HMS Achates (H12): The Destroyer That Kept Making Smoke Until She Couldn't

A Solid, Unspectacular Start

Named after the loyal companion of Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid, and carrying the fitting motto Fidus Achates, or faithful Achates, HMS Achates began life as one of nine A-class destroyers, built by John Brown & Company on the Clyde, laid down on 11 September 1928, launched just over a year later on 4 October 1929, and completed on 27 March 1930.

She was a fairly standard destroyer of her era, 323 feet long, capable of 35 knots, armed with four 4.7-inch guns, two 2-pounder anti-aircraft guns and eight torpedo tubes in two quadruple mounts, with a standard displacement of 1,350 long tons, a crew of around 134 and a range of some 4,800 nautical miles at 15 knots.

She had been ordered on 6 March 1928, and there was little in her early career to suggest the extraordinary decade that lay ahead.

Her 1930s were the sort of gentle peacetime cruising that later, harder years would make look almost comic.

She escorted the carrier HMS Eagle to a trade exhibition in South America, got sent to Cyprus during a bout of civil unrest, collided with her sister ship HMS Active off Saint-Tropez in 1932 (the details of which history has politely declined to dwell on), and in January 1937 rescued the crew of the Spanish steamer Aragon, seized, of all people, by the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, a ship Achates and her country would have rather more urgent business with a few years later, at the bottom of the River Plate.

She returned home that March, paid off at Devonport, and spent the best part of a year as parent ship to the 1st Anti-Submarine Flotilla at Portland before the decade's peace ran out.

War Breaks Out

With the outbreak of the Second World War, HMS Achates, under Commander Robert James Gardner, joined the 18th Destroyer Flotilla at Portsmouth before moving to the 16th Destroyer Flotilla at Harwich in July 1940 under his successor, Lieutenant-Commander Robert William Jocelyn, and settled into the unglamorous but essential work of anti-submarine patrols and convoy escort, first in the English Channel and then the North Sea.

The war found her at once. She spent September 1939 on Channel convoy escort and anti-submarine patrol with the 18th Destroyer Flotilla, and in January 1940 drew a job that sounds like fiction: escorting the battleship HMS Royal Sovereign out of Portsmouth for Halifax with five million pounds of gold bullion in her holds, part of the quiet shipment of Britain's reserves across the Atlantic to pay for the war. In August she helped pull survivors out of the water after the armed merchant cruiser HMS Transylvania was torpedoed, working alongside HMS Antelope and HMS Fortune.

On 2 November 1940, escorting Convoy OB 237 with HMS Antelope, she detached to hunt a submarine contact and had the deeply unhelpful experience of her ASDIC failing in the middle of it. Antelope pressed on alone, caught U-31 on the surface, forced her under with her conning tower still open and sank her on the spot. Forty-three of the forty-five men aboard were rescued. It was a notable kill for reasons nobody in either ship can have appreciated at the time: U-31 had already been sunk once, bombed by an RAF Blenheim on sea trials in March 1940 with the loss of her entire crew, then raised from the shallows, repaired at Wilhelmshaven and sent back to sea in July. She remains the only U-boat of the war to be sunk, salvaged, recommissioned and sunk again.

Her captain for most of this period is worth a note of his own. The officer the records list as Lieutenant-Commander Robert William Jocelyn appears in the Navy's signals and logs by his title, Viscount Jocelyn, heir to an Irish earldom and, from August 1940, in command of a fourteen-year-old destroyer in the North Atlantic. He held her until late 1941 and took her through very nearly everything that follows.

Searching for Hood's Survivors

She had not been dropped into the Bismarck operation at random. Through April and May 1941 Achates had been Hood's regular escort, screening her out of Hvalfjord on 28 April to cover the mid-ocean passage of convoys SC 29 and HX 122, putting into Reykjavik with her to fuel on 3 May, and bringing her back into Scapa Flow on the 6th. In between, in April, she had been detached to escort the 1st Minelaying Squadron while it laid a section of the Northern Barrage, an operation catalogued as SN 71. Remember that.

