RAN Destroyers, Frigates & Sloops of WW2 (WWII)

Once the ships of the RAN’s destroyer flotilla had been sent, at Admiralty request, first to Singapore and then the Mediterranean, Australia’s naval defences were remarkably short of escort vessels. Little remained apart from two sloops, Yarra and swan, soon to be joined by their sister ships Warrego and Parramatta. The departure of the five destroyers - Stuart, Vampire, Vendetta, Voyager and Waterhen - thus created an urgent need to find replacements, requiring the requisitioning of a number of vessels in civilian use.

HMAS Nestor sunk by a British torpedo after being crippled by enemy bombs.

The 'V' and 'W' class destroyers had been in RAN service only from 1933, when they were transferred from the Royal Navy.

Already well past their prime when the war began, having all been built during 1917-1918, they were nonetheless quite powerful and effective units for their time.

By 1943, however, only Stuart and Vendetta remained of the original flotilla, the other three having all been lost in the course of the previous year.

Vampire had been sunk in the Bay of Bengal by Japanese bombers on 10 April 1942, followed by Waterhen (lost on the Tobruk ferry run on 30 June) and Voyager (grounded at Betano Bay on the Timor coast while landing troops on 25 September and blown up by the crew to prevent its capture).

The main replacements for these vessels were ships of the 'N' and 'Q' classes of fleet destroyers originally ordered for the Royal Navy during 1938-1939. The five 'N' class ships - Napier, Nepal, Nestor, Nizam and Norman - were loaned to Australia for the duration of the war.

Arriving in 1940, they remained with the RAN until 1945, when they joined the British Pacific Fleet; after the war the four remaining vessels (Nestor had been sunk in the Mediterranean in June 1942) returned to England. Initially only two 'Q' class ships - Quiberon and Quickmatch - were made available to the RAN on loan in 1942, with another three - Quadrant, Quality and Queenborough - not arriving until the war's last stages; in 1946 all five were transferred to the RAN as an outright gift.

Supplementing these acquisitions were three Tribal Class vessels - Arunta, Warramunga and Bataan which became the first destroyers built in Australia since the end of World War 1. Originally seven of these 2032 tonne vessels were planned, but the remaining four were cancelled. When the Naval Board announced its intention to name the ships after Aboriginal tribes, the humanitarian Daisy Bates wrote to express her pleasure at the decision. Bataan was originally to have been called Kurnal, but the name was changed while it was still in stocks at Cockatoo Island, to honour the US Navy's action off the Bataan peninsula in the Philippines; the vessel was launched by the wife of General Douglas MacArthur. This gesture was in return for that of the Americans in naming one of their cruisers after HMAS Canberra, lost at Savo Island.

Arunta undergoing sea trials, 1942. The 36-knot speed of Tribal Class destroyers led to them being dubbed 'Greyhounds'.

Essentially the same as the sixteen vessels of this class built for the RN (another eight were built in Canada), the Australian Tribals differed only in that they had a smaller second funnel and six 4.7-inch (12 cm) guns in their main armament instead of eight; one of the pairs on the British vessels was replaced in the RAN ships by twin 4-inch guns in a rear mounting. Dubbed the 'greyhounds' of the navy on account of their 36 knot speed, the Tribals earned high praise for their fighting efficiency and ability to withstand arduous conditions.

Arunta, featured on one of the stamps, was first of the Australian Tribals to be built. Launched a year after its keel was laid in November 1939, the vessel was completed in March 1942 and almost immediately began operations.

Laid down in February 1940, Warramunga was not completed until November 1942, while Bataan was not ready until May 1945.

The proud reputation of the Tribals in the wartime RAN was, therefore, established primarily by just two ships.

On 29 August 1942 the motor vessel Malaita, belonging to the Burns Philp trading company, left Port Moresby for Cairns after delivering troops and supplies, under escort from Arunta. While still in the approaches to Moresby, the merchant ship was struck by a torpedo and developed a list which necessitated it being towed back to port.

Arunta immediately started sweeping for an enemy submarine, and after acquiring a contact on its equipment for detecting submarines underwater (known as asdic) at about 1 p.m. began making depth-charge attacks which lasted for 90 minutes. Oil and rising air bubbles indicated that these had found the quarry. It was later confirmed that Japanese submarine R 033 had been destroyed by Arunta.

