HMS Patriot
 The Patriot 1922
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HMS Patriot of the Royal Navy or the Canadian Navy was a Thornycroft M-class destroyer that was built for the Royal Navy from 1915 to 1916. The destroyer and its sister ship Patrician became the Royal Canadian Navy's first destroyers in 1920 . Mainly used as a training ship , the Patriot was separated in 1927 and canceled from 1929.
History of the Patriot
In February 1915 the shipyard of John I. Thornycroft & Company in Woolston near Southampton received construction contracts for two destroyers, which should be executed as "specials" similar to the two "specials" Meteor and Mastiff built in 1913/14 , although the shipyard now has six destroyers according to the admiralty draft as part of the war programs. The new orders were started in June / July 1915 after the first two war orders with Michael and Milbrook had been launched. The shipyard specializing in destroyers, which supplied torpedo boats from 1873, was allowed to continue to build destroyers deviating from the plans of the Admiralty from this order during the war. The shipyard built slightly different versions of the war series ( M- , R- , S- , V- and W- class ), plus the Shakespeare-class flotilla leaders .
The two new buildings for the February contract with building numbers 806 and 805 were launched on April 20 as Patriot and on June 5, 1916 as Patrician . Patriot was then taken over by the Royal Navy on June 27, 1916.
The newbuildings normally displaced 985 ts and a maximum of 1130 ts. They had a length of 274 ft over all (265 ft pp), were 27 ft 5 in wide and had a normal draft of 9 ft. The fuel supply amounted to 250 ts. With the machinery, three Yarrow boilers with oil firing and two sets of Brown Curtis geared turbines , the "specials" differed from the Admiralty type. There were no deviations in the weapons equipment. The three chimneys were oval with flat sides and the middle one was noticeably thicker. The Thornycroft specials also had a slightly higher freeboard than the M-class destroyers built according to the Admiralty draft.
Operations in World War
Shortly after its takeover by the Royal Navy in July 1916 , the Patriot was assigned to the 14th Destroyer Flotilla, newly formed in May, at the Grand Fleet, which received thirteen new M-class destroyers that month. At the beginning of July 1917, the Patriot was involved in an operation against German submarines marching out and back in the North Sea. Together with the destroyers Anzac (2nd Leader 14th DF), Norman (14th DF), Maenad (12th DF), Morning Star and Moon (both 11th DF), who all carried captive balloons , a search operation found on the marching routes of the German submarines instead of. Although submarines were sighted several times, the destroyers did not get into an attack position in time and broke off the operation on July 8 because there was no longer enough hydrogen available to fill the balloons. It also remained unclear whether a single submarine was sighted several times or whether several submarines were in the vicinity of the unit.
On July 11th, the Patriot took part in a similar operation and carried a tethered balloon of her own. On July 12, the observer reported a submarine running on the surface in his own balloon. When Patriot approached and opened fire, the submarine dived. From the balloon the destroyer was led to the supposed position of the submarine and threw depth charges, the explosions of which brought a small amount of oil to the surface. About an hour later, another underwater explosion was observed and an oil slick formed on the surface of the water. It is believed that the U 69 was sunk. see SM U 69
In mid-October 1917 the Patriot took part in a major operation in the North Sea. Thirty cruisers and 54 destroyers formed eight groups that monitored various positions in the North Sea in order to detect and stop an expected German advance early. The 14th DF presented Patriot with Miranda , Nonpareil and Offa to 3rd Light Cruiser Squadron from which to Chatham , Yarmouth , Birkenhead and Chester , and two destroyers of the 12th DF the third line in the middle of the North Sea to the north. Despite these safeguards, the German mine cruisers Bremse und Brummer managed to advance undetected to the Shetlands and on October 17th attacked a British convoy from Norway to Great Britain and sank nine merchant ships and the destroyers Mary Rose and Strongbow and returned unhindered to Germany. see Action off Lerwick
from a few weeks in the spring of 1918 remained the Patriot to the resolution at the 14th DF , the conversion to the destroyer of the war, S- and V and W class began. When the flotilla was disbanded in March 1919 as part of the post-war reorganization of the fleet, the Patriot came to the Local Flotilla on the Firth of Forth and then in November 1919 to the reserve in Portsmouth .
