HMS Boreas (H77): Twenty-One Dead in a Stuka Attack, Then a Second Life as Greek Warship Salamis

A Destroyer for the Mediterranean Fleet

HMS Boreas was built by Palmer's Shipbuilding and Iron Company at Jarrow, her keel laid on 22 July 1929, launched on 11 June 1930, and commissioned on 20 February 1931.

The yard has a story that overtook the ship entirely. Palmer's Shipbuilding and Iron Company was Jarrow: not the largest employer in the town but very nearly the only one, taking on as much as eighty per cent of the working population, with its own iron and steel works alongside the slips so that a ship could be begun as ore and finished as a destroyer without leaving the site. Boreas went down those ways in June 1930.

Palmer's collapsed in 1933, two years after she commissioned. The yard was bought by National Shipbuilders Securities Ltd, a body set up by the industry itself to purchase surplus shipyards and shut them permanently, and it did precisely that: the works were closed and then demolished in 1935. A town whose entire economy was that one yard lost it in the middle of the Depression, and unemployment in Jarrow went to figures that are difficult to read now.

On 5 October 1936 two hundred unemployed Jarrow men set out to walk to Parliament. They went two hundred and eighty-two miles in twenty-six days, led by David Riley, the chairman of the council, and accompanied for much of the way by the town's Member of Parliament, Ellen Wilkinson, who was known to everybody as Red Ellen. They reached London on 31 October, and on 4 November she presented their petition, twelve thousand signatures, in the Commons. Nothing whatever was done about it. Wilkinson wrote a book about the whole business in 1939 and called it The Town That Was Murdered.

So Boreas is among the last things Palmer's ever built. The ship outlived the yard by nineteen years and the men who built her walked to London to ask for work while she was on patrol off Spain. It is worth holding on to when reading the rest of this, because the destroyer that pulled four hundred Spanish sailors out of the sea in 1938 had been put together by people who, by then, had nothing.

Her two names make a rather neat pair, and almost certainly by accident. Boreas was the Greek god of the north wind, and the Athenians credited him with a specific service: according to Herodotus they prayed to him as the Persian fleet came down the coast in 480 BC, a great gale duly wrecked a large part of it off Cape Sepias, and they built him a shrine by way of thanks. What finished the job a few weeks later was the battle in the narrows off Salamis. So a British destroyer named after the wind that scattered the Persians spent the last seven years of her life flying the Greek flag under the name of the victory that followed it.

A B-class destroyer displacing 1,360 tons standard and up to 1,790 tons at deep load, she carried four 4.7-inch guns in single mounts, two 40mm 2-pounder anti-aircraft guns and two quadruple 21-inch torpedo tube mounts, along with depth charge equipment later expanded from 20 to 35 charges as the anti-submarine war intensified.

HMS Boreas joined the Mediterranean Fleet on completion and served there through the mid-1930s.

Patrolling Spain's Civil War

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, HMS Boreas was employed evacuating civilians from the conflict zone, before spending 1937 and 1938 on patrol off the Spanish coast as part of Britain's non-intervention policy, monitoring the fighting between Nationalist and Republican forces without formally taking sides.

The non-intervention scheme deserves a word, because it was one of the more cynical arrangements in modern European history. The idea was that the powers would keep arms out of Spain, and to that end the coast was divided into patrol zones shared between Britain, France, Germany and Italy, two of which were at that moment openly supplying Franco with aircraft, artillery, tanks and men. It got worse. Through the summer of 1937 merchant ships of various neutral countries began being torpedoed in the Mediterranean by submarines described in every official communication as unknown, and known by everybody to be Italian. The response was the Nyon Conference in September 1937, at which Britain and France simply announced that any submarine attacking a non-Spanish merchant ship would be hunted and destroyed on sight. The attacks stopped within days. It is one of the very few occasions in the 1930s on which collective security worked exactly as advertised, and it is why Boreas was out there.

The single most dramatic moment of that patrol came on 6 March 1938, during the Battle of Cape Palos, the largest naval action of the entire war. In the early hours, the Nationalist cruiser Baleares, escorting a convoy off Cartagena alongside her sister ships Canarias and Almirante Cervera, was engaged by a Republican force that included the destroyer Lepanto; two or three torpedoes struck Baleares between her forward turrets, detonating a magazine and sinking her within minutes, killing the great majority of her roughly 1,200-man crew. HMS Boreas and HMS Kempenfelt, the latter under Captain Rhoderick McGrigor, later Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord, raced to the scene to pull survivors from the floating wreckage of the stern, a genuine act of humanitarian rescue carried out in the middle of someone else's war.

