HMS Tyrian (F67): From the Sicily Landings to Running Aground at the Coronation Review

Adopted by Great Yarmouth

HMS Tyrian was ordered from Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson in March 1941, laid down that October, launched on 27 July 1942 and completed the following April, a T-class destroyer adopted by the people of Great Yarmouth following a successful Warship Week fundraising campaign in March 1942.

Tyrian means of Tyre, the Phoenician city whose murex-shell dye gave the world Tyrian purple, the colour Roman emperors reserved for themselves and which cost, weight for weight, more than gold. The Admiralty gave her a badge of a silver owl carrying a gold crook and flail on a red field, and the motto Tireless Ever. What the men of Great Yarmouth made of all this is not recorded, but they had put up the money: her adoption came out of a Warship Week savings campaign in March 1942, a scheme explained in HMS Beaver (F93). Yarmouth was, at the time, a fishing town under regular air attack with a good deal of its centre already flattened, which makes the sum raised rather more impressive than the usual civic gesture.

She was the third ship of the 24th Destroyer Flotilla, and she spent the war in company with the other two. What the flotilla did as a body is in HMS Troubridge (R00) and HMS Tumult (F121). Her own record has some things in it that theirs do not.

Screening the Sicily Landings

Joining the 24th Destroyer Flotilla in April 1943, Tyrian deployed to the Mediterranean and formed part of the destroyer screen for major British battleships and aircraft carriers during Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, that July, before providing bombardment and gunfire support at Messina, Calabria and the Salerno landings through August and September.

The Fleet That Was Waiting for a Fleet

The destroyer screen she joined on 10 July 1943 is worth listing, because it is the last time the Royal Navy assembled anything like it in the Mediterranean. Four battleships: Nelson, Rodney, Valiant and Warspite. Two fleet carriers, Indomitable and Formidable. Four cruisers, Aurora, Penelope, Cleopatra and Euryalus. And eighteen Allied destroyers, of which Tyrian was one, spread out ahead of them in the Ionian Sea.

They were not there to shell anything. They were there in case the Italian battle fleet came out to interfere with the landings, and the entire force spent the operation steaming up and down waiting for an enemy that stayed in harbour. It is one of the least dramatic and most important things a navy does: the fleet that is not used is often the one that decided the matter. Six weeks later Italy surrendered and those battleships sailed to Malta under British escort.

Her own gunnery came afterwards, and there was a lot of it: bombarding the Italian mainland from the Messina Straits on 21 August; supporting the Calabria landings on 31 August with Nelson, Rodney and the cruiser Orion; putting fire down for XIII Corps at Reggio on 3 September; and then Salerno on the 9th, screening the heavy ships alongside twenty other destroyers of three flotillas, and firing in support of the beaches on the 11th.

A Ship Sunk and a Ship Taken

On 16 October 1943, working an interception patrol off the Albanian coast with HMS Tumult, the two destroyers found a German supply convoy. They sank one ship and captured another, and the second half of that sentence is the unusual part. Destroyers of that period very rarely took prizes; there was almost never time, almost never a spare crew to put aboard, and almost always a good reason to be somewhere else before daylight. Capturing a loaded supply ship off an enemy-held coast and bringing her away is a piece of work that argues for a well-drilled ship and a captain willing to take a chance.

She kept at it. On 8 November she bombarded the Volturno, and on the 11th she was shelling the Gulf of Gaeta in company with Tumult, HMS Grenville and the Polish-manned ORP Piorun. In December she caught a convoy off Kotor and sank small craft, and in February 1944 she was bombarding Vela Luka on the Dalmatian island of Korcula.

Carrying a General Through the Adriatic

Between December 1943 and March 1944, Tyrian carried out supply ship interception and shore bombardment work in the Adriatic, and on one occasion transported General Alexander, a notable passenger for a destroyer more usually engaged in direct combat operations.