Use at the RCN
In March 1920, the Canadian government accepted the British offer to take over a cruiser and two destroyers from the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy offered various ships as gifts, and even a capital ship was considered. Due to the low staffing of the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), the gift was reduced to three ships to replace the two totally outdated cruisers Rainbow and Niobe . The Royal Navy's offer then consisted of the cruiser Glasgow and the Talisman and Termagant destroyers of the Talisman class . The Canadians wanted the most modern standard ships possible with little special training requirements. In September 1920, Patriot and her sister ship Patrician were selected for transfer to Canada. In addition, some modernization work was carried out on the destroyers. So they got a closed navigating bridge. Together with the cruiser Aurora , which was also given away , the two destroyers were taken over by the Royal Canadian Navy in Devonport on November 1, 1920 and the association then moved to Halifax in December , where they arrived shortly before Christmas. The new ships of the RCN could be viewed by the population on Christmas days.
Aurora , Patrician and Patriot began a training trip to the Caribbean in the spring of 1921 . The association ran north to the Canadian naval base Esquimalt on the Pacific coast after passing the Panama Canal . A visit to Puntarenas , Costa Rica , was also made to clarify the interests of the Royal Bank of Canada in a dispute with the Costa Rican government over oil production there. The trip is also said to have served to distribute secret documents to British representations. In the summer of 1921 the association returned to Halifax.
In September 1921, the Patriot supported the inventor Alexander Graham Bell in his experiments with hydrofoils, in which the destroyer tested the test boat HD-4 in the Baddeck Bay of Bras d'Or Lake near Baddeck , Nova Scotia , where Bell lived dragged. In the winter of 1921/1922, the Canadian ships took part in the Royal Navy exercises in the Caribbean. In the summer, the Canadian government decided not to expand the RCN for the time being. The poor financial situation required cost-cutting measures and the number of units was reduced. The Aurora has been decommissioned and no longer maintained. Patriot stayed on the east coast as a training and training ship for the newly established Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, while the Patrician moved to Esquimalt on the west coast to perform the same tasks there. Patriot also made a trip to the Caribbean almost every year to train with the Royal Navy. The constant training service and the fact that they were the only ocean-going ship at the respective station put a considerable strain on the destroyers. In the post-war years it was customary to overhaul an active destroyer thoroughly and comprehensively every six to eight years (so-called D2 refit). The M destroyers completed in 1916 had never received such an overhaul. In 1927 the RCN began looking for a replacement for the Patriot and Patrician . Finally, the government in Great Britain ordered two newbuildings ( Skeena and Saguenay ) and lent two S-class destroyers on short notice, Vancouver ex Toreador and Champlain ex Torbay . Patriot was then decommissioned in December 1927. The destroyer was transferred to Great Britain and canceled in Briton Ferry , Wales in 1929 .
The sister ship Patrician
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In addition to the M-class destroyer Patriot , its sister ship HMS Patrician was also handed over to the Royal Canadian Navy in 1920. The destroyer had mainly served in the World War with the 13th Destroyer Flotilla , which secured the Battlecruiser Force and was stationed in Rosyth . This flotilla received its first V-class destroyers as early as autumn 1917 . At the end of the World War, the flotilla led by the cruiser Champion had two V-class leaders, 20 V- and W-class destroyers , seven R-class destroyers and only the M-class patricians , a kind of reserve within the flotilla was.
From 1920 to the summer of 1922, the three new units of the RCN often performed their duties together. After the government decided to reduce the cost of the Navy, the Patrician was relocated to the Canadian Pacific coast in autumn 1922. There she trained members of the naval reserve for the next five years. The strangest assignment in those years was the unsuccessful search for bank robbers in November 1924 who allegedly fled to the United States by motorboat.
Patrician was decommissioned on January 1, 1928 and then sold to Seattle for demolition in 1929 .
literature
- Maurice Cocker: Destroyers of the Royal Navy, 1893-1981. Ian Allan, 1983, ISBN 0-7110-1075-7 .
- Fred Dittmar, Jim Colledge: British Warships 1914-1919. Ian Allen, 1972, ISBN 0-7110-0380-7 .
- William Johnston, William GP Rawling, Richard H. Gimblett, John MacFarlane: The Seabound Coast: The Official History of the Royal Canadian Navy, 1867-1939. Dundurn Press, Toronto 2010, ISBN 978-1-55488-908-2 .
Web links
- 6 Thorneycroft "M" Jane´s 1919, p. 110
- HMS Patriot (1916)
- repeat "M" class destroyers (1915–1917)
- PATRIOT destroyers (1916/1920)
Individual evidence
- ↑ 14th DF on dreadnoughtproject
- ^ Newbolt: History of the Great War: Naval Operations : Volume V, April 1917 to November 1918
- ↑ 14th DF, Attached to the Grand Fleet November 1918
- ^ William Schleihauf: Necessary stepping stones ... The Transfer of Aurora, Patriot and Patrician to the Royal Canadian Navy after the First World War.
- ↑ Johnston et al. a .:, The Seabound Coast: The Official History of the Royal Canadian Navy, 1867-1939 , p. 882