HMS Exe (1903): A River-Class Destroyer's Long War Against U-Boats and Mines

Built by Palmers

HMS Exe was built by Palmers, laid down on 14 July 1902 and launched on 27 April 1903, part of the very first batch of River-class destroyers, a remarkably significant design generation that moved away from the small, lightly built torpedo boat destroyers of the previous century towards larger, more seaworthy vessels better suited to operating in truly rough weather. The whole class owed its existence to one exasperated officer: in December 1900, Commander John M. de Robeck, the senior destroyer officer in the Mediterranean, wrote to the Admiralty demanding a destroyer that could actually survive the crossing from Malta to the Dardanelles at 18 knots and then keep working for two days once it got there, rather than shaking itself to pieces along the way.

That officer is worth following, because his career closes a circle around this ship. John de Robeck was the destroyer man's destroyer man: by April 1912 he was Admiral of Patrols with four flotillas under him, and in early 1915 he went out to the eastern Mediterranean as deputy to Vice-Admiral Carden for the operation against the Dardanelles. When Carden's health broke in March, de Robeck took the command, and on 18 March 1915 he took the fleet into the Narrows and lost three battleships in an afternoon to a minefield nobody knew was there. Fourteen years earlier he had written to the Admiralty asking for a destroyer that could get from Malta to the Dardanelles and still be fit to fight when it arrived. He got the River class, and then he got the Dardanelles.

The three Palmer-built ships of this first batch, HMS Exe alongside her sisters HMS Erne and HMS Ettrick, were distinguished by their four funnels arranged in two pairs, a visually distinctive layout compared to later River-class ships.

She displaced 550 tons standard, rising to 620 tons loaded, measured 233.5 feet in length, and could reach 25.5 knots. As built she carried a mixed armament of one 12-pounder and five 6-pounder guns, the forward pair mounted on sponsons that proved rather wet in anything approaching rough seas, a design flaw corrected on subsequent vessels of the class; by the time she went to war her armament had been standardised to four 12-pounders, as listed in the 1914 and 1919 Navy Lists.

She was completed in March 1904, following coal consumption trials that October which initially failed due to leaking condensers before succeeding on a second attempt, ultimately achieving 25.273 knots.

Malta, China, and Home Waters

HMS Exe departed Plymouth on 1 May 1904 alongside HMS Erne, bound for Malta, serving with the Mediterranean Destroyer Flotilla through 1905, before moving on to the China Station between 1905 and 1906, and subsequently rotating through a series of home fleet assignments, the fairly typical peacetime pattern of overseas and home postings that shaped most destroyer careers of the era.

Peacetime service was not entirely without incident. Her commanding officer, Lieutenant and Commander Percy Pontifex, died in office in 1908 after being taken suddenly ill with pneumonia, and in July 1910 the ship's own gunsight went missing altogether, prompting a formal court of inquiry into whether it had simply been thrown overboard, a small mystery the surviving records never quite resolve.

Hunting Submarines Off Portsmouth

HMS Exe joined the Second Battle Squadron at Scapa Flow when war broke out in August 1914. On 27 February 1915 she was one of five River-class destroyers, alongside Teviot, Ure, Boyne and Foyle, sent racing south from Scapa Flow to Dover and Devonport to form the new Portsmouth Escort Flotilla, replacing Beagle-class destroyers that had been sent to reinforce the Dardanelles campaign; Exe and Ure reached Dover on 2 March. It was in this role, defending the vital shipping lanes along Britain's own south coast, that HMS Exe spent the bulk of her war, and the difficulty of the job showed almost immediately: on the night of 9-10 March 1915 she was unable to stop a U-boat sinking the French trawler Grisnez, a reminder that catching a submerged submarine in this period took as much luck as skill.

The failure off Grisnez needs no excuse, because in March 1915 there was quite literally nothing she could have done. A destroyer of that period had no sonar, no hydrophone worth the name, no depth charge and no ahead-throwing weapon of any kind. The only way of attacking a submerged submarine was to run over the spot and hope; the depth charge did not appear in service until January 1916 and was not available in useful numbers until well into 1917. What a destroyer could actually achieve in 1915 was to be visible. A U-boat that saw a warship coming had to dive, and a dived U-boat of that generation made about seven knots for a very short time and could see almost nothing. Forcing a submarine under and keeping it under was the whole of anti-submarine warfare for the first two years of the war, and it is why so many of these accounts end with the submarine getting away.

