HMS Escapade (H17): From Churchill's Escort to a Hedgehog Bomb That Killed Her Own Crew

The Build: Greenock

HMS Escapade was ordered on 1 November 1932 from Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, laid down at Greenock, launched on 30 January 1934, and commissioned on 30 August 1934, at a cost of £249,987 excluding armament.

An E-class destroyer, a slightly improved version of the preceding D class, she displaced 1,405 tons standard, rising to 1,940 tons at deep load, and her Parsons geared turbines produced 36,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 35.5 knots.

She originally carried four single 4.7-inch guns, machine guns and torpedo tubes, an armament that would be steadily reworked as the war progressed to keep pace with the changing nature of the threats she faced.

Spain and the Early War

HMS Escapade transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet during 1935 and 1936 amid the Abyssinia Crisis, and went on to serve five separate patrols during the Spanish Civil War, enforcing the Non-Intervention Committee's arms blockade intended to prevent foreign weapons reaching either side of that brutal conflict.

She joined the 12th Destroyer Flotilla for escort and patrol duties in the Western Approaches when the Second World War broke out in September 1939, making unsuccessful attacks on U-boats on 5 and 15 November that year, and rescuing survivors from the torpedoed SS Navasota on 5 December.

On 25 February 1940, while escorting Convoy HN14 to Norway, she spotted and depth-charged the submarine U-63, contributing to its eventual destruction by gunfire from other British destroyers.

Norway, Dakar and a Prime Minister's Escort

HMS Escapade took part in the Norwegian Campaign from 7 April 1940, responding to the sighting of the German invasion fleet, screening HMS Southampton and HMS Electra out of Scapa Flow, protecting troopship landings at Harstad in mid-April, and screening the evacuation convoys that withdrew Allied forces from Norway in early June as the campaign collapsed.

She was detached that August and September to escort the battleship HMS Barham during Operation Menace, the failed Allied attempt to seize Dakar in French West Africa from Vichy forces.

HMS Escapade escorted HMS Nelson during the unsuccessful hunt for the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in February 1941, and in August that year formed part of the escort screening HMS Prince of Wales as she carried Prime Minister Winston Churchill across the Atlantic to Newfoundland for the conference that produced the Atlantic Charter, one of the defining diplomatic statements of the entire war, and a particularly prestigious assignment for a single destroyer to be trusted with.

The Arctic Convoys

HMS Escapade took part in Operation Dervish in August 1941, the very first Arctic convoy sent to Russia, arriving at Arkhangelsk on 31 August, and went on to cover Convoys PQ 1, PQ 6 and QP 4, followed by PQ 14 and PQ 15 in April 1942, some of the most dangerous convoy routes of the entire war, combining relentless U-boat and Luftwaffe attack with brutal Arctic weather.

She also covered the disastrous May 1942 attempt to transfer the damaged cruiser HMS Trinidad from Murmansk to Iceland, an effort that ultimately ended in HMS Trinidad's deliberate scuttling after further damage proved impossible to repair.

Malta and Operation Torch

HMS Escapade escorted Convoy WS19Z to Malta during Operation Harpoon in June 1942, one of the most fiercely contested convoy battles of the entire Mediterranean campaign, and covered the carrier HMS Argus on the return voyage.

Later that year, she escorted HMS Furious to Gibraltar and took part in the Operation Torch convoys KMF1 and KMF2, supporting the Allied invasion of French North Africa in November 1942, before joining Escort Group B3 of Western Approaches Command from November 1942 to September 1943, escorting Convoys HX 228, ONS 175, HX 232 and HX 239 through the decisive Battle of the Atlantic engagements of May 1943, the month that marked the effective turning point against the German U-boat campaign.

A Weapon That Turned on Her Own Crew

HMS Escapade's war took a tragic turn on 20 September 1943, in the midst of one of the fiercest convoy battles of the entire campaign, as she escorted the jointly-run Convoys ONS 18 and ON 202 off Northern Ireland. At 4.57am that morning, the German submarine U-270 struck the frigate HMS Lagan's stern with a GNAT, the newly introduced acoustic homing torpedo, the first time the weapon had ever been used against an Allied ship, killing 29 of Lagan's crew and leaving her wrecked. HMS Escapade turned to counter-attack the very U-boat responsible, and it was during that attack, not routine patrol work, that one of her own Hedgehog projectiles, the very weapon that had helped make ships like HMS Escapade so effective against U-boats, prematurely exploded on deck.

