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 ordered on 10 March 1936 at a cost of just over £341,000, laid down on 9 June that year, launched on 8 June 1937, and commissioned on 3 May 1938 under her first captain, George Hector Creswell, a powerful, modern warship carrying eight 4.7-inch guns, well above the armament of the older destroyers she was designed to replace.

She was the second Royal Navy ship to carry the name, after a destroyer of 1907 sold in 1919, and she inherited that ship's honours: Dover Patrol 1914 to 18 and Zeebrugge 1918, to which she would add Norway 1940. Her badge showed the head and shoulders of an Afridi tribesman on a field of blue and white waves. The tender price of £341,462 did not include her guns or her wireless outfits, which the Admiralty supplied separately, so the real figure was a good deal higher.

One coincidence is worth recording. HMS Cossack, a sister ship, was launched at the same Tyne yard on the same day, 8 June 1937. Within three years the two would be commanded in turn by the same officer, and one of them would become one of the most famous ships in the Royal Navy while the other went to the bottom off Norway.

She commissioned on 29 April 1938 as Senior Officer's ship of the 1st Tribal Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean Fleet, took up her pennant number F07 that December, and found her flotilla renumbered as the 4th Destroyer Flotilla in April 1939, the Navy having decided that a flotilla named after its own ship class was a needless piece of tidiness.

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.

The HMS Penelope collision off Palma is worth a footnote of its own: the two ships were transferring mail at the time. Afridi went to Malta for dockyard repair and missed the rest of the Mediterranean Fleet's spring cruise to the south of France, which is a costly way to deliver the post.

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.

Vian handed over briefly in the new year to Commander Robert St Vincent Sherbrooke, who commanded Afridi from mid-January to late March 1940 before Vian resumed command, and who would himself go on to win the Victoria Cross commanding HMS Onslow at the Battle of the Barents Sea in December 1942.

Vian's own name 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.

The winter refit was not simply routine wear. The Tribals had been designed to a stress calculation that turned out to be optimistic, and ships of the class developed cracks in the hull when driven hard in heavy weather. Most of the British-built Tribals also stripped turbine blades in their first months of service, and the blades had to be replaced wholesale in the 1939 and 1940 refits. Afridi went into a West Hartlepool yard on 17 January 1940 and did not come out until 19 March.

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.

The reason the Bergen attack was called off was less dramatic than it sounds and rather more revealing. Afridi and five other Tribals were screening the cruisers Manchester, Glasgow, Sheffield and Southampton for a strike on shipping in the harbour when the Admiralty cancelled it, having concluded that an attack at that strength was unlikely to succeed. The force turned away to rejoin the Home Fleet, and it was on that withdrawal that the Luftwaffe found them. The screen that week also included three Polish destroyers, ORP Grom, Burza and Błyskawica, a reminder of how quickly the Royal Navy had become a coalition.

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.

Not everything in the campaign was tragedy. On 13 April Afridi and five sisters were sent to destroy enemy shipping reported at Ålesund. They arrived, looked carefully, and established that the ships were Norwegian. Air attacks followed anyway.

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, embarking men of the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment among the last troops off the beach, departing last herself at quarter past three in the morning with the final troops aboard.

The evacuation itself took two nights. On 2 May she lifted men of the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment off the shore and put them aboard the French auxiliary cruiser Kantara, then stayed behind for the rearguard. On the 3rd she embarked the Hallamshire Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment, and before sailing she turned her guns on the transport vehicles the army had been forced to abandon on the quayside, so that the Germans would not inherit them. Then she followed the troopships out.

The rearguard she was waiting for belonged to one of the least plausible officers in British military history. Maurice Force, the British half of the Namsos landing, was commanded by Major-General Adrian Carton de Wiart, who was Brussels-born, wore a black eye patch and an empty left sleeve, and had by then been wounded in the Boer War, lost his left eye in Somaliland in 1914, lost his left hand in 1915, and been shot through the hip, the ankle, the leg, the ear and the back of the skull on the Western Front.

He won the Victoria Cross at La Boisselle on 2 and 3 July 1916, the citation noting that after three other battalion commanders had become casualties he simply took over their commands as well and held the ground. Of the whole experience he later wrote: "Frankly I had enjoyed the war." He was fifty-nine at Namsos, with something over five thousand men drawn up on a bombed quayside in good order waiting for ships, and Afridi took the last party off at twenty past two in the morning. He reached Scapa Flow on 5 May 1940, two days after she went down, on his sixtieth birthday.

Why any of them were at Namsos in the first place, and what the Luftwaffe did to the town, is set out in the article on HMS Bittern (L07), which was bombed in the harbour three days before the evacuation. As for Carton de Wiart, the rest of his war ran to form. He was shot down into the Mediterranean in 1943, taken prisoner by the Italians, spent eight days at large after tunnelling out at the age of sixty-two, was repatriated to help broker the Italian surrender and finished as Churchill's personal representative to Chiang Kai-shek. He died in 1963, aged eighty-three, which on the available evidence was a considerable achievement in itself.

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.

Bison deserves a proper introduction, because calling her a French destroyer rather undersells what was lost. She was a contre-torpilleur of the Guepard class, built at the Arsenal de Lorient, laid down in March 1927, launched in October 1928 and commissioned in October 1930. The type was a French speciality with no British equivalent: about 2,690 tonnes standard against roughly 1,900 for a Tribal, a 138.6mm main battery, sixty-four thousand horsepower and a design speed of 35.5 knots. Half cruiser, half destroyer, built to lead flotillas and run down enemy scouts. The article on HMS Keppel (D84) records what happened to a British destroyer that ran into one of them in the dark.

The bomb hit her at ten past ten in the morning, in position sixty-five degrees forty-two minutes north, seven degrees seventeen minutes east, about a hundred and ten miles west of Vega. It went into the forward magazine and took the entire fore part of the ship off. Her commanding officer, Capitaine de Vaisseau Jean Bouan, was killed. Afridi was not alone in going in for her people: HMS Grenade (H86) and HMS Imperial were pulling men out of the water alongside her. Grenade had twenty-six days left herself. She was sunk in Dunkirk harbour on 29 May.

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, on 3 May 1940, the second anniversary, to the day, of her own commissioning.

She went down in position 66 degrees 14 minutes north, 5 degrees 45 minutes east, off the Norwegian coast she had been working for a month.

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 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.