Where the General Was Going

The passenger is worth more than a mention, because of where and when he was going. General Sir Harold Alexander was Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies in Italy, the man in charge of the whole campaign, and Tyrian embarked him at Alexandria in January 1944 for passage to Anzio.

Anzio in January 1944 was going wrong. The landing had been made on the 22nd, thirty miles behind the German line and sixty from Rome, on the theory that it would unhinge the whole front. Instead the beachhead had been contained within days and was being shelled from the hills. Alexander went to see it for himself almost immediately, which was characteristic of him, and getting a full general from Egypt to a beach in Italy in the middle of that meant a fast ship. That is what a fleet destroyer was for when nobody was shooting at her: thirty-four knots, a wardroom, and a captain who could be relied upon not to lose the Commander-in-Chief.

That summer she transferred to American command for Operation Dragoon, the invasion of Southern France, before joining the British Aegean Force for further operations that autumn.

For Dragoon she sailed from Malta on 12 August 1944 as part of the screen for Task Group 88.1: the escort carriers Attacker, Khedive, Emperor, Searcher and Pursuer, with the cruisers Royalist and Delhi. She was in the assault area on the 15th, went out to Maddalena to replenish on the 19th, came back on the 21st and was released on the 27th. In the Aegean that autumn she bombarded Melos on 26 October with the cruiser Aurora and HMS Tetcott, and was back on the Italian Adriatic coast in November shelling Civitanova and Pedaso.

A New Pennant in Australian Waters

During her later wartime deployment, Tyrian's pennant number was changed to conform with American destroyer identification conventions after her arrival in Australia, one of several administrative changes that reflect just how closely Allied naval operations were coordinated by the closing stages of the war.

Taking Shanghai Back

The pennant change was D52, adopted for visual signalling after she reached Australia so that American signalmen could read her, and it is the least interesting thing that happened to her out there. On 27 August 1945, twelve days after the Japanese surrender, she sailed as part of Task Group 111 with the light fleet carrier Colossus, the cruisers Bermuda and Argonaut and the destroyers Tumult, Tuscan and the Australian Quiberon, to take part in the occupation of Shanghai.

Sailing a British squadron up the Whangpoo into Shanghai in August 1945 was not a formality. The city had been under Japanese occupation since 1937 and had held the largest foreign community in Asia, most of whom had spent the war in internment camps; there were tens of thousands of armed Japanese troops in it who had surrendered in principle and not yet in practice; and the Chinese Nationalists and Communists were already manoeuvring for what came next. The Royal Navy had run the China Station out of Shanghai for a century before the war and would never do so again. She went home by way of Melbourne in February 1946.

Aground at the Coronation Review

Returning to Britain in February 1946, Tyrian was converted into a Type 16 anti-submarine frigate at Liverpool, completing in 1952, and attended the Coronation Review at Spithead in June 1953. That September, she suffered the embarrassment of running aground on Haisborough Sands, though she was successfully refloated without lasting damage.

Aground Within Sight of the Town That Bought Her

The grounding was in September 1953, during Exercise Mariner, which was the largest naval exercise NATO had ever mounted: some three hundred ships from nine navies working the North Atlantic and the North Sea in weather that turned out to be atrocious even by the standards of that ocean in autumn. Haisborough Sands lie off Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast, a bank a dozen miles long in water that shoals from twenty fathoms to two, and they have been wrecking ships since records began.

They are also about fifteen miles up the coast from Great Yarmouth, which had paid for her. There is no evidence anybody in the town noticed, and it is a pity, because it would have made a marvellous headline in the local paper. She came off undamaged, went back to Portland, and finished her seagoing career three years later.

Broken Up at Troon

HMS Tyrian spent her final years in reserve before arriving at the Troon breakers on 9 March 1965 for demolition, closing out the career of a destroyer whose wartime record across the Mediterranean and Adriatic was substantial, even if her postwar service is now perhaps better remembered for a moment of maritime embarrassment off the Norfolk coast.