WW2 100 – 26 May 1941 – The sad story of the Fighting G: Petty Officer William Frederick Pannell (1909-41) Royal Navy, HMS Gloucester
Continued from 24 May 1941
Lost with the Mighty Hood: ABLE SEAMAN PERCIVAL CHARLES HERBERT ACTON (1917-41)
https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2023/10/ww2-75-24-may-1941-lost-with-mighty.html
Budleigh Salterton's War Memorial
The Pannell name is well known in the local area. At least one Budleigh resident claims to have found five generations of Pannells living in the town. There are also Pannells in Exmouth. So in some ways it is not surprising to find William Frederick Pannell’s name on war memorials in both towns, although on the Exmouth War Memorial he is listed with just one initial. According to researchers on the Devon Heritage website, William (Service Number D/J 111241) was the son of Wallace and Alice Kate Pannell (née Selway), and the husband of Violet Lilie Pannell (née Brook).
The same source states that he was born in Budleigh Salterton in 1909 which would make him 32 when he died, although elsewhere on that website he is described as born in Exmouth, and two years older!
William’s ship was one of the last batch of three Town-class light cruisers built for the Royal Navy during the late 1930s. Commissioned shortly before the start of WW2 in August 1939, Gloucester was initially assigned to the Far East and was transferred to the Indian Ocean and later to South Africa to search for German commerce raiders. She was transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet in mid-1940 and spent much of her time escorting Malta Convoys. The ship acquired the nickname ‘The Fighting G’ after earning five battle honours in less than a year.
This Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero (Italian for sparrowhawk) three-engined Italian aircraft was developed as a torpedo bomber during WW2 Image credit: Wikipedia
Following Italy’s entry into the war on 10 June, Gloucester was involved in attacks on targets along the coast of Libya, an Italian colony. Just over a month later, on 8 July, a bomb dropped by Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bombers struck the ship's bridge, killing 18 crew members instantly, including the captain, Frederick Rodney Garside CBE.
Commander Reginald Percy Tanner DSC was serving as the ship’s gunnery officer and took over command as senior surviving officer, but as a result of the attack, the ship could not be steered from the bridge and was uncontrolled for a time. Despite this, Gloucester remained with the fleet and the next day participated in the Battle of Calabria, an indecisive encounter with an Italian naval force off the southern coast of Italy.
Captain Henry Aubrey Rowley took over command of Gloucester on 16 July. Repairs to her damaged bridge were completed by the end of August and the ship spent most of the rest of the year ferrying troops and escorting convoys to and from Greece and Malta.
Stuka dive bombers - Ju 87 Bs - over Poland,
September/October 1939 Image credit: Wikimedia
A new and more potent threat to Allied naval shipping than Italian bombers came in the form of German dive-bombers. Sturzkampfgeschwader 2 (StG 2) Immelmann was a Luftwaffe dive-bomber wing which operated the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka. Formed on 1 May 1939, StG 2 had fought in the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, and flew in support of the German army in May and June 1940. Following the Battle of Britain it transferred to southern Europe, bombarding Malta from January to March 1941 and taking part in the German invasion of Yugoslavia.
On 11 January 1941, while escorting convoys, Gloucester and sister ship HMS Southampton came under attack from Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers from StG 2 while leaving Malta. Gloucester was hit by a 250-kilogram (550 lb) bomb which failed to explode after penetrating through five decks. Southampton was hit by at least two bombs and caught fire; heavily damaged and without power, the ship was scuttled by torpedoes from the light cruiser Orion.
Bletchley Park Mansion in 2017, location of the
Code and Cypher School where the secret communications of the Axis Powers were
penetrated
A significant engagement for Gloucester took place a few months later at the Battle of Cape Matapan, off the south-west coast of the Peloponnesian peninsula of Greece. Italian coded signals had been intercepted by experts of the British government’s Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. The battle, from 27-29 March, was a decisive Allied victory when ships of the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy, under the command of the Royal Navy's Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, sank or severely damaged several ships of the Italian navy. Allied losses were three killed, compared with 2,300 killed and 1,015 captured on the Italian side.
Less than two months later it was a different story for the Allies in the Mediterranean.
Map of the
area of the Battle of Crete, showing Cape Matapan, Maleme Airfield and the
Kythira Strait where HMS Gloucester and HMS Fiji were sunk by enemy action
To discover more about the circumstances of William’s death in May 1941 on HMS Gloucester, historians would say that you have to look at events of the previous year. 1940 had seen a setback for Germany in its failure to win the Battle of Britain, and Hitler’s strategists had decided to look elsewhere for victory. Crete was presented as an easy target for the Luftwaffe to launch an airborne invasion, and Hitler was persuaded. His directive of April 1941 stated that the island ‘will be the operational base from which to carry on the air war in the Eastern Mediterranean, in co-ordination with the situation in North Africa’.
German paratroops landing on Crete from Junkers
52 transports, 20 May 1941. Image credit: Wikipedia
The invasion of Crete, codenamed Operation Mercury by Nazi military planners, began on the morning of 20 May 1941 with the landing of German paratroops. Greek and other Allied forces, along with Cretan civilians, defended the island, and after one day of fighting, the Germans had suffered heavy casualties and the Allied troops were confident that they would defeat the invasion. The next day, through communication failures, Allied tactical hesitation, and German offensive operations, Maleme Airfield in western Crete fell, enabling the Germans to land reinforcements and overwhelm the defensive positions on the north of the island. Allied forces withdrew to the south coast. More than half were evacuated by the Royal Navy and the remainder surrendered or joined the Cretan resistance.
