Naval officer who survived being torpedoed and sunk twice and after the war was promoted Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Operations)
To be torpedoed and sunk twice while still a midshipman might be thought a challenging start to a naval career. Peter Branson graduated from Dartmouth naval college in 1941 and was on his way to the Far East war zone in the motor vessel Alfred Jones when she was torpedoed off Freetown by Kapitänleutnant Gunter Hessler commanding U107, a sinking which contributed to the most successful U-boat patrol of the entire war.
Survivors took to two lifeboats, one of which was quickly found. Branson’s was not recovered for six days, the survivors attempting to row towards the coast and being rationed to one-sixth of a pint of water a day in tropical heat. Some were seriously wounded and one engineer died. Midshipman Branson’s log exhibited extraordinary maturity. “Another point that struck me,” he wrote after observing that everyone was giving orders and no one was listening, “is that the best morale in the world is useless without discipline to back it up in such a case as this. Our morale was high but rendered useless through lack of discipline”.
The C-in-C of the South Atlantic station wrote to his father, Commander Cecil Branson, praising his son’s courageous conduct during the sinking and while in the lifeboat.
At Simonstown, Branson joined the elderly light cruiser Dragon, built in 1917, and took part in convoy escort duties in the South Atlantic and East Indies. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Dragon took part in sweeps to find Japanese invasion forces and was perhaps lucky not to meet them. She survived the campaign which saw the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, the fall of Singapore on February 15, 1942, and the catastrophe of the Battle of the Java Sea in which a force of American, British, Australian and Dutch cruisers and destroyers was virtually wiped out. Dragon escaped through the Sunda Strait to Ceylon with the Australian cruiser Hobart on February 28, shortly before the cruiser Exeter was sunk. Even Ceylon became too hot for comfort, and Dragon joined the Indian Ocean forces led by Admiral Somerville based in East Africa.
He was returning home for courses in the P&O troopship Orcades when she was torpedoed by U172 with the loss of 48 lives, 1,117 being saved.
Qualifying as a submariner, Branson arrived at Fremantle, West Australia, in September 1944 in the submarine Sea Rover and took part in three patrols off Sumatra and the Strait of Malacca, interdicting Japanese supply lines by sinking a number of coasters by gunfire.
After the war he served in submarines until 1949. In 1953 he was second in command of the destroyer Defender in the Far East.
His first command was the Type 15 anti-submarine frigate Roebuck in the Dartmouth Training Squadron in 1958, followed by a tour in Malta on the staff of the Flag Officer Flotillas. Promoted to commander, he was appointed second-in-command of the carrier Victorious in the Far East. He subsequently commanded the Gibraltar shore establishment, HMS Rooke and the crack anti-submarine Londonderry Squadron from the frigate Phoebe.
Other tours included a course at the Nato Defence College in Rome and, from 1970 to 1973, naval attaché in Paris.In 1973 he was appointed captain of the commando carrier Hermes, which in July 1974, with four frigates, played a major role in the evacuation of some 1,500 civilians of various nationalities from Kyrenia following the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus. In a well-organised operation, Hermes’s 16 Wessex helicopters landed 41 Commando Royal Marines to help to safeguard the British sovereign base areas. Branson was appointed CBE in 1975.
Branson’s final tour, as a rearadmiral, was in the MoD as Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Operations). He retired in 1977.
One of his tours on the naval staff had involved him in the politics of the First Cod War between Britain and Iceland. It was this which renewed an interest in Hull where he retired to become the managing director of the UK Trawlers Mutual Insurance Association for eight years.
In 1945 he was married to Sonia Moss, who died last year. He is survived by their daughter.
Rear-Admiral Peter Branson, CBE, Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Operations), 1975-77, was born on March 30, 1924. He died on January 1, 2011, aged 86
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