HMS Faulknor (H62): The Hardest Worked Destroyer in the Fleet

The Flotilla Leader

HMS Faulknor was built by Yarrow at Scotstoun on the Clyde under the 1932 programme as the leader of the F Class destroyers. She was laid down on 31 July 1933, launched on 12 June 1934 and completed on 24 May 1935.

As a leader she was a little larger than the eight ships she led, with room for the Captain (D) and his staff and a fifth 4.7 inch gun. She was named after Captain Robert Faulknor, killed in 1795 when his frigate Blanche fought and took the French frigate Pique in the West Indies.

She commissioned as leader of the 4th Destroyer Flotilla in the Home Fleet, was at King George V's Silver Jubilee Review that summer and went out to the Mediterranean during the Abyssinian crisis. In 1937 she was on the Non-Intervention patrols off Spain, came under air attack for the first time at Bilbao and was damaged in a collision with a merchant ship off Ushant.

In 1939 the flotilla was renumbered the 8th, and in August she led it north to Scapa Flow.

The First U-Boat

On 14 September 1939, eleven days into the war, the U-boat U-39 fired torpedoes at the carrier Ark Royal west of the Hebrides. They exploded prematurely, and Faulknor, with Foxhound and Firedrake, counter-attacked with depth charges, forced the U-boat to the surface and picked up her crew.

U-39 was the first U-boat lost in the Second World War. A week later Faulknor was hunting U-27 with Fortune and Forester, and Fortune sank her.

That winter she screened the Home Fleet in its exile from Scapa after the loss of the Royal Oak, escorted the torpedoed battleship Barham into Liverpool at the end of December.

In January 1940 she escorted the battleship Nelson, damaged by a magnetic mine, to her repairs, and picked up ten survivors of the torpedoed Swedish steamer Orania, and in February 1940 she screened Cossack home to Leith after the Altmark incident, with the freed British merchant seamen aboard.

Narvik

She joined the fleet off Norway on 10 April 1940 and spent April and early May in the fjords around Narvik, bombarding German positions and coming under sniper fire as she shelled the wreck of the German destroyer Hermann Künne. On 4 May the Polish destroyer Grom was bombed and sunk in the Ofotfjord, and Faulknor picked up fifty two of her men.

The next day she struck a submerged wreck in Rombaksfjord. She came home in May for a refit at Grimsby, where her torpedo tubes were exchanged for an anti-aircraft gun.

Force H

At the end of June 1940 she led the flotilla to Gibraltar to join Force H. On 3 July she was in the screen of Hood and Ark Royal for the attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, and a few days later she stood by her old flotilla-mate Escort after the destroyer was torpedoed by an Italian submarine.

She went to Dakar in September, was in the action off Cape Spartivento in November, and escorted convoy after convoy to Malta: Excess, Tiger, during which she was damaged by bombing in the Skerki Channel, and Substance. In February 1941 she picked up survivors of the tanker British Premier who had been forty one days in an open boat.

On 18 June 1941, with four of her flotilla, she hunted down and sank U-138 west of Gibraltar and rescued twenty eight of the crew, and five days later she caught the German supply ship Alstertor, whose crew scuttled her, and freed seventy eight British merchant seamen held prisoner aboard. That autumn, during a refit at Southampton, it was found that her turbines had been deliberately sabotaged.

The Arctic

In 1942 she was on the Russian convoys, covering the PQ and QP convoys through the spring and PQ 17 in July. In September she sailed in the fighting destroyer escort of PQ 18 with the cruiser Scylla and the escort carrier Avenger, the first convoy to Russia with its own carrier, and on 12 September she sank a U-boat, recorded as U-88, that was closing the convoy.

In December she was senior officer of the escort of JW 51A, and in the first months of 1943 she sailed with the convoys to Russia and back again, sinking a torpedoed American freighter that could not be saved.

In the spring she joined the 4th Escort Group in the Atlantic at the height of the convoy battles, helping to drive off the U-boats attacking convoy HX 234 with the help of aircraft, and rescuing a pilot from the escort carrier Archer who had come down in the sea.

Sicily and the Aegean

In June 1943 she went to the Mediterranean for the invasion of Sicily, escorted Warspite to Malta and shelled Catania, and in September covered the landings at Salerno and escorted the surrendered Italian fleet. She was then sent east for the Aegean campaign, the attempt to hold the Dodecanese islands after Italy's surrender.

On 18 September, with Eclipse and the Greek destroyer Queen Olga, she sank two German ships off Stampalia. On 26 September she was at Leros when German bombers sank Intrepid and Queen Olga in the harbour, and on 7 October, with Fury, she destroyed an ammunition ship and landing craft in the Scarpanto Strait.

In November she ran 750 troops and 80 tons of stores into Leros by night, bombarded Kos and Leros, and helped with the evacuation when the island fell.

At the end of December 1943 she escorted the landing ships carrying 9 Commando for a reconnaissance raid behind the German lines north of the Garigliano, and in January 1944 she was off Anzio, bombarding Gaeta, Formia and Terracina and then giving gunfire support to the landings on 22 January, where the destroyer Janus was sunk by German aircraft.

Normandy and Guernsey

She came home for the invasion of Normandy, with Force J off Juno Beach, gave gunfire support on D-Day, and on 7 June carried General Montgomery across to the beachhead to set up his headquarters. The next day she ran aground and had to go to Portsmouth for repairs.

Repaired, she was back off the beachhead later in June and shot down a German aircraft that attacked the anchorage. For the rest of the war she patrolled the Channel and escorted its convoys, and hunted the small craft trying to carry German troops away from the besieged ports of the Biscay coast.

On 8 May 1945, VE Day, Faulknor was at St Peter Port in Guernsey for the surrender of the German garrison of the Channel Islands, which had held the islands since 1940; her service record has her accepting it there, and the formal surrender was signed aboard the destroyer Bulldog the next morning.

On 9 May Faulknor took the German commander to Plymouth, and on 6 June, the anniversary of D-Day, she escorted the cruiser Jamaica carrying King George VI on his visit to the liberated islands.

The Hardest Worked Destroyer

She paid off at Dartmouth on 25 July 1945 and arrived at Milford Haven to be broken up on 4 April 1946. Few ships saw so much of the war: eleven battle honours, from the Atlantic in 1939 to Normandy in 1944, and a reputation as the hardest worked destroyer in the fleet.

The other F Class prints, including Foresight, Foxhound, Firedrake and Fortune, are in the F Class destroyers collection.