Ships
- HMAS Waterhen (D22) In command when she was lost, 30 June 1941
James Hamilton Swain (10 May 1905 – 31 March 1970) was a Royal Navy officer who commanded the Australian destroyer Waterhen for the first twenty-two months of the Second World War, from her recommissioning at Sydney in August 1939 until she was bombed and sank off the Libyan coast on 30 June 1941. She was the first ship of the Royal Australian Navy lost to enemy action in the war. He was then a lieutenant commander. In December 1941 he took command of the new destroyer Penn, and in August 1942, in Operation Pedestal, he lashed her alongside the crippled tanker Ohio and helped bring the ship and her cargo of fuel into Malta, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. He later won the Distinguished Service Cross, retired from the Navy as a commander in 1948, and became a clergyman of the Church of Ireland. He died at the age of sixty-four, in office as rector of Maghera in County Londonderry.
The sources examined here give his date of birth, 10 May 1905, and nothing about his birthplace, parents, schooling or the manner in which he entered the Navy. The naval record that survives in public lists begins with his promotion to sub-lieutenant on 1 November 1926, when he was twenty-one.
The published naval rank lists, which are compiled from the Navy List, give the stages of his seniority: lieutenant on 1 August 1928, at twenty-three, and lieutenant commander on 1 August 1936, at thirty-one. The Dreadnought Project, which draws on the Navy List of July 1937, records him as the captain of the destroyer Whitshed from 15 September 1936, which was his first known command, taken six weeks after his promotion. Beyond those entries his service between 1926 and 1939 is a blank in the sources used here: no ships as a young officer, no staff or specialist appointment, no account of how he came to be on loan to the Australian navy.
What is clear is that he was a Royal Navy officer, not an Australian. In 1939 the Royal Australian Navy's five old destroyers, the V and W class ships of the First World War vintage that would become known as the "Scrap Iron Flotilla," were brought out of reserve with a mixture of Australian and loaned Royal Navy captains. Swain, aged thirty-four, took the Waterhen; the previous captain of the Waterhen in the lists was Alfred E. Buchanan. The Stuart, under Commander H. M. L. Waller of the Royal Australian Navy, and the Waterhen under Lieutenant Commander Swain, were commissioned from reserve at Sydney on 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland.
The story of the Waterhen in the Mediterranean is documented in some detail in the Australian War Memorial's holdings of her monthly reports of proceedings, which Swain would have signed as commanding officer, and in the compilation of destroyer histories and movement records at uboat.net. The ship worked up off Sydney in September 1939, went with the flotilla to Singapore and Colombo in October and November, and in late November, as the record notes, picked up the entire crew of a Swordfish of 824 Squadron that had crashed on anti-submarine patrol off Colombo. She and Vendetta then went by way of Aden to the Mediterranean, reaching Malta by 24 December 1939, from where they took over the escort of convoy K 6 to Marseilles, arriving on 26 December. Through the spring of 1940 she did the work of any British destroyer at Malta and Gibraltar: exercises, convoy escort, sailing from Malta on 10 April 1940 with the aircraft carriers Ark Royal and Glorious and their escort.
The war in the desert came to her late in 1940. On Christmas Day she left Sollum for a sweep along the coast between Tobruk and Derna to disrupt Italian coastal shipping. At 0030 on 26 December she intercepted the Italian schooner Tireremo Diritto near Bardia, took the crew and passengers prisoner, and sank the schooner with gunfire. Four days later, on the night of 30 December, on an anti-submarine patrol off Sollum, she collided at 2105 with the anti-submarine trawler Bandolero, which sank by 2150; the Waterhen picked up the entire crew and went on with her patrol despite damage to her bow. The record says that she was taken in hand at Port Tewfik from 3 January 1941 for repairs to her stem and a partial retubing of her boilers, and that she was fitted with a 12-pounder anti-aircraft gun in place of her after bank of torpedo tubes, and with a captured Italian Breda gun.
In March 1941 she and the destroyer Hotspur arrived at Piraeus for the Greek convoys; in April, with Vendetta under Lieutenant Commander Rodney Rhoades, she joined the inshore squadron supplying Tobruk. On 14 April 1941, around 1730, the hospital ship Vita was attacked and badly damaged by German aircraft outside Tobruk harbor. Vendetta and Waterhen went to her help. Waterhen tried to take her in tow without success, and at about 2230 went alongside and took off all 437 patients, six doctors, six nurses and forty-one sick-berth ratings. She then set course for Alexandria. The Vita, left behind, was later towed into Tobruk by a tug.
