HMS Decoy (H75): She Evacuated a King, Then Sank Three U-Boats as HMCS Kootenay

Constructed at Woolston

HMS Decoy was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston, Southampton, her keel laid on 25 June 1931, launched on 7 June 1932, and completed on 17 January 1933 at a cost of £225,236 excluding equipment supplied directly by the Admiralty, a D-class destroyer displacing 1,375 long tons standard, capable of 36 knots, and carrying four 4.7-inch guns alongside anti-aircraft armament, torpedo tubes and depth charges.

Her first seven years were spent a very long way from any of that. Decoy went to the Mediterranean Fleet on completion, and in October 1934 she recommissioned at Devonport for the 8th Destroyer Flotilla on the China Station, which meant Hong Kong, Wei-hai-wei in the summer, the Yangtze, and the peculiar half-diplomatic, half-police work the Royal Navy did on that station between the wars. In late 1935 she was pulled out and sent to the Red Sea, because Mussolini had invaded Abyssinia and Britain was making a point of having ships between Italy and the Suez Canal, a point that was not in the end pressed. Then back east, where she stayed until the middle of 1939, and home to the Mediterranean just in time. Nine thousand miles from Portsmouth is where most of her life was actually spent.

Two of the men who commanded her in those years are worth stopping for, because between them they account for two of the most quoted episodes of the war that followed. Her first captain, appointed on 2 September 1932, was Commander Ralph Kerr. He spent more than twenty years in destroyers, was marked out for his seamanship, and on 15 February 1941 was given command of HMS Hood, then refitting at Rosyth. He had her for three months. On 24 May, in the Denmark Strait, Hood blew up; Kerr made no attempt to leave, stayed at his station beside Vice-Admiral Holland, and went down with all but three of a company of over fourteen hundred. He was mentioned in despatches posthumously. Her story is told in the article on HMS Hood (51).

The man who relieved him on 23 October 1934, and took Decoy out to China, was Commander Bernard Armitage Warburton-Lee. On the morning of 10 April 1940 he took the five destroyers of the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla up Ofotfjord in a snowstorm, on his own initiative and against a force he knew to be stronger, and attacked the German ships lying off Narvik. The first pass went well. The second engagement, against five more German destroyers coming down the fjord behind him, did not: a shell hit the bridge of his own ship, HMS Hardy, and killed him. His last signal told the flotilla to keep on engaging the enemy. He was awarded the first Victoria Cross of the Second World War and the first posthumous one. So a modest interwar destroyer, in her first two commissions, was handled by the last captain of the Hood and by the first VC of the war. Neither of them knew it at the time, and neither of them saw the first two years of the war out.

Hunting Italian Submarines

HMS Decoy was initially assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet, transferring briefly to Freetown in early 1940 for West African convoy escort duty before returning to the Mediterranean as Italy entered the war.

She helped sink the Italian submarine Console Generale Liuzzi on 27 June 1940 and the Argonauta two days later, and took part in the Battle of Calabria on 9 July 1940, one of the largest fleet actions of the entire Mediterranean naval campaign.

Those two sinkings were part of the shortest and sharpest defeat any submarine service suffered in the war. Italy declared war on 10 June 1940 with about a hundred and fifteen submarines, the largest force in the world after the Soviet Union's, and inside three weeks she had lost Torricelli on the 22nd, Galvani on the 23rd, Liuzzi on the 27th and Argonauta on the 28th. Liuzzi was caught south of Crete by five destroyers together, Dainty, Ilex, Decoy and Defender with the Australian Voyager, and depth-charged to the surface. Her captain, Capitano di Corvetta Lorenzo Bezzi, got his men out of her, set the scuttling charges and stayed where he was; he was awarded the Gold Medal for Military Valour posthumously, and deserved it. The boats were well built and the crews were brave. They had been trained for a different war, and the Mediterranean in the summer of 1940 was full of British destroyers with asdic.

HMS Decoy was struck by a bomb at Alexandria on 13 November 1940 that penetrated completely through the ship, and suffered further damage in January 1941, requiring permanent repairs at Malta that ran until 1 February that year, a notably serious run of damage even by the standards of the hard-fought Mediterranean theatre.

Evacuating a King From Crete

HMS Decoy took part in Operation Demon, the evacuation of Allied troops from Greece, in April 1941, and on 22 May that year, following the German invasion of Crete, evacuated King George II of Greece and his entourage to safety, a truly dramatic and historically significant mission for a single destroyer to carry out amid the chaos of the German airborne assault on the island.