Sailing just after midnight on 22 May 1941 alongside the destroyers Electra, Antelope, Anthony, Echo and Icarus, HMS Achates found herself attached to one of the most consequential naval operations of the war, escorting the battlecruiser HMS Hood and the battleship HMS Prince of Wales as they moved to intercept the German battleship Bismarck in the Denmark Strait.

On 24 May, during the Battle of the Denmark Strait, Hood was struck and destroyed by a catastrophic magazine explosion, sinking in a matter of minutes.

Achates was one of the ships sent to search the freezing water for survivors. 

Of Hood's crew of over 1,400, only three men were found alive. It was a grim and largely fruitless task, and one that would have left a mark on any crew who took part in it.

Nor did her part end with the search. On 26 May she joined Home Fleet units screening the hunt that ran Bismarck down and sank her, and on 27 May she was at Hvalfjord when the battered Prince of Wales came in to land her wounded. The next day Achates escorted her south to Rosyth. In the space of a week she had screened the battlecruiser that was destroyed, searched for her survivors, helped screen the ships that avenged her, and taken the damaged survivor of the same battle home for repair.

Blown Apart By a Friendly Mine

If the Denmark Strait was a brush with someone else's disaster, what happened at the end of July 1941 was entirely, cruelly domestic. While supporting a carrier raid against Kirkenes and Petsamo, Achates struck a British mine.

The sequence matters, because it was not simply bad luck. On 23 July 1941 she sailed as part of the escort for the carriers HMS Victorious and HMS Furious on their way to raid Kirkenes and Petsamo. On the 24th she was detached to take passage to Iceland. On the 25th her engines failed, the fuel having been contaminated, and the drifting destroyer went into British minefield SN 69, part of the same Northern Barrage whose laying she had escorted three months earlier, in position 64 degrees 25 minutes north, 12 degrees 45 minutes west.

One of the officers on board that summer was Temporary Acting Sub-Lieutenant Ronald Weyman of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, an anti-submarine specialist who had been press-ganged by his captain into doubling as navigating officer and who wrote the whole thing up years afterwards. His account contains a detail that reads very differently with hindsight. Leaving a west coast anchorage ahead of a loaded fleet minelayer, Achates was sent through the narrow channel at high speed on purpose, to set off any magnetic mines the Germans might have laid overnight. As the first lieutenant put it to him: it clears the channel for the important blokes. Three months later a British mine took her bow off.

The explosion tore off the destroyer's bow outright and killed 63 of her crew, with a further 25 injured.

It is a sobering reminder that in the crowded, heavily mined waters of a world war, a ship's own side's ordnance could be every bit as lethal as the enemy's.

The salvage was its own ordeal. HMS Anthony took her in tow and got her into Seyðisfjörður on 26 July for patching. She left again on 7 August under tow by the tug Assurance with HMS Antelope escorting, and by the 10th her hull was visibly working in storm conditions, so she was put into the Faroes for more temporary repair. She did not sail for the Tyne until 21 August, and was handed to a commercial yard there on the 24th.

What came back was not quite the same ship. She paid off in September 1941 for repair and conversion into an escort destroyer, and the eight months of work included a Type 271 surface warning radar and a Hedgehog ahead-throwing anti-submarine mortar. A 1929 fleet destroyer went into the Tyne; a 1942 convoy escort came out, which is the whole story of the Atlantic war compressed into one refit.

Back Into the Arctic

Repaired and recommissioned under a new captain, Lieutenant-Commander Arthur Andre Tait, HMS Achates was sent straight back into some of the most brutal convoy work of the entire war: the Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union, running the gauntlet of U-boats, aircraft, and appalling weather to keep Britain's ally supplied. 

She escorted the outbound Convoy PQ 16 in May and June 1942, which lost seven of its 36 merchant ships, then the return convoy QP 13 that summer, and in September took on Convoy PQ 18, one of the war's costliest convoys, which lost 13 merchant vessels even as its escorts managed to sink three German submarines in return.

