HMS Wager (R98): Strikes off Norway, the Sumatran Oil Raids, Okinawa and Tokyo Bay with the Duke of York

A Wager from Clydebank

HMS Wager was a W Class destroyer of the 9th War Emergency Flotilla, one of the eight ships of the class ordered in December 1941, and she was built at Clydebank by John Brown. She was launched on 1 November 1943 and completed on 14 April 1944.

Her name is best remembered from the Wager of Anson's voyage round the world, wrecked on the coast of Chile in 1741, whose castaways mutinied and made their way home in open boats. Her badge showed a blue cross charged with five golden roundels inside an upturned red horseshoe, and her motto meant I challenge with a wager.

Like every War Emergency flotilla from the Q Class onwards, the W Class of 1943 were built on the proven hull of the pre-war J Class, armed with a single 4.7 inch gun in each of four positions and eight torpedo tubes, and built quickly and simply for a navy that needed destroyers faster than it could build anything better. All eight of them went east with the 27th Destroyer Flotilla in 1944.

Her captain throughout was Lieutenant Commander Roland Watkin.

The photograph shows her at rest on completion in 1944, broadside on in the Admiralty scheme of the time, with a darker hull, R98 below the funnel and pale grey upperworks. Her four 4.7 inch guns, lattice radar mast and torpedo tubes are all clear.

Norway and the Mediterranean

She worked up at Scapa Flow in May 1944 and was straight into operations with the Home Fleet, screening the carriers in a run of air strikes on German shipping off the coast of Norway.

With Whelp, Wakeful and Wizard she screened Victorious and Furious at the end of May, in the series of strikes that included a planned attack on the battleship Tirpitz, and in June she was out again for further strikes in the Leads, while the rest of the Home Fleet waited in case the German surface ships tried to interfere with the Normandy landings.

The 27th Destroyer Flotilla had been chosen for the Far East, and after a refit Wager and her sisters set off in August by way of the Mediterranean.

On 4 August they sailed from Spithead escorting the old battleship Ramillies to Gibraltar and Algiers, and on 13 August they took her out of Algiers towards the coast of Provence, where she was to bombard the German defences for Operation Dragoon, the landings in the south of France. Then the destroyers went on through Suez, and at the end of August Wager sailed from Aden for Trincomalee.

The Nicobars and Sumatra

In October 1944, while the Americans landed at Leyte in the Philippines, the Eastern Fleet made a diversion against the Nicobar Islands. Wager, Whelp, Wakeful and Wessex screened the carriers Indomitable and Victorious, and on 17 October a dozen Japanese torpedo bombers came out to attack them; the carriers' fighters shot down seven of them for the loss of three of their own, and none reached the fleet.

In November she and Whelp escorted the tanker Wave King, which refuelled the destroyers at sea during the fleet's first strike on the Pangkalan Brandan refinery in Sumatra.

The next target was the same: Japan's fuel. Wager screened the carriers again when they went back to Pangkalan Brandan on 4 January 1945, and when the new British Pacific Fleet sailed from Trincomalee for Australia later that month she was in the screen for its two great raids on the Palembang refineries, at Pladjoe on 24 January and Soengei Gerong on 29 January.

On the second of them Japanese bombers attacked the fleet, and in the confusion Illustrious was hit by shells from one of her own escorting cruisers. The fleet reached Fremantle on 4 February, and Wager was given the signal letters D30 to fit in with the American system.

Okinawa

In March, after a long wait at Manus while the Americans decided how to use their new allies, the British fleet joined the US Fifth Fleet as Task Force 57 for the invasion of Okinawa, and from 26 March it struck at the airfields of the Sakishima Islands.

On 1 April, the day of the landings, Wager was screening the cruiser Argonaut, stationed away from the fleet as a radar picket to give early warning of air attack, when the kamikazes came in for the first time against the British ships and damaged Illustrious and Ulster.

She stayed with the fleet through the first series of strikes and earned the battle honour Okinawa 1945, then went back to Leyte and to Sydney for a refit.

Guam and Tokyo Bay

In July 1945 she and Whelp were given a special job. Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, the commander of the British Pacific Fleet, was going in Duke of York to the American headquarters at Guam to meet Admiral Nimitz and confer a British knighthood on him, and the two destroyers escorted the battleship there and back.

When they rejoined the fleet in mid-August the war was ending. Most of the British ships had gone back to Manus for lack of fuel, and Duke of York, Whelp and Wager joined the small British force that stayed with the Americans.

On 27 August they entered Sagami Wan, the bay outside Tokyo, to wait while the anchorage was swept and the berths for the surrender were made ready, and then went on into Tokyo Bay. On 2 September 1945 Wager was in the bay, with Duke of York flying Fraser's flag and her sister Whelp, when the Japanese signed the instrument of surrender aboard the American battleship Missouri.

Afterwards she went to Hong Kong and worked with the flotilla bringing home Allied prisoners and internees.

The Yugoslav Pula

She came home at the end of 1945 and was paid off into reserve at Portsmouth in January 1946. Unlike Undine and many other wartime destroyers she was never rebuilt as a frigate, and in 1956 she was sold to Yugoslavia, together with her sister Kempenfelt, while Wrangler of the same flotilla went to South Africa that year.

After a refit she was commissioned into the Yugoslav navy in 1959 as Pula, named after the port on the Istrian coast, and she served in the Adriatic until she was struck off in 1971. She was sold to be broken up the following year.