HMS Cossack (L03): 'The Navy's Here', Narvik, the Bismarck and a Tow That Failed

A Tribal From the Tyne

HMS Cossack was launched at Vickers-Armstrongs' High Walker yard on the Tyne on 8 June 1937, on the same day and at the same yard as her sister Afridi, whose story is in HMS Afridi (F07). They were Tribals, the big destroyers of the late 1930s, built with twice the gun power of the destroyers before them because the Navy expected to fight Japanese and Italian destroyers that were bigger than its own.

She commissioned in June 1938 with the pennant L03, which is the number painted on her in the photograph at the top of this page, taken that year in her light peacetime grey.

Her first year was the last peacetime summer anybody would have for a while: the Mediterranean Fleet, a visit to Istanbul with the battleship Warspite in August 1939, and then convoys in the western Mediterranean as war came. She came home in October.

In November she collided with a merchant ship off the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth, and four of her men were killed before she had fired a shot in anger. She was repaired at Leith, which turned out to be the right place, because in three months' time she would be bringing three hundred men home to it.

The Altmark

In the autumn of 1939 the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee had sunk nine British merchant ships in the South Atlantic and taken their crews prisoner. Most of them were transferred to her supply ship, the tanker Altmark, and when Graf Spee was cornered off the River Plate in December, Altmark was left at sea with them in her holds.

She spent two months working her way home around the north of Iceland, and in February 1940 she slipped down the Norwegian coast inside neutral waters.

Norwegian officers inspected her and found nothing, because nobody looked very hard and the prisoners were battened down below. A British search group found her on 16 February and she ran into Jøssingfjord, with two Norwegian torpedo boats standing guard.

Cossack, then leading the 4th Destroyer Flotilla under Captain Philip Vian, was ordered in. The Norwegians refused to escort the tanker to Bergen for a joint search, and from London Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, sent the order to board.

At about twenty past ten that night Vian brought Cossack alongside. Altmark tried to ram her, ran aground in the attempt, and the boarding party of three officers and thirty men went over the rail. The German guards were overpowered after a short and violent struggle in which several of them were killed.

Then the boarders went looking for the prisoners, opened a hatch over a dark hold and shouted down to ask whether there were any Englishmen there. A cheer came back. The answer that went down the hatch became one of the best-known lines of the war: "The Navy's here!"

They brought out 299 men, some of them held for nearly six months. Cossack, her bows dented from the approach, steamed straight for home and landed them at Leith on 17 February, where the press and newsreel cameras were waiting and some two hundred and fifty of them went to the Eastern General Hospital.

Norway protested at the breach of her neutrality. Germany drew its own conclusions about how neutral Norway would be allowed to stay, and the invasion plan for Norway was hurried forward. Vian got the DSO.

Narvik

The invasion came seven weeks later, and on 13 April 1940 Cossack was one of the destroyers that went up the Ofotfjord to Narvik under the guns of the battleship Warspite to finish off the German destroyers trapped there. With Foxhound she sank the destroyer Erich Giese, and then she pushed into the harbour itself and met the Diether von Roeder, crippled and lying alongside, which still had her guns.

Roeder hit her nine times. A shell burst in the forward structure and killed the party supplying ammunition to A gun, others went into her boiler rooms and stopped her, and with no way on she drifted ashore. Eleven of her men were killed and twenty-three wounded.

She lay there under fire from the town, still shooting back, and put a German field gun out of action from her stranded position. On the rising tide the next morning she floated off, went astern out of the fjord to Skelfjord for patching, and eventually got back to Portsmouth on 29 April.

She was rebuilt at Thornycroft's yard at Southampton, and she came out with something new: a Type 286 air warning radar, the first fitted to any Royal Navy destroyer. She also lost one of her twin 4.7-inch mountings for a pair of 4-inch anti-aircraft guns, because Norway had taught every destroyer captain what the Luftwaffe could do to a ship with no high-angle guns.

Her pennant became G03, and in June she was back leading the 4th Flotilla with Vian in command again.

The Bismarck by Night

In May 1941 she was escorting the troop convoy WS 8B when the Bismarck broke out and sank HMS Hood. On 25 May the 4th Flotilla, Cossack, Sikh, Maori, Zulu and the Polish Piorun, was taken off the convoy and sent to join the hunt. Their crossing is told in Sikh's own article.

By the evening of 26 May aircraft from HMS Ark Royal (91) had jammed Bismarck's rudder, and HMS Sheffield (C24) was shadowing her. Vian's destroyers were ordered to keep touch through the night and attack if they could.

It was blowing a full gale, Bismarck was still shooting accurately with radar, and the destroyers went in one at a time through starshell and heavy seas. Cossack fired at about twenty to two in the morning.

Several hits were claimed by the flotilla that night, but none has ever been confirmed, and what the destroyers really did was keep the battleship awake, firing and in sight until the battleships arrived at dawn and HMS Rodney (29) and King George V finished her. Cossack then escorted King George V home to Loch Ewe.

Malta

That summer she went south. In July 1941 she was in the escort of Operation Substance, the convoy that fought its way to Malta under air attack, and in September she took the Operation Halberd convoy through the same waters, the operation in which the battleship Nelson was torpedoed, reaching the island on 28 September.

In October she screened Ark Royal while the carrier flew more fighters off to Malta. The destroyer HMS Legion (G74) was on the same runs that year, and has her own account.

HG 75

On 22 October 1941 she sailed from Gibraltar with the escort of HG 75, a slow convoy bound for Britain. Her captain was now Captain Edward Berthon. On the night of 23 October she was stationed astern of the convoy, west of the Strait, when U-563 put a torpedo into her forward of the bridge.

Ammunition forward exploded. The whole fore part of the ship was wrecked, and Berthon and 158 of her officers and men were killed, most of them in the explosion. The survivors abandoned her on Carley floats, and then, when she did not sink, some of them went back aboard.

They shored up what was left and got her moving stern first, and the next day the tug Thames took her in tow for Gibraltar, with the corvette Jonquil standing by.

For four days they tried to bring her in. The weather got worse, the wreck worked loose in the swell, and on 27 October the tow had to be given up and the men still aboard were taken off by Jonquil.

She sank at seventeen minutes to eleven that morning, about 150 miles from where she had been hit and roughly halfway to Gibraltar.

A Name Worth Keeping

She had three years of service and a remarkable amount happened in them: a rescue that made the whole country cheer, a battle in a fjord, the first radar in a British destroyer, a night chasing the most famous battleship in the world, and two Malta convoys. The Navy gave the name to a new destroyer before the war was out, and she in turn served off Korea.

Of all of it, the four words shouted down a hatch in Jøssingfjord are what people remember, and that seems right. Most of what a destroyer does in a war is done to ships. That night she did it for three hundred men in the dark who had begun to think nobody was coming.