Lieutenant, Royal Navy
Born: June 22nd 1912
Died: December 18th 1942
Age at Death: 30
Killed in action, December 18th 1942
Medals/Honours: Distinguished Service Cross and Bar
John was born on 22 June 1912 in a smart, newly built villa just off the seafront at Bexhill-on-Sea, to Herbert Langton, an army officer of large private means, and his wife Marie Antoinette (née Gehle), the daughter of a retired colonel.
After school John joined the P&O shipping line, and received training in the Royal Naval Reserve as part of his employment. Shortly before the war he was transferred to the Royal Navy as first lieutenant of HMS Walker, which guarded convoys against U-boats. Just ten days into the war the Walker collided with another destroyer, HMS Vanquisher, and Langton was compelled to shoot a man who had been trapped in the wreckage, to save him from further suffering in his last minutes.
In 1941 he came under the command of Captain Donald Macintyre, the legendary destroyer commander, whose reputation was summed up well in his post-war memoir, U-boat Killer. The team sank U-boats commanded by two of the most famous of all U-boat commanders, Günther Prien and Otto Kretschmer. The latter survived after tapping out the message ‘We are sunking [sic]’ in Morse code, which prompted the Walker to scour the waters for the U-boat crew, whom they managed to save. Kretschmer had spent eight months studying English before the war, staying at the house of a professor at Exeter University, though evidently he had not been a brilliant student. Langton gave them all whisky after they boarded, to stave off pneumonia.
In early 1942 he was transferred to HMS Partridge, another destroyer, based in the Mediterranean. He had already earned the Distinguished Service Cross for his ‘successful enterprises against enemy submarines’, as a Manchester Evening News report put it but now earned a bar to his DSC for conduct during Operation Harpoon, the despatch of a convoy to supply the British naval base at Malta. Later that year the ship was on an anti-submarine sweep in the Mediterranean when she was hit by a torpedo from a U-boat. The Partridge sank, and Langton perished with her. He is commemorated at the Chatham Naval Memorial.