HMS Electra (H27): Hood's Three Survivors, Repulse's Five Hundred and the Java Sea

Built on the Tyne

HMS Electra was ordered from Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn on the Tyne on 1 November 1932 under the 1931 programme, and laid down on 15 March 1933, the same day as her sister Encounter in the next berth. She was launched on 15 February 1934 and completed on 13 September that year.

The E Class were a slight enlargement of the C and D Classes before them: about 1,400 tons, four 4.7 inch guns, eight torpedo tubes and a speed of 35 knots.

She joined the 5th Destroyer Flotilla in the Home Fleet. In the autumn of 1935, when Italy invaded Abyssinia, the flotilla was sent out to reinforce the Mediterranean, and in the years of the Spanish Civil War she took her turn on the Non-Intervention patrols off the Spanish coast.

After a refit at Sheerness in 1938 she was laid up in reserve. The photograph on this page shows her in her prime, under way with her ship's company fallen in on the forecastle.

The First Day of the War

In August 1939 she was brought forward with a reservist crew for the King's review of the Reserve Fleet in Weymouth Bay, and when war came she was commissioned into the 12th Destroyer Flotilla at Portland. On the evening of 3 September, within hours of the declaration, the liner Athenia was torpedoed by U-30 west of Ireland with some 1,400 people aboard, and Electra, with Escort and Fame, was sent out to her.

They picked up hundreds of survivors between them. It was the first rescue of the war, and the first of several Electra would make.

That winter she escorted convoys between the Clyde and the Forth and out into the Atlantic. When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940 the flotilla joined the Home Fleet, and on 24 April she escorted the repair ship Vindictive into the Narvik area for the landing of the Irish Guards.

In June she screened the fleet covering the convoys from Narvik, and on the 11th was with Ark Royal for the air strikes on Trondheim. Two days later she was badly damaged in a collision with the destroyer Antelope and sent home.

While she was repaired at Troon her after torpedo tubes were taken out and replaced by a 3 inch anti-aircraft gun, a sign of what the Norwegian campaign had taught about air attack.

The Home Fleet

She joined the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla at Scapa that September, and spent the winter of 1940 and 1941 on the Home Fleet's endless round of minelayer escorts, sweeps after raiders and screens for the heavy ships. In January 1941 she picked up the three crew of a Coastal Command Anson that had come down in the sea, and that spring she screened Hood, Rodney and the new Prince of Wales.

Hood

In May 1941 she sailed from Scapa as part of the destroyer screen for Hood and Prince of Wales, sent to intercept the Bismarck in the Denmark Strait. In the heavy weather that night the destroyers were ordered to spread and search to the north, and so Electra was not there at dawn on 24 May when Hood blew up.

She was sent back to the position to look for survivors. Her men had made tea and sandwiches and got blankets ready for hundreds.

They found three: Able Seaman Ted Briggs, Able Seaman Bob Tilburn and Midshipman William Dundas, on rafts in a sea of oil and wreckage, out of a ship's company of more than fourteen hundred. T. J. Cain, Electra's torpedo gunner, wrote long afterwards of the shock of it.

A few days later she escorted the damaged Prince of Wales into Rosyth.

The First Convoy to Russia

After a refit in London, where she was fitted with radar, she was chosen as the senior officer's ship for the escort of Operation Dervish, the first British convoy to Russia, which sailed from Iceland in August 1941 and reached Archangel without loss at the end of the month. She stayed on at Archangel through September on anti-submarine patrols, and came home with the return convoy QP 1.

Behind her came nearly four years of Arctic convoys and some of the hardest fighting of the naval war.

Force Z

She was then picked for foreign service. On 23 October 1941 she sailed from Greenock with Express to join Prince of Wales on her passage to the Far East, by way of Freetown and Cape Town, and at Colombo on 28 November they met Repulse, Encounter and Jupiter to form Force Z. They reached Singapore on 2 December.

Six days later the Japanese landed in Malaya, and on the evening of 8 December the force sailed to attack the invasion convoys off the east coast.

On 10 December, off Kuantan, Japanese aircraft from Indo-China sank both Repulse and Prince of Wales in under two hours. Electra went in among the oil and the swimmers as Repulse went down, and picked up 571 of her men by the usual count, so many that her decks were packed and her own men could barely work the ship.

It was Electra that signalled the news of the sinking. She landed the survivors at Singapore the next day.

Singapore and Java

For the next two months she was in action almost daily as Malaya and Singapore fell.

She escorted convoys and the evacuation of civilians, fought off air attacks in the Sunda Strait, and on 3 February 1942 she towed the bombed destroyer Isis to Java, and on 25 February she sailed for Surabaya with Exeter, the Australian cruiser Perth, Encounter and Jupiter to join the Allied striking force under the Dutch admiral Karel Doorman.

The Battle of the Java Sea

On the afternoon of 27 February the striking force, five cruisers and nine destroyers, went out to meet the Japanese invasion convoy for Java. Electra was stationed four miles ahead of the cruisers.

Just after four o'clock the Japanese were sighted, and as the leading ship she was the first to come under fire, straddled at fourteen thousand yards; Cain later praised the magnificent handling of the ship by her captain, Commander Cecil May. At about a quarter past five Exeter was hit in a boiler room and fell out of the line, and the destroyers were ordered to lay smoke and then to counter-attack to cover her.

Electra went through the smoke alone. Coming out of it she found three Japanese destroyers at six thousand yards and claimed hits with four salvoes on the leading one, the Asagumo. Then a shell burst in her No. 2 boiler room, wrecking the boiler and the steering, and she came to a stop.

A single destroyer came out of the smoke and closed her, and her guns were silenced one by one, until only Y gun, aft, was still firing. The order was given to abandon ship.

The one undamaged whaler took away the wounded, and Cain and Leading Steward Gretton put two injured men over the side with a lifebuoy and a grating and threw anything that would float to the men in the water, while the enemy's pom-poms were still firing. Cain saw a figure, presumably the captain, come to the starboard side of the bridge and wave to the men in the water, who cheered him. He was not seen again.

Electra turned over and hung for a time with her screws and a few feet of quarterdeck showing, and sank at about six o'clock. That night the American submarine S-38 surfaced among the survivors and picked up fifty four of them, and took them to Java.

Seven later died, and of the 173 men aboard about forty two came home. Cain, who wrote the official report as senior surviving officer, ended it simply: "She was a grand ship, and I am proud to have served in her with such a fine crowd of men."

Afterwards

The striking force was destroyed. The Dutch cruisers De Ruyter and Java went down that night, taking Doorman with them, Exeter and Encounter were sunk two days later trying to escape, and Jupiter was mined.

Electra's survivors had been saved by the submarine; many of the men from the other ships spent the rest of the war as prisoners of the Japanese. Her sisters are in the E Class destroyers collection, among them Encounter, laid down beside her in 1933 and lost in the same battle, and Escort, which stood by the Athenia with her on the first day of the war.