From May 1941 the "Tobruk Ferry" was the destroyers' work: the run from Alexandria or Mersa Matruh to Tobruk with troops, ammunition and stores, and back with wounded and prisoners, timed so as to be out of range of German aircraft by dawn. The Australian War Memorial records that the service began on 5 May with a round trip made by Waterhen and Voyager. In the eight weeks that followed, the movement record shows Waterhen making the run again and again. She went out on 22 and 30 May, on 15, 17, 19 and 22 June, and on 24 June, when she and Vendetta were diverted to the aid of the sloop Parramatta and the damaged tanker Pass of Balmaha after the destroyer Auckland had been sunk by air attack. Swain was mentioned in despatches, the award dated 19 August 1941.
The last run began on 28 June 1941. Waterhen left Alexandria for Tobruk with the destroyer Defender, and on the afternoon of 29 June sailed from Mersa Matruh on what the Australian War Memorial counts as her thirteenth run, loaded with fifty tons of stores and seventy troops. At 7:45 in the evening, off Sollum, a squadron of fifteen German dive bombers attacked. Defender was attacked first and was not hit. The first bomb aimed at Waterhen exploded in the water behind her and left her unresponsive to the helm. Three more bombs flooded the engine and boiler rooms; a final attack damaged the engine room, the engineer's cabin and the central store. In the Australian War Memorial's account, Defender "responded to Lieutenant Commander Swain's decision to abandon ship," coming alongside and taking everyone off. There were no casualties among those on board.
The decision that followed was a common one in Mediterranean destroyer warfare, and it was Swain's to make. Defender would take advantage of nightfall and tow the Waterhen toward Mersa Matruh before dawn. During the preparations the rising moon showed a submarine nearby, shells were fired, and Defender chased it, then returned and began the tow. By 11 p.m. the list to port was increasing, and Swain decided to abandon the tow. Some men had gone back aboard for the tow, and they were brought off again. They watched from Defender as the ship rolled over and sank, at 1:50 on the morning of 30 June. The crew called her "Chook." No man was lost. The memorial's account notes a single minor casualty, a sailor struck by a tin of peaches. Swain was thirty-six, and had commanded her for twenty-two months.
His next ship was new. Penn, a P-class destroyer built by Vickers-Armstrongs at the High Walker yard on the Tyne, was commissioned on 10 February 1942, and Swain, according to uboat.net's command list, took her over from 2 December 1941, before her commissioning, and held her until the middle or late part of 1944. In August 1942 he took her into Operation Pedestal, the fight to get a convoy of fourteen merchant ships through to Malta. A member of Penn's company, in a memoir deposited with the BBC's People's War archive, describes the night of 12 August, when two Italian submarines torpedoed the cruisers Nigeria and Cairo and the tanker Ohio, and the E-boat attacks that followed, which his ship passed through picking up survivors. On the morning of 13 August Penn was ordered to look after the Ohio, whose engines had given out after repeated near misses. For three hours she tried to tow the tanker, slipping the tow each time the dive bombers returned, until the single destroyer could not manage the task. On the 14th, with the minesweeper Rye towing from ahead and the destroyers Bramham and Ledbury helping, the memoir says, "Our Captain, Lieutenant-Commander Swain, now made the decision that if the Ohio was ever to get to Malta we would have to stop slipping the tow each time the Stukas arrived. It was going to be Malta or bust." Penn was lashed alongside the tanker's starboard side "using just about every wire left in the ship." The Ohio entered Grand Harbour on 15 August with her fuel. The memoir is a crewman's recollection, written long afterward, and not an official record.
Swain's Distinguished Service Order is listed with a date of 6 November 1942. Penn continued in the eastern Mediterranean. Wikipedia's article on the ship, which is a secondary summary, says that on 16–17 October 1943 she and the destroyer Jervis sank the German submarine chaser UJ-2109 at Kalymnos, and that on 7 November 1943 she and Pathfinder sank the German submarine trap GA 45 off Amorgos. A Distinguished Service Cross is listed to him with the date 4 April 1944. The citation was not found in the sources examined here, and what it was awarded for is not established.
He left Penn in mid- or late 1944; the sources examined here do not say where he served for the rest of the war. He was placed on the retired list with the rank of commander on 17 September 1948, at forty-three.
The record then takes an unexpected turn. According to the uboat.net officer page, he joined the Church of Ireland, was rector of the Maghera Union, in the diocese of Derry and Raphoe, from 1953 to 1970, and became a canon of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, in 1969. The page names his wife as Elizabeth Louisa Swain, who died in 1984. The sources examined here give no obituary, no account of his ordination, and no record of children; the dates of his marriage and ordination are not known. The parish of Maghera lies on the road between Belfast and Londonderry, at the foot of the Sperrin Mountains.
He died on 31 March 1970, aged sixty-four. The place of death and burial were not found.