HMS Delight (H38): Sunk in Daylight After Sailing Against Orders

The Build: Govan

HMS Delight was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan on the Clyde, her keel laid on 22 April 1931, launched on 2 June 1932, and completed on 31 January 1933 at a total cost of £229,378, a D-class destroyer displacing 1,375 long tons standard, capable of 36 knots on 36,000 shaft horsepower.

She measured 329 feet long with a crew of 145, and commissioned at Portsmouth on 1 April 1933 under Commander Albert Lawrence Poland for service with the 1st Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean.

Her first captain is worth following, because he had a considerably larger war than his ship did. Albert Lawrence Poland was born in 1895 and took Delight new out of Portsmouth in April 1933; among the officers who noticed him in the destroyer flotillas of that decade was Andrew Cunningham, and that turned out to matter. In April 1941, with Cunningham commanding in the Mediterranean and Tobruk under siege, Poland was made Senior Naval Officer Inshore Squadron, which meant that every ship, lighter, schooner and small craft keeping the army supplied along the north African coast was his responsibility. The Tobruk run was done at night, in whatever would float, against an enemy air force that owned the daylight, for months on end. It is one of the hardest sustained jobs the Royal Navy did in that war and it was given to a man Cunningham had watched handling destroyers before it.

He did not stop there either. In March 1942 Poland was appointed Captain (D) of the 14th Destroyer Flotilla, flying his pennant in the famous HMS Jervis, and took his ships through the Malta convoys and into the Second Battle of Sirte, the action in which a British force of light cruisers and destroyers held off an Italian battleship and heavy cruisers in a gale to get a convoy through. He finished the war having collected a DSO and a DSC and retired as Vice-Admiral Sir Albert Poland. The ship he had commissioned new in 1933 lies in sixty-two metres of water off Portland Bill.

Years on the China Station

HMS Delight transferred to the China Station in 1935, and that autumn was briefly redeployed to the Red Sea during the Abyssinia Crisis, when Italy's invasion of Ethiopia raised the possibility of a wider Mediterranean conflict the Royal Navy needed to be ready for. She returned to routine China Station duties and remained there until the summer of 1939, finally departing Hong Kong on 28 August that year as war with Germany drew near, steaming home via Singapore, Colombo, Aden and Alexandria to rejoin the Mediterranean Fleet.

Those China years are worth a moment because they were not hers alone. Her sister Decoy did exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, out to the station in early 1935, into the Red Sea that autumn when Italy invaded Abyssinia, and back east until 1939, and what that posting actually consisted of, the treaty ports, the Yangtze, and a Chinese civil war going on round the edges of it, is set out in the article on HMS Decoy (H75). Delight left Hong Kong on 28 August 1939, six days before the declaration of war, and steamed home by Singapore, Colombo, Aden and Alexandria. The two of them had eleven months left together.

Norway and the Retreat

HMS Delight transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet in late 1939 before moving to the Home Fleet that December. During the Norwegian Campaign, she escorted HMS Furious, ferried troops during the evacuation from Åndalsnes, and supported operations around Narvik between April and June 1940, direct participation in the difficult and ultimately unsuccessful Allied effort to hold Norway against the German invasion.

The Norwegian entries are compressed and they cover a great deal of hard work. Andalsnes was the evacuation of the central Norwegian front at the end of April 1940, and it was carried out at night from a small fjord port under continuous air attack, with destroyers going alongside a burning quay to lift troops off and stand out to sea again before first light. That is what ferried troops means. Narvik was the far north, a fortnight of operations in a fjord system in the perpetual daylight of an Arctic spring, and it ended in another evacuation in June. The campaign is one the Royal Navy is not usually credited with, because it was lost, and the ships did everything that was asked of them in it. Delight came home from that in one piece, went into a refit at Portsmouth, and was sunk in daylight twenty miles off the English coast on a routine passage.

Sailing Against Orders

HMS Delight's loss came on 29 July 1940 in circumstances that made the disaster considerably more painful in retrospect: she departed Portland Harbour in broad daylight, contrary to standing orders that called for exactly this kind of movement to be made under cover of darkness given the very real threat of German air attack along the south coast at that stage of the war. She had just completed a refit at Portsmouth and was in transit to the Clyde when she called at Portland, an essentially administrative passage rather than any kind of combat patrol, which makes the decision to sail in daylight look all the more avoidable in hindsight.

She was detected some twenty miles off Portland Bill by the German Freya radar station at Auderville, near Cherbourg, at a range of around sixty miles, an episode naval historians consider one of the earliest recorded instances of a radar-directed air attack of the entire war. At 19:25 that evening, twelve Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers attacked her.

It was more than early. Her loss is the reason Britain found out that German radar existed at all. In the summer of 1940 the prevailing view in Whitehall was that the Germans had nothing comparable to Chain Home, partly because they had not needed it and partly because nobody had seen any evidence of it. Then Bletchley broke a signal reporting that a station at Auderville had detected a British destroyer at sixty miles on 29 July, and that she had subsequently been sunk. The station was called Freya.

The man who made sense of it was R. V. Jones, the young physicist running scientific intelligence for the Air Ministry, and his way in was the codename. In Norse mythology the goddess Freyja owned a famous necklace, and the necklace was guarded by Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, who could see for a hundred miles. Jones wondered whether the Germans could conceivably have been careless enough to name a long-range detection set after a mythological sentry with that particular attribute. They had. Once he knew what he was looking for, the transmissions could be characterised, the bearings could be plotted, and within months the whole German coastal radar chain from Norway to Brittany had been mapped from a laboratory in London.

The chain of consequences runs a long way from a destroyer off Portland Bill. Mapping the Freya sites led to the discovery of the smaller, more precise Wurzburg dishes sitting alongside them, and one of those was photographed on a clifftop at Bruneval near Le Havre. On the night of 27 February 1942 a company of British parachutists dropped on it, took it apart with a radar mechanic on hand to say which bits mattered, and were lifted off the beach by the Royal Navy. It was the first successful British airborne operation of the war and it told the scientists exactly how good German radar was. The German response was to order every radar site in occupied Europe to be surrounded with barbed wire, which had the effect of making all of them extremely easy for RAF photographic reconnaissance to find.

HMS Delight was hit by a bomb on her forecastle, causing a major fire and a subsequent explosion, and she sank that same evening with six of her crew killed.

A Preventable Loss

HMS Delight's sinking stands as a notably sobering example of how quickly a straightforward breach of standing orders could turn into disaster during the summer of 1940, when German air superiority along the Channel and south coast made daylight movements by Royal Navy warships a remarkably serious gamble.

The date matters too. 29 July 1940 falls inside what the Luftwaffe called the Kanalkampf, the Channel battle, the opening phase of the Battle of Britain fought from the middle of July against shipping in the Dover Strait and the western Channel. Convoys were being attacked in daylight almost every day, and the coastal shipping route through the Strait had become so expensive that the Admiralty was on the point of closing it to daylight traffic altogether. That is the context in which a destroyer left Portland at teatime with an easy sixty miles of open water in front of her, and it is why the standing order she broke existed.

Her wreck now rests at a depth of 62 metres off Portland, broken into multiple sections, and is protected today under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986, a permanent and legally safeguarded memorial to the six men lost when she went down.

Research into the sinking is still ongoing: a transcript of the official inquiry into her loss has recently been located by maritime researchers and is being prepared for publication, nearly nine decades after the event itself, a reminder that even well-documented wartime losses can still yield fresh detail.