HMS Whaddon (L45): Newport Pagnell's Hunt, Two Years on E-boat Alley and Seven Battle Honours in the Mediterranean

A Hunt from Govan

HMS Whaddon was one of the first ten Hunt Class escort destroyers of the 1939 programme, small, fast ships designed to protect coastal convoys from aircraft and submarines. Like all the Hunts she was named after a fox hunt, in her case the Whaddon Chase in Buckinghamshire, and her badge showed a gold primrose inside a stirrup on a red field.

She was ordered from Alexander Stephen and Sons at Linthouse in Govan on 11 April 1939 and laid down on 27 July 1939, the same day as her sister Tynedale in the same yard. She was launched on 16 July 1940 and completed on 28 February 1941, the first ship of her name, with four 4 inch anti-aircraft guns in twin mountings, a four-barrelled pom-pom and depth charges.

The design had gone wrong on paper: when the first of the class, Atherstone, was inclined in 1940 she turned out to be dangerously top-heavy, because of an error in the stability calculations, and the Type I ships had to be completed with one of their three planned twin gun mountings left off and ballast added low in the hull.

They were short-legged, lively ships in a seaway, but they were exactly what the east coast needed, and they could be built quickly. Her first captain was Lieutenant Commander Peter Merriman. In February 1942 Newport Pagnell, in the heart of the old Whaddon country, adopted her after its Warship Week.

The East Coast Convoys

Her first job, in March 1941, was a grand one: with the destroyer Nestor and her sister Eridge she escorted Hood from Scapa Flow to Rosyth and back, two months before the battlecruiser was lost to the Bismarck.

Then, in April, she joined the Rosyth Escort Force, and for almost two years she worked the east coast convoys, the long procession of colliers and coasters that carried coal, food and war materials up and down the North Sea between the Firth of Forth and the Thames. The sailors called the southern stretch E-boat Alley.

The convoys ran within range of German aircraft, minelayers and the fast motor torpedo boats from the Dutch ports, and the escorts were at sea in every weather. On 5 May 1941, while she lay at Hull during an air raid, Whaddon was slightly damaged by bomb splinters. It was the only damage she suffered in the whole war.

The photograph was taken in June 1942, in the middle of this long service, and shows her moving slowly through choppy water in two-tone disruptive camouflage, with a lighthouse on its rock and two small islands, one topped by a building, behind her. In September 1942 she and her sisters Blean and Zetland screened Formidable back into Scapa Flow, and that autumn she was chosen for service abroad.

To the Mediterranean

On 16 March 1943, now under Lieutenant Commander Jack Palmer, she sailed from the Clyde in the escort of the troop convoy WS 28 and its North African section KMF 11. On 23 March, as the KMF ships neared Algiers, German aircraft torpedoed the troopship Windsor Castle, but nearly all of the thousands of men aboard were saved.

On arrival she joined the 60th Destroyer Division at Gibraltar and screened Nelson, Rodney and Force H, and in May, as the Axis armies in Tunisia collapsed, she joined the blockade of Cape Bon to stop them escaping to Sicily by sea.

Pantelleria, Sicily and Salerno

In June she was with Laforey, Loyal, Jervis, Tartar and Nubian in the screen of the cruisers Orion, Newfoundland, Aurora, Penelope and Euryalus as they bombarded the island fortress of Pantelleria, which surrendered on 11 June without a fight on land.

In July, for the invasion of Sicily, she sailed from Sfax with the assault convoy SB 5 and on 10 July was off the beaches south-west of Syracuse, giving gunfire support as the troops of the Eighth Army went ashore. In September she escorted a convoy to the Salerno beaches, and on 14 September she was one of the three Hunts that escorted the cruiser Uganda away from the beachhead.

A German radio-controlled glider bomb had gone straight through the cruiser and burst under her keel, and she was towed to Malta by the American tug Narragansett, arriving safely the next afternoon.

The Adriatic, the Riviera and the Aegean

Through the winter of 1943 and the first half of 1944 she escorted convoys in the central Mediterranean and supported the Army on the Adriatic coast of Italy, and in January 1944 Lieutenant Commander Robert Green, a reservist, took command. In August 1944 she was lent to the American command for Operation Dragoon, the landings on the coast of Provence.

On 13 August she sailed from Naples with the convoy SM 2, one of eight escort destroyers in its screen, and brought it to the assault area for the landings on 15 August.

In September, with the Germans pulling out of Greece, she went to the Aegean for patrols to catch the ships evacuating the German garrisons from the islands, and towards the end of the month she had an inconclusive brush with German torpedo boats, former Italian ships taken over after the Italian armistice.

She spent the rest of 1944 supporting the operations in Greece and on the Adriatic coast, had a refit at Alexandria early in 1945, and was back in the Adriatic until the war in Europe ended. Her seven battle honours were North Sea 1941-43, Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943, Mediterranean 1943, South France 1944, Aegean 1944 and Adriatic 1944, an unusually long list for so small a ship.

Reserve and Faslane

She was refitting at Gibraltar when the war against Japan ended, and on 29 September 1945 she sailed for home. She paid off at Devonport and joined the reserve fleet at Plymouth, where she lay until 1954, when she was towed to Cardiff to join the reserve there.

In 1958 she was placed on the disposal list, and the following year she was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation and towed to the Shipbreaking Industries yard at Faslane on the Gareloch, where she arrived to be broken up in April 1959.