HMS Esk (H15): The Minelaying Destroyer Lost to a Minefield of Her Own Kind

Built for Speed and Mines

HMS Esk was ordered on 1 November 1932 from Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend under the 1931 Naval Programme, laid down on 24 March 1933, launched on 19 March 1934, and commissioned on 28 September 1934, at a cost of £247,279 excluding armament.

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

Crucially, HMS Esk was specifically designed for rapid conversion to a fast minelayer, a role that removed two of her guns and both sets of torpedo tubes to make room for 60 Mark XIV mines, delivered from sponsons fitted at her stern, giving the Royal Navy a properly valuable capability: a destroyer fast enough to dash into contested waters, lay a minefield, and get out again before the enemy could effectively respond.

It is worth saying what an offensive minefield actually achieves, because it looks like the least dramatic thing a warship can do and it is arguably among the most efficient. A destroyer laying sixty mines in the dark commits no crew to danger after she has gone, needs no reconnaissance, and cannot be counter-attacked; the field simply sits there, indefinitely, and every ship that wants to use that water must either sweep it, go round it, or take the risk. It closes a channel with no further effort. The cost is that the closure lasts long after anyone remembers laying it, that mines break their moorings and drift, and that the sea has no way of telling one navy's hull from another's. Every ship that laid mines in the North Sea in 1939 and 1940 was helping to fill a fairly small piece of water with objects that would kill anything that touched them.

Before the War

HMS Esk accompanied the Home Fleet on a West Indies cruise between January and March 1935, and was attached to the Mediterranean Fleet during the Abyssinia Crisis from September 1935 to March 1936.

She spent a considerable stretch of the following years enforcing the Non-Intervention Committee's arms blockade during the Spanish Civil War, right through to March 1939, and practised minelaying during the tense Munich Crisis of October 1938, useful rehearsal for the role that would come to define her wartime career.

A Prolific Minelayer

Following her recommissioning on 2 August 1939, HMS Esk's conversion to minelayer configuration was completed by 7 September, and she joined the 20th Destroyer Flotilla the following day.

Over the months that followed, she carried out a remarkable string of minelaying operations: laying mines in the Heligoland Bight on 9 and 10 September 1939, contributing to a field of 240 mines off the mouth of the Ems River on 17 and 18 December, and laying mines near Horns Reef on 3 March 1940 that went on to sink the German submarine U-44, a remarkably concrete result from an otherwise largely invisible form of naval warfare.

She laid 234 mines in Vestfjord during Operation Wilfred on 8 April 1940, part of the opening moves of the Norwegian Campaign, followed by 236 mines off Bergen on 10 May alongside other destroyers, and 164 mines off the Hook of Holland on 15 May, a field that subsequently accounted for three German minesweepers.

Operation Wilfred is worth a note of its own, because of what it was. Norway was neutral, and Swedish iron ore for German industry came down the Norwegian coast inside Norwegian territorial waters where the Royal Navy could not legally touch it. Wilfred was the decision to mine those neutral waters anyway, and Esk laid 234 mines in the Vestfjord on 8 April 1940 to do exactly that. The next morning Germany invaded Norway, having planned it for weeks and having been given a very serviceable justification into the bargain. It is one of the more uncomfortable operations in the Royal Navy's war, and the ship that carried it out was mined and sunk herself before the year was out.

HMS Esk also took part in the Dunkirk evacuation between 29 May and 3 June 1940, helping bring 3,904 troops back to Britain, including more than 1,000 French personnel rescued from the sinking troopship TSS Scotia, a rare direct rescue mission for a destroyer more usually employed on the quieter, more technical business of minelaying.

The ship she took them off deserves naming properly. Scotia was not a troopship in any built sense: she was a railway steamer, a London, Midland and Scottish packet whose ordinary work was carrying passengers across the Irish Sea, and on 1 June 1940 she had somewhere in the region of two and a half thousand French soldiers aboard when the bombers found her off Dunkirk. She was hit, took a heavy list and began to go. More than three hundred men died in her.

Esk went alongside a sinking ship, under air attack, and took off over a thousand of them. That is a very great many people to move between two vessels in an emergency, and it is worth putting against her total: of the three thousand nine hundred and four soldiers she carried back to England across those five days, better than a quarter came off Scotia in a single operation.

