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

A Solid, Unspectacular Start

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 and eight torpedo tubes, 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 a Spanish steamer that had been 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.

War Breaks Out

With the outbreak of the Second World War, HMS Achates settled into the unglamorous but essential work of anti-submarine patrols and convoy escort, first in the English Channel and then the North Sea. She got her first real taste of success on 2 November 1940, helping HMS Antelope depth-charge the German submarine U-31 while escorting Convoy OB 237; U-31 surfaced and scuttled herself rather than face further punishment, a small but satisfying win early in a very long war.

Searching for Hood's Survivors

In May 1941, 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.

Blown Apart By a Friendly Mine

If the Denmark Strait was a brush with someone else's disaster, what happened on 23 July 1941 was entirely, cruelly domestic. While supporting a carrier raid against Kirkenes and Petsamo in the far north, Achates struck a British mine. 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.

HMS Achates survived, after a fashion, taken under tow by the tug Assurance, further battered by a storm on 10 August that forced emergency repairs in the Faroe Islands, before finally limping into the Tyne on 24 August for proper repair work. It took eight months to put her back together and return her to something resembling fighting condition, a long and expensive convalescence for a ship that had nearly been cut in two by a mine laid by her own navy.

Back Into the Arctic

Repaired and recommissioned, 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.

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

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 A. H. T. Johns, and worsened the flooding significantly.

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, 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 R. St. Vincent Sherbrooke, 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

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.