HMS Fortune (H70): A U-Boat in the First Month, Three Oceans, and HMCS Saskatchewan

Built at Clydebank

HMS Fortune was one of the nine F Class destroyers of the 1932 programme, ordered from John Brown and Company at Clydebank in January 1933. She was laid down on 28 July 1933, launched on 29 August 1934 and completed on 27 April 1935, with four 4.7 inch guns, eight torpedo tubes and a speed of 36 knots.

Hers was one of the oldest names in the Navy: she was the twenty second ship to carry it. In her peacetime years she patrolled Spanish waters during the Civil War, and in August 1939 she went to Scapa Flow with the 8th Destroyer Flotilla.

U-27

On 20 September 1939, west of the Hebrides, she and Forester found U-27 and attacked with depth charges until the U-boat came to the surface. All thirty eight of her crew were picked up. She was the second U-boat lost in the war, six days after Faulknor, Foxhound and Firedrake had sunk the first.

On 20 March 1940, north west of the Shetlands, Fortune attacked what she took to be another U-boat, and for many years she was credited with sinking U-44. Post-war research has shown that U-44 had in fact been lost a week earlier in a British minefield off the Dutch coast, and that Fortune's attack was probably not on a submarine at all.

Such false credits were common in a war in which a depth charge pattern and a patch of oil could look like a kill.

Norway and Iceland

In April 1940 she screened the carriers Glorious and Ark Royal as their aircraft attacked the Germans in Norway, and in May she escorted the cruisers Berwick and Glasgow carrying the Royal Marines who occupied Iceland, to deny the island to Germany.

In August she helped pick up survivors of the armed merchant cruiser Transylvania, torpedoed off the north of Ireland, and at the end of the month she joined Force H at Gibraltar.

Dakar

In September 1940 she sailed with the expedition to Dakar, which was meant to bring French West Africa over to de Gaulle. On 24 September, as the British ships closed the port, the Vichy French submarine Ajax came out to attack them.

Fortune found her and depth-charged her to the surface, and picked up her whole crew, seventy six men, before she sank. The expedition was a failure and was called off the next day; the destroyers' part in it is also told in the article on HMS Greyhound.

In October Fortune covered the Free French landing at Duala in the Cameroons.

Force H

For the next eight months she was with Force H: the Malta convoys and Hurricane runs, the Excess convoy in January 1941 with Malaya and Ark Royal, the hunt for the Hipper after it attacked a troop convoy at Christmas 1940, and the interception of a Vichy convoy off Morocco.

On 10 May 1941, escorting Queen Elizabeth through to the eastern Mediterranean in the Tiger operation, she was nearly hit by a bomb off Bougaroni on the Algerian coast. The near miss did serious damage to her hull, and her men threw equipment from her upper deck over the side to keep the flooding under control.

She limped back to Gibraltar and went home to Chatham, where she was repaired from July to October.

Malta, Ceylon and Vigorous

In February 1942 she was sent east to join the Eastern Fleet, and on the way she ran a cargo of aircraft engines into Malta with the cruiser Cleopatra. She was damaged by bombing on the way in, and the deck cargo made her dangerously top-heavy.

From Malta she went on through the Suez Canal to Aden and Colombo, where in March she was out searching for Japanese warships south of Ceylon. On 2 and 3 April, as the Japanese carriers struck at Ceylon, she was picking up survivors of the merchant ship Glenshiel, sunk by a Japanese submarine.

In June she was one of the destroyers sent back to the Mediterranean, with Griffin and Hotspur, for the Vigorous convoy to Malta. For three days the convoy was attacked from the air and by E-boats while the Italian fleet put to sea, and Fortune was damaged by friendly fire on 13 June.

On the 15th the destroyer Hasty was torpedoed and sunk, and the convoy was turned back to Alexandria. Fortune went back to the Indian Ocean with a defective rudder, escorted the liner Aquitania, and in September 1942 escorted troops for the last stage of the occupation of Madagascar.

That December, working from the Cape, she found four survivors of the American Liberty ship Pierce Butler and landed them at Durban.

HMCS Saskatchewan

She came home early in 1943 and was refitted in a commercial yard, and on 31 May 1943 she was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy as HMCS Saskatchewan, keeping her pennant number. The photograph at the top of this page shows her in 1943, newly refitted, around the time of the handover.

Under her first Canadian captain, Commander Ralph Medley, she became senior officer's ship of Escort Group C-3 and spent the next year on the North Atlantic convoys with the Mid Ocean Escort Force, the Canadian and British groups that took the convoys across the open ocean between Newfoundland and Northern Ireland.

In May 1944 she moved to the 12th Escort Group at Plymouth, with her sister Foxhound, by then HMCS Qu'Appelle, to keep the U-boats away from the Normandy invasion routes.

On 6 July 1944, on a patrol along the Biscay coast, the group found two German trawlers escorting surfaced U-boats into port. In the gunfight that followed one of Saskatchewan's men was killed and four wounded; the U-boats escaped.

After a refit in Nova Scotia she returned to the British coast early in 1945, and at the end of the war she carried Canadian servicemen home from Britain to Quebec. She paid off at Sydney, Nova Scotia, on 28 January 1946 and was broken up.

The Canadian battle honours of the name are Atlantic 1943 to 1944, Normandy 1944 and Biscay 1944.

In May 1942 she had been adopted by the people of Midlothian. Her sisters are in the F Class destroyers collection.