The manner of it is better than the sentence suggests. George II was on Crete for a political reason: as long as any part of Greece remained unoccupied, the British and Greek governments wanted a Greek government standing on it. When the German paratroops came down on the morning of 20 May they landed near the house he was using, and General Freyberg decided that the King of Greece could not be allowed to spend another night on the island. The party that set off consisted of the King, his youngest sister Princess Katherine, Prince and Princess George of Greece, their son Prince Peter, and Colonel Jasper Blunt, the British military attache to the Greek army. Their escort was 12 Platoon of B Company, 18th New Zealand Battalion, under a lieutenant named Ryan.

They walked. There was no other way across the island, so the King of the Hellenes and a platoon of New Zealanders went over the White Mountains on foot, three days of it, down through Samaria and out at Ay Roumeli, a fishing village on the empty south coast where the gorge meets the sea. Decoy came in after dark on 22 May and took the lot of them off, royal family, attache and infantry platoon together, and had them in Alexandria the following day. The King spent the rest of the war in exile in Egypt and then London, and did not see Greece again until 1946.

What it cost the Royal Navy to be there at all deserves recording. Over eleven days off Crete, under continuous air attack with no fighter cover to speak of, the fleet lost three cruisers and six destroyers sunk and had two battleships, a carrier, six cruisers and seven destroyers damaged, with something approaching two thousand sailors killed. When the army command asked whether the evacuation could continue, Admiral Cunningham gave the answer the service has quoted ever since: it takes three years to build a ship and three centuries to build a tradition, and the navy would not let the army down. Decoy was one of the destroyers that kept going in.

To the Indian Ocean and Then Canada

Following collision damage in December 1941, HMS Decoy transferred to the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean in March 1942, serving there until September that year. She was then transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy during a refit beginning 1 March 1943, recommissioning as HMCS Kootenay on 12 April 1943, beginning a remarkable second act under a new flag.

The transfer to Canada was not a hand-me-down, whatever it looks like. By the autumn of 1942 the Royal Canadian Navy was escorting a very large share of the North Atlantic convoys and had twelve destroyers to do it with, seven of which were the ex-American four-stackers of 1918 vintage that had come over in the destroyers-for-bases deal and were by then close to unmaintainable. Over that winter the two governments agreed the transfer of six British destroyers, which the Canadians classed as their River class and renamed after Canadian rivers: Decoy became Kootenay, and Gatineau, Saskatchewan, Chaudiere and Qu'Appelle followed between the summer of 1943 and February 1944. Two of them, Kootenay and Chaudiere, were in the group that made the three kills of 1944. Britain was not disposing of a tired ship. It was reinforcing the navy that was doing the escorting, with the only hulls anybody had.

Three U-Boats in Six Weeks

As HMCS Kootenay, the former HMS Decoy sank U-678 in the English Channel south of Brighton on 7 July 1944, and went on to take part in sinking U-621 on 18 August and U-984 just two days later on 20 August 1944, an extraordinary run of three confirmed U-boat kills within barely six weeks, a record that stands among the most successful individual anti-submarine periods of any single escort vessel during the entire Battle of the Atlantic.

She did not do it alone, and the group is the point. Kootenay joined Escort Group 11 in May 1944 and was off the beaches on D-Day, and the group then spent the summer working the Channel and the Bay of Biscay, hunting the U-boats sent to get at the invasion shipping. All three kills belonged to the same handful of ships. HMCS Ottawa and Kootenay were in every one of them: with the British corvette HMS Statice for U-678, south-west of Brighton on 7 July, and with HMCS Chaudiere for U-621 off La Rochelle on 18 August and U-984 west of Brest two days after that. Three boats in six weeks by three ships that had learned to hunt together, which is exactly the lesson the Atlantic had spent five years teaching.

The End of Service

HMCS Kootenay underwent an extensive refit between October 1944 and February 1945, before serving as a troop transport after the war's end and being placed in reserve in October 1945.

She was broken up for scrap in 1946, closing out a remarkably extraordinary career that had carried her from Mediterranean submarine hunts and a royal evacuation under the White Ensign to three confirmed U-boat kills under Canadian colours, a remarkable working life packed into little more than a dozen years.