HMS Afridi (F07): Lost Rescuing the Survivors of a Ship She Had Just Sunk Herself

One of the Navy's New Heavy Hitters

HMS Afridi was one of sixteen Tribal-class destroyers built for the Royal Navy in the late 1930s, a class specifically designed to out-gun the increasingly large and heavily armed destroyers being built by other navies. Built by Vickers-Armstrongs on the Tyne, she was laid down on 9 June 1936, launched on 8 June 1937, and commissioned on 3 May 1938, a powerful, modern warship carrying eight 4.7-inch guns, well above the armament of the older destroyers she was designed to replace.

Her early career was a fairly conventional prewar posting with the Mediterranean Fleet, enforcing the arms embargo during the Spanish Civil War, taking part in fleet exercises, and picking up a spot of light collision damage against HMS Penelope off Palma de Mallorca in March 1939, the sort of minor mishap that barely registers against what was coming.

War, and a Move North

When war broke out in September 1939, Afridi was in the Red Sea, and spent her first weeks of the war on convoy escort and contraband inspection out of Alexandria before being recalled to home waters in October. Based first at Immingham and then Rosyth, she settled into coastal convoy escort between Britain and Norway, under the command of Captain Philip Vian from the end of December 1939, a name that would shortly become one of the most famous in the wartime Royal Navy, though it was aboard HMS Cossack rather than Afridi that Vian would make his name a few weeks later, in the celebrated Altmark boarding incident of February 1940.

A refit at Hartlepool over the winter fixed leaks and turbine trouble, readying Afridi for the operation that would define, and end, her career: the Allied response to the German invasion of Norway.

Into the Norwegian Campaign

Germany's Operation Weserübung, launched on 9 April 1940, beat the Allies to Norway's ports before British troops could be landed as planned. Afridi and her flotilla were initially tasked with an attack on Bergen, cancelled when German cruisers were reported in the area, and as British ships withdrew they came under heavy air attack, in which Afridi's sister ship HMS Gurkha was sunk and the battleship HMS Rodney damaged. It was an early, sobering demonstration of just how dangerous the Luftwaffe would prove to be for ships operating without air cover of their own.

Afridi spent the following weeks in the thick of the campaign: surviving a bombing attack off Ålesund on 13 April, helping assess and then reject Namsos as a landing site, ferrying troops of the 148th Infantry Brigade from Lillesjona later that month, and repeatedly escorting supply convoys into Åndalsnes and Molde under sustained air attack, taking only splinter damage each time despite the Luftwaffe's best efforts.

One Last Rescue

By early May, with the Namsos campaign judged a failure, Afridi was committed to the evacuation of Allied troops from the Norwegian coast. On the night of 2 May she led the cruiser HMS York and three French troopships into Namsos to lift out the rearguard, departing last herself at quarter past three in the morning with the final troops aboard.

The Luftwaffe found the withdrawing force the following morning. At around ten o'clock, a German Stuka dive bomber scored a direct hit on the French destroyer Bison, detonating her forward magazine in a catastrophic explosion. Afridi, along with HMS Imperial and HMS Grenade, moved in to help, fighting off further air attacks while pulling survivors from the water. Unable to save the wrecked French ship, Afridi finished her off with gunfire shortly before noon, a mercy killing of a ship beyond saving, and pulled away with 69 rescued French sailors aboard.

Lost Within Hours

Afridi had only a few hours left herself. Renewed dive-bombing attacks resumed at two in the afternoon, and this time she could not avoid the bombs. One struck near the wireless office and detonated beside the forward boiler room; a second hit forward of the bridge and set the mess decks ablaze. HMS Imperial and HMS Griffin moved in to take off survivors, but by quarter to three Afridi had capsized and sunk, bow first, off the Norwegian coast.

The cost was heavy on every count. Afridi lost 52 of her own crew, along with 13 soldiers she was carrying, the only military casualties of the entire Åndalsnes to Namsos evacuation. Of the 69 French sailors she had rescued from Bison only hours earlier, 30 died when Afridi herself went down, a grim, almost unbearable coincidence for men who had already survived the loss of one ship that same day.

A Costly Campaign

Afridi's loss was one small part of a genuinely brutal campaign for the Royal Navy's destroyer force, operating for weeks off an enemy-held coast without meaningful air cover of its own. She had spent her short career doing exactly what a Tribal-class destroyer was built for, fighting hard, moving fast, and, in her final hours, trying to save lives even as her own time ran out.