HMS Exmoor (L08): From a U-Boat Kill Off Madeira to Every Mediterranean Landing

Named for a Lost Sister Ship

HMS Exmoor was originally ordered as HMS Burton on 20 December 1939 from Swan Hunter at Wallsend, laid down on 7 June 1940 and launched on 12 March 1941.

She was renamed Exmoor in June 1941, taking the name of the previous HMS Exmoor, a Type I Hunt-class destroyer that had been torpedoed and sunk earlier that year, a fittingly determined gesture of continuity from a Royal Navy that had no intention of letting a lost name, or a lost ship's fighting spirit, simply disappear.

The ship whose name she took had lasted six months. The first HMS Exmoor was lost off Lowestoft on 25 February 1941 while escorting a coastal convoy down the East Coast route, and she capsized and sank in about ten minutes. What actually killed her has never been settled: the Germans credited the E-boat S30 under Klaus Feldt, and a mine has always been the other candidate. Either way she was one of the Type I Hunts, the ships that had been built with a plain arithmetical error in their stability calculations and had a gun mounting removed to compensate, a story set out in the article on HMS Eglinton (L87). The second Exmoor was a Type II, which is why she carries six 4-inch guns where the first carried four: the Admiralty had fixed the fault by cutting the hulls lengthwise down the middle and inserting a two-and-a-half-foot strip to widen them.

A Type II Hunt-class destroyer, HMS Exmoor displaced 1,050 tons standard, rising to 1,430 tons at full load, and her Parsons turbines produced 19,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 27 knots.

She carried six 4-inch guns, 2-pounder and Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns, and a substantial fit of 110 depth charges, a remarkably well-equipped escort destroyer for the demanding convoy and coastal work she would spend her entire war carrying out.

She commissioned on 18 October 1941 and completed her work-up exercises with the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow that November.

A U-Boat Kill Within Weeks

HMS Exmoor wasted no time proving herself. On 17 December 1941, barely two months after commissioning, she joined a proper multinational hunting party while escorting the historically significant Convoy HG-76: HMS Blankney, HMS Stanley, the corvette HMS Pentstemon, the sloop HMS Stork under the celebrated U-boat hunter Commander F. J. "Johnnie" Walker, and a Martlet fighter flying from the escort carrier HMS Audacity, all converging on the German submarine U-131 northeast of Madeira.

Battery gas forced U-131 to the surface, unable to dive, and her captain tried to make a run for it on the surface instead. One of the Martlets pressed home a strafing run so aggressively that the U-boat's own flak brought it down into the sea, before the escorts closed in with gunfire; rather than let her be sunk outright, the crew scuttled U-131 themselves, all 47 of them surviving to be taken prisoner, a properly impressive early result for a ship still very much finding her feet.

HG 76 is not just any convoy, and the company she was keeping that day was extraordinary. It sailed from Gibraltar in December 1941 into a waiting wolfpack, with Focke-Wulfs working from French airfields overhead, and it was the first convoy in the war to be escorted by an escort carrier and by an aggressive, well-drilled support group under an officer who knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. Over seven days and nights the escorts fought off repeated attacks and killed five U-boats, a figure no convoy battle had previously come close to, and thirty of the merchant ships got home. It cost two merchantmen and four escorts, and it made Frederic Walker's reputation overnight.

The carrier flying that Martlet has a story of her own worth knowing. HMS Audacity was the Royal Navy's first escort carrier: a captured German merchant ship, the Hannover, taken in the Caribbean in 1940 by the cruiser HMS Dunedin, as described in the article on HMS Dunedin (96), and rebuilt with her superstructure cut away and a flight deck laid over the top. She had no hangar and no lift; her half-dozen aircraft lived on deck in all weathers. She was the proof of concept for a type that would eventually number in the hundreds, and she did not survive her second convoy: U-751 caught her on the night of 21 December, zig-zagging astern of HG 76 with no escort of her own, and put three torpedoes into her. Exmoor's first kill and the loss of the ship that helped make it happened within four days of each other.

Malta and the Mediterranean Convoys

HMS Exmoor spent much of 1942 supporting the desperate effort to keep Malta supplied, taking part in Operations Spotter and Picket between February and March, delivering aircraft to the besieged island, and escorting Convoy MW 11 during Operation Vigorous in June, an operation ultimately cancelled in the face of a serious Italian naval threat.

She went on to take part in the successful Operation Stone Age in November 1942 and Operation Portcullis that December, both further contributions to keeping vital supplies flowing to Malta at a time when the island's survival still hung particularly in the balance.

