HMS Cleveland (L46): From the Channel to the Aegean, and Wrecked on the Gower

Built at Scotstoun

HMS Cleveland was one of the first group of Hunt Class escort destroyers, ordered from Yarrow at Scotstoun on the Clyde in March 1939 and named, like all the class, after a fox hunt, in her case the Cleveland Hunt of North Yorkshire. She was laid down on 7 June 1939, launched on 24 April 1940 and completed on 18 September 1940, the fourth ship of the name.

The Hunts were small ships of about a thousand tons, with four 4 inch high-angle guns in twin mountings, a multiple pom-pom and depth charges, built to escort coastal convoys against aircraft, E-boats and submarines. Her sister Garth spent her war on the East Coast; Cleveland's took her much further.

The Channel

She worked up at Scapa in the autumn of 1940 under her first captain, Lieutenant Commander William Clouston, and on 20 October picked up survivors of the steamer Conakrian, torpedoed by aircraft off Aberdeen.

That winter she escorted the big ships between the dockyards, among them the carrier Furious and the battleships Queen Elizabeth, Ramillies, Resolution and Revenge, and then joined the 1st Destroyer Flotilla on the Channel convoys. In May 1941 she moved to the 15th Destroyer Flotilla at Plymouth, and on 21 May rescued ten men of the armed yacht Viva, sunk by German aircraft off Trevose Head.

Plymouth was her base for the next eighteen months. In February 1942 she was among the ships sent too late to intercept Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in their dash up the Channel. That spring she escorted Coastal Forces craft in connection with the raid on St Nazaire and was attacked by aircraft on the way home.

In March the people of Middlesbrough adopted her. On 16 May she shot down a Messerschmitt 109 off Rame Head while defending a convoy, and on the night of 17 September she fought a gun action with E-boats off the Eddystone light, in which a torpedo narrowly missed her and three of her men were wounded.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken in Plymouth Sound that October, in her pale camouflage, with the radio masts on the headland and a barrage balloon behind her.

Torch and Sicily

In November 1942 she escorted one of the first convoys for the invasion of North Africa to Gibraltar, and in 1943, after a refit at Dundee, she went out to the Mediterranean to join the Hunts at Algiers, now under Lieutenant James Hamilton. At the beginning of July she was escorting convoy KMS 18B to Sicily when U-boats attacked off Algeria.

On 4 July two merchant ships were sunk, and on 5 July U-593 torpedoed the troopship Devis, carrying Canadian soldiers for the invasion. Cleveland picked up 291 survivors. Five days later she gave gunfire support to the landings in Sicily.

Salerno

In September 1943 she sailed for Salerno, and on 16 September she was one of the escorts of the battleship Warspite after a German radio-controlled glider bomb had gone down through her decks and left her helpless off the beachhead; the battleship was taken in tow, and the escorts stayed with her through the night. For the rest of the year Cleveland escorted convoys across the central Mediterranean.

On 26 November, off Algeria, her convoy was attacked by German aircraft with glider bombs, and the transport Rohna, carrying American troops, was sunk with the loss of more than a thousand men.

The Aegean

In August 1944 she escorted a convoy from Oran for the landings in the south of France, and then went east to the Aegean, where the British were clearing the Germans from the islands as they withdrew. On 3 October, with the destroyer Calpe, she attacked a group of German assault craft off Piscopi, north west of Rhodes, and sank six of them.

On 17 October she put a landing party ashore on Scarpanto, and in November she supported the British landings in Greece. In the last days of the war, on 1 May 1945, she bombarded the German positions at Genoa.

Her battle honours are Atlantic 1942, Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943, South France 1944, Aegean 1944 and Adriatic 1944.

The Gower

She came home in September 1945 and spent the next eleven years in reserve at Portsmouth and Cardiff. In 1957 she was sold to be broken up at Llanelli.

On 28 June 1957, on her way there under tow, the tow parted off Burry Holms at the northern end of Rhossili Bay, and she drifted ashore on the sands near Llangennith. Every attempt to refloat her failed. She was cut up where she lay, and the last of her remains were blown up in December 1959, two years later.

Her sister Cotswold and the other Hunts are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.