HMS Foresight (H68): Force H, the Edinburgh Gold Convoy and the Pedestal Torpedo

Built at Birkenhead

HMS Foresight was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, one of the nine F Class destroyers of the 1932 programme. She was laid down on 21 July 1933, launched on 29 June 1934 and completed on 15 May 1935, the fifth ship of the Royal Navy to carry the name.

She served in home waters in the years before the war, and in August 1939 went north to Scapa Flow with the 8th Destroyer Flotilla, the F Class flotilla of the Home Fleet, in which she would spend almost all of her service.

The First Year

Her first winter of war was spent screening the heavy ships of the Home Fleet and hunting submarines in the North Sea and the Western Approaches. In January 1940 she helped escort the battleship Nelson, damaged by a magnetic mine in Loch Ewe, round to Portsmouth for repair.

In May she was moved to the Humber for the East Coast convoys, and on the 18th she and two other destroyers picked up survivors from a minelayer sunk in the estuary, staying on to warn other shipping of the new minefield.

Force H

In June 1940 the flotilla was sent to Gibraltar to form part of Force H, the new squadron under Vice Admiral Somerville that was to hold the western Mediterranean after the fall of France. Its first task was the most painful of the war.

On 3 July Foresight was in the screen of Ark Royal and Hood when Force H opened fire on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, near Oran, to keep it out of German hands, killing nearly thirteen hundred French sailors.

Later that month she sailed with Ark Royal for an air strike on the French Atlantic port of Bordeaux, called off because of the weather, and that summer she escorted the first carrier runs to fly off fighters for Malta and covered the reinforcements passed through to the Mediterranean Fleet.

In September she sailed with the expedition to Dakar, the attempt to bring French West Africa over to de Gaulle. On 23 September she was damaged by fire from the shore batteries, and on the 25th, after the French submarine Persée had attacked the battleship Resolution, Foresight helped sink her.

The expedition was called off, and in October Foresight covered the Free French landings in the Cameroons before going home for a refit at Liverpool, where she was damaged again, this time by German bombs in the December blitz on the city.

1941

She went back to Gibraltar in January 1941 carrying the plans of the Tirso Dam in Sardinia, which Ark Royal's Swordfish were to attack at the beginning of February.

Over the following months she was in the screen for the bombardment of Genoa, the interception of a Vichy French convoy from West Africa, and a string of Malta operations: the Hurricane deliveries, the Tiger convoy of tanks for Egypt, during which she was damaged by bombing and repaired at Malta, and the Substance, Style and Halberd convoys.

On 18 June 1941, west of Gibraltar, she and four of her sisters, Faulknor, Fearless, Forester and Foxhound, hunted down and sank the U-boat U-138, and picked up most of her crew. Fearless was lost to Italian torpedo bombers on the Substance convoy a month later.

In November 1941 Foresight was adopted by the town of Penzance.

That month she was ordered home, and in December she was one of the destroyers escorting HMS Duke of York as she carried Winston Churchill across the Atlantic to meet President Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor. The weather was so bad that the destroyers could not keep up with the battleship at speed, and Foresight was damaged by the sea and put into the Azores for repairs.

Edinburgh

In the spring of 1942 she joined the Arctic convoys. In March she was one of fifteen destroyers screening the battleships and the carrier Victorious as distant cover for PQ 13, with the Tirpitz known to be in Norway.

In April she sailed with PQ 14 to Murmansk, and was detached with Forester to escort Edinburgh, which was carrying steel plate for the repair of the damaged Trinidad in the Kola Inlet. German destroyers came out after them but did not attack.

At the end of the month she joined the escort of the homeward convoy QP 11, with the cruiser Edinburgh carrying more than four tons of Soviet gold in payment for British war supplies. On 30 April Edinburgh was torpedoed twice by U-456 and lost her stern and steering.

Foresight and Forester were detached, with two Russian ships, to help her limp back towards Murmansk.

On 2 May, in snow showers in the Barents Sea, three German destroyers, the Hermann Schoemann, Z24 and Z25, came out to finish the cruiser off. In a confused fight at close range Edinburgh, steering in circles, crippled the Hermann Schoemann with her guns, and the Germans later scuttled her.

Both British destroyers were hit, Forester losing her captain, and Foresight had men killed and wounded and was disabled for a time before she got under way again. Edinburgh had been hit by a German torpedo in the fight and was now beyond saving.

Her men were taken off by the minesweepers, and Foresight was ordered to sink her. She did so with her last remaining torpedo. The gold lay on the sea bed until 1981, and that story is told in the article on HMS Edinburgh.

After temporary repairs at Murmansk, Foresight sailed for home in May as part of the escort for the patched-up cruiser Trinidad. On 14 May Trinidad was set on fire by German bombers, and Foresight took off survivors before the burning cruiser was sunk by her own escort. Foresight then went home for permanent repairs.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken on 2 July 1942, as she returned to the fleet.

Pedestal

A month later she sailed from the Clyde with the Home Fleet ships for Operation Pedestal, the convoy of fourteen merchant ships sent to relieve Malta in August 1942, when the island was close to starving. She was to be one of the destroyers sweeping for mines ahead of the convoy in the Skerki Channel.

The convoy entered the Mediterranean on 10 August, and over the next four days lost the carrier Eagle to a U-boat, saw Indomitable wrecked by bombs, and lost the cruisers Manchester and Cairo and nine of the merchant ships.

On the evening of 12 August, as the big ships turned back before the Sicilian Narrows and the convoy went on with its close escort, Foresight was hit aft by a torpedo from an Italian aircraft north of Bizerta.

The explosion broke her back and flooded her stern, and one officer and three ratings were killed. Tartar took her in tow, but under continual air attack, and with U-boats about, there was no hope of getting her to Gibraltar. Early the next morning Tartar took off her 181 survivors and sank her with a torpedo.

Five merchant ships, the tanker Ohio among them, reached Malta, and they were enough to keep the island in the war.

Her Sisters

Of the eight F Class destroyers and their leader Faulknor, four were lost or written off in the war: Fearless, Foresight, Firedrake and Fury. Her sisters, including Forester, which shared the fight for Edinburgh, and Fury, which swept ahead of the Pedestal convoy with her, are in the F Class destroyers collection.