On the Chatham Naval Memorial is the name of C/JX 229497 Signalman Isaac Hyde, serving on H.M.S. Aldenham with the Royal Navy who died 14/12/1944.
The son of Joseph and Jane Hyde and the husband of Frances Bell Hyde, of Ashington, Northumberland.
Acknowledgments: Margaret Allison
HMS Aldenham (pennant number L22) was an escort destroyer of the Type III Hunt-class. The Royal Navy ordered its construction in July 1940. Upon completion in February 1942, she was deployed to convoy escort duty. Aldenham is one of the ships credited with the sinking of the U-587 on the 27th March 1942. After circumnavigating Africa, she joined the Mediterranean Fleet, escorting convoys between Alexandria, Malta and Tobruk. She took part in the Allied invasion of Sicily, landings at Salerno and Anzio, the Dodecanese Campaign and Operation Dragoon before being assigned to the Adriatic Campaign.
On the 14th December 1944, Aldenham was sunk by a naval mine in the Adriatic Sea off Pag Island after she led a Royal Navy force in a bombardment mission against targets on the island of Pag and near the town of Karlobag in support of the Yugoslav Partisans. Although the rest of the force came to pick up survivors, cold weather and severe damage to Aldenham permitted the rescue of only 63 of her crew. Her wreck, broken in two by the explosion, was discovered in 19992000. It is a war grave, where 126 crew members and two Yugoslav Partisans aboard Aldenham at the time of the mining died.
As Aldenham was making a turn at a position north of the islet of krda, to sail between islands of Planik and Olib, she hit a mine that exploded under her engine room. The ship broke in two and her bow sank quickly, followed by her stern a little later, at 15:29. Cold weather hampered rescue efforts by Atherton and accompanying motor launches ML 238 and HDML 1162, and only 58 seamen and five officers, including Farrant, were pulled out of the sea. 126 crewmen died, as well as a wounded Yugoslav Partisan transported from Pag for medical treatment and Yugoslav Partisan liaison officer, Colonel Ivan Preradović. Aldenham was the last Royal Navy destroyer lost in World War II.
A portion of the surviving crew revisited the site on the 14th December 1984, but the shipwreck was not located until 15 years later. In 1999, Italian wreck divers located a 30-metre (98 ft) long bow section one nautical mile (1.9 kilometres) off krda. It lies on the port side, at a depth of 86 metres (282 feet), but it is normally obscured by silt stirred up by trawling further north in the Kvarner Gulf. The aft section of the ship was discovered in 2000 through testimony of a fisherman from Pag. It was found closer to krda, approximately 700 metres (2,300 feet) away from the bow section. Aldenham’s boilers and propellers were still operating as the ship sank, and the section struck the silty seafloor at a depth of 82 metres (269 feet), with her keel on top. Her rudder is now at a depth of 67 metres (220 feet). The wreck was declared a British war grave, and forms a part of “the Ghost Fleet of Pag” together with wrecks of Kriegsmarine destroyer TA20 (ex-Italian Audace), corvettes UJ 202 and UJ 208 (ex-Italian Melpmene and Spingarda) sunk in the Action of the 1st November 1944, and World War I wrecks of Austro-Hungarian steamships SS Albanien and SS Euterpe.
Isaac Hyde is remembered at Ashington on A17.01 (A17.27) and A17.43, at Hirst on H62.02 and H62.04 (identical books of Remembrance) where his first name is given as “Isaiah”, and in our List of Ships’ Crews.
