HMS Cassandra: Torpedoed in the Arctic, Towed to Safety by a Soviet Tug

A Destroyer Built for the Arctic Convoys

HMS Cassandra was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde, ordered under the name HMS Tourmaline before being renamed in November 1942 to conform with her seven "Ca" group sisters. Her keel was laid on 30 January 1943 and she was launched on 29 November that year, a C-class destroyer armed with three QF 4.5-inch guns, Bofors and Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns, and two pentuple 21-inch torpedo tube mounts, commissioning on 28 July 1944 under Commander Philip Frederick Powlett, DSO, DSC, and joining the 6th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet.

That October she screened the aircraft carrier HMS Implacable during Operation Goodwood's strikes on the airfields at Sorreisa and Bardufoss and a photo-reconnaissance run over the German battleship Tirpitz in Tromsø, part of the vast, years-long Allied effort that finally ended that November when RAF Lancasters sank her at anchor. In between, she escorted the Arctic convoys carrying vital supplies to the Soviet Union, running JW 61A and RA 61A that November and laying mines off the Norwegian coast on Operations Divan, Tenable and Lycidas.

Torpedoed in the Arctic Dark

On 11 December 1944, while escorting the homeward convoy RA 62 some 165 miles north of the Kola Inlet, HMS Cassandra was struck by a Gnat, an acoustic homing torpedo, fired by the German submarine U-365 under Oberleutnant zur See Diether Todenhagen. It was 0602, pitch dark in the Arctic midwinter, when Ordinary Seaman Dudley Mills, on watch in the charthouse, felt the ship give what he later remembered as "a mighty lurch," the impact itself "an almighty clang... as if a huge muffled hammer had struck a metal plate." He heard no explosion, only that. Moments later a voice crackled over the radio, probably from her sister ship HMS Caprice: "Cassandra has been torpedoed."

The weapon deserves a word, because it explains a great deal about how escorts fought in 1944. The Gnat, properly the T5 Zaunkoenig, was an acoustic homing torpedo introduced by the Germans in 1943 for one purpose: killing the escorts rather than the merchant ships. It listened for the noise of a ship's propellers and steered itself towards the loudest source it could hear, which meant that the faster an escort ran, the more attractive a target she became. The counter was a device called Foxer, a set of noisy steel bars towed astern to sound more like a propeller than the propeller did. It worked, but it made such a racket that it blinded the towing ship's own asdic, so an escort using Foxer could not hunt while she was protected, and could not be protected while she hunted.

Two of her sisters were in that screen with her and have their own accounts of it. HMS Caprice was almost certainly the voice on the radio, and HMS Cambrian was in the same 6th Destroyer Flotilla screen for JW 62 and RA 62. All eight Ca-class destroyers came through that war, Cassandra by the narrowest margin of any of them, and every one of the eight was still in service twenty years afterwards, which says something about the ships and rather more about the men who kept them going.

When the crew got a proper look at the damage, lit by a "snowflake" flare fired from a nearby escort, there was simply nothing left forward of the bridge. The torpedo had blown away her entire bow ahead of the forward magazine, "A" gun turret included; sixty-two men, roughly a third of her ship's company, were killed, almost all of them from the forward mess decks. To keep the crippled ship from going down, her crew jettisoned ammunition over the side and fired eight torpedoes into the sea to shed top weight, while a damage control party under Chief Stoker Willis shored up the shattered forward bulkhead that was all that now stood between the ship and the Barents Sea.

She was taken under tow by the frigate HMS Bahamas, screened by her sister ships Somaliland and Tortola, through a severe Arctic gale, before a Soviet Navy tugboat took over the tow once the weather moderated, bringing her into the Kola Inlet on 14 December, a striking example of Allied cooperation between British and Soviet forces even amid the immense strain of the Arctic convoy campaign. Some of the dead recovered from the wreckage were committed to the sea in a burial service held on the iron deck during the tow; more, found once she reached dry dock, were transferred to the auxiliary trawler HMS Chiltern for burial at sea off the Kola Inlet. U-365 herself did not get far: she was sunk with all hands two days later, on 13 December, by a Fairey Swordfish flown from the escort carrier HMS Campania.

Cassandra was in dry dock at the Rosta naval yard at Murmansk by 15 December, so badly holed that only the personal intervention of the Senior British Naval Officer, Northern Region persuaded a reluctant Soviet dockyard to clear the dock ahead of schedule. Her survivors spent Christmas in North Russia, entertained by their own concert party, cheerfully styled "Kassandra's Kola Klowns," before passage home began trickling out through February 1945 aboard other convoy escorts.

