by John Rodgaard, Robert Moore

This is a ship biography of one of the 67 V & W Class destroyers built at the end of the Great War and scrapped at the end of World War II.  After freezing in the forgotten war in the Baltic in 1919, Venomous spent the 1920s in the Mediterranean. She was in the front line when the German blitzkrieg swept across Europe and the V & Ws made high speed dashes across the Channel to bring troops (and civilians) back from Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk.

Venomous and her sister ships escorted the Atlantic convoys which kept Britain fed and the Arctic convoys which supplied our Russian allies with the weapons to stop the German advance. She took part in Operation Pedestal which saved Malta and, as the allies prepared for the landings in North Africa, was ordered to escort the destroyer depot ship, HMS Hecla, to the invasion beaches. When Hecla was torpedoed off the coast of Morocco, Venomous fought the attacking U-Boat and rescued 500 survivors.  

Venomous escorted convoys along the coast of north Africa including the first through convoy from Gibraltar to Alexandria and the invasion force to Sicily, Operation Husky. In October 1943 she returned to Britain and was converted to an Air Target ship for training Barracuda Torpedo Bomber aircrew based at Douglas in the Isle of Man. She was nearly lost in a hurricane off the east coast of Scotland before being sent to Kristiansand in Norway to accept the surrender of German naval forces. 

This third revised edition contains dozens of photographs taken by the ship's company; most have never been seen before.

Author: john_rodgaard@yahoo.com
Publisher: Holywell House Publishing, UK, 2017

Ordering Info: Amazon, or directly from the author.