pacific War, as Allied forces were pushed back across Malaya towards the eventual fall of Singapore. Her crew's sacrifice, and the fate of those who survived the sinking only to be murdered afterward, remains a solemn part of the history of the Royal Navy's war in the Far East.