The clause about Gibraltar is doing an enormous amount of work, because getting her there was a six-month problem and the answer to it is the best story in her record. Once the wrecked structure had been cut away at Rosta, she needed a temporary bow simply to be seaworthy enough to go anywhere at all. Steel plate was sent out from England to make one. It was sunk on passage. More was sent. That was sunk too. At which point the Soviet yard gave up waiting, took its own plate, and built her a dummy bow out of Russian steel.

It was welded on, by the accounts of the men who watched it, largely by young men and women, in a yard in North Russia in the winter and spring of 1945, and it held. That is the part worth sitting with. A British destroyer with a bow made of Soviet steel by Soviet welders sailed from the Kola Inlet on 14 June 1945, in company with HMS Onslaught, and reached Rosyth on the 18th without incident. She left Rosyth on 24 July for Gibraltar, arrived on the 28th, paid off there and finally got a proper bow and new forward mess decks fitted in the dockyard. She was back at Devonport that December.

Set the whole sequence out and it is quite a list of people who kept her afloat: a chief stoker's damage control party shoring a bulkhead in the dark, a frigate and two of her sisters towing her through an Arctic gale, a Soviet tug taking the tow when the weather let it, a British admiral leaning on a Soviet dockyard to clear a dry dock early, and then a shipyard in Murmansk building her a new front end out of its own steel because the British steel kept getting torpedoed. The Arctic convoys are usually remembered for what went wrong on them. This is what going right looked like.

Rebuilt and Modernised

HMS Cassandra survived the attack, but her new bow and forward mess decks were not fitted until a lengthy repair at Gibraltar; she then spent much of the following decade in reserve before Yarrow, her original builder, modernised her with an enclosed bridge and twin triple Squid anti-submarine mortars in place of some of her original weaponry. She recommissioned with the new pennant number D10 in April 1960, joining the 8th Destroyer Squadron for service in the Far East, a very different ship from the wreck that had limped into the Kola Inlet fifteen years before.

A Long Postwar Career

HMS Cassandra went on to serve in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, and in late June 1961 was ordered to the Persian Gulf to reinforce British forces there for Operation Vantage, the rapid deterrent response to Iraqi threats against the newly independent Kuwait. She arrived on 7 July as part of a task force that also included the carriers HMS Victorious and HMS Bulwark, Royal Marines of 42 Commando, and her sister destroyers HMS Camperdown, HMS Finisterre and HMS Saintes, before being relieved by the frigate HMS Blackpool on 29 July and returning to the Far East station. She covered some 50,000 miles during her 1962 to 1963 commission alone, a demanding operational tempo for a twenty-year-old destroyer.

She went on to serve during the Indonesian Confrontation in 1964 and 1965, latterly with the 21st Destroyer Squadron, adding a further conflict to a service record that already included one of the most dangerous convoy routes of the Second World War.

A Well-Earned Retirement

HMS Cassandra was placed on the disposal list in December 1965 and formally paid off the following January. She was sold to Thos. W. Ward and Company in March 1967, left Portsmouth under tow on 25 April, and arrived at the breakers' yard at Inverkeithing on 28 April to be broken up, closing out the career of a destroyer whose survival after being torpedoed in the Arctic, thanks in no small part to a Soviet tugboat crew who towed her to safety, stands as one of the more remarkable stories of endurance and international cooperation from the entire Arctic convoy campaign.

Her sixty-two dead are still remembered. The HMS Cassandra Association, formed by her survivors in 1994, unveiled a memorial plaque bearing all their names at Southsea's D-Day Museum in 1999, fittingly unveiled by Admiral Sir Jock Slater, who had served as the ship's own navigating officer in 1962 and 1963 before going on to become First Sea Lord. The memorial, and Cassandra's own ship's bell, now hang together at Chatham Historic Dockyard.

The officer who unveiled the plaque is worth a paragraph too. Jock Slater joined the Navy as a cadet in 1956 and served in Cassandra as a young officer at the very end of her career, one appointment among several early ones that also included the Royal Yacht Britannia. He was given his first command, the minesweeper HMS Soberton, in 1965, specialised in navigation, and was equerry to the Queen from 1968 to 1971. He was Commander-in-Chief Fleet during the first Gulf War and First Sea Lord from 1995 to 1998, where he had a leading hand in the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, and after retiring he became chairman of the RNLI.

So the man who ran the Royal Navy through the deepest cuts of the post-Cold War years, and who then spent his retirement chairing the lifeboats, began his sea time in a destroyer that had come home from the Arctic with a bow the Russians built for her. When he unveiled that plaque in 1999, the sixty-two names on it belonged to men killed in a ship he would serve in himself eighteen years later, when he was a small boy in Scotland. There is a reason ships' associations exist, and that is roughly it.