HMS Troubridge (R00): Five Invasions in Eighteen Months

Built on the Clyde

HMS Troubridge was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down on 10 November 1941, launched the following September and completed on 8 March 1943, a T-class destroyer that joined the 24th Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean and would go on to take part in an extraordinary run of Allied amphibious landings.

The Family She Was Named After

The name is the best thing about her and almost nobody knows why. Flotilla leaders were given the names of distinguished dead officers rather than another word beginning with the flotilla letter, a convention explained in HMS Kempenfelt (R03), and the T flotilla got Troubridge. The man in question was Sir Thomas Troubridge, one of Nelson's closest friends and, by common consent, one of the finest captains of his generation, who is remembered chiefly for the single worst piece of luck in the history of the Royal Navy: at the Battle of the Nile his ship Culloden ran onto a shoal at the entrance to Aboukir Bay and stuck there, and he spent the most famous night of the age watching the destruction of the French fleet from a mile away, unable to fire a shot.

His descendants kept going to sea. His son Edward became an admiral. His great-grandson Ernest Troubridge commanded the 1st Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean in August 1914 and declined to engage the German battlecruiser Goeben with four armoured cruisers he judged too slow and too weak to catch her, a decision that let Goeben reach Constantinople, helped bring Turkey into the war and produced a court martial. He was acquitted and never given a sea command again; the affair is set out in HMS Inflexible (1907).

Which brings us to the thing worth knowing about this ship. Ernest Troubridge's son was Thomas Hope Troubridge, who made rear-admiral in 1943, and in August 1944 he commanded the force of nine British and American escort carriers covering the invasion of southern France. Screening those carriers was a destroyer named after his own great-great-grandfather. It is not often that a warship gets to work for the family she is named after, and rarer still that the family in question had spent a century and a half being celebrated and court-martialled in roughly equal measure.

Capturing an Island Fortress

Troubridge's first major action came during Operation Corkscrew in May and June 1943, the bombardment and capture of the fortified island of Pantellaria, before she went on to cover the invasion of Sicily that July during Operation Husky, escort the bombardment forces supporting the Calabria landings in August's Operation Baytown, and provide covering force for the Salerno landings that September under Operation Avalanche, an exhausting sequence of major operations within the space of just a few months.

The Island That Surrendered to Nobody

Operation Corkscrew deserves more than a clause, because it is one of the oddest things that happened in the Mediterranean. Pantelleria is a volcanic lump between Tunisia and Sicily with an airfield on it, and in 1943 it was fortified: twelve thousand Italian troops, twenty-one gun batteries and a landscape of concrete pillboxes on ground that offered an attacker almost no cover. It sat directly across the route to Sicily and it had to go.

The Allied commanders decided to try an experiment first. Rather than assault it, they would find out whether a defended position could be bombed and shelled into surrendering on its own, and for a fortnight the island was hit from the air and from the sea, Troubridge among the ships doing the shelling. It worked, though not entirely for the reasons the air power theorists afterwards claimed. The garrison commander asked Rome for permission to surrender on the evening of 10 June and was given it the next morning, and when the first Commandos came ashore on 11 June the island simply gave up: 11,621 Italians and 78 Germans taken prisoner without a fight. Churchill recorded afterwards that the only British casualty of the whole operation was a man bitten by a mule.

The lesson the Allies took from it, that bombing alone could break a defence, turned out to be badly wrong and cost a great many lives elsewhere. The lesson the Italian garrison had already drawn, which was that there was nothing on Pantelleria worth dying for on behalf of Mussolini, was rather more accurate.

The Adriatic and Southern France

Through 1944, Troubridge conducted bombardment operations against targets along the Dalmatian coast in the Adriatic, before screening escort carriers supporting the invasion of Southern France that August under Operation Dragoon, adding yet another major amphibious operation to her already substantial wartime record.

Working for the Admiral She Was Named After

The escort carriers she screened off the south of France in August 1944 were Task Force 88, and the flag flying over them was Rear-Admiral Thomas Hope Troubridge's. HMS Royalist (C89) was his flagship. The carriers kept fighters over the beaches from first light, in a landing that turned out to be very much easier than Salerno had been, largely because the Germans in the south of France had already worked out that they were going to have to leave.