The next few days saw efforts by the Navy to counter the invasion of Crete by attacking German supplies to the island. A convoy of fishing boats laden with approximately 2,000 enemy troops and escorted by the Italian torpedo boat Lupo was intercepted by a British naval force under Rear Admiral Irvine Glennie and 300 German soldiers lost their lives.
The brutality of the episode, in which survivors later spoke of their friends being killed in spite of waving white flags, is a point stressed by historian Ken Otter in his book HMS Gloucester: The Untold Story (1999). He quotes the example of survivor Ernst Stribny, who claimed that a British cruiser had repeatedly passed through the wreckage, firing at the soldiers in the sea and that many men had drowned by being sucked under by the ship's propellers. ‘The accounts of German soldiers who were aboard the small boats in the flotilla are of crucial importance in understanding events that took place later in the day,’ writes Ken Otter. ‘These accounts were fed back to the Luftwaffe pilots who then sought revenge.’
In the early morning of 22 May, Gloucester and the light cruiser HMS Fiji were damaged during an attack by 50 Stuka dive-bombers. A report at this time on levels of anti-aircraft ammunition for five Royal Navy cruisers revealed that Gloucester had the lowest: 18%.
Three of the cruisers, Ajax, Orion
and Dido were ordered to return to Alexandria to rearm but Gloucester
and Fiji remained, vulnerable, in the Kythira Strait, about 14 miles north
of Crete.
HMS Greyhound Image credit: Wikipedia
The destroyer HMS Greyhound was sailing to rendezvous with Gloucester and Fiji in the Kythira Strait when she was struck by three bombs dropped by Stukas of the Luftwaffe’s StG 2 and sank a few minutes afterwards. Orders were given to pick up the survivors.
Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham KT, GCB, OM, DSO & Two Bars in 1947
Image credit: Wikimedia
But on 30 May 1941, in a letter to the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley
Pound, Admiral Cunningham wrote, ‘The sending back of Gloucester and Fiji
to the Greyhound was another grave error and cost us those two
ships. They were practically out of ammunition but even had they been full up I
think they would have gone. The Commanding Officer of Fiji told me that
the air over Gloucester was black with planes.’
The sinking of HMS Gloucester
Photograph taken by a German airman recording the sinking of the ship off the coast of Crete, 22 May 1941. This is photograph HU 1997E from the collections of the Imperial War Museums (collection no. PC 2250)
During the afternoon of 22 May, Gloucester was hit by several bombs, this time by Stukas of StG 2. The accounts of survivors, as given by Ken Otter in his book, make for painful reading. Blasted by Stuka attacks, Gloucester was soon ablaze.
HMS Fiji under heavy air attack, by Lieutenant Commander R Langmaid RN, Official Fleet Artist Photograph A 13645 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums
Fiji, itself under heavy fire, dropped rafts for the despairing crew members as it passed the ship but was unable to stop and was itself sunk within a few hours.
Ken Otter quotes the Royal Navy’s own historian, Captain S.W. Roskill DSC, as claiming that destroyers were dispatched that night to search for survivors from Gloucester, but states that this was untrue.
In a 1999 BBC news programme, broadcast to coincide with the publication of the book HMS Gloucester: The Untold Story, a survivor commented ‘The tradition in the Navy is that when a ship has sunk, a vessel is sent back to pick up survivors under cover of darkness. That did not happen and we do not know why. We were picked up by Germans.’ Of the 807 men aboard at the time of her sinking, only 85 survived to reach shore; two more subsequently died after being taken into captivity, one in 1941 and another in 1945.
The defence of Crete had evolved into a costly naval engagement. By the end of the campaign the Royal Navy's eastern Mediterranean strength had been reduced to only two battleships and three cruisers.
Sir Alexander Cadogan OM GCMG KCB in 1945 Image credit: Wikimedia
Ominously, Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, wrote in his diary on 27 May 1941: ‘Awful news from Crete. We are scuppered there, and I'm afraid the morale and material effects will be serious. Certainly the Germans are past-masters in the art of war — and great warriors. If we beat them, we shall have worked a miracle.’
As far as we know, William’s body was never recovered. The variations of detail in his listings on the Exmouth and Budleigh sections of the Devon Heritage website also include his date of death, but this is given officially by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as 26 May. Naval casualty records accept that while the ship was sunk on 22 May, missing personnel were not declared presumed dead until May 1945.
Plymouth Naval Memorial, Devon
Image credit: Partonez/Wikipedia
William is remembered on the Plymouth Naval
Memorial, situated on Plymouth Hoe, as well as on Budleigh and Exmouth War Memorials.
The next post is for SERGEANT JOHN LAKE ENDICOTT (1921-41) who died at Stiffkey, Norfolk on 10 June 1941.
You can read about him at
https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/12/ww2-75-10-june-1941-vaseful-of.html
These ‘orphans’ are listed
on Budleigh Salterton War Memorial, but have not been identified. Their first
names, date of death and service numbers are not known. They are recorded on
the Devon Heritage website as ‘Not yet confirmed’.
If you know anything which
would help to identify them,
please contact Michael
Downes on 01395 446407.
F.E. Newcombe
F.J. Watts
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