HMS Eclipse (H08): From the Arctic Convoys to a Minefield Off Kalymnos

Built at Dumbarton

HMS Eclipse was ordered on 1 November 1932 from William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton, an E-class destroyer representing a modest evolution of the preceding D-class design. She was laid down on 22 March 1933, launched on 12 April 1934, and entered service on 29 November 1934 at a cost of £246,664.

HMS Eclipse displaced 1,405 tons standard, measured 329 feet in length, and was powered by Parsons geared steam turbines producing 36,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 35.5 knots, with a range of 6,350 nautical miles at cruising speed thanks to 470 tons of fuel oil carried aboard.

Her main armament comprised four 4.7-inch guns, backed by anti-aircraft machine guns, torpedo tubes and depth charges, a well-rounded fit typical of interwar British destroyer design and carried by a crew of around 145 officers and ratings.

Her sisters are worth a line, because the E class had a very hard war and one of them left a name behind. Nine were built for the Royal Navy, small, fast, lightly built ships of the interwar pattern, and they were spent across every theatre the Navy fought in. HMS Echo, laid down alongside her, survived long enough to be handed to the Greek Navy in 1944, and her name came back to the fleet in 2002 on a survey ship that would eventually go and put a sonar picture to some of the wrecks of the war her namesake had fought; that story is in the article on HMS Echo (H87).

HMS Eclipse joined the 5th Destroyer Flotilla and deployed to the Mediterranean during the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935, serving at various Eastern Mediterranean bases between August 1935 and March 1936, part of Britain's naval response to Italy's invasion of Abyssinia and an early sign of the tensions that would eventually erupt into full war with Italy several years later.

Her war began within hours of Britain's own declaration: on 4 September 1939, the day after, she joined an anti-submarine patrol off Plymouth and attacked a contact that turned out, rather deflatingly, to be entirely bogus, an inauspicious first shot for a ship whose war would eventually take her a very long way from home. The following day she helped screen a convoy of eleven civilian ocean liners, including the Britannic, Orcades and Orion, sailing from the Clyde alongside the battleship HMS Ramillies to escort them safely through to Gibraltar and on into the Mediterranean.

From Dakar to the Arctic

HMS Eclipse took part in Operation Menace in the autumn of 1940, providing protective screening for the troopships involved in the proposed Allied landings at Dakar in French West Africa, an operation that ultimately failed to dislodge the Vichy French garrison there.

Her war then took her considerably further north: between June and August 1941, she screened the 1st Minelaying Squadron during Northern Barrage operations in Arctic waters, escorted the carriers of Force P during the raid on the German-occupied Norwegian ports of Kirkenes and Petsamo, and screened cruisers during Operation Gauntlet, a raid on the Norwegian archipelago of Spitsbergen.

In September 1941, she took part in the related Operation Gearbox, helping establish a refuelling facility at Lowe Sound on Spitsbergen, unglamorous but properly essential logistical work supporting the Royal Navy's wider Arctic operations.

HMS Eclipse also served on more conventional Atlantic convoy escort duty, and in April 1943 escorted Convoy HX 231 through determined U-boat attacks, rescuing sixteen survivors from the torpedoed Dutch cargo ship Blitar on 9 April, one small act of rescue amid a considerably larger and bloodier convoy battle.

HX 231 was not an ordinary convoy either, and it is worth knowing why. It sailed in the first days of April 1943, at the exact hinge of the Atlantic campaign, escorted by Commander Peter Gretton's B7 group, and it was one of the first convoys where a well-drilled escort group with radar, high-frequency direction finding and enough ships simply refused to be broken. The wolf pack attacked for days and was held off; the convoy got through with modest losses and the U-boats took casualties they could not replace. Six weeks later Doenitz withdrew his boats from the North Atlantic altogether. Eclipse was one of the escorts at the moment the arithmetic of that war changed, and she spent it, characteristically, picking sixteen men out of the water.

A Devastating Encounter in the Aegean

By September 1943, HMS Eclipse was operating in the eastern Mediterranean, where the Aegean campaign was unfolding in the chaotic aftermath of Italy's armistice with the Allies. On the night of 22 to 23 September 1943, under the command of Commander Edward Mack, HMS Eclipse detected a convoy in the eastern Aegean and opened fire, sinking the transport ship Gaetano Donizetti, roughly 3,428 tons, escorted by a German torpedo boat that HMS Eclipse also severely damaged in the same engagement.