Between January and March 1943, HMS Exmoor supported the British Eighth Army's advance across Libya and Tunisia, and rescued 13 survivors from the merchant ship City of Guildford on 27 March 1943.

In May that year, she took part in Operation Retribution, blockading Cape Bon to prevent Axis forces evacuating to Sicily as the North African campaign reached its conclusion, a role that helped ensure a substantial haul of Axis prisoners and equipment fell into Allied hands rather than escaping across the Mediterranean.

Sicily, Salerno and Anzio

HMS Exmoor was assigned to Escort Force P for Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, departing Port Said on 5 July 1943 and escorting Convoy MWF 36 to the Bark West landing beach on 10 July, before defending the beachhead and engaging coastal artillery at Augusta the following day.

She went on to support the Salerno landings in September 1943 as part of Task Force 65, departing Tripoli on 6 September and escorting Convoy TSF 1 to the landing beaches on 10 September, providing anti-aircraft defence and gunfire support through to 16 September, a particularly demanding stretch of continuous combat operations.

HMS Exmoor took part in the ill-fated Dodecanese Campaign in the Aegean between October and December 1943, one of the more disappointing Allied efforts of the Mediterranean war, attempting to intercept German invasion craft and supply isolated British garrisons before the campaign collapsed. She helped evacuate the damaged Greek destroyer Adrias in December, arriving at Alexandria on 6 December 1943.

That campaign is one of the least creditable episodes in the Royal Navy's war, and what it cost is set out in the article on HMS Eclipse (H08). Six destroyers were sunk in the Aegean between September and November 1943 and the whole island group fell inside two months, because the operation had been pushed through without air cover. Exmoor spent those weeks running German-held waters in daylight in a ship designed for the Western Approaches, and came out of it, which a good many did not.

Early in 1944, she protected shipping supporting Operation Shingle, the landings at Anzio, defending against precisely the kind of threat that had left Toulon on 10 February specifically to attack it: the German submarine U-450. On 10 March 1944, Exmoor joined HMS Blankney, HMS Blencathra, HMS Brecon and the American destroyer USS Madison, an Anglo-American hunting group, in a depth-charge attack south of Ostia that forced U-450 to scuttle, a further confirmed success against the U-boat threat still lurking in Mediterranean waters even as the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula continued.

Final Wartime Duties

HMS Exmoor became flotilla leader of the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla in October 1944, escorting convoys to Greece in support of Operation Manna, the relief effort supporting liberated Greece, and continued supporting ground operations into early 1945, carrying out further Aegean operations right through to April that year, a notably long and continuous run of active Mediterranean service stretching across nearly the entire second half of the war.

A Second Career in Denmark

HMS Exmoor was under refit at Taranto when Germany surrendered in May 1945, and her planned deployment to the Eastern Fleet was cancelled following Japan's own surrender that August. She decommissioned in November 1945 and entered reserve at Portsmouth, before being placed on the sale list in 1953 and sold to Denmark in 1954, entering Danish service as HDMS Valdemar Sejr, pennant F343.

The obvious question is why Denmark was buying fourteen-year-old British escort destroyers in the middle of the 1950s, and the answer is 29 August 1943, the morning the Royal Danish Navy scuttled itself in its own harbours rather than let the Germans take it. Thirty-two of its fifty-two vessels went to the bottom where they lay. That story, and what it left Denmark with in 1945, is set out in the article on HMS Blackmore (L43).

Exmoor was not on her own, either. Blackmore had gone across on loan in 1952 and became Esbern Snare, HMS Calpe became Rolf Krake, and Exmoor was bought outright and became Valdemar Sejr. Three elderly Hunts, all of them veterans of the Mediterranean, formed a class of their own in a navy that had been rebuilt from nothing and had been handed the defence of the Baltic approaches by NATO. It is a curious afterlife for a ship that spent her war in the sunshine: fifteen years of Danish winters, with the Soviet Baltic Fleet on the other side of the water.

Her new Danish name was a fitting one for a former U-boat hunter: Valdemar Sejr honoured King Valdemar II, known to Danish history simply as "the Victorious", one of medieval Denmark's most celebrated monarchs.

The Danish Navy placed her on the disposal list in 1962, and she was finally sold for scrapping in Denmark in 1966, closing out a career that had taken her, in her Royal Navy years alone, through practically every major Allied landing and campaign the Mediterranean theatre had to offer.