HMS Calpe: Command Ship for the Dieppe Raid, and a Hospital for a Quarter of Her Own Crew

A Destroyer Built for Escort Duty

HMS Calpe was built by Swan Hunter at Wallsend, ordered in December 1939, her keel laid the following year and launched and completed in 1941, entering service on 11 December that year before proceeding to Scapa Flow.

A Type II Hunt-class escort destroyer displacing 1,050 tons standard and up to 1,490 tons at full load, she carried six 4-inch guns on twin mounts, Vickers and Oerlikon guns, and six Thornycroft depth charge throwers, a solid escort destroyer that would go on to play a pivotal role in one of the most controversial Allied operations of the entire war.

A Quiet War Turns Busy

Four months before Dieppe, HMS Calpe had already taken part in a raid that never actually happened. In April 1942 she joined Operation Myrmidon, a plan to land the men of No. 1 and No. 6 Commando near the mouth of the Adour estuary at St Jean de Luz, on the French-Spanish border, to wreck coastal batteries and a T.N.T. factory. For weeks beforehand she sailed under a Spanish ensign as part of the deception, her own ship's company kept out of sight below decks, only running up the White Ensign as the force closed the coast on the night of 4/5 April. The disguise proved unnecessary: an unmarked sandbar and worsening weather stopped the landing craft before a single commando got ashore, and the whole force turned quietly for home.

One small thing, given how the year had started. Calpe is the ancient name for the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the two Pillars of Hercules. There is a certain irony in a ship named after the most famously British rock in the western Mediterranean spending several weeks of 1942 flying a Spanish ensign off the Spanish coast, with her own company hidden below decks, and then finding out that the sandbar nobody had charted was what stopped the operation anyway.

Convoy escort duty filled most of the months in between, interrupted on 28 July 1942 by a sharper action in the Channel: working with her sister ship HMS Cottesmore and two motor gunboats off La Hague, she helped shell and sink the German patrol vessel (Vorpostenboot) V202 Hermann Bösch, badly damaging a second, Carl Röver, in the same brief engagement.

Directing the Dieppe Raid

HMS Calpe served as the command ship for the raid on Dieppe, Operation Jubilee, on 18 and 19 August 1942, with Major-General John Hamilton Roberts, commanding the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, and Captain John Hughes-Hallett, the naval commander for the raid, directing operations from her bridge throughout the disastrous assault, under her own commanding officer, Lieutenant-Commander John Henry Wallace.

The fighting quickly outran what anyone aboard Calpe could actually see. An ambiguous wireless message, misread as meaning the Essex Scottish had fought their way into the town, led Major-General Roberts to commit his last reserve, the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, ashore at 0700. By 0900 the true picture was unmistakable: German guns still held the high ground on both flanks and were tearing the beaches apart, and the order to withdraw, under the codeword Vanquish, went out at 1100.

Calpe herself was still in the thick of it as the evacuation wound down. At 1248, with most of the fleet already standing off, she closed the beach one last time with two boats for a final attempt to lift off survivors before turning for England, a small, stubborn coda to a morning that had already cost the raiding force dear.

The Dieppe Raid became one of the costliest single actions of the war for the troops involved, particularly the Canadian forces who bore the brunt of the fighting, and HMS Calpe's crew found themselves in the middle of it: as casualties mounted ashore and offshore, the ship was pressed into service as an improvised hospital ship, accommodating 278 casualties even as she herself lost approximately a quarter of her own complement, a harrowing statistic for a ship whose crew were meant to be directing the battle rather than becoming casualties of it themselves.

The arithmetic of that morning is worth setting out, because it explains why Dieppe is argued about to this day. Some 6,086 Allied servicemen were committed. Of those, 1,197 were killed and 4,397 were wounded, missing or taken prisoner. The Canadians took the worst of it by a distance: 4,963 Canadians embarked, 907 were killed, 1,946 became prisoners of war, and only 2,210 came back to England. The Royal Air Force lost 106 aircraft, its heaviest single day of the entire war. Thirty-four Allied vessels were lost, among them the destroyer HMS Berkeley, bombed so badly that she had to be torpedoed by her own side to keep her out of German hands. All of it happened inside about nine hours, most of it within sight of Calpe's bridge.

What came out of it was a set of conclusions that shaped everything afterwards. The Allies would not attempt to seize a defended port by direct assault again, because Dieppe demonstrated both that it could not be done cheaply and that anything captured would be wrecked in the taking, which is the reasoning that produced the Mulberry harbours towed to Normandy two years later. Any future landing would need overwhelming air cover, a proper preliminary bombardment, real intelligence about the defences and purpose-built craft to get the men off again. Every one of those lessons was learned by the people who were on those beaches, and a good many of them did not come home to see them applied.

