HMS Diamond (H22): Lost Rescuing Survivors From the Slamat Disaster

The Build: Barrow

HMS Diamond was built by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness, her keel laid on 29 September 1931, launched on 8 April 1932, and completed on 3 November 1933 at a cost of £223,509 excluding Admiralty-supplied equipment, 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, with a complement of 145 officers and men.

China and the Mediterranean

HMS Diamond served on the China Station with the 8th, later the 21st, Destroyer Flotilla from January 1935, remaining there for four years before a refit at Singapore and transfer to the Mediterranean Fleet in November 1939, several months before Italy's own entry into the war made that theatre considerably more dangerous. She took part in Operations Hats and Collar, escorted convoys to the besieged island of Malta, and fought at the Battle of Cape Spartivento in November 1940, a significant fleet engagement between British and Italian naval forces in the western Mediterranean.

She was not out there on her own. Two of her sisters went east at the same moment and did the same four years: HMS Decoy (H75) and HMS Delight (H38), both of them on the China Station from early 1935 until 1939, and what that posting consisted of is set out in their articles. The three of them came home within months of each other as the war began, and within two years two of the three were gone: Delight bombed off Portland in July 1940, Diamond off Greece in April 1941. Decoy was the only one of the trio to see the end of the war, and then only by being handed over to the Royal Canadian Navy and renamed.

The Sinking of the Slamat

HMS Diamond's loss came on 27 April 1941 during Operation Demon, the evacuation of British, Australian and New Zealand forces from Greece following the country's defeat by German and Italian invasion.

Operation Demon is worth setting out properly, because the rule that Slamat broke was not a suggestion. The evacuation ran over five nights from 24 April, taking men off open beaches in the Peloponnese and Attica, and it was conducted with no air cover of any kind: the Luftwaffe held the sky over Greece completely, and every ship in the operation knew it. The whole scheme therefore rested on one arithmetic constraint. Transports came in after dark, loaded from boats and lighters in the black, and had to be clear of the coast and out of aircraft range by three in the morning. Anything still close inshore at first light was, in practice, already lost. On that basis the Royal Navy brought away 50,732 men, about four fifths of the army it had landed in Greece in the first place.

The trouble began the previous evening in the Bay of Nauplia, where another grounded transport had blocked the harbour, forcing the evacuation ships to anchor offshore and rely on a single landing craft, local caïques and their own boats to bring troops out from the beaches, a painfully slow process. At 03:00 on 27 April, the convoy commander ordered every ship to sail in time to clear the area before daylight; most did, but Slamat, having embarked barely half her roughly one-thousand-strong capacity, delayed until 04:15, a decision that left her exposed when German aircraft found the convoy still within reach at dawn.

The Dutch troopship Slamat, carrying around 500 soldiers, came under attack from Luftwaffe aircraft off Leonidion, struck by a 250-kilogram bomb that set her ablaze and disabled her water systems, forcing her captain, Tjalling Luidinga, to order the ship abandoned.

HMS Diamond moved alongside to begin rescuing survivors from the burning wreck, continuing the rescue effort even as air attacks persisted around her, and taking an estimated 600 people aboard in the process, meaning that when her own turn came, most of those she carried were people she had only just pulled from the sea.

At around 13:15 that afternoon, a second wave of German aircraft targeted HMS Diamond and her fellow destroyer HMS Wryneck directly. A bomb struck HMS Diamond's engine room, and she sank within just eight minutes; HMS Wryneck took three direct hits and capsized within ten to fifteen minutes of her own.

The scale of loss across all three ships that day was catastrophic: of the roughly 500 soldiers embarked on Slamat, only eight survived, and of her 214 crew and gunners, only eleven survived.

HMS Diamond herself lost all but 20 of her 166-strong complement, while HMS Wryneck lost all but 27 of her 106 crew. In total, 983 people died and only 66 survived across the three ships, one of the single deadliest days of the entire Greek evacuation.

What that day actually consisted of is a chain of consequences from a single decision. Slamat was seventy-five minutes late leaving. Because she was late she was still within reach at dawn, and she was bombed and set on fire. Because she was burning, Diamond stopped to take her people off, which is what a destroyer is for and which meant sitting still under a sky full of aircraft for as long as it took. Because Diamond and Wryneck were still there in the middle of the afternoon, the Germans came back and got both of them. Nine hundred and eighty-three people died, of whom sixty-six did not, and most of those who went down in Diamond had been alive and dry aboard Slamat that morning. Nobody in the chain did anything dishonourable. One ship was late.

Legacy

HMS Diamond's loss stands as a stark illustration of the price paid during the desperate final stages of the Greek campaign, when Royal Navy destroyers repeatedly placed themselves directly in harm's way to rescue soldiers and sailors from sinking transports, fully aware of the mortal risk that German air superiority posed to any ship that lingered in these waters.

The overwhelming casualty toll from the Slamat disaster, and HMS Diamond's own near-total loss of life, remain a sober reminder of just how costly the Royal Navy's commitment to rescue operations could be, even when that commitment reflected exactly the kind of courage the service prided itself on.

And they did it again four weeks later. The army taken off Greece was landed on Crete, the Germans came down on Crete by parachute on 20 May, and the same fleet went back in to take the same men off a second time, this time losing three cruisers and six destroyers in eleven days. HMS Decoy took the King of Greece off the south coast on 22 May; HMS Curlew had already been sunk from the air off Norway the year before, in exactly the same way, by exactly the same argument. The lesson of the spring of 1941 was not that the Royal Navy lacked courage. It was that a fleet without air cover cannot operate within range of a hostile air force, however brave everybody in it is, and it took a year and a great many ships for that to be accepted.

It is worth stepping back and looking at what happened to the whole class, because the arithmetic is almost unbelievable. The D class was nine ships: the leader Duncan and eight destroyers, Dainty, Daring, Decoy, Defender, Delight, Diamond, Diana and Duchess. Duchess was rammed and cut in half by the battleship Barham she was escorting in December 1939, before the war was four months old. Daring was torpedoed by U-23 off Norway in February 1940. Delight was bombed off Portland that July. Diana, by then Canadian and renamed Margaree, was run down and sunk by a freighter she was escorting in October. Dainty was bombed off Tobruk in February 1941, Diamond off Greece in April, and Defender was crippled by a bomber on the Tobruk run in July and had to be scuttled. Seven of the nine were gone inside nineteen months.

Two came through. Decoy went to Canada as Kootenay and spent the rest of the war in the Atlantic, and Duncan, the leader, survived to be broken up afterwards. The class had been designed in the late 1920s for a war against surface ships in fair visibility, with guns that would not point far above the horizon and a hull with no armour worth the name; six of the seven losses were caused either by aircraft or by being run down in the dark by something much larger. That is not a criticism of the ships or of the people in them. It is what happens to a design when the war it actually gets bears very little relation to the war it was drawn for, and the D class ran into that harder than almost any other British class of its generation.