HMS Auckland (L61): Lost Escorting the Tobruk Supply Run

A Sloop Renamed Before She Sailed

HMS Auckland was ordered from William Denny and Brothers of Dumbarton on 5 March 1937 and laid down that June under the working name Heron, before being renamed Auckland when she was launched on 30 June 1938.

She completed on 16 November that year as an Egret-class sloop, powered by geared steam turbines and armed with eight 4-inch guns and a quadruple mount of half-inch machine guns, a solidly built escort vessel intended for exactly the kind of convoy protection work that would come to define her short career.

Eight 4-inch guns on a sloop is a striking figure, and it tells you what the Egret class was really for. They carried them in four twin high-angle mountings, which is a proper anti-aircraft battery on a ship of under fifteen hundred tons, and the class was designed as a long-range escort with the aircraft threat firmly in mind at a point when a good many navies were still treating it as secondary. Only three of them were built. Given what happened off Tobruk in June 1941, the design thinking behind them looks a great deal better than the outcome.

The name ship has a grim distinction of her own. On 27 August 1943, off the western coast of the Iberian peninsula, HMS Egret was attacked by German bombers carrying the Henschel Hs 293, a rocket-boosted glide bomb steered onto its target by radio from the launching aircraft. She was hit and blew up, and 198 of her people died. Egret is the first ship in the history of the world to be sunk by a guided missile. Two of the three sloops of this small class were therefore lost to air attack, one of them to a weapon that did not exist when they were designed.

The third one did a great deal better, and she is the reason the design deserves defending. HMS Pelican was ordered from Thornycroft at Woolston and was originally meant to be a survey ship for the West Indies, of all things; she was altered on the slipway into a convoy escort and anti-submarine vessel once it became obvious what sort of war was coming. She sank four U-boats. As senior officer's ship of the 1st Support Group she was in the fight around convoy ONS 5 in May 1943, the week generally taken as the point at which the Battle of the Atlantic turned, and she sank U-438 in it; the following month, with ONS 10, she got U-334; and in 1944, working outside the Bay of Biscay with the 7th Escort Group, she shared in the destruction of U-448. She was recommissioned in 1954, paid off in 1956 and scrapped in 1958.

Three ships, then, built to one drawing in one small programme. One was sunk by Stukas off Tobruk. One was blown up by the first guided missile ever to sink a ship. The third outlived the war by thirteen years and killed four submarines, and was the only one of them that had not originally been intended to do any of it. There is no moral to be drawn from that, except that with a class of three there is no such thing as a typical career.

From Norway to the Red Sea

Auckland was stationed at Simonstown in South Africa when war broke out, before moving to Rosyth in January 1940 for North Sea convoy escort duty. That April she took part in Operation Primrose, helping evacuate British troops from Norway during the disastrous campaign there, before being transferred to the Mediterranean and onward to Red Sea service that May.

October 1940 saw her involved in the attack on Convoy BN 7, and by April 1941 she was defending troop convoys against Italian destroyers in the Kasos Strait, a truly varied and demanding first eighteen months of war for a single sloop.

Both of those clauses are hiding real actions, and the first of them is worth telling properly. Convoy BN 7 was thirty-two merchant ships working up the Red Sea towards Suez, and the reason that was dangerous is that Italy still held Eritrea and still had a naval squadron at Massawa. On the evening of 20 October 1940 four Italian destroyers came out after the convoy with a sensible plan: Pantera and Leone, the heavier pair, would pull the escort off to one side while Sauro and Nullo got in among the merchant ships with torpedoes. It did not work. One merchantman was slightly damaged, and that was the sum of it.

What happened next is one of the more satisfying small actions of the war, and it did not go entirely one way. At twenty past two in the morning the cruiser Leander found Francesco Nullo at about four and a half thousand yards and fired a hundred and twenty-nine six-inch rounds at her over ten minutes, wrecking her gyrocompass and her gunnery director before losing her in the haze. The destroyer Kimberley then ran her down and torpedoed her, and Nullo was driven ashore on Harmil Island off Massawa. Kimberley promptly got herself hit and disabled by the Italian shore battery on the same island and had to be towed out of range by Leander, which is the kind of detail that stops a good story becoming a tidy one.