Her luck held rather better later in the war. Between 6 and 9 December 1916 she took part in salvaging the merchant ship SS Poona, work her crew were formally awarded prize money for in January 1918, and just days later, on 15 December 1916, HMS Exe and HMS Cherwell discovered the German submarine UC.17 attacking the merchant ship SS Red Rose.

The two destroyers succeeded in saving the merchant vessel, though an attempt to deploy a paravane against the submarine went wrong when its charge exploded almost immediately, probably due to an operating error, a reminder of just how unreliable and dangerous some of the improvised anti-submarine technology of the era could be, even for the crews operating it.

The paravane that nearly killed her own crew deserves explaining, because it was one of the worst weapons the Royal Navy ever issued. The high-speed submarine sweep was developed at the torpedo school, HMS Vernon, and issued from January 1916. It consisted of a pair of paravanes, underwater kites, towed one from each quarter on armoured electric cable, each carrying about eighty pounds of TNT. The theory was that a destroyer would tow them across a submerged submarine, one would foul her, and the charge would fire; and the charge could also be fired from the bridge if the ship needed to be rid of the things in a hurry. The practice was that a ship steamed about with 160lb of high explosive on wires a few yards astern of her own propellers, connected to a firing circuit. Nobody who used it liked it, and in the entire war the high-speed sweep accounted for exactly two U-boats. Exe's charge going off the moment it entered the water was not an unusual event; it was the weapon behaving in the way it usually behaved.

On 27 February 1917, HMS Exe dropped depth charges on the German submarine U.B.40, forcing it to submerge and abandon whatever attack it had been pressing. On 13 May 1917, while escorting SS Irwell, she engaged a U-boat, quite possibly UC.20 or UB.36, on the surface and attempted to ram it, only for the submarine to escape into a rain squall before the attack could be completed, a frustratingly narrow miss after an aggressive pursuit; she dropped a depth charge after it regardless, in the hope of forcing it under. Neither UC.17 nor UB.40 ever paid for their escapes: both went on to become two of the most successful boats of the entire U-boat war, with 96 and 99 ships sunk between them, and both survived it too, UC.17 surrendered intact in November 1918 and UB.40 scuttled by her own crew during the German retreat from Belgium the previous month, a slightly deflating postscript to two of HMS Exe's most dogged efforts.

It is worth resisting the temptation to read that as failure, though. The measure of an escort in the First World War was never how many submarines she sank; the vast majority sank none at all, because there was no reliable means of doing it. The measure was whether the ships she was looking after arrived. Exe drove UC.17 off the Red Rose, made UB.40 abandon an attack, chased another boat until it hid in a rain squall, and salvaged a merchantman. Every one of those is a ship that got where it was going. The U-boats went on to sink ninety-six and ninety-nine ships respectively, and the ones they did not sink were the ones with a four-funnelled destroyer of 1903 sitting between them and the target.

Struck by Mines

HMS Exe's own luck ran out, at least partially, on 27 March 1918, when she struck mines while operating off the east coast, sustaining serious damage and losing five of her crew. She was under the command of Lieutenant Wesson C. H. Jones RNR at the time, whose brief command of the ship, barely six weeks long, ended just four days after the strike, most likely once she had been sent for repair at Aberdeen.

Her sister ship HMS Kale was sunk outright in the same incident with the loss of forty men, a grim illustration of just how persistent and lethal the threat of enemy minefields remained right through to the closing months of the war, even for ships and crews as experienced in anti-submarine and coastal patrol work as HMS Exe's had become by that stage.

The End

HMS Exe survived the mine strike and the remainder of the war, and by January 1920 was listed for sale, subsequently being broken up later that year, closing out a seventeen-year career that had carried her from the pioneering early days of the River-class design through years of dangerous anti-submarine patrol work in home waters during the First World War.