Apart from convoy protection, the RAN's Tribal Class destroyers performed patrol duties, gunfire support for troops ashore, and participated in the major amphibious landings during the final stages of the war in the Pacific. Both Arunta and Warramunga were subjected to the attacks by Japanese suicide planes in Leyte Gulf, but escaped damage. In the war's last days, it fell to Warramunga and the recently-completed Bataan to be on hand during the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. All three ships served on in the post-war RAN, being modified to the anti-submarine destroyer role in the early 1950s.

Often substituting for destroyers in the wartime RAN were British-designed frigates which were, essentially, enlarged and faster corvettes. Displacing a little over 1422 tonnes, these vessels were all built locally and bore the names of Australian rivers. Ultimately eight of these ships saw service with the RAN, but only six were completed before the war ended, these being Barcoo, Burdekin, Diamantina, Gascoyne, Hawkesbury and Labuan. In addition to convoy escort duty, these ships assisted in the fire-support role, anti-submarine sweeps and the carrying out of surveys. Burdekin accepted the surrender of Japanese forces in Dutch East Borneo in September 1945, while Hawkesbury took part in the Japanese surrender at Koepang, Timor.

Smaller again than the frigates were the four Grimsby Class sloops, Yarra, Parramatta, Swan and Warrego, normally displacing less than 1118 tonnes.

The first pair of these little vessels, Yarra and Swan, completed in 19361937, began anti-submarine patrols off Sydney at the outset of the war.

Swan was in Darwin during the initial Japanese raid, suffering only light damage. Thereafter this ship was involved in various gunnery support actions around New Guinea for most of the war.

Yarra, on the other hand, was stationed in the Persian Gulf in late 1941, and briefly saw service in the Mediterranean before hurrying back to the Pacific.

In Singapore in February 1942 Yarra was lightly damaged by enemy dive-bombers, yet managed to assist in rescuing some 1800 men from a troopship which had been set on fire.

As the allies fell back in front of the Japanese advance through South-East Asia and the Netherlands East Indies, Yarra found an imperishable moment of glory defending against hopeless odds.

In charge of a convoy of three ships making for the safety of Australia, Yarra came up against a vastly superior force of Japanese cruisers and destroyers at 6.30 a.m. on 4 March. Ordering the ships he was protecting to scatter, the captain of Yarra, Lieutenant- Commander R.W. Rankin, placed his ship between them and the enemy while proceeding to make smoke.

He then opened fire on the enemy, pitting his three 4-inch (10 cm) guns against the thirty 8-inch (20cm) guns of the Japanese cruisers. The result, in the words of one writer, was "sacrificial slaughter". With his ship quickly battered beyond recognition, Rankin gave the order for the crew to abandon ship moments before he was killed by an enemy salvo.

With the tattered fragments of the white ensign still flying, the Yarra slid beneath the waves at 8 a.m. Rankin's defiant gesture, which cost the lives of 117 of the ship's personnel, did not save the other vessels in the allied convoy either; all three were sunk even before Yarra met its end.

Lieut- Commander Robert Rankin, captain of Yarra.

Another 21 of the 34 survivors of the unequal battle were to die on rafts before a Dutch submarine came to their rescue five days later, so that ultimately just thirteen men lived to recall what many regard as the finest action in Australian naval history.

Tampion from Yarra on display in War Memorial.

Of the other sloops, Parramatta also saw service in the Red Sea before transferring to the Mediterranean in mid- 1941, where it took part in the 'Tobruk ferry' operation.

Early in the morning of 27 November the sloop HMAS Parramatta sloop was 40 kilometres off Bardia when a German U-boat attacked it and a fully-loaded ammunition ship being escorted to Tobruk. Three torpedoes missed the two vessels, but as the captain of Parramatta, Commander J.H. Walker, ordered a change of course and for fire to be opened, another torpedo struck the sloop amidships and exploded, immediately triggering a second explosion in the ship's magazine. Walker gave the order to abandon ship but few of the more than 160 crew and passengers on board could escape, as the vessel rolled over and sank in barely two minutes. Only 23 ratings survived.

After seeing action in New Guinea, the Philippines and Borneo, Warrego and Swan survived the war to serve on in the post-war Australian fleet Both were inheritors of a gallant tradition for such little ships.