She did more on those convoys than shoot. Achates joined the ocean escort of PQ 16 on 23 May 1942 alongside HMS Ashanti, Martin, Volunteer and the Polish destroyer ORP Garland, and on the 28th, after Garland was badly knocked about by air attack, it was Achates who went alongside to put medical help aboard her. For PQ 18 in September she was in company with HMS Malcolm, the anti-aircraft ships Alynbank and Ulster Queen and four Flower-class corvettes, and stayed with the convoy until it reached Murmansk on the 21st.

By November 1942, Achates had swapped the Arctic cold for the rather different demands of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa. Off Oran on 8 November, she and HMS Westcott between them sank two Vichy French submarines, Argonaute and Actéon, though history has never entirely settled which destroyer deserves credit for which kill. It hardly mattered to the two submarines involved.

The Battle of the Barents Sea

She went into her last battle already damaged. Released from Torch, where she had worked with the Central Task Force, she took passage north for Scapa Flow, and on 23 December 1942, running for Iceland, her mast structure sprang in heavy weather. Two days later she joined HMS Obedient, Obdurate, Oribi, Onslow and Orwell as part of the ocean escort for JW 51B.

HMS Achates war ended where so much of it had been spent: escorting an Arctic convoy. On 25 December 1942 she joined the escort of Convoy JW 51B, bound from Loch Ewe to Murmansk, and six days later, on 31 December, the convoy was attacked by the German heavy cruisers Admiral Hipper and Lützow, backed by six large destroyers, in what became known as the Battle of the Barents Sea.

HMS Achates job, under standing orders, was to lay smoke to hide the merchant ships from German gunfire while the escort's faster, more heavily armed destroyers moved to intercept the attackers. She began doing exactly that, and kept doing it even after taking damage early on from a near miss that started her flooding.

Shortly after eleven in the morning, ordered to move up and assist the damaged destroyer HMS Onslow, Achates briefly emerged from her own smoke screen and was spotted and hit hard by Admiral Hipper. The strike killed 40 men, including her commanding officer, Lieutenant-Commander Arthur Henry Tyndall Johns, who had taken command the previous July, and worsened the flooding significantly. The Germans had a name for the operation, Regenbogen, meaning rainbow, which is not the word anybody aboard Achates would have chosen.

Command passed to Lieutenant Loftus Peyton-Jones, who kept the smoke screen going even as the ship listed further and further and eventually lost power. At around half past one in the afternoon, some 135 nautical miles east-south-east of Bear Island, with the trawler Northern Gem closing in to help, Achates capsized and sank.

Northern Gem pulled 81 survivors from the freezing water, though one later died of his injuries. In total, 113 officers and men were lost with her.

It was, in the bleakest possible sense, a job well done. Achates' smoke screen, and the stubborn resistance of the rest of the escort under Captain Robert St Vincent Sherbrooke, who kept directing his ships even after a shell splinter badly wounded him in the face and cost him the sight of one eye, and was afterwards awarded the Victoria Cross for it, held the German attack off long enough for the cruisers HMS Sheffield and HMS Jamaica to arrive, damage Admiral Hipper, and sink the German destroyer Friedrich Eckoldt, forcing the enemy force to withdraw.

Every single one of the fourteen merchant ships in Convoy JW 51B reached the Soviet Union safely. Achates never saw it happen.

There was a longer consequence too. Hitler was so incensed that two heavy cruisers and six destroyers had failed to destroy a lightly escorted convoy that he ordered the German surface fleet scrapped and its guns sent ashore. The order was not carried out in full, and Grand Admiral Raeder resigned rather than carry it out and was replaced by the submariner Karl Dönitz, who quietly judged that scrapping the ships would achieve very little and kept most of them, but the German big-ship fleet never seriously threatened an Arctic convoy in the same way again. A destroyer laying smoke, and a wounded captain refusing to break off, had done rather more than save fourteen merchant ships.

What Was Left

The action brought a clutch of decorations for those who survived it, including a Distinguished Service Order for Peyton-Jones, a Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, a Distinguished Service Cross, seven Distinguished Service Medals, and sixteen Mentions in Dispatches, eleven of them posthumous, including one for Achates' lost commanding officer.

None of it brought back the 113 men who went down with her, in a battle whose entire point, for Achates at least, was to make herself as visible and as vulnerable as possible so that fourteen merchant ships and their crews would not be.