The sinking of HMS Penelope

On the morning of 18 February 1944 in the Tyrrhenian Sea, about 35 nautical miles west of Naples, the German submarine U-410 torpedoed the British light cruiser HMS Penelope. The ship, which in 1941–1942 had been one of the symbols of the defence of Malta, went down a few minutes after the second hit. Four hundred and seventeen members of her crew were killed, among them her commanding officer, Captain George Belben; 206 men were rescued.

War chronologies usually state that Penelope sank “off Anzio” and that 415 sailors were killed. Although the ship was indeed heading for the Anzio anchorage, she was torpedoed much closer to Naples than to the beachhead. The figure of 415 appears in some studies; British casualty lists, on which uboat.net among others relies, name the captain, 24 officers, 368 ratings and 24 Royal Marines – 417 dead in all.

A cruiser of Force K

Penelope was an Arethusa-class light cruiser, built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast and commissioned in November 1936. She was a small ship of about 5,200 tons displacement, armed with six 6-inch (152 mm) guns and torpedo tubes – designed to protect trade routes and to operate with the fleet.

The outbreak of war found her in the Mediterranean, but early in 1940 she transferred to the Home Fleet. During the Norwegian campaign, on 11 April 1940, while hunting German ships in the Vestfjord, she ran aground; towed first to a makeshift base in the Lofoten Islands and then to Britain, she returned to service only in the summer of 1941.

In the autumn of 1941 Penelope and her sister ship Aurora formed the core of Force K, which hunted from Malta the convoys sailing from Italy to Libya. On the night of 8/9 November the force destroyed the entire Duisburg convoy, and in the following weeks further ships carrying supplies for the Axis armies. In the spring of 1942, when the Luftwaffe was trying to raze Malta to the ground, Penelope lay in dry dock under constant air attack. Bomb splinters riddled her sides so thickly that her sailors, plugging the holes with wooden pegs, nicknamed her “HMS Pepperpot”. On 8 April 1942 she slipped away from the island to Gibraltar, and from there went for several months of repairs at the New York Navy Yard.

In 1943 she returned to the Mediterranean. In June she bombarded Pantelleria, in July the coast of Sicily, and in September she supported the landing at Salerno. In October, during the Dodecanese campaign, together with the cruiser Sirius and destroyers she sank a German convoy near the island of Astypalea – landing craft, an ammunition ship and an armed trawler – but on the way back through the Karpathos Strait she was hit by German dive-bombers. Towards the end of the year she operated from Gibraltar against German blockade runners in the Atlantic.

Off Anzio

On 22 January 1944 Penelope was part of the gunfire support force covering the landing at Anzio, together with the American cruiser Brooklyn and destroyers. Over the following weeks she shelled German positions on the coast, including the area around Formia on the seaward flank of the Gustav Line, and shuttled between the beachhead and Naples, where she replenished ammunition and fuel.

The ships’ fire was invaluable to the beachhead. General Eberhard von Mackensen’s German Fourteenth Army had surrounded the Allied troops on three sides, and from 16 February, in Operation Fischfang, was trying to break through to the sea along the Anzio–Albano road. It was precisely on 17 and 18 February that the battle reached its crisis: the Germans had come up to the beachhead’s last line of defence, and naval gunfire, together with the corps artillery and aircraft, was breaking up their columns before they could attack.

Two torpedoes

On the morning of 18 February Penelope was sailing alone, without a destroyer escort, at about 26 knots. According to most accounts she was returning from Naples to her station off Anzio. Her speed was supposed to protect her from submarines; in the Tyrrhenian Sea this was common practice, since destroyers were still in short supply.

Lying in wait in her path was Oberleutnant zur See Horst-Arno Fenski’s U-410, a Type VIIC boat of the 29th Flotilla, based at Toulon and La Spezia. According to data compiled by uboat.net, the first torpedo hit the cruiser in the after engine room at 6.58 a.m. At about 7.16 a.m. Fenski fired a second torpedo, which struck the after boiler room; according to German records cited in some accounts, this was a G7es Zaunkönig acoustic torpedo, which homed in on the noise of a ship’s propellers. After the second explosion Penelope began to sink rapidly and within a few minutes had disappeared beneath the surface.

There was no time to abandon ship in good order. Four hundred and seventeen men went down with her, including Captain Belben. The 206 survivors were picked up from the water by two British tank landing ships (LSTs).

Submarines in the Tyrrhenian Sea

The sinking of Penelope was the greatest success of the German U-boats during the battle of Anzio, but not the only one. The beachhead lived entirely on seaborne supplies: every soldier, shell and jerrycan of fuel came from Naples in LSTs and merchant ships, which had to make a passage of several dozen miles along the coast. This traffic was a predictable target for the dozen or so U-boats that Karl Dönitz kept in the Mediterranean despite the losses suffered in passing through the Strait of Gibraltar.

U-410 alone sank three vessels from the convoys supplying the beachhead in the space of six days: the British freighter Fort St. Nicolas on 15 February, Penelope on 18 February and the American tank landing ship LST-348 on 20 February. In the same days U-230 sank the British LST-418 (16 February) and LST-305 (20 February).

Even more dangerous to the ships off Anzio was air attack. German bombers struck at the anchorage at dusk, using aerial torpedoes and Henschel Hs 293 radio-controlled glide bombs. On 23 January the destroyer HMS Janus was sunk, on 24 January the hospital ship St David, and on 29 January the anti-aircraft cruiser Spartan, hit by an Hs 293. On 25 February a bomb of the same type sank the destroyer Inglefield. On top of this came mines, shelling by heavy artillery from the Alban Hills and night attacks by German E-boats.

Significance

The loss of Penelope had no effect on the course of the fighting at Anzio. The Allies had overwhelming superiority at sea and in the air in the Mediterranean, and naval gunfire continued without interruption until the breakout from the beachhead in May 1944. In terms of lives lost, however, it was the Royal Navy’s heaviest single loss in the battle of Anzio, and it showed that the safety of a fast ship sailing without escort had become illusory once the Germans had acoustic torpedoes.

U-410’s career ended soon afterwards. On 11 March 1944 the boat was destroyed in dock at Toulon during a raid by the US Fifteenth Air Force; the French took over her wreck in August 1944. Fenski took command of U-371, which in May 1944 was sunk off the coast of Algeria after a fight with Allied escorts; her commander survived and was taken prisoner. At the end of March another U-boat, U-223, sank the destroyer Laforey north of Sicily, but the German submarine force in the Mediterranean, bombed in its bases and hunted by aircraft and escort groups, dwindled month by month; its last boats were sunk or scuttled in the autumn of 1944.

In Britain Penelope was remembered above all as a Malta ship. While she was still afloat, in 1943, C.S. Forester dedicated to her officers and men his novel The Ship, inspired by the Second Battle of Sirte. A memorial plaque to her dead was placed in St Ann’s Church in Portsmouth Naval Base.