HMS Goathland (L27): Named After a Fox Hunt, Wrecked by a Mine off Normandy

Named for a Yorkshire Hunt

HMS Goathland was ordered on 28 July 1940 under the wartime Emergency Programme and built as yard number 694 by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, laid down on 30 January 1941 and launched on 3 February 1942, her construction stretched out by roughly thirteen months thanks to the air raids periodically interrupting work at the yard, a reminder that building a destroyer in wartime Britain was itself a small campaign of its own.

A Type III Hunt-class destroyer designed for fleet work and convoy escort, she took her name, in keeping with the class's tradition of borrowing names from English and Welsh fox hunts, from the Goathland hunt of North Yorkshire, and was formally adopted by the community of Axbridge in Somerset during Warship Week in March 1942, a popular wartime scheme in which towns raised funds in a ship's honour and received an affiliation with her in return.

The Warship Week scheme is worth a paragraph on its own, because the numbers are extraordinary. Between October 1941 and the end of March 1942 there were 1,178 of these weeks across 1,273 districts of Britain, each one a town or a borough or a cluster of villages setting itself a target and then raising it through National Savings, and the total came to £955,611,589. Between them the participating communities adopted eight battleships, four aircraft carriers, forty-nine cruisers, three hundred and one destroyers, twenty-five submarines, one hundred and sixty-four corvettes and frigates and two hundred and eighty-eight minesweepers. A plaque with the ship's crest went to the council and a plaque with the town's arms went to the ship, and a great many of those plaques are still on the walls of parish halls. Axbridge in Somerset, a town of perhaps a thousand people at the time, has a Yorkshire-named destroyer on its civic record because of it.

The Type III part of that description is the interesting bit. The Hunts were meant to be small, cheap escorts turned out in numbers, and the first of them arrived with a genuine design fault that had to be corrected on ships already building, a story set out in the article on HMS Eglinton (L87). By the time Goathland was drawn the Admiralty had gone further and changed what the ships were for: the Type III gave up one of the twin 4-inch mountings and put two torpedo tubes amidships instead, which turned a convoy escort into something that could go looking for German coastal convoys in the Channel at night. That is precisely what she spent 1943 doing, and it is why she has a surface action on her record at all.

She commissioned on 6 November 1942 under Lieutenant Commander Nigel Pumphrey, DSO, DSC, who handed over to Lieutenant Breon Bordes, DSC, in October 1943, meaning it was Bordes rather than Pumphrey who would command her through D-Day and the mine strike that finally ended her career.

Her first captain was not an obvious choice for a convoy escort, which tells you what the Admiralty had in mind for her. Pumphrey had spent the earlier part of the war commanding motor torpedo boats at Dover, and on 12 February 1942 he led the boats out into the Channel against Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen as they ran up the coast in daylight under an air umbrella. He got five boats away of the six he was supposed to have, his own developed engine trouble on the way in, and he sent the others on and fired his torpedoes at the leading battlecruiser anyway. He was decorated for it. Nine months later he was handed a brand new Hunt with torpedo tubes and told to go and do the same thing rather more comfortably.

Escort Duty and Convoy Work

HMS Goathland joined the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow in early 1943 before transferring to Portsmouth that January to join the 15th Destroyer Flotilla, taking up coastal patrol and escort duties in the English Channel and Western Approaches.

In March 1943 she escorted the substantial combined convoy WS 28/KMS 11, carrying troop transports and naval auxiliaries bound for Africa, and later in the year served as escort to capital ships including HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Jamaica, solid, unglamorous work that nonetheless kept vital shipping moving safely through dangerous waters.

That unglamorous reputation took a break on the night of 27 to 28 April 1943, when HMS Goathland and HMS Albrighton ran into a German-Italian convoy off Les Sept Iles on the Brittany coast. Albrighton torpedoed and sank the Italian blockade runner SS Butterfly, while Goathland accounted for the German submarine chaser UJ 1402 with her own gunfire, a genuine surface action rather than the routine convoy shepherding that otherwise filled her logbook.