The rescue itself deserves its numbers. Baleares had gone in a few minutes with more than twelve hundred men aboard, and what was left was her stern section, burning, upside down in the dark, with survivors clinging to it and to the wreckage around it. Kempenfelt and Boreas closed and took off four hundred and forty-one of them. Seven hundred and sixty-five were lost, among them the admiral commanding the cruiser division. British sailors then spent the rest of the night with several hundred half-drowned, oil-soaked Spaniards aboard two small destroyers, in the middle of a war neither government would admit to being involved in.

It very nearly cost Boreas dear in her own right. Republican aircraft, apparently unable or unwilling to distinguish a rescue operation from a combat one, attacked the British destroyers while they worked, killing one of Boreas's own crew and wounding four more, a sharp reminder that non-intervention patrol work in someone else's civil war offered no real guarantee of safety, however carefully neutrality was supposed to be observed.

A Devastating Afternoon off Dover

HMS Boreas's war took a grievous turn on 25 July 1940, during the Kanalkampf, the Luftwaffe's opening campaign against Channel shipping ahead of the Battle of Britain proper. That afternoon a convoy of coastal steamers, codenamed CW8, came under heavy air attack off Dover, and when a flotilla of German E-boats moved in to finish off the survivors, HMS Boreas and her sister ship HMS Brilliant intercepted them and drove them off. It proved a costly success: as the two destroyers withdrew, they were caught by a fresh wave of German Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers, and HMS Boreas's bridge took two direct hits, killing one officer and twenty of her crew in a single, terrible afternoon and leaving her so badly damaged that she had to be towed back into Dover.

That afternoon was worse than one ship's casualty list suggests. Convoy CW8 consisted of twenty-one coasters carrying coal down the Channel, and something like sixty Ju 87 Stukas came at it in a coordinated attack in the Straits of Dover. Eleven of the twenty-one were sunk and seven more badly damaged, and the destroyers that came out of Dover to fight off the E-boats were themselves caught in the open. The consequence was strategic rather than local: the losses were bad enough that the Admiralty withdrew its destroyers from Dover altogether and stopped using the port as an advanced base, handing responsibility for the Channel convoys to Fighter Command. The day Boreas lost twenty-one of her people is the day the Royal Navy conceded the Straits of Dover in daylight, and the Battle of Britain proper began a few weeks later over precisely that question.

She spent from that summer until 23 January 1941 under repair at Millwall Dock, a lengthy convalescence made even longer when bomb splinter damage struck the ship again on 19 January 1941 while repairs were still under way, a grim reminder of just how exposed British ships and dockyards remained to German air power during the Battle of Britain and its aftermath.

A Second Flag, and the War's Final Year

HMS Boreas was transferred to the Royal Hellenic Navy on 10 February 1944 and recommissioned as HHMS Salamis on 25 March that year, part of the wider Allied effort to rebuild and re-equip Greece's navy after the country's occupation.

The Greek navy she joined had spent three years in exile. When Germany overran Greece in April 1941 the ships that could get away went to Alexandria and fought on from there under Allied command, and Britain kept the fleet in being by handing over destroyers, corvettes and submarines as they could be spared; Boreas was one of them. She arrived at a fraught moment. Barely a fortnight after she recommissioned as Salamis, on 6 April 1944, the Greek forces in Egypt mutinied over the composition of the exiled government, with sailors putting their officers ashore and holding their own ships. It was put down within weeks, but the political split it exposed, between the exiled establishment and the resistance movements at home, ran straight on past the liberation and into the Greek civil war. A serviceable destroyer arriving from Britain that spring was one of very few pieces of good news the Royal Hellenic Navy had that month.

Following working-up damage that required further repairs at Hull between 28 April and 13 June 1944, she served as an escort vessel out of Gibraltar before moving to the Aegean that October to join the 12th Greek Destroyer Flotilla, seeing out the final months of the war supporting operations to liberate Greek waters from German occupation, the ship that had once flown the White Ensign now doing much the same job under Greek colours.

Returned, and Scrapped

Salamis, the former HMS Boreas, continued in Greek service as a training ship after the war before being returned to British control at Malta on 9 October 1951.

She was towed to Rosyth, arriving on 15 April 1952 to be broken up by Metal Industries Limited, bringing to a close a career that had carried her from rescuing Spanish sailors to surviving a devastating Stuka attack and finally into a second, entirely different national service under the flag of an ally.

The firm that took her apart at Rosyth had a curious sideline of its own: in the years before the war, Metal Industries had been dismantling the German High Seas Fleet, raised upside down off the bottom of Scapa Flow, in the very same dockyard. That story is in the article on HMS Benbow (1913).