HMS Firedrake (H79): From the First U-Boat Kill to a Night in the Winter Atlantic

Built on the Tyne

HMS Firedrake was one of the nine F Class destroyers of the 1932 programme. She was ordered from the Parsons Marine Turbine Company on 15 March 1933, and her hull was built by Vickers-Armstrongs alongside that of her sister Fame.

She was laid down on 5 July 1933, launched on 26 July 1934 and completed the following spring, the seventh ship of the name. Like her sisters she carried four 4.7 inch guns, eight torpedo tubes and depth charges, and could make 36 knots.

She spent most of her peacetime years in the Mediterranean, through the Abyssinian crisis and the patrols off Spain during the Civil War, and the photograph at the top of this page shows her in those years.

The First Kill

When war came she was with the 8th Destroyer Flotilla in the Home Fleet. On 14 September 1939 she was one of the three destroyers, with Faulknor and Foxhound, that counter-attacked U-39 after her torpedoes had exploded short of Ark Royal, forced her to the surface and took her crew prisoner.

It was the first U-boat sunk in the war. That autumn she picked up survivors of the steamer Glen Farg, torpedoed east of the Orkneys.

Narvik and Bodø

She was damaged in a collision at Invergordon in March 1940 and missed the first weeks of the Norwegian campaign, but she was off Narvik by the end of May. On 27 May, with the anti-aircraft cruisers Cairo and Coventry, she gave gunfire support to the French and Norwegian troops of the final attack that retook the town.

The next days were spent taking the army away again. On 29 and 30 May, with Fame, she brought the last of the Irish Guards, the Independent Companies and the military police out of Bodø, and fished a Hurricane pilot out of the sea off Narvik.

On 12 June, in the final evacuation from Harstad, she was hit by bombs that damaged her forward gun and her steering, and went home for repairs.

The Durbo

In July she searched for survivors of the liner Arandora Star, torpedoed off Ireland with German and Italian internees aboard, and at the end of August she joined Force H at Gibraltar. On 18 October 1940, east of Gibraltar, she and the destroyer Wrestler, with two flying boats, found the Italian submarine Durbo and forced her to the surface.

Before the submarine sank, Firedrake's boarding party got aboard and recovered her papers. They are generally said to have given away the patrol area of a second Italian submarine, the Lafolè, which was sunk two days later by Gallant, Griffin and Hotspur.

In November she was in the brief action with the Italian fleet off Cape Spartivento, and in January 1941 she was intercepting Vichy French merchant ships off the coast of Morocco, exchanging fire with the shore batteries as she brought them into Gibraltar. On 1 March she ran aground in fog off Malaga and went home to Chatham for repairs.

Substance

She was back at Gibraltar in time for Operation Substance, the convoy to Malta in July 1941. On 23 July, south of Sardinia, the Italian bombers attacked.

The destroyer Fearless was sunk and the cruiser Manchester torpedoed, and a 100 kg bomb burst so close to Firedrake that it caused serious structural damage and stopped her. The escort destroyer Eridge towed her back to Gibraltar, with Avonvale and Sikh guarding them, and she reached it a week later.

Boston

She was patched up at Gibraltar, and in September she crossed the Atlantic in company with the damaged Manchester for full repairs at the US Navy Yard at Boston.

While she was there she was converted for the Atlantic battle: her forward gun was replaced by a Hedgehog, the new ahead-throwing anti-submarine mortar, and she was given Type 271 radar, the centimetric set that could pick out a U-boat's conning tower on the surface at night. She sailed for home in January 1942 as escort to a convoy, and joined the 7th Escort Group.

ONS 153

Through 1942 she escorted the North Atlantic convoys. In September she picked up survivors of a Swedish steamer, and in November she was sent with the American destroyer Badger to reinforce convoy ONS 144, under attack by four U-boats.

In December she sailed with the 7th Escort Group as escort of ONS 153, thirty eight merchant ships outward bound from Britain to North America, into the worst of the winter weather.

From 15 December the convoy was attacked by the U-boats of the Raufbold group in a gale, some 600 miles south of Iceland. At a quarter past one on the morning of 17 December, in the darkness, Firedrake was hit on the starboard side by a torpedo from U-211, commanded by Karl Hause. She broke in two.

Her bow sank at once; her stern stayed afloat for some hours in the gale, with the survivors clinging to it. About five hours after the attack the corvette Sunflower, under Lieutenant Commander John Treasure Jones of the Royal Naval Reserve, a merchant officer who would later be the last master of the liner Queen Mary, reached them and took off twenty seven men, one of whom died of his wounds.

Commander Eric Tilden, who had taken command only that September, was lost with well over a hundred of his officers and men. Three of the convoy's merchant ships were also lost.

Her Sisters

In February 1942 Firedrake had been adopted by the people of Tynemouth, near the yard where she was built. Of the nine F Class ships, four were lost or written off in the war; Firedrake was the only one sunk by a U-boat.

Her sisters, among them Faulknor and Foxhound, which shared the first kill with her, are in the F Class destroyers collection.