HMS Eridge (L68): The Heythrop Tow, Clan Campbell's Survivors and U-568

Built on the Tyne

HMS Eridge was ordered from Swan Hunter at Wallsend on 4 September 1939, the day after war was declared, one of the Type II Hunt Class escort destroyers of the first War Emergency Programme. She was laid down on 21 November 1939, launched on 20 August 1940 and completed on 28 February 1941, the second ship of the name.

She was named after the Eridge hunt in Sussex, and her badge showed a red rose in front of two crossed hunting horns; in March 1942 the town of Crowborough adopted her. Her captain for her whole active life was Lieutenant Commander William Gregory-Smith, who won the DSC and the DSO in her.

After working up at Scapa Flow she joined the Irish Sea Escort Force, and in April and May 1941 she was one of the local escorts taking the big troop convoys out through the North Western Approaches. On 22 May she sailed with the convoy WS 8B, screened by the anti-aircraft cruiser Cairo and Captain Vian's Tribals Cossack, Maori, Sikh and Zulu with the Polish Piorun.

Four days later Vian's destroyers were taken away to join the hunt for the Bismarck, and Eridge came back to the Clyde with the local escort.

Substance and Style

In June she was sent to the 13th Flotilla at Gibraltar, and in July she sailed in Operation Substance, a convoy of six fast merchant ships and a troopship for Malta. The photograph at the top of this page dates from that month.

She was in Force X, the close escort under the cruisers Edinburgh and Manchester, and when Italian aircraft hit Manchester and the destroyer Firedrake on 23 July, Eridge was detached to escort the crippled Firedrake back to Gibraltar under tow. All six merchant ships reached Malta.

A few days later she was in the screen of Nelson, Ark Royal and Renown for Operation Style, which ran soldiers and airmen into the island in warships.

Round the Cape to Alexandria

In August she and her sister Avon Vale were sent to the 2nd Flotilla at Alexandria, and the only way to get there was round Africa. She was docked in the Selborne dry dock at Simonstown in September and reached Suez on 29 September.

Through the autumn she was on the run to besieged Tobruk and on shore bombardments, shelling the Axis petrol dumps and headquarters at Bardia with the cruisers in October and November. On 22 October she joined Griffin and Jaguar as they went out to the river gunboat Gnat, torpedoed by U-79 off Bardia, and brought her in to Alexandria under tow.

The Heythrop Tow

In February 1942 she sailed with the convoy MW 9A for Malta with Carlisle; the bombers damaged the Clan Campbell, which had to put into Tobruk, and sank the Clan Chattan, and the operation was a failure. On 20 March she was sweeping ahead of the next convoy with six other Hunts when U-652 slipped past the screen north east of Bardia and torpedoed her sister Heythrop.

Eridge took the stricken ship in tow and hung on to her for five hours before Heythrop sank north of Sollum.

Second Sirte and the Clan Campbell

The next day Eridge refuelled at Tobruk and joined the escort of MW 10: the fast supply ship Breconshire with 5,000 tons of fuel, the Pampas, the Norwegian Talabot full of ammunition, and the Clan Campbell again, repaired from the last attempt. On 22 March the Italian fleet came out, with the battleship Littorio and three cruisers.

While Rear Admiral Vian's cruisers and destroyers held them off behind smoke in the Second Battle of Sirte, Eridge and the other Hunts took the convoy south, away from the enemy, under constant air attack.

That evening the convoy was split up so that each ship could run for Malta at her best speed, and Eridge went with the slow Clan Campbell, in company with the cruiser Penelope, Legion and Hurworth. They were caught at daylight by the bombers.

A bomb hit the Clan Campbell short of the island and she sank in a heavy sea. Eridge, tossed about by the waves, as one account puts it, like an empty barrel, got more than a hundred of her men out of the water, 112 by one count, and landed them in Grand Harbour.

Breconshire was disabled within sight of Malta, and Pampas and Talabot got in only to be bombed in harbour. Of the 26,000 tons of supplies in the four ships, only about 5,000 tons reached the island.

U-568

Through the spring she was on the Tobruk run. At the end of May, escorting the convoy AT 4 with the destroyer Hero and her sister Hurworth, she joined a long hunt for a U-boat north east of Tobruk.

After fifteen hours of pursuit U-568 was forced to the surface on 29 May and sunk, and 42 of her crew were picked up and taken prisoner.

In June she sailed again for Malta, in the decoy convoy MW 11C of Operation Vigorous with Beaufort, Aldenham and five other Hunts, and endured three days of air attack before the whole operation was called off and the ships turned back. That summer Rommel's army reached El Alamein, and the Hunts went back to work against the German supply line along the coast.

On 11 July she shelled Mersa Matruh harbour with four of her sisters, and an ammunition ship was sunk there.

El Daba

On 28 August she sailed again with Aldenham, Croome and Hurworth to bombard the German airfield at El Daba, behind the Alamein line. The bombardment was carried out, but as the ships withdrew in the dark an Italian motor torpedo boat, one of the small fast craft the Italians called MTSM, got in close and hit Eridge on the port side aft with an 18 inch torpedo.

The explosion tore a hole some twenty feet across from the keel upwards, flooded her engine room and cut off her electric power, and five of her men were killed. She lay disabled within reach of the German bombers.

Aldenham took her in tow, with Croome and Hurworth screening, and through the next day they brought her slowly back towards Alexandria while Ju 87 dive bombers attacked them. She arrived on 31 August. The dockyard surveyed her and found that she was not worth repairing, and in September 1942 she was paid off.

A Hulk at Alexandria

She was not wasted. She lay at Alexandria for the rest of the war as a hulk, serving as a base ship and later as an accommodation ship, and her machinery was used as a store of spare parts for the Hunts still fighting.

In April 1943 one of her propeller shafts was taken out and fitted to Aldenham, the ship that had towed her home, after Aldenham had damaged her own in a grounding. She was put on the disposal list after the war and sold to a Greek shipbreaker at Alexandria in October 1946.

Her old consort Farndale, which had sailed with her from Gibraltar in 1941, is also in this collection, with the other prints of her class in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.