HMS Wizard (F72): Nearly Sunk by Her Own Depth Charges

Laid Down at Barrow

HMS Wizard was built by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 14 September 1942, launched on 29 September 1943 and entering service on 30 March 1944, joining the Home Fleet and screening the aircraft carriers Furious and Searcher from 6 May that year.

Screening Furious and Searcher from 6 May 1944 puts her in the middle of a campaign that usually goes unnamed. That spring the Home Fleet was running a series of carrier strikes against German shipping along the Norwegian coast, hunting the iron ore traffic and the coastal convoys in the leads inside the islands, and covering the mining operations that went with them. It was cold, close, unglamorous work flown off flight decks in weather that regularly cancelled everything. The story of the carrier she was screening, and how that ship invented a good deal of naval aviation by trial and error, is in HMS Furious (47). She then spent early June on distant cover for the Normandy landings, out in the western approaches where the Home Fleet sat in case the German heavy ships came south.

A Dangerous Accident

On 9 June 1944, Wizard suffered major damage from an accidental explosion of her own depth charges, killing six of her crew, a particularly alarming mishap for a ship whose entire anti-submarine armament was meant to be a weapon against the enemy rather than a hazard to herself. Emergency repairs at Lyness were followed by extended work at Middlesbrough that kept her out of action until April 1945.

What Happens When Your Own Depth Charges Go Off

The mishap deserves to be explained rather than raised an eyebrow at, because a depth charge accident was one of the most feared events aboard an escort and it killed a great many more people than the phrase suggests.

A depth charge is a drum of about three hundred pounds of high explosive with a pressure pistol on it, set to fire at a chosen depth. On a destroyer they are carried in racks on the quarterdeck and in throwers on either beam, on the open deck, feet from where men work, ready for use. There is no armour, no magazine, no protection of any kind. The whole of a destroyer's anti-submarine armament sits out in the weather at the after end of a lightly built hull, and the after end of the hull is where the shafts, the steering gear and the tiller flat are.

On 9 June 1944, in the North West Approaches, hers were released accidentally. A charge set shallow, going off directly beneath the stern, does not blow a hole so much as hit the ship with a wall of water: the hull whips, riveted seams open along the length of the after compartments, shafts bend, and the sea comes in everywhere at once. The record describes major structural damage and severe flooding. Six of her people were killed, and on a quarterdeck those will have been the men handling the charges.

Her captain at the time was Lieutenant Commander D T McBarnet, DSC. She had been in commission for ten weeks.

Lyness, where she was patched up, is worth knowing about too. It was the Royal Navy's base on the island of Hoy at Scapa Flow: oil tanks cut into the hillside, a repair yard, workshops, a cinema and accommodation for thousands, the industrial back end of the Home Fleet's anchorage. It kept the fleet at sea through two world wars and it is now the Scapa Flow Museum. What Lyness could do was keep a badly damaged ship afloat and get her south; the real work, at Middlesbrough, took the better part of nine months.

Present at Tokyo Bay

Reassigned to the British Pacific Fleet, Wizard reached the Far East in August 1945 and was present in Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender, though her limited operational deployment meant she received no formal Battle Honour for the campaign, a slightly bittersweet footnote given how eventful her war had already been.

In Tokyo Bay, Without a Battle Honour

The battle honour point is a good one and worth setting out properly, because it is a rule rather than an oversight.

A battle honour is awarded for participation in a named action or campaign, and participation means being there and taking part while it was still an action. Wizard reached Sydney in August 1945 and was assigned to Task Force 37 on paper, but the shooting stopped before she was committed. Being present in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 for the signature was a ceremonial occasion, not a battle, and no navy awards honours for attending ceremonies. She therefore has a record that includes standing in the anchorage while the Second World War formally ended and a battle honours board that says nothing about it.

She is on the American list of ships present that morning as HMS Wizard, R.72, among the destroyers, so the claim is a matter of record rather than family legend. Only seven British destroyers appear on that list, and one of them, anchored a few cables away, has her own account here, along with two more of the flotilla who were in the same waters that week: HMS Whelp (R37), HMS Wakeful (F159) and HMS Wrangler (F157).

Rebuilt as a Type 15 Frigate

After serving with Plymouth's local flotilla between 1946 and 1951, Wizard was converted into a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate at Devonport between 1953 and 1954, emerging with the pennant number F72 and going on to deploy to Northern Ireland, take part in Mediterranean operations during the 1956 Suez Crisis, and serve with training squadrons and the 8th Frigate Squadron in the West Indies until 1964.

The conversion at Devonport gave her a second and much longer career than her first. A Type 15 was a wartime destroyer cut down to the upper deck and rebuilt as a fast anti-submarine frigate: a full-length enclosed superstructure, a low bridge well aft, one twin 4-inch mounting right at the stern, and two Limbo mortars in wells in the quarterdeck. The depth charge racks that had nearly killed her in 1944 went, and the whole ship was rearranged around sonar and mortars instead. Why the Royal Navy did this to some forty wartime hulls, rather than building new, is set out in HMS Rapid (F138).

The West Indies Was Not a Cruise

The 8th Frigate Squadron in the West Indies until 1964 sounds like the softest billet in the fleet and was in fact one of the busiest, because of what was happening in the Caribbean in exactly those years.

The station covered the whole arc from Bermuda to British Guiana, and between 1962 and 1964 that arc was coming apart and rearranging itself. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962. British Guiana was in the middle of serious civil disorder. Cuba is in the same sea, and in October 1962 the world spent a fortnight expecting a nuclear war to start there. On top of all of that sits the hurricane season, and a frigate is the only thing that can reach a flattened island with fresh water, engineers, a medical team and a working radio within a day of the wind dropping.

So the job was guardship, disaster relief, showing the flag at independence ceremonies, evacuating people, carrying governors about and being the visible British presence in a region where the arrangements of two centuries were being dismantled in about five years. It is the sort of work that leaves almost no trace in a service record and takes up most of a commission.

Scrapped at Inverkeithing

HMS Wizard was paid off and reduced to reserve status in 1966, sold for scrap on 16 February 1967 and broken up at Inverkeithing, closing out a career that had survived her own depth charges before going on to serve in two very different eras of the Royal Navy.

She came home, went into reserve in 1966 and was sold to Thomas Ward in February 1967, and was broken up at Inverkeithing on the Forth that March. Twenty-three years old, one of which she spent under repair from an injury she did to herself.