Lost Off Texel

HMS Esk's own end came on 31 August 1940, when she sailed with four sister destroyers, HMS Express, HMS Ivanhoe, HMS Intrepid and HMS Icarus, to lay mines off the Dutch coast north of Texel, continuing exactly the kind of mission she had carried out successfully so many times before. Steaming in line at 26 knots, the flotilla ran straight into a minefield the Germans had themselves recently laid there, uncharted and unknown to the British, and just after 11pm HMS Express struck the first mine, blowing away her entire bow forward of the bridge.

In the chaos that followed, both HMS Ivanhoe and HMS Esk turned back to help the stricken Express, and both were themselves mined in turn.

What they did there breaks a rule that every officer of the watch knew, and it is worth understanding why they broke it. The standing principle in a suspected minefield is brutally simple: you do not go back for anybody. A ship that has been mined is by definition sitting in mines, and a second ship that closes her is putting herself where the first one was. The reason Ivanhoe and Esk turned back is that nobody aboard believed they were in a minefield at all. The chart showed clear water; the Germans had laid the field recently and the British had no idea it was there; and a destroyer blowing her bow off in open sea in 1940 looked far more like a torpedo from a submarine, in which case the correct response is precisely to close the damaged ship and hunt. They did the right thing for the situation they thought they were in.

HMS Esk went down fastest of the three. A first explosion knocked out her lights and power, and roughly fifteen minutes later a second blast, quite possibly her own boilers going up, tore through her amidships and broke her in two, the after section sinking immediately and the forward section following soon after at position 53°26'36"N, 03°48'00"E.

Of her ship's company of 154, 64 were confirmed dead and a further 63 posted missing, a combined toll of 127 killed or lost, a devastating figure for a ship that had spent the previous year laying precisely the kind of hidden, lethal hazard that ultimately claimed her. The handful who made it into the water clung to Carley floats for around 36 hours, without fresh water or proper food, before German minesweeping trawlers found them near Wilhelmshaven and took them prisoner: 26 survived the war as prisoners, and only one man ever made it home. HMS Ivanhoe, mined in the very same incident, lost a further 53 of her own crew, while Express, hit first of the three, survived only by being towed home minus her bow.

The full cost of that night went well beyond Esk herself. The 20th Destroyer Flotilla had five ships out, joined by Kelvin, Jupiter and Vortigern of the 5th. Express lost her bow and lived. Esk broke in two and went down. Ivanhoe was so badly damaged that Kelvin had to sink her with gunfire the following day. When Kelvin and Jupiter came back to pick up survivors, the light cruisers Aurora and Galatea were sent out to cover them, and Galatea struck a mine on the way. Two destroyers sunk, one crippled, a cruiser damaged and something approaching three hundred men dead in a single night, without a shot being fired by either side. It is known simply as the Texel Disaster, and it remains one of the worst nights the Royal Navy ever had in home waters.

Legacy

HMS Esk's loss, part of what became known as the Texel Disaster, stands as a stark reminder of the particular danger faced by minelaying destroyers: ships built to operate in the very waters most likely to be seeded with enemy mines in return, a truly dangerous occupational hazard that no amount of speed or skill could entirely guard against, and one made crueller still by the instinct to go back for a stricken sister ship.

Her earlier record, from sinking U-44 to helping evacuate thousands of troops from Dunkirk, stands as testament to just how valuable and versatile her class proved across the opening year of the war, even as her own fate demonstrated exactly how unforgiving that same kind of warfare could be.

There is one more thing to say about the mines, because a minefield outlasts everybody who laid it and it is worth following that to its conclusion. When the war ended, the North Sea and the Baltic contained hundreds of thousands of mines, British, German, Russian and otherwise, in fields laid over six years by people who were mostly dead or dispersed. Somebody had to go and get them.

The answer was the German Mine Sweeping Administration, formed on 21 June 1945 under Royal Navy supervision and staffed by the surviving Kriegsmarine. Some twenty-seven thousand German sailors, on nearly three hundred vessels to begin with and seven hundred and fifty-five at its height, went back to sea under British officers to clear the water they had spent the war seeding. Their records account for something in the order of half a million mines. It was wound up in January 1948, against American objections, because the Soviet Union had concluded, not unreasonably, that a fleet of seven hundred German ships with twenty-seven thousand German sailors in it was a navy whatever anybody chose to call it.

Which means the fields Esk laid in the Heligoland Bight, off the Ems, at Horns Reef, in the Vestfjord, off Bergen and off the Hook of Holland were eventually cleared by the same navy she had laid them against, working for her own. And the German field north of Texel that broke her in half on a summer night in 1940 was swept up by German crews five years later, on British orders, as part of the same operation.