HMS Wallace (D3A): A Flotilla Leader Too Late for One War, in Time for Prince Philip

Completed Just After the Armistice

HMS Wallace was built by J I Thornycroft at Woolston in Hampshire, laid down on 15 August 1917, launched on 26 October 1918 and commissioned on 14 February 1919, a Thornycroft-type flotilla leader that arrived just after the First World War had ended and so saw no combat in the conflict she had been built for.

A flotilla leader is worth defining, because the type has been extinct for eighty years. A destroyer flotilla of the First World War was eight or nine boats, and the officer commanding it needed somewhere to put a staff, a wireless outfit and a plot, none of which would fit into a destroyer already full of machinery and torpedoes. So the Admiralty built leaders: destroyers a few hundred tons larger, a little faster, with an extra gun and, crucially, room for the captain of the flotilla and the people who did his thinking for him. Wallace was one of five built to Thornycroft's own design, and at seventeen hundred tons she was a big ship for 1918.

Into the Russian Civil War

Wallace led the 1st Destroyer Flotilla, later renamed the 5th Destroyer Flotilla in 1925, and deployed to the Baltic in 1919 during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, supporting operations against Soviet forces in exactly the kind of dangerous, mine-strewn waters that claimed several British ships during that campaign.

The Chanak Crisis

Between 1922 and 1923, Wallace was deployed to Turkey during the Chanak Crisis, a tense standoff between Britain and Turkish nationalist forces that brought Europe close to renewed war so soon after the last one ended, before returning to more routine service and modernisation with the Atlantic Fleet through the interwar years.

The Baltic in 1919 was not a quiet posting. It was an undeclared war against the Bolsheviks in shallow, ice-bound, comprehensively mined water, and it cost the Royal Navy seventeen ships and well over a hundred dead in eleven months; the campaign is set out in HMS Vanity (D28). Chanak, three years later, was the other end of the same unravelling: a confrontation with Mustafa Kemal's Turkey over the Dardanelles that brought down a British government and is described in HMS Tourmaline (H00). Wallace was at both. A ship that missed the war she was built for spent her first four years in two others that nobody had planned.

Six Years Up and Down the East Coast

Mainly escorting convoys along the East Coast of Great Britain is one line for the longest continuous operation of the Second World War. From September 1939 to May 1945, convoys ran between the Thames and the Forth, week in and week out, in a swept channel a few miles wide with sandbanks on one side and Germany on the other. They carried coal, and London needed forty thousand tons of it a week; there was no other way to move it in the quantity required.

They were attacked by aircraft, by E-boats at night, by mines laid from the air and by the occasional submarine, and the escorts were mostly elderly: converted First World War destroyers, requisitioned trawlers, and whatever else could carry an anti-aircraft gun. Wallace, rebuilt in 1938 and 1939 as a fast anti-aircraft escort, spent almost the whole war doing it. There are no battle honours for that. It simply went on, without a break, for the whole five years and eight months of the war.

A Future Duke of Edinburgh Aboard

Converted to a fast anti-aircraft escort between 1938 and 1939, Wallace spent the Second World War mainly escorting convoys along the East Coast of Great Britain, performing rescue operations and taking part in Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, in July 1943.

During this period, a young Prince Philip, later Duke of Edinburgh, served aboard, adding Wallace to the list of ships that briefly carried the future royal consort during his wartime naval service.

The Raft, and the Man Who Thought of It

Served aboard is doing an enormous disservice to the most interesting thing that ever happened in this ship.

Philip of Greece joined Wallace in October 1942 as her First Lieutenant. He was twenty-one. A first lieutenant is the second in command of a warship, responsible for the running of the whole ship's company and for taking over if the captain is killed, and at twenty-one he was among the youngest in the Royal Navy. He was, by every account of that commission, extremely good at it.

In July 1943 Wallace was off Sicily, screening the landings. On one of the nights of the operation she was found and attacked by German bombers, alone, in bright moonlight, in water she could not leave. She had been near-missed once and the next aircraft was coming round again, and there was no realistic prospect of a small ship with 1918 engines outrunning it.

Philip's idea was very simple and very cool-headed. He had a wooden raft made up, loaded with smoke floats, and thrown over the side. The floats lit, the raft drifted away from the ship burning and smoking on the water, and it looked from three thousand feet exactly like a destroyer that had been hit and was on fire. The bomber went for it and spent the rest of the night bombing it. Wallace stopped making smoke, altered course and slid away into the dark, and by the time anybody realised there was nothing there she was gone.

That is a young officer, in the middle of the night, in a ship he expects to lose, inventing a decoy out of a raft and two smoke floats and getting it in the water in time. Seven years later he had his own command, HMS Magpie (U82), and then his wife became Queen and he never went to sea in a warship again. It is generally agreed by people who knew him that he would have gone a very long way in the Navy, and that he knew it.

Scrapped After Collision Damage

Increasing mechanical problems marked Wallace's final years, compounded by collision damage suffered in March 1945. She was placed in reserve in 1945 and broken up later that year by Clayton and Davie on the Tyne, bringing to a close the career of a ship whose service had spanned a war she missed and a war she saw through to the end.

The end is a matter of arithmetic rather than sentiment. In March 1945 she was damaged in a collision, and by then she was twenty-six years old, with worn machinery, in a navy that was about to have several hundred more modern escorts than it could possibly use. Repairing a 1918 flotilla leader in the spring of 1945 would have taken a dockyard slot and a working party away from ships with a future. She was laid up, and she was broken up on the Tyne before the year was out.