HMS Encounter (H10): From Force H to the Java Sea, and an Enemy Who Stopped to Save Her Men

Built on the Tyne

HMS Encounter was ordered from Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn on 1 November 1932, one of the E Class destroyers of the 1931 programme, and was laid down on 15 March 1933 in the berth next to her sister Electra. She was launched on 29 March 1934 and completed on 2 November that year, the fifth ship of the name, with four 4.7 inch guns, eight torpedo tubes and a speed of 35 knots.

Her peacetime years took her to the Mediterranean during the Abyssinian crisis and on the Non-Intervention patrols off Spain, and were marked by no fewer than three collisions. The photograph at the top of this page was taken in July 1938, with a line of her sailors fallen in on the forecastle.

1939 and 1940

She was due to go into reserve in 1939, but was kept in commission with a crew of reservists instead, and at the end of August she was at the King's review of the Reserve Fleet in Weymouth Bay. When war came she joined the 12th Destroyer Flotilla on convoy work in the South Western Approaches, and that winter she moved north to Scapa.

In February 1940 she replaced the destroyer Daring, torpedoed and sunk by a U-boat, in the escort of a Norwegian convoy. In April she took part in the Norwegian campaign, bombarding Narvik with Warspite on 24 April and screening the carriers, and in June she ran aground while guarding the wreck of a boom carrier off Kinnaird Head and went to Sheerness for repairs.

Force H

In July 1940 she joined the 13th Destroyer Flotilla at Gibraltar and Force H. She screened the old carrier Argus on the first delivery of Hurricanes to Malta, covered the air strike on Cagliari and the passage of reinforcements to the eastern Mediterranean, and in October, on patrol off Cape St Vincent, rammed the British submarine Utmost in the belief that she was a U-boat.

Utmost survived and reached Gibraltar for repairs. On 27 November Encounter was in the screen of Renown, Ark Royal and Sheffield in the action off Cape Spartivento, and in February 1941 she was with them again for the bombardment of Genoa.

Bombed at Malta

In February 1941 she sailed round the Cape to join the Mediterranean Fleet at Alexandria, and in April she screened the battleships bombarding Tripoli and escorted the fast supply ship Breconshire into Malta. While she was in dock at Malta she was caught by the German bombers that were attacking the island day and night.

On 29 and 30 April a near miss and then a direct hit did major structural damage, and on 16 May she was hit again, with an internal explosion that wrecked all three of her boiler rooms. She was patched up well enough to sail with a convoy in July and was finished at Gibraltar.

That summer she sailed on more Malta operations and Atlantic convoys, and in October she joined the Inshore Squadron running supplies into besieged Tobruk. On 25 October she picked up survivors of the fast minelayer Latona, bombed and sunk on the Tobruk run.

Singapore

In November 1941 she was transferred to the Eastern Fleet, and at the end of the month she was one of the destroyers escorting Prince of Wales on the last stage of her passage to Singapore. On 3 December she went into dock to have a propeller bush renewed, and so she was not with Force Z when it sailed on 8 December and Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk by Japanese aircraft two days later.

Through January and February 1942 she escorted convoys as the Japanese advanced on Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, and in February she tried to tow the bombed destroyer Isis to Java until the tow wire fouled her propeller and Electra took over.

The Java Sea

At the end of February she joined the Allied striking force of British, Dutch, American and Australian ships at Surabaya. On 27 February, in the Battle of the Java Sea, she engaged the Japanese light cruiser Jintsu at long range and went in with Electra to attack, and saw her sister sunk; the story is told in the article on HMS Electra.

That night she returned to Surabaya with survivors of the British destroyer Jupiter and the Dutch destroyer Kortenaer.

On 28 February she sailed with the damaged cruiser Exeter and the American destroyer Pope to try to escape to Ceylon through the Sunda Strait. On the morning of 1 March they were caught by four Japanese heavy cruisers and their destroyers.

Encounter laid smoke to cover Exeter, but the cruiser was hit and stopped, and Encounter herself was hit, with her fuel system ruptured and the power to her guns cut. She could neither fight nor steam, and her captain, Lieutenant Commander Eric Morgan, ordered her scuttled. She sank south of Borneo. Exeter and Pope were sunk too.

Ikazuchi

Her men were left in the water through the rest of that day and the following night, in their lifebelts and on whatever would float, many of them wounded and covered in oil. On 2 March the Japanese destroyer Ikazuchi, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Shunsaku Kudō, came upon them.

Though there was a risk of Allied submarines in the area, Kudō stopped his ship and had his men haul the exhausted British sailors aboard, some four hundred from Encounter and Exeter, about a hundred and fifty of them from Encounter.

They were given water, food and clothing, and the officers were brought up to the deck, where, it is said, Kudō addressed them in English and told them they were the honoured guests of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

It was the last kindness many of them would know for three and a half years. They were handed over as prisoners of war, and thirty seven of Encounter's survivors died in captivity. But they never forgot Ikazuchi.

One of her officers, Sam Falle, who survived the camps to become a British ambassador, spent much of his later life telling the story so that Kudō, who had died in 1979 having said little of it even to his family, would be remembered, and in 2008 he travelled to Japan to visit his grave.

Her Sisters

Electra and Encounter, laid down side by side at Hebburn in 1933, were both lost in the Java Sea within three days of each other, and their flotilla-mate Escort had been sunk in the Mediterranean in 1940. The surviving prints of the class are in the E Class destroyers collection.