HMS Forester (H74): Boldly I Cut Down the Mighty

Built at Cowes

HMS Forester was one of the nine F Class destroyers of the 1932 programme, built by J. Samuel White at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. She was laid down on 15 May 1933, launched on 28 June 1934 and completed on 19 April 1935, the tenth ship of the name, with four 4.7 inch guns, eight torpedo tubes and a speed of 36 knots.

Her motto was Audax potentes caedo: boldly I cut down the mighty. She joined the 4th Destroyer Flotilla in the Home Fleet, went out to the Mediterranean with Fame during the Abyssinian crisis, and was at the Coronation Review at Spithead in 1937. In 1939 the flotilla was renumbered the 8th.

The First Winter

On 20 September 1939, with her sister Fortune, she hunted down U-27 west of the Hebrides, and between them they depth-charged her to the surface. All thirty eight of her crew, under Kapitänleutnant Johannes Franz, were picked up.

She was the second U-boat lost in the war, six days after the flotilla had sunk the first. That winter she screened the Home Fleet in the search for Scharnhorst and Gneisenau after the loss of the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi, and in February 1940, with a tug, she towed the damaged tanker Imperial Transport, broken in two by a torpedo, back towards port.

Narvik

She was escorting the first troop convoy for Norway when the Germans invaded, and on 13 April 1940 she was one of the nine destroyers that went up the Ofotfjord with the battleship Warspite in the Second Battle of Narvik, which destroyed all eight German destroyers still there. Afterwards she escorted the damaged Cossack, which had been hit and run aground in Narvik harbour, out to Skjelfjord for repairs.

In June she landed survivors of the armed merchant cruiser Andania, torpedoed south of Iceland, and at the end of the month she went south to join Force H at Gibraltar.

Force H

She was at Mers-el-Kébir on 3 July 1940 when Force H opened fire on the French fleet, and in the screen three days later for the air strike on the French battleship Dunkerque. On 11 July her flotilla-mate Escort was torpedoed by an Italian submarine, and Forester tried to tow her to Gibraltar; the tow failed when Escort foundered.

In September she escorted Barham to Dakar, in November she was in the action off Cape Spartivento, and through 1941 she sailed on the Malta convoys and Hurricane runs and in the search for the Bismarck.

On 18 June 1941, west of Cadiz, she was one of five destroyers of the flotilla, with Faulknor, Fearless, Foresight and Foxhound, that sank U-138; every one of the U-boat's crew was saved. Five days later they caught the German supply ship Alstertor and freed seventy eight British merchant seamen held prisoner aboard her.

In the winter of 1941 she was converted to an escort destroyer, with more anti-aircraft and anti-submarine weapons in place of some of her guns and torpedo tubes.

The Barents Sea, 2 May 1942

In the spring of 1942 she went north for the Russian convoys. In April she and Foresight escorted the cruiser Edinburgh to Murmansk with convoy PQ 14, and at the end of the month they sailed with the homeward convoy QP 11, Edinburgh carrying more than four tons of Soviet gold.

On 30 April Edinburgh was torpedoed by U-456 and lost her stern, and Forester and Foresight were detached to stay with her as she tried to struggle back to Murmansk at a few knots, steering in circles.

On the morning of 2 May three German destroyers, the Hermann Schoemann, Z24 and Z25, came out of the snow showers to finish off the cruiser. Forester went in to make a torpedo attack, and was hit by three shells from Z25, in her boiler room and on her B and X gun mountings.

She was stopped, and twelve of her men were killed, among them her captain, Lieutenant Commander George Huddart, and nine wounded. The fight went on around the stopped and drifting ships: Edinburgh crippled the Hermann Schoemann, which the Germans later scuttled, and was herself hit by a German torpedo.

That afternoon Edinburgh was abandoned and Foresight sank her. The full story of the action and of the gold is told in the article on HMS Edinburgh.

Forester was patched up at Murmansk, and on 13 May she sailed as part of the escort for the cruiser Trinidad, which had been repaired at Murmansk after being hit by her own torpedo in March. The next day German bombers set Trinidad on fire, and Forester went alongside the burning cruiser to take off her wounded and other survivors before she was sunk by Matchless.

Forester then went home to the Tyne for repairs that lasted through the summer.

The Arctic and the Atlantic

She was back on the Russian run that winter, in the screen of the battleship Anson and the cruiser Cumberland covering convoy JW 51B, whose escort fought off the Hipper and Lützow in the Battle of the Barents Sea at the end of December 1942, and with the homeward convoys RA 52 and RA 53.

In June 1943 she joined the 1st Canadian Escort Group in the Atlantic, and that year claimed to be the first destroyer to steam 200,000 miles since the outbreak of war, a distance of eight times round the world.

On 10 March 1944, leading the Canadian group with convoy SC 154, she shared with the Canadian destroyer St Laurent, the corvette Owen Sound and the frigate Swansea in sinking U-845 south west of Ireland. The U-boat, under Korvettenkapitän Werner Weber, was on her first patrol; ten of her men were killed and forty five picked up.

Normandy and the Channel

For the invasion of Normandy she escorted one of the first convoys from the Thames to the beaches of the Eastern Task Force, and then stayed in the Channel on convoy defence, fighting German R-boats off Cap d'Antifer in July and E-boats in August. On 20 August 1944, off Beachy Head, she, the escort destroyer Wensleydale and the destroyer Vidette hunted down U-413 south of Brighton.

Under Gustav Poel she had been one of the more destructive boats of the war, sinking the troopship Warwick Castle off Portugal in November 1942 and the destroyer Warwick off Cornwall in February 1944. Forty five of her crew were lost; one man survived. It was Forester's fourth shared U-boat kill.

The End

After repairs at Liverpool she finished the war with the Rosyth Escort Force on the North Sea convoys, paid off in September 1945, and arrived at Rosyth to be broken up on 26 February 1946. In March 1942 she had been adopted by the people of Morley in Yorkshire.

Her sisters are in the F Class destroyers collection, among them Foresight, which fought beside her for the Edinburgh.