Auckland's part in that night was the part sloops always played and which nobody writes ballads about: staying with the convoy while the cruisers and destroyers went off after the enemy, and getting thirty-two merchant ships to Suez. That was the whole object of the exercise. The Red Sea was the last stretch of the long route round the Cape, the one Britain had to use because the Mediterranean was shut, and every ship of the Eighth Army's supplies came up it. Massawa fell in April 1941 and the Italian threat to the route went with it. Two months after that, Auckland was off Tobruk.

The Tobruk Run

From May 1941, Auckland was assigned to escort convoys to besieged Tobruk, the Libyan port that Allied forces were holding under siege conditions and that depended entirely on ships like Auckland to keep it supplied by sea, a role that placed her squarely within range of Axis air power operating from nearby bases.

The Tobruk run deserves a proper description, because it is one of the hardest sustained jobs the Royal Navy did in that war. Tobruk was besieged from April 1941, and the garrison holding it, largely Australian to begin with, was cut off by land entirely. Everything it needed, ammunition, fuel, water, food, reinforcements, and everything it sent out, chiefly wounded, went by sea into a harbour within easy flying distance of Axis airfields. The runs were made at night by destroyers and small craft moving at speed, because anything caught in daylight on that coast was in serious trouble, and the sailors who did it called the stretch Bomb Alley long before anybody applied the phrase to San Carlos Water.

On 24 June 1941, while escorting the oiler Pass of Balmaha to Tobruk alongside the Australian sloop HMAS Parramatta, some 20 nautical miles northeast of the port, Auckland, under the command of Commander Mervyn Somerset Thomas, DSO, RN, came under attack for most of the day.

Italian and German torpedo bombers made an unsuccessful pass around midday, but the real blow fell that evening, when around 48 Junkers 87 Stuka dive bombers, roughly two thirds of them targeting Auckland, tore into the two sloops. Struck repeatedly and left out of control, Auckland veered so close to Parramatta that the Australian ship had to manoeuvre hard to avoid a collision.

Forty-eight Stukas against two sloops is worth sitting with for a moment. The Junkers 87 was slow, ugly and hopelessly vulnerable to fighters, and it was also one of the most accurate bombing platforms of the entire war: it dived almost vertically, released low and pulled out automatically, and against a ship manoeuvring in open water it could put a bomb within a few yards. Roughly two thirds of those aircraft were coming for Auckland specifically. There is no defence against that except gunfire and helm, and a sloop has a limited amount of both.

With her stern shot away but her forward guns still firing, Auckland finally went down in what appears to have been a boiler explosion that broke her back, roughly fifteen minutes after her crew had begun abandoning ship.

Which makes one detail of her end worth pulling out. She had her stern shot away, she was out of control, she was close enough to Parramatta that the Australians had to throw the wheel over to avoid her, and her forward guns were still firing. She stayed in action until the boilers went and broke her back. Thirty-eight of her two hundred died, nearly half of them in the engine room, which is where men die when the sea comes in and there is no time. The other hundred and sixty-two were picked up.

Of her complement of 200, 38 were killed, almost half of them in the engine room, and the other 162 were pulled from the water by Parramatta, which itself shot down four attacking aircraft and probably three more, reckoned at the time to be a one-day record for a single ship's anti-aircraft fire.

The tanker they had been protecting, Pass of Balmaha, survived the attack and reached Tobruk under tow from the destroyer HMAS Waterhen, delivering the fuel Auckland had died protecting.

Neither of the two ships that saved that convoy long outlived her: Waterhen herself was sunk just four days later, on 28 June 1941, and Parramatta, Auckland's own rescuer, went down on 27 November that year, a grim run of losses among the small, elderly escorts that kept the Tobruk supply line open.

The run of losses at the end of that account is not a coincidence and is worth spelling out. Waterhen, the destroyer that towed the tanker in, was sunk within days. Parramatta, the sloop that pulled Auckland's people out of the water, was torpedoed off Tobruk in November 1941 and went down with most of her company. The tanker got through and Tobruk held for two hundred and forty-one days. The bill for that was paid almost entirely by small, elderly, unglamorous escorts and their crews, and it was paid in full.