HMS Escort (H66): The Athenia, a U-Boat Kill and a Torpedo on the Way Home From Oran

Built at Greenock

HMS Escort was ordered from Scotts at Greenock on 1 November 1932, one of the E Class destroyers of the 1931 programme, and was built alongside her sister Escapade. She was launched on 29 January 1934 and completed on 30 October that year, the fifth ship of the name, with four 4.7 inch guns, eight torpedo tubes and a speed of 35 knots.

She joined the 5th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet, but much of her peacetime service was spent away from home: an early deployment to the West Indies, the Mediterranean during the Abyssinian crisis, and patrols for the Non-Intervention Committee off the Mediterranean and northern coasts of Spain during the Civil War. The photograph at the top of this page shows her at a buoy around 1937.

The First Night of the War

In August 1939 she was in the Reserve Fleet on training duties. She was commissioned for war into the 12th Destroyer Flotilla, and on 2 September she and Electra sailed from Portsmouth as escort to the battlecruiser Renown.

On the evening of 3 September, within hours of the declaration, the liner Athenia was torpedoed west of Ireland. Escort and her sister Electra were detached from Renown and went out to her, and the next day between them they picked up 481 survivors; the story is told more fully in Electra's article.

Escort spent the autumn on convoy escort and anti-submarine patrols in the Western Approaches, and in December moved to Rosyth for the convoys between Britain and Norway.

U-63

On 25 February 1940 Escort was in the escort of convoy HN 14, coming home from Norway, when the British submarine Narwhal sighted a U-boat south of the Shetlands. Escort, with the destroyers Inglefield and Imogen, hunted her down with depth charges and forced her to the surface.

She was U-63, on her first patrol under Oberleutnant Günther Lorentz, and she had sunk one merchant ship. Twenty four of her crew were picked up and one was lost.

Norway

When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940 she sailed with the Home Fleet. On 11 April, under heavy air attack, the destroyer Eclipse was hit by a bomb and disabled, and Escort was sent with the cruiser York and the destroyer Hyperion to stand by her.

Eclipse's crew had abandoned her, but Escort's men went back aboard and got a tow across. The cruiser York took over for a while, then Escort took the tow again, and for six days she dragged the crippled destroyer across the North Sea within reach of the German bombers, joined at the end by Fury and Hesperus, until Eclipse reached the Shetlands on 17 April. Eclipse survived to fight on until 1943.

At the end of April Escort screened the carriers Glorious and Ark Royal as their aircraft struck at the Germans in Norway, and escorted Glorious back to Scapa to take on new aircraft. In May she escorted the Polish troopship Chobry towards Narvik and was slightly damaged in a collision with her, and then helped shepherd the damaged cruiser Penelope home to the Clyde.

At the end of May she escorted Hood from Plymouth to Liverpool, and then the battleship Revenge as she sailed from the Clyde for Halifax with a cargo of gold bullion, part of Britain's reserves being sent across the Atlantic for safety.

Mers-el-Kébir

In June 1940, with France out of the war, the flotilla was sent to Gibraltar, and Escort joined Force H on 28 June. Four days later she sailed in the screen of Hood, Valiant, Resolution and Ark Royal for Oran, and on 3 July she was present when Force H opened fire on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir after the negotiations had failed.

On 6 July she was in the screen again when Ark Royal's aircraft attacked the damaged battleship Dunkerque, and on 8 July Force H sailed east to attack the Italian airfield at Cagliari in Sardinia. Heavy Italian air attacks forced the operation to be abandoned, and the force turned back for Gibraltar.

The Marconi

East of Gibraltar, in the early hours of the morning, at about twenty past two on 11 July according to the most detailed record, though some accounts date it to the return passage a few days before, Escort was hit on the starboard side by a torpedo from the Italian submarine Guglielmo Marconi. It struck between her boiler rooms and tore a hole some twenty feet across, flooding her badly.

Two of her men were killed. Her ship's company, under Lieutenant Commander John Bostock, fought to keep her afloat, and Forester took her in tow, with Faulknor standing by and screening them against a further attack.

For some hours it seemed she might reach Gibraltar. Then, at ten past six in the morning, she suddenly took a list of thirty four degrees, and the order was given to abandon ship. The rest of her ship's company were taken off. About five hours later she broke in two and sank.

Marconi, the submarine that sank her, was one of the Italian boats that went on to operate from Bordeaux against the Atlantic convoys, and was herself lost in the autumn of 1941.

Her Sisters

The class leader, Exmouth, had been torpedoed with all hands in January 1940, and Escort was the second ship of the flotilla to go. Others followed: Esk on a minefield off Holland a few weeks later, Electra and Encounter in the Java Sea in 1942, and Eclipse, the ship she had saved, on a minefield in the Aegean in 1943. The surviving prints of the class are in the E Class destroyers collection.