The human cost of that action was almost unimaginably heavy, though it only became fully clear afterwards.

Gaetano Donizetti was carrying somewhere in the region of 1,600 Italian prisoners of war, soldiers rounded up by German forces following Italy's surrender and being transported away from the islands under German guard, packed into cargo holds designed to hold barely half that number, alongside around 220 German guards and a small crew.

The ship went down with catastrophic speed after being hit, and casualty estimates for the sinking run as high as 1,800 dead, an appalling toll made all the worse by the fact that the great majority of those killed were Italian soldiers who, only weeks earlier, had been on the Allied side of the war following their country's armistice, now caught as forced transportees on a German-controlled vessel that HMS Eclipse had no way of identifying as anything other than a legitimate enemy target in the darkness.

It remains one of the deadliest single losses of life connected to any Royal Navy action in the entire war, a particularly sobering illustration of how the fog of naval warfare could produce tragedy on a scale entirely disproportionate to the tactical significance of the engagement itself.

It is worth explaining what the Royal Navy was doing in that sea at all, because the answer is not creditable. When Italy surrendered in September 1943 Churchill saw a chance to seize the Dodecanese, bring Turkey into the war and open a route into the Balkans, and he pushed the operation through over the objections of the American commanders, who thought it a distraction from Italy and declined to release the aircraft for it. So the campaign went ahead without air cover. That is the single fact from which everything else follows. British destroyers, cruisers and troopships operated for two months in a narrow sea within easy reach of German airfields on Rhodes and in Greece, in daylight, with no fighters overhead, because the aeroplanes were somewhere else and the politics would not allow the operation to be cancelled.

Lost to a Mine

HMS Eclipse's own end came barely a month later. On 23 October 1943 she sailed with HMS Petard along the Turkish coast bound for Leros, carrying Brigadier-General George Davy, the Director of Military Operations, Middle East, along with other senior officers on their way to inspect the island's defences, together with A Company of the 4th Battalion, the Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment), under Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Iggulden. On 24 October, while operating east of Kalymnos in position 37°01'N, 27°11'E, she struck a mine. The explosion broke HMS Eclipse in two, and she sank in a matter of minutes, an agonisingly short span in which to escape a sinking, broken warship: survivor accounts, including Davy's own, later recalled the ship going down in as little as two minutes.

Davy himself survived, picked up after more than three hours in the water, and went on to command Land Forces, Adriatic, before retiring from the Army in 1949; in 1967, twenty-four years later, he painted the scene of Eclipse's sinking from memory, a work now held by the Imperial War Museum. The loss of life that night was severe: 119 of her own ship's company were killed, along with 134 soldiers of the Buffs who had been embarked aboard her at the time, a further heavy blow in a campaign that had already cost the Royal Navy and its Army passengers dearly in the confused, dangerous waters of the Aegean during the autumn of 1943.

Legacy

HMS Eclipse's wartime record spans an unusually wide geographic range for a single destroyer, from the West African coast to the high Arctic and finally to the Aegean, and her loss, coming so soon after the Donizetti tragedy, meant that her final months carried an unusually heavy weight of loss on both sides of the conflict she was fighting.

She stands as a reminder of just how costly, confused and dangerous the Aegean campaign of late 1943 proved to be for every navy and every nationality caught up in it.

The bill for those ten weeks is worth setting down. Between 7 September and 28 November 1943 the Royal Navy lost six destroyers sunk in the Aegean, with two cruisers and two more destroyers damaged, and the whole island group fell to the Germans inside two months. Eclipse was one of the six. So was the wartime HMS Dulverton, hit off Kos three weeks later by a radio-guided glider bomb, an account of which sits inside the article on the modern HMS Dulverton (M35), which carries the same name. The Dodecanese is remembered, when it is remembered, as one of the last real German victories of the war, which is an odd thing to have handed over in the autumn of 1943, and a great deal of it was paid for by ships that had already fought their way through the Arctic and the Atlantic to get there.