HMS Glowworm (H92): The Destroyer That Rammed the Admiral Hipper

A Thornycroft Destroyer

HMS Glowworm was ordered from John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston, on the Itchen opposite Southampton, on 5 March 1934, one of the nine destroyers of the G Class built under the 1933 programme. She was laid down that August as yard number 1125, launched on 22 July 1935 and completed on 22 January 1936.

She was the third ship of the name. The one before her had been a river gunboat of 1906, which earned the name its first battle honour on the Dvina in North Russia in 1919, when the Royal Navy was sent to support the White armies against the Bolsheviks, and was sold in 1928.

The new ship took the motto Ex tenebris lux, out of darkness light.

The G Class were handy, well liked ships of about 1,350 tons, with four 4.7 inch guns and a speed of 36 knots. Glowworm differed from her sisters in one respect.

She was chosen as the trial ship for a new quintuple torpedo tube mounting, five tubes on a single turntable in place of the usual four, which was being considered for later classes. She carried two of them, ten torpedoes in all, and the design was adopted for the destroyers that followed.

It is worth remembering when reading what she did with them.

The Mediterranean

She went out to the Mediterranean in May 1936 with the 20th Destroyer Flotilla and moved to the 1st Destroyer Flotilla that August, just as the Spanish Civil War began. Like the rest of the fleet's destroyers, she took her turn on the patrols off the Spanish coast, carrying refugees and watching shipping under the Non-Intervention agreement.

The photograph at the top of this page belongs to these years, with the ship in light Mediterranean grey and the bands on her funnels showing her place in the flotilla.

She came home to pay off at Portsmouth in June 1938, recommissioned the following month and went straight back to the 1st Flotilla in the Mediterranean, in time for the Munich crisis that September. On the night of 16 May 1939, during exercises off Malta, she collided with her sister HMS Grenade and damaged her bow, and was repaired in the dockyard at Malta.

The First Winter of the War

When war came on 3 September 1939 she was at Alexandria with the flotilla, patrolling to stop merchant ships and enforce the blockade of Germany. With Italy not yet in the war the Mediterranean was quiet, and in October the flotilla was ordered home.

Glowworm sailed for England on 19 October in company with Greyhound, Gallant and Grafton, reached Plymouth on the 22nd, and spent a few weeks on convoy escort and anti-submarine patrol in the South Western Approaches.

On 12 November she was moved to the 22nd Destroyer Flotilla at Harwich for patrol and escort work in the North Sea, a winter of fog, mines and East Coast convoys. On 22 February 1940, lying at anchor in fog off the Outer Dowsing, she was struck by the Swedish merchant ship Rex and badly damaged.

She was taken in hand at a commercial yard at Hull, transferred back to the 1st Flotilla while the work went on, and on 20 March sailed to rejoin it at Scapa Flow, where she began screening the heavy ships of the Home Fleet.

Operation Wilfred

At the beginning of April 1940 the British decided to lay mines in Norwegian waters to stop the iron ore traffic from Narvik to Germany. On 5 April Glowworm sailed from Scapa as part of the screen for the battlecruiser HMS Renown, with Greyhound, Hero and Hyperion, to cover the minelayers off the Vestfjord.

Neither side knew that the Germans had chosen the same days to invade Norway, and that within two days their warships would be at sea on the same course.

On 6 April, in heavy weather, a man was washed overboard from Glowworm. Lieutenant Commander Gerard Roope asked permission to turn back and look for him, and was given it. The search was unsuccessful, and by the time it was abandoned the force had gone on without her.

She was making her own way north to rejoin, alone, when the weather finally cleared a little on the morning of 8 April.

8 April 1940

A little after eight o'clock that morning, some way north west of Trondheim, Glowworm sighted a destroyer through the murk and challenged her. The reply claimed she was Swedish. She was in fact the German destroyer Bernd von Arnim, carrying soldiers for the landing at Narvik, and she opened fire.

Glowworm fired back, and a second German destroyer, the Paul Jacobi, appeared. In the heavy sea the British ship, smaller but better able to fight her guns, had the best of it, and the two German destroyers turned away into a rain squall.

Roope followed them, though he suspected he was being drawn towards something larger, and he signalled what he had found to the Admiralty.

He was right. Out of the squall came the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, of 14,000 tons, with eight 8 inch guns, which had turned back to deal with the destroyer that was chasing her escort. Glowworm was hit early on and badly damaged, and with her speed and her guns she had no prospect of getting away.

Roope laid smoke and came out of it to fire his torpedoes at the cruiser. None of them hit. Hipper's gunfire was now tearing the destroyer apart, and her captain, Kapitän zur See Helmuth Heye, turned his ship towards her, intending perhaps to ram her himself. Roope gave the order to stand by to ram.

Glowworm struck Hipper on her starboard side, ripping away something like a hundred feet of the cruiser's armour belt, wrecking her starboard torpedo tubes and holing two of her fresh water tanks. The destroyer's bow was torn off in the collision.

As she fell away from the cruiser's side a single gun aft, under Petty Officer Walter Scott, was still firing. Then her boilers blew up, and she sank in position 64 degrees 27 minutes north, 6 degrees 28 minutes east.

Survivors

Heye stopped his ship and spent more than an hour picking up survivors, lying across the current so that it would carry the men in the water towards Hipper's side, a risk he took with British submarines and aircraft known to be about. The sea was bitterly cold and many of the men were too exhausted to climb the ropes and ladders let down to them.

Roope had been helping his men into lifejackets and on to the ropes, and was being hauled up the side himself when his strength gave out. He fell back into the sea and was drowned.

The figures for those saved differ between accounts, which put them at thirty one or thirty nine of the hundred and fifty men aboard; one hundred and eleven were lost. The only officer to survive was Lieutenant Robert Ramsey.

The German sailors treated their prisoners well, and the survivors spent the rest of the war in prison camps.

A Victoria Cross on the Enemy's Word

It is usually told that Heye was so struck by the destroyer's fight that he wrote to the British authorities, by way of the International Red Cross, to recommend her captain for a high award. Whether or not the letter happened quite as the story says, it is generally said to be the only time a Victoria Cross was awarded partly on the evidence of the enemy.

The full account could not be given until the prisoners came home in 1945 and Ramsey was able to tell it.

The awards were published in a supplement to the London Gazette on 10 July 1945. Lieutenant Commander Roope received a posthumous Victoria Cross, for the great valour of a commanding officer who closed and fought a vastly superior enemy and finally rammed her.

Lieutenant Ramsey received the Distinguished Service Order, and three ratings the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal: Engine Room Artificer Henry Gregg, Petty Officer Walter Scott, who had fought the last gun, and Able Seaman Reginald Merritt. Roope's was the earliest action of the Second World War for which the Victoria Cross was awarded, though one of the last to be gazetted.

What Followed

Hipper, holed and leaking, went on to Trondheim and landed her troops, and was then sent home to Germany for repair. Glowworm's sighting report was among the first signs the Admiralty had that the German fleet was out in strength, and the next morning Renown met the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in a snowstorm off the Lofoten Islands.

Two months later another destroyer, HMS Acasta, would turn towards those same two battleships in much the same spirit.

Glowworm's battle honours are Atlantic 1939 and Norway 1940, with White Sea 1919 from the gunboat before her. Her sisters are in the G Class destroyers collection, among them Greyhound, which sailed with her on that last operation and was lost off Crete a year later.