HMS Foxhound (H69): Two U-Boats, Narvik, a Doomed Parley at Oran, and a Canadian Second Life

Built at Clydebank

HMS Foxhound was one of the nine F Class destroyers of the 1932 programme. She was laid down by John Brown and Company at Clydebank on 15 August 1933, launched on 12 October 1934 and completed on 21 June 1935, the sixth ship of the name, with four 4.7 inch guns, eight torpedo tubes and a speed of 36 knots.

She served with the flotilla in home waters and the Mediterranean, including the patrols off Spain during the Civil War, and in April 1939 the flotilla was renumbered the 8th.

The First U-Boat

On 14 September 1939 she was screening Ark Royal west of the Hebrides when U-39 fired torpedoes at the carrier, which exploded short of her. With Faulknor and Firedrake, Foxhound counter-attacked and forced the U-boat to the surface, and forty three of her crew were taken prisoner.

It was the first U-boat lost in the war. In January 1940 she helped escort the mined battleship Nelson to Portsmouth, and in February picked up survivors of the torpedoed Swedish steamer Orania north east of the Shetlands.

Narvik

On 13 April 1940, three days after the first British attack on Narvik, the battleship Warspite and nine destroyers went up the Ofotfjord to finish off the German destroyers trapped there. Foxhound swept for mines ahead of the battleship, and in the fighting that followed she and Cossack engaged the German destroyer Erich Giese, which was sunk; Foxhound picked up eleven of her survivors.

All eight German destroyers that remained at Narvik were destroyed that day. In May she escorted Warspite to Gibraltar and then the cruisers carrying the Royal Marines who occupied Iceland, and in June she screened Renown and Repulse in the Faroes and Iceland gap.

Oran

With the fall of France in June 1940 the flotilla went to Gibraltar to join Force H. Its first task was to deal with the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir near Oran, which the British government was determined should not fall into German hands.

On 3 July Foxhound carried Captain Cedric Holland, captain of Ark Royal and a former naval attaché in Paris who knew and liked the French Navy, into Mers-el-Kébir to put Britain's terms to the French admiral, Marcel Gensoul: to join the British, to sail to a British or neutral port, or to scuttle, or be sunk. Holland spent the whole of that day trying to find a way through, at first refused even a meeting.

The attempt to avoid what was coming failed, and late in the afternoon Hood and the battleships of Force H opened fire, killing nearly 1,300 French sailors.

Through the rest of 1940 and 1941 Foxhound was with Force H on its operations into the Mediterranean: Hurricane deliveries to Malta, the Excess convoy, the air attack on the Tirso Dam in Sardinia and the bombardment of Genoa. In May 1941 she was in the screen when Force H was sent north to stop the Bismarck reaching Brest.

Two U-Boats off Gibraltar

On 18 June 1941, west of Gibraltar, Foxhound was one of five destroyers of her flotilla, with Faulknor, Fearless, Forester and Foresight, that hunted down and sank U-138 west of Cadiz. Every one of the U-boat's twenty seven men was picked up alive.

U-138 had been the first command of Wolfgang Lüth, who went on to become one of the most successful U-boat captains of the war, and under him she had sunk four ships from a single convoy in one night in 1940. Five days later the flotilla caught the German supply ship Alstertor, which was scuttled.

That July she swept the approaches to Grand Harbour as the Substance convoy came into Malta. In December, escorting a troop convoy from the Clyde, she was one of the escorts, with Croome, Gurkha and the Australian destroyer Nestor, that hunted U-127 west of Gibraltar; the kill is usually credited to Nestor's depth charges.

U-127 was on her first patrol and had joined a wolf pack only the day before. All fifty one of her crew were lost.

The Indian Ocean and Africa

In January 1942 she joined the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla at Alexandria and escorted convoys to Malta from Port Said, and in April she was sent to the Indian Ocean to join the Eastern Fleet after the Japanese raid on Ceylon.

From the middle of 1942 she was based at Simonstown and Freetown, escorting the WS troop convoys carrying soldiers round the Cape to the Middle East and India, and hunting the U-boats that had come south to the waters off West Africa and the Cape. The photograph at the top of this page was taken in December 1942, during this period.

In the summer of 1943 she came home to be refitted as a long-range escort.

HMCS Qu'Appelle

On 8 February 1944 she was transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy and renamed Qu'Appelle, after a river in Saskatchewan, one of several British destroyers lent to Canada as the Canadian navy took on a growing share of the Atlantic war. Her sister Fortune had already gone the same way as HMCS Saskatchewan, and the two served together in the 12th Escort Group.

After the Normandy landings the Canadian destroyers were sent into the Bay of Biscay and the approaches to Brest to attack the German escorts and shipping working along the French coast.

On 6 July 1944 Qu'Appelle helped sink German flak ships off Brest, and on 11 August, in the operations against the shipping trying to escape from the Biscay ports, she sank two trawlers before being damaged in a collision with her group-mate Skeena. That October, at anchor off Reykjavik in a gale, Skeena dragged her anchors and was wrecked.

Qu'Appelle went home to Canada for a refit, ended the war bringing Canadian servicemen home from Greenock to Halifax, and paid off on 11 October 1945. She was sold in December 1947 and broken up at Sydney, Nova Scotia, in 1948.

Her sisters, among them Fortune, Faulknor, Firedrake and Fame, are in the F Class destroyers collection.