The two ships that fought that action had rather different afterwards. Albrighton went on to Dieppe, survived the war and ended up serving in the West German navy for another two decades, which is set out in the article on HMS Albrighton (L12). Goathland had fourteen months left. Night actions of this kind, two British destroyers finding a German convoy on the Brittany coast and cutting into it, were the whole point of the Channel forces, and they were fought at ranges where the flash of the guns blinded everybody on both sides.

D-Day off Sword Beach

HMS Goathland sailed as part of military convoy S2 on 5 June 1944, bound for the Normandy invasion beaches.

On D-Day itself, 6 June, with Bordes still in command, HMS Goathland served as headquarters ship for Assault Group 3, leading the group ashore and directing the amphibious landings of the 8th Infantry Brigade off Sword Beach, her radar also pressed into service helping to guide supporting Royal Air Force aircraft over the beachhead. She remained on station through 17 June and later accounted for two German naval mines during subsequent operations, a particularly central role in one of the most consequential single days in the entire war.

Being a headquarters ship on D-Day was a peculiar and demanding job, and it is worth explaining what she was actually doing off Sword. The assault group commander and his staff, army and navy together, were embarked aboard her, and from her bridge and operations room they controlled which landing craft went in and when, kept the beach reporting back, called for naval gunfire where it was needed, and rerouted the follow-up waves when things went wrong, which they did. Her radar was simultaneously being used to direct RAF fighters over the beachhead. A ship doing all that is stationary, close inshore, crammed with people who cannot fight the ship, and conspicuously worth sinking. Goathland held that position from the morning of 6 June to the 17th.

Struck by a Mine

HMS Goathland's own luck ran out on 24 July 1944, when she struck a mine some 17 nautical miles north-north-west of Courseulles off the Normandy coast, the explosion wrecking her shafts and turbines.

The mine that did it was very probably of a kind the Allies had never seen before that summer, and it deserves explaining because it changed minesweeping permanently. The Germans had developed a pressure mine, known to the Allies as the Oyster, by 1943, and had deliberately not used it: the fear was that one would be recovered intact and copied. They released it on the night of 6 and 7 June 1944, into the invasion anchorages. It sits on the bottom and fires on the drop in water pressure that a moving hull drags along under itself, which means no wire will find it, no magnetic loop will set it off and no noisemaker will fool it. There was, and is, no way to sweep one. The only counter available in 1944 was to go slowly enough that the ship did not generate the pressure signature, which in a crowded anchorage full of shipping under air attack was a considerable thing to ask. Off Normandy the type sank four destroyers and two minesweepers and damaged more than twenty-five other vessels, and it went on doing so for months after the beaches were secure.

Limited repairs restored enough mobility to get her back to Portsmouth, but she was never fully repaired, laid up for the remainder of the war as a constructive total loss, a truly sobering fate for a ship that had so recently played a direct role in supporting the invasion she was ultimately damaged defending.

Constructive total loss is a phrase worth translating, because it is an accountant's verdict rather than a sailor's. It does not mean the ship was destroyed; it means the cost of putting her right came to more than she was worth, and in the summer of 1944 a two-year-old Hunt with her shafts and turbines wrecked was competing for dockyard space against damaged ships that could be back at sea in weeks. So she was towed home, tied up, and quietly stopped being a warship at the age of two, while the people of Axbridge went on holding her plaque. She had under two years of active service in all, and one of the days in it was the sixth of June.

The End

HMS Goathland was declared surplus once the war in Europe ended and sold to BISCO for scrapping, broken up by the West of Scotland Shipbreaking Company at Troon from February 1946, closing out the career of a destroyer whose service, from convoy escort to D-Day and finally to her own crippling encounter with a German mine, captured a good deal of the Hunt class's wartime experience in a single hull.