The blast killed fifteen ratings outright and wounded ten more, one of them mortally, while destroying her 'B' gun mount, the Hedgehog mount itself, her bridge and her wheelhouse, a devastating accident that inflicted more damage and cost more lives in a single moment than most of her wartime engagements against the enemy combined.

That torpedo is the reason the whole battle happened, and it deserves explaining. The G7es, which the Germans called Zaunkonig and the British called the GNAT, did not need to be aimed at a ship. It carried two hydrophones tuned to around 24.5 kilohertz, which is roughly the noise an escort's propellers make at between ten and eighteen knots, and it steered itself towards whatever it could hear; it ran straight for the first four hundred metres so as not to turn round and home on the submarine that had fired it. The first eighty were delivered on 1 August 1943, and Donitz held them back for a single co-ordinated blow. The tactics changed with the weapon. Instead of slipping past the escorts to get at the merchant ships, the U-boats were now to kill the escorts first and then deal with a defenceless convoy at leisure. ONS 18 and ON 202 were the test case, and HMS Lagan was the first ship in the world to be hit by a homing torpedo.

What happened aboard Escapade a few minutes later was the nightmare that everybody who worked with the weapon had privately considered. How Hedgehog functioned, and why it was so much better than a depth charge, is set out in the article on HMS Enchantress (L56). The relevant point here is what a loaded Hedgehog actually was: twenty-four contact-fuzed bombs, each with a substantial charge, sitting in a cluster of spigots on an open forecastle a few feet in front of the bridge. It was a weapon that worked by not exploding until it hit something. When one of them went off where it stood, it took the mounting, B gun, the bridge and the wheelhouse with it. Fifteen ratings were killed at once and eleven more were hurt, one of them fatally, and every one of those men was standing on his own ship in the middle of counter-attacking the submarine that had just crippled a consort.

Both crippled ships had to withdraw from the battle together, escorted back towards Northern Ireland; Lagan was found to be damaged beyond economical repair and never sailed again, her wreck eventually broken up in 1946. The extensive damage aboard HMS Escapade required over a year of repairs of her own, sidelining her for the remainder of 1943 and virtually the whole of 1944.

The battle those two convoys fought is worth finishing, because the score and the claim were very different things. The U-boat commanders reported nine merchant ships and twelve escorts sunk, which would have been a catastrophe and was reported in Germany as one. The real figures were six merchant ships and three escorts: a destroyer, a frigate and a corvette. Within weeks the Allies were streaming Foxer, a towed rack of noise-making bars that made a racket the acoustic torpedo preferred to an escort's propellers, and escorts had new drills for approaching a submarine without giving the torpedo something to lock on to. Donitz drew the conclusion himself before the year was out: the new weapon had produced a flare-up, not a reversal, and surface warfare for U-boats had come to an end.

The weapon she came back with was the answer to what had happened to her. Squid did away with the spigots and the contact fuzes altogether: three heavy mortars in a mounting that could be trained, throwing three large bombs ahead of the ship in a triangle, fuzed to burst at a depth the sonar had already worked out, and fired automatically from the sonar control room without anybody having to be near them. It was more effective than Hedgehog and it was very much safer to have on the forecastle. Its own successor, Limbo, was still in Royal Navy frigates thirty years later, as the article on HMS Duncan (F80) describes. Escapade spent fourteen months in dockyard hands and came out with the weapon that would not do to her what the last one had.

The End of the War, and the End of the Ship

HMS Escapade returned to duty on 30 December 1944, trialling the newer Squid anti-submarine mortar, which had replaced the ill-fated Hedgehog fit on her forward mount, while serving with the 8th Escort Group in the war's final months. She escorted Norwegian personnel home to their newly liberated country in May 1945, a fittingly hopeful final wartime duty after everything the ship and her crew had endured.

HMS Escapade briefly served with the Anti-Submarine Training Flotilla after the war before being approved for scrapping on 18 February 1946. She was stripped of equipment on 15 November 1946, paid off as tender to HMS Tartar on 3 December that year, and handed over to the British Iron and Steel Corporation for scrapping on 17 May 1947, with breaking up beginning at Grangemouth on 3 August 1947 under G. W. Brunton, closing out the career of a destroyer whose service had ranged from escorting a wartime prime minister across the Atlantic to surviving one of the most devastating accidental explosions any Royal Navy ship suffered from its own weaponry during the entire war.