- Author
- A.N. Other and NHSA Webmaster
- Subjects
- Biographies and personal histories, History - WW2
- Tags
-
- RAN Ships
- None noted.
- Publication
- December 2005 edition of the Naval Historical Review (all rights reserved)
(Other accounts state that Lieutenant Polkinghorn furiously ordered the Japanese officer off his ship ((Badges & Battle Honours of HM Ships by LCDR K V Burns, DSM, RN – Maritime Books 1986 – (Japanese officers and marines came onboard to demand Peterel’s surrender. The CO roared: “Get off my bloody ship!” The enemy cruiser, destroyer and gunboat opened fire at point-blank range. Many died as the ship sank.))) and immediately sounded off Action Stations (worthy of Captain Hornblower in an earlier era) and the Japanese warships and shore artillery opened fire shortly afterwards. I had been uncertain whether the gunboat had been alongside or moored in the stream, but the above eye-witness account is more specific. Lieutenant Columbus Smith USN had been sleeping ashore at his club when awoken and loosely arrested by the Japanese. He had attempted to return to USS Wake but had been prevented by Japanese military units already attacking Allied ships in Shanghai. His ship had already been overpowered and his planned sabotage and destruction of the Wake thwarted by the Japanese. Both COs had been aware of possible Japanese hostile action but the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour had not been foreseen. Subsequently all Allied service personnel were rounded up and imprisoned in Shanghai Gaol, in increasingly desperate conditions. Both men survived the War as POWs.
Three sister ships of Peterel (Sandpiper, Gannet and Falcon) were stranded near Nanking, far up the Yangtze River, and after the evacuation of their crews, the vessels were presented to the Chinese Nationalist Government in 1942, already fighting a desperate war against the invading Japanese ((White Ensign – Red Dragon – Cdre P J Melson CBE, Royal Navy (Edinburgh Financial Publishing (Asia) – 1997))).
Another sister ship, HMS Moth, was refitting in drydock in Hong Kong, and was sabotaged by deliberately flooding her in the dock before the Japanese captured the island colony. However, she was eventually subsequently salvaged and used by the Imperial Japanese Navy, but later sunk by mine near Nanking. Ed)
Bibliography:
- GUNBOAT – Small Ships at War – Bryan Perrett (Cassell Military Paperbacks 2001)
- Royal Navy Day by Day – LCDR Bushy Shrubb RN (Centaur Press, in association with Portsmouth Royal Naval Museum ) 1976