HMS Wolverine (D78): The Destroyer Who Rammed Her Way Through Operation Pedestal

The Build: Cowes

HMS Wolverine was built by James Samuel White and Co at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, laid down on 8 October 1918, launched on 17 July 1919 and commissioned on 27 February 1920, an Admiralty modified W-class destroyer that would go on to serve a full two decades before her most demanding war even began.

The dates at the start are worth pausing on. She was laid down on 8 October 1918, which is thirty-four days before the Armistice, and she was not finished until February 1920, by which time the war she had been ordered for had been over for fifteen months. That is why the modified W class exist in the numbers they do: a very large destroyer programme running at full speed into a peace nobody in the shipyards had planned for. The Isle of Wight yard that built her, and what else came off those slips, is described in HMS Winchester (L55).

She was therefore nineteen years old when the next war began and twenty-two when she did the things she is remembered for, which is worth holding on to. The Atlantic in 1941 was in large part being fought by ships built for the Kaiser's war, with their original boilers, by crews who had mostly been at school when the ships were launched.

A Disputed Claim

Wolverine took part in East Coast defence and the Norwegian campaign before settling into extensive Atlantic convoy escort duty, ultimately covering twenty-seven North Atlantic convoys. In March 1941, while defending Convoy OB 293, she was for a time credited with sinking the German submarine U-47, commanded by the notorious Günther Prien who had famously sunk HMS Royal Oak at Scapa Flow.

The Prien Question

The U-47 claim is the most argued-over sinking in the Battle of the Atlantic, and it is worth setting out why anybody cares, because it is not really about the arithmetic.

Gunther Prien was the most famous serving submarine officer in the world. In October 1939 he had taken U-47 through the sunken blockships into Scapa Flow, sunk the battleship HMS Royal Oak at her moorings, killing eight hundred and thirty-five of her people, and got out again. He was flown to Berlin, decorated by Hitler personally, put on the front of every newspaper in Germany and given a nickname, the Bull of Scapa Flow. Losing him was not a tactical setback; it was a propaganda problem of the first order. The German naval command concealed his death for ten weeks and only admitted it on 23 May 1941, and even then a rumour persisted for years that he was alive in a punishment battalion.

What is actually known is short. On the night of 7 March 1941, in the fight around convoy OB 293 south of Iceland, Wolverine held a contact and attacked it repeatedly with depth charges over several hours. U-47 was never heard from again. The Admiralty credited Wolverine, and for half a century every book said so.

Later historical research has revised this assessment, suggesting Wolverine more likely damaged the submarine UA instead, though the precise circumstances remain debated among naval historians to this day.

The current assessment is that Wolverine's contact was not Prien. She was attacking UA, a much larger boat commanded by Hans Eckermann, and UA was damaged and got home. U-47 is now listed simply as missing since 7 March 1941 with forty-five dead and no survivors, and the honest verdict on the file is that there is no convincing explanation for her loss. She may have been mined. She may have been sunk by one of her own torpedoes running in a circle, which happened more often than the Kriegsmarine liked to admit. She may have been the boat that HMS Camellia and HMS Arbutus were hunting. Nobody knows.

What is not in doubt is the fortnight. On 7 March Camellia and Arbutus sank U-70. On the 8th Prien and U-47 vanished. On 17 March, against convoy HX 112, Joachim Schepke was killed when U-100 was rammed by HMS Vanoc, and Otto Kretschmer, the highest-scoring submarine commander of the entire war, was taken prisoner when U-99 was forced up by HMS Walker. Three of the four best U-boat commanders in the German navy were gone in twelve days. It is remembered as Black March, and it was the first time the escorts had beaten the wolf packs rather than merely survived them.

Confirmed Kills

Whatever the truth of the disputed March 1941 action, Wolverine's record includes confirmed successes of her own, sinking U-76 alongside HMS Scarborough on 5 April 1941 and ramming the Italian submarine Dagabur during the fierce fighting of Operation Pedestal in August 1942, the desperate convoy operation to resupply Malta, sustaining significant damage herself in the collision.

The U-76 action a month later is the uncomplicated one. On 5 April 1941, again south of Iceland, Wolverine and the sloop Scarborough got a firm contact and depth charged the boat until she had to come up. Her crew abandoned her on the surface and she went down by the stern. All but one of the forty-three men aboard were taken off, which is an unusually good outcome for either side and worth saying, because these accounts have a habit of counting only the hull.

Twenty-Seven Knots Into a Submarine

The Dagabur ramming needs the numbers, because ramming a submarine is not a manoeuvre, it is a decision taken in about ninety seconds and lived with afterwards.

On the night of 11 and 12 August 1942, Wolverine was one of five destroyers detached from the HMS Furious group to sweep for submarines. They had reason to be thorough: earlier that day U-73 had put four torpedoes into the carrier HMS Eagle, who sank in eight minutes, and Pedestal was only a day old.

Wolverine picked up a contact at four thousand nine hundred yards, worked up to twenty-seven knots and steered for it. At seven hundred yards a conning tower came into sight. She hit the Italian submarine Dagabur square on and cut her open. Fifty-odd men went down with her and there were no survivors at all.

Her own bow was crushed backwards. A destroyer's stem is not built to hit anything; the plating forward is thin, the frames are light, and at twenty-seven knots the shock runs the full length of the ship. She was left with her forward compartments flooded and her bow folded, in the western Mediterranean, in the middle of the most heavily attacked convoy operation of the war, and had to be got back to Gibraltar. HMS Malcolm (D19) went part of the way with her before turning back to the fight.

What that fight cost, and what got through to Malta, is in HMS Cairo. Wolverine did not see the end of it. She had already done the thing that mattered, which was to remove one submarine from a sea full of them before it could get among the tankers.

Scrapped at Troon

HMS Wolverine was withdrawn from service following VE Day and sold for scrap on 28 January 1946, towed to the breaker's yard at Troon that September, closing out the career of a destroyer whose genuine wartime record, disputed claims aside, was one of consistent and often dangerous service against the U-boat threat.

Twenty-seven North Atlantic convoys, a confirmed submarine, a submarine rammed and sunk, a claim she probably never earned and a claim nobody can settle. She was sold on 28 January 1946 and towed to Troon in September, twenty-seven years after she went down the ways at Cowes into a navy that had just won a different war.