Sinking a Ship and a U-Boat in the Aegean

That September, Troubridge took part in operations interfering with the German evacuation of the Greek islands, sinking the cargo ship Toni and taking part in the destruction of the German submarine U-407, a particularly productive close to her European war before she deployed east, briefly serving with the East Indies Fleet in March 1945 and then the British Pacific Fleet from that May, taking part in operations including attacks on Truk.

She then followed the same admiral to the Aegean. In September 1944 Troubridge shifted his flag to Alexandria and took charge of Force 120, seven escort carriers and later six cruisers, for Operation Outing: five phases of attacks on German shipping and troop movements through the Dodecanese while the German garrisons of Greece and the islands tried to get home before the front closed behind them. That is what the destroyer was doing when she sank the cargo ship Toni, and it is the campaign HMS Pursuer (D73) earned a battle honour for.

U-407 was killed on 19 September, north-west of Milos, by Troubridge, HMS Terpsichore and the Polish-manned HMS Garland, in a hunt that ran on for the better part of a day. She was a boat with a scalp of her own: ten months earlier she had put a torpedo into the cruiser HMS Birmingham and very nearly finished her. Three navies took a hand in the sinking, which is a fair summary of the Mediterranean by that stage of the war.

Hurricane Relief in the Caribbean

Converted into a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate between 1955 and 1957 and recommissioned as F09, Troubridge went on to serve with the 8th Frigate Squadron on the America and West Indies Station, undertaking humanitarian relief operations after Hurricane Hattie struck in October 1961 and responding to civil disturbances in British Guiana the following February, a truly varied second career a world away from her wartime Mediterranean service.

What Hurricane Hattie Did

Hattie is worth describing, because humanitarian relief operations covers something close to the destruction of a country's capital city. She came ashore just south of Belize City on 31 October 1961 as a category four hurricane, with winds well over 150 miles an hour and a storm surge of four metres. Belize City in 1961 was built almost entirely of wood, on a swamp, at sea level. Seventy per cent of its buildings were wrecked, ten thousand people were left with nowhere to live, and 307 died, a figure that would have been vastly worse without the warnings that got people inland first.

What Troubridge did there was the unglamorous end of it: landing men to help the police hold a city with no power, no clean water and no intact buildings, in the days before anybody else could get there. The longer consequence is visible on the map. British Honduras concluded that its capital could not stay on that coast, and over the following decade built a new one thirty miles inland at Belmopan, which is why Belize is one of very few countries whose seat of government was moved by a single storm. The name Hattie was retired and has never been used again.

Black Friday in Georgetown

The civil disturbances in British Guiana the following February were a good deal more serious than the phrase allows, and they were the opening act of a long and unattractive piece of Cold War politics. Cheddi Jagan's elected government had brought in an austerity budget that fell hardest on the urban African and mixed-race population; the opposition parties and the trades unions called a general strike; and on Friday 16 February 1962 Georgetown burned. Shops were looted, the commercial district went up, several people were killed, and the police and the single company of British troops in the colony could not hold it.

Troubridge was ordered up from Barbados on the 14th, sailed on the 15th and met her sister at the mouth of the Demerara at seven in the morning on the 16th, then went up the river to Georgetown. She was wearing the broad pennant of the Senior Naval Officer West Indies, which made her the command ship for the whole business. Landing parties went ashore, and the ships' boats spent the day towing burning barges off the blazing warehouses and out into the river before the fire could spread to the shipping. HMS Wizard (F72) was alongside her throughout.

Scrapped at Newport

HMS Troubridge was decommissioned for the final time on 29 March 1969 at Chatham and sold for scrap, arriving at the yard of John Cashmore Ltd at Newport, Wales, on 5 May 1970, closing out the career of a destroyer whose wartime record of amphibious support operations was remarkably exceptional even by the standards of her hard-fighting class.