HMS Garth (L20): E-Boat Alley, Dieppe and a King Carried Home

A Hunt Class Destroyer

HMS Garth was one of the Hunt Class escort destroyers, small, fast ships of about 1,000 tons designed just before the war to escort coastal convoys and defend them against aircraft and submarines. They carried their main armament of 4 inch guns in high-angle twin mountings and were named after fox hunts; Garth took her name from a hunt in Wales and was the second ship to carry it.

She was one of the first group, the Type I Hunts, ordered from John Brown and Company at Clydebank in March 1939. She was laid down that June, launched on 14 February 1940 and completed on 1 July 1940, a month after Dunkirk, into a war that had moved to Britain's own coasts.

Her sisters Cleveland and Cotswold are also in this series.

E-Boat Alley

After working up at Scapa she joined the 21st Destroyer Flotilla at Sheerness in August 1940, and for most of the next four years her work was the escort of the convoys that ran up and down the East Coast between the Thames and the Forth.

They carried the coal and cargoes that kept London and the south going, along a narrow swept channel between the minefields, and from the autumn of 1940 they were attacked night after night by German E-boats, the fast motor torpedo boats working from the Dutch and Belgian ports. The sailors called the route E-boat Alley.

In August 1940 she escorted the minelayers laying the new minefields in the South Western Approaches, with the anti-aircraft cruiser Calcutta. On the night of 31 August, under her first captain, Lieutenant Commander Eric Hart Dyke, she was on patrol off Harwich when the destroyers of a minelaying sortie ran onto a German minefield off the Dutch coast.

Express was mined and Esk sunk, and Garth and Hambledon were sent out to help. The next afternoon Garth found the crippled Ivanhoe under German air attack; she could not be saved and was sunk by a British torpedo.

That autumn she escorted the monitor Erebus as she bombarded the German-held Channel ports of Calais and Dunkirk, where the invasion barges were gathering.

In November 1940, off Southwold, Garth and the destroyer Campbell caught the E-boat S38 attacking a convoy and sank her. It was the first E-boat ever sunk during an attack on a British coastal convoy. A few weeks later, on 1 December, Garth was damaged by a mine in the Thames Estuary.

In 1941 she ran aground and was repaired in London, On the night of 20 November 1941, scouting ahead of a convoy for E-boats with her radar out of action, she ran into another British patrol and was fired on by the destroyer Campbell, her partner in the S38 action a year before; two of her men were killed and she had to be towed home. In February 1942 the people of Wokingham adopted her.

Dieppe

In August 1942 she sailed with the assault forces for the raid on Dieppe, Operation Jubilee. On 18 August she escorted the landing craft across the Channel, and on the 19th she gave gunfire support to the Canadian troops landing on Blue Beach at Puys, where the Royal Regiment of Canada was cut to pieces under the cliffs.

The German garrison had been ready for them. On the 20th she covered the return of the surviving craft.

A Second E-Boat

On the night of 17 February 1943, under Lieutenant Commander John Scatchard, escorting a convoy off Great Yarmouth with the destroyer Montrose, she fought a gun action with E-boats and then rammed one and sank her; the boat is recorded as S71.

A year later, on 22 February 1944, she was in action off Smith's Knoll with the destroyer Southdown and two motor torpedo boats, during which two E-boats, S94 and S128, collided and sank.

Earlier that February she had towed the new escort carrier Slinger, mined in the Thames Estuary on her way from the builders, back into Sheerness.

Normandy and Walcheren

For the invasion of Normandy she escorted one of the first convoys of transports and landing ships, ETM1, from the Thames through the Solent to the Eastern Task Force beaches on 6 and 7 June 1944, and then went back to the East Coast convoys.

On 1 November 1944 she gave gunfire support, with the destroyer Cottesmore, to the assault on the island of Walcheren, whose German batteries blocked the approaches to the port of Antwerp. On 16 October she had carried King George VI back across the Channel from Ostend to Dover after his visit to the armies in the Low Countries.

The Last Months

In the winter of 1944 and 1945 the Germans sent their new midget submarines against the East Coast and Scheldt convoys. On 14 March 1945, off Orfordness, Garth sank one of them and took her crew prisoner.

On 25 May, after the German surrender, she carried the British ambassador to the Netherlands across to Rotterdam, and on 14 July 1945 she was among the escorts that took the American cruiser Augusta, carrying President Truman to the Potsdam conference, through the Channel to Antwerp.

She paid off in December 1945 and spent her last years as an accommodation ship in reserve at Sheerness, Harwich and Barrow, and was broken up at Barrow in 1958. Her scrap value was nineteen thousand pounds; she had cost about a hundred and fifty thousand to build. Her sisters are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.