The line that produced the Mulberry harbours was spoken aboard this ship. Captain John Hughes-Hallett, the naval commander who had spent that morning on Calpe's bridge watching the thing come apart, was heard on the way home on 19 August 1942 to say that if a port could not be captured then one would simply have to be taken across. He was laughed at. It is an absurd proposition on the face of it: build a harbour in England, tow it two hundred miles across the Channel in pieces and assemble it on an open beach under fire.

He did not let it go. Hughes-Hallett went from Dieppe to being Commodore commanding the Channel Assault Force and then Naval Chief of Staff to the Overlord planners, and in 1943, at the Rattle conference, he and Captain Tom Hussey put the whole scheme in front of the people who could authorise it and got it through. Two Mulberry harbours went across in June 1944 and one of them worked for months. He finished the war a Vice Admiral, and afterwards went into the House of Commons as the member for Croydon East and then Croydon North East. He died in 1972.

Which is a rare thing to be able to say about a disaster. The most consequential idea to come out of Dieppe was thought of on the day, on the command ship, by the man in charge of the naval side of it, while the survivors were still being brought aboard around him.

Operation Torch and a U-boat Kill off Bizerta

She took part in Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, in November 1942, by then under a new commanding officer, Lieutenant-Commander Henry Kirkwood, DSC, who had taken over that October and would remain in command for the U-boat action still to come.

That action came on 13 December 1943, off Bizerta, when Calpe and the American destroyer USS Wainwright carried out a joint anti-submarine sweep as part of a Mediterranean patrol that saw her screening the aircraft carrier HMS Formidable that same month. Wainwright gained the first Asdic contact and opened the attack; Calpe followed with two ten-charge depth charge patterns of her own, at 1428 and again at 1441, close enough that, as U-593's own commanding officer later described it, it sounded like "a curious noise, like a handful of pebbles thrown against a wall."

U-593 surfaced at 1444 under fire from both ships' guns to keep her crew away from their own weapons. Below decks a badly misjudged damage report, her engineer believed a leak was letting in a trickle rather than the roughly 400 litres a minute actually flooding in, had already sealed her fate, and armed ratings stood guard on her own bridge with machine pistols while scuttling charges were set. She went down bows-first at 1508. Calpe's whaler alone pulled 43 of the German crew from the water, with Wainwright accounting for the rest of all 51 men aboard: not a single life lost on either side that afternoon.

What that submarine had done the previous day makes the Bizerta action considerably less abstract. U-593 was on her sixteenth patrol, out of Toulon since 1 December, under Gerd Kelbling, the only commanding officer she ever had. At ten past seven on the morning of 12 December she torpedoed the Hunt-class destroyer HMS Tynedale and sank her, killing seven officers and sixty-three men. Seven hours later, while another Hunt, HMS Holcombe, was hunting for her, she put a Gnat acoustic torpedo into Holcombe and sank her too.

Two Hunt-class destroyers in one day. Calpe was a Hunt-class destroyer. When she and Wainwright picked up the contact the following afternoon they were hunting the boat that had killed two ships exactly like her, and they stayed on her for something in the order of thirty-two hours before she came up. That is what the two ten-charge patterns at 1428 and 1441 were the end of, and it puts the phrase joint anti-submarine sweep in a rather different light.

And then nobody died, which is the part that matters. All fifty-one Germans were pulled out of the water, forty-three of them by Calpe's own whaler, less than a day after their boat had drowned seventy British sailors. There is a postscript, too. In 1993, fifty years on, the survivors of HMS Tynedale invited Kelbling and one of his former crew to the anniversary commemoration of the sinking at Hexham, and they came.

A Long Danish Retirement

Two more commanding officers saw her through to the war's end: Lieutenant-Commander Alfred Thomas Morgan, RNVR, from January 1944, and Acting Lieutenant-Commander Norman Frederick René Gill, RNR, from May 1944. Calpe went on serving in the Indian Ocean into 1946 before finally returning to home waters and being laid up in reserve, first at Sheerness and then, from 1947, at Portsmouth.

She was loaned to the Royal Danish Navy in 1952, recommissioned as HDMS Rolf Krake with the new pennant number F342, and rebuilt with modern Type 271, Type 285 and Type 291 radars plus a Type 128 sonar to bring her up to contemporary anti-submarine standards. She served Denmark for nine years with a complement of 164 before being purchased outright by the Danish government.

Rolf Krake, the former HMS Calpe, remained on the Danish Navy's active list until 1962 and was finally scrapped at Ystad in Sweden in 1966, closing out a career that had opened with a disguise nobody was fooled by for long, weathered its costliest morning off the beaches of Dieppe, and ended with a U-boat sent to the bottom off Bizerta: one of the more eventful service records of any Hunt-class destroyer to wear the White Ensign.