HMS Tumult (F121): Eight Battle Honours From Sicily to Southern France

Built on the Clyde

HMS Tumult was built by John Brown Shipbuilding and Engineering at Clydebank, laid down on 16 November 1941, launched almost a year later and commissioned on 2 April 1943, a T-class destroyer under the command of Lieutenant Commander Norman Lanyon that would go on to see action across nearly every major Mediterranean campaign of the following two years.

Three Bells and a Town in Staffordshire

She was the second HMS Tumult, the first having been a destroyer of the previous war, and the Admiralty gave her a badge of three gold bells on a blue field and the motto Tumultu, which the Navy translated as let us use this tumult to our advantage. It is one of the better mottoes in a service that has produced a great many dull ones.

She also had a town. In March 1942, while she was still on the stocks, the community of Rowley Regis in what was then Staffordshire ran a Warship Week National Savings campaign, raised the money notionally required to build her, and adopted her. The scheme, and what it actually meant to the places that took part, is explained in HMS Beaver (F93). Rowley Regis is now part of Sandwell in the West Midlands and had, in 1942, a population of around forty thousand people, most of them working in chainmaking, brickworks and quarries. They bought a destroyer that went on to sink two submarines.

Sinking U-86 East of the Azores

On 29 November 1943, Tumult took part in sinking the German submarine U-86 east of the Azores using depth charges, working alongside HMS Rocket, a significant confirmed kill for a destroyer whose service that year had already been remarkably busy.

A Kill She Did Not Know She Had

The U-86 attack is stated here as settled, and it was not settled for a very long time. For sixty-two years after the war the credit belonged to somebody else entirely: the boat destroyed east of the Azores on 29 November 1943 was recorded as having been killed by Avengers and Wildcats of VC-19 flying from the American escort carrier Bogue, and that is what every published account said.

It was wrong. In 2005 the German naval historian Axel Niestle went back through the original signals and attack reports and found that the Bogue aircraft had in fact attacked U-764, which was damaged and got home, and that the boat killed that day had died about fifty miles to the south-east under the depth charges of two British destroyers. Tumult and Rocket had spent an afternoon on a contact, dropped patterns, seen nothing conclusive and moved on, and the fifty men of U-86 went to the bottom without anybody knowing whose it was for the next six decades. U-86 had been at sea since 1941, had made eight patrols, had sunk three ships and had never lost a man until the day she lost all of them. HMS Launceston Castle (F397) is the same process running the other way.

Covering the Invasion of Sicily

As part of Force H, Tumult provided cover for the invasion fleet during Operation Husky, the landings on Sicily in July 1943, escorting capital ships and protecting convoys throughout an intense summer and autumn of Mediterranean operations.

Her accumulated service earned her battle honours for Atlantic 1943, Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943, Mediterranean 1943-44, Aegean 1943-44, Adriatic 1944, South France 1944 and Atlantic 1944, an unusually comprehensive collection reflecting just how widely she was deployed across the theatre.

What the Eight Honours Were Actually For

A list of battle honours is a summary of a diary, and hers is worth unpacking. She joined the 24th Destroyer Flotilla and sailed from Malta on 8 July 1943 with HMS Troubridge and HMS Tyrian to screen the heavy ships covering Sicily. Two months later the same three ships were off Salerno, where on 11 September she was firing in support of the beaches rather than merely guarding the fleet.

In October she went to the Aegean, into the campaign that was going wrong as she arrived. On the 5th she patrolled the Kaso Strait with Pathfinder and the cruisers Dido and Aurora, hunting for the craft reinforcing the German garrisons and finding none, under intermittent air attack. On the 16th she and Tyrian caught a convoy and sank a supply ship. On the 21st she sank a trawler. That is what Aegean 1943-44 means for her; what it meant for the campaign as a whole, and for the garrisons on Kos and Leros, is in HMS Intrepid (D10). In November she was off the west coast of Italy shelling shore batteries at the Volturno and at Gaeta.

A Destroyer in the Partisan War

The Adriatic winter is the strangest thing on her record and it is worth a moment. From December 1943 her flotilla was working the eastern Adriatic, and the people they were working for were Tito's partisans. Yugoslavia had no navy, the Germans held the coast and most of the islands, and the partisans on Hvar, Korcula and the rest were being supplied and supported by a British force operating out of southern Italy, of which a handful of fleet destroyers formed the heavy end.

So the entries read: 8 January 1944, bombardments at San Benedetto, Dubrovnik and Korcula; 1 February, shelling south of Ancona with HMS Tenacious; 4 February, Hvar and Korcula with HMS Teazer; 27 February, Korcula again, this time with Troubridge. A three-year-old destroyer built for fleet work on the Clyde, spending her winter putting 4.7-inch shells into German positions on Dalmatian islands at the request of a communist guerrilla army. Very little of the Second World War went the way anybody had planned it.

The Boat That Took a Destroyer With Her

Her second submarine is missing from the account and should not be, because it was a considerably harder piece of work than the first and it cost the Royal Navy a ship. On 29 March 1944, north of Palermo, a contact came up and Tumult joined the hunt along with the flotilla leader HMS Laforey and, as the day went on, Hambledon, Blencathra and others. They attacked through the afternoon and the attacks went on until nightfall, and then the contact was simply held through the dark, which with 1944 asdic and a submarine crew fighting for their lives is a piece of seamanship in itself.

It went on all night. Shortly after daylight on the 30th, U-223, out of air and out of battery, came up. Before she did, she put three torpedoes into Laforey at fifteen hundred yards. They found the magazine. Laforey, a flotilla leader with a distinguished war behind her, went down almost at once: of 247 men aboard, 182 were lost, among them her captain, H T Armstrong, and 65 were pulled out. U-223 was then destroyed by gunfire, and Tumult picked twenty-seven Germans out of the water.

It is the sort of ending these hunts often had, and it is why the destroyer men of that war were rarely sentimental about them. Twenty-seven Germans out of the water and a hundred and eighty-two British sailors left in it, from a boat that had been cornered for eighteen hours and had nothing left but her tubes.

Southern France, Skyros, and a Pacific War She Missed

For Operation Dragoon in August 1944 she was one of five T-class destroyers, with Troubridge, Tuscan, Tyrian and Teazer, screening Task Group 88.1 and its escort carriers Khedive, Emperor, Searcher, Pursuer and Attacker, under overall American command. Released at the end of the month, she went straight back to the eastern Mediterranean, and on 29 August bombarded Skyros in company with the cruiser HMS Black Prince, covering the re-occupation of the Aegean islands the Germans were finally leaving.

Then she was nominated for the British Pacific Fleet, went home to Portsmouth in November 1944 for the refit that any ship going east needed, and did not finish it until the spring. She worked up in the Mediterranean in May 1945 and sailed for Sydney by way of Suez in June. The war she was going to ended in August, six weeks after she left. It is the same near-miss a great many British destroyers had that summer, and it is why a ship with eight battle honours from one ocean has none at all from the other.

A Second Career as a Frigate

Placed in reserve at Portsmouth in 1946, Tumult underwent substantial reconstruction between 1953 and 1954 by Grayson Rollo at Birkenhead, converting her into a Type 16 fast anti-submarine frigate with the new pennant number F121. She went on to serve with the 2nd Training Squadron at Portsmouth from November 1956, before further stretches in reserve at Chatham and Rosyth.

Broken Up at Dalmuir

HMS Tumult was taken to Arnott Young at Dalmuir for breaking up, arriving there on 25 October 1965, closing out the career of a destroyer whose wartime record across the Mediterranean stands among the more thoroughly documented of her class.