HMS Grafton (H89): Sunk While Rescuing the Survivors of Another Sinking Ship

Constructed at Woolston

HMS Grafton was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston, Hampshire, laid down on 30 August 1934, launched on 18 September 1935 and completed on 20 March 1936, a G-class destroyer built at a cost of £248,485, a substantial sum at the time, equivalent to somewhere in the region of £22 million today.

She joined the 1st Destroyer Flotilla of the Mediterranean Fleet, and between August and September 1936 escorted the yacht carrying King Edward VIII on an eastern Mediterranean cruise, a prestigious early duty before she went on to patrol Spanish waters during the Spanish Civil War, enforcing the international non-intervention policy that, in practice, satisfied almost nobody involved in that brutal conflict.

The non-intervention patrols are worth a word, because they produced one of the odder episodes of the 1930s. Through 1937 merchant ships trading with Republican Spain were being torpedoed in the Mediterranean by submarines that nobody would admit to owning; they were Italian, everybody knew they were Italian, and Italy denied it. Rather than accuse Mussolini directly, the powers met at Nyon in September 1937 and agreed to treat the attacks as piracy, with British and French warships authorised to hunt and sink any submarine found attacking a merchant ship. The attacks stopped almost at once. It was a piece of diplomatic theatre that worked, and it is the sort of duty a destroyer of Grafton's generation spent the late 1930s on: patrolling a war that officially was not happening, on behalf of an agreement that carefully named nobody.

The Fall of France

HMS Grafton transferred to British waters following the outbreak of war in September 1939, serving with various destroyer flotillas on contraband inspection and convoy escort duties.

In the spring of 1940 she escorted convoys to Norway and took part in operations supporting the desperate defence of Calais, before, on 27 May, evacuating over 1,600 troops from the beaches near Dunkirk as the British Expeditionary Force fell back toward the coast.

Getting to and from the beaches was itself half the problem, and the geography explains everything that happened to her. There were three swept routes between Dunkirk and Dover. Route Z was the direct one at 39 sea miles, and it ran within range of the German batteries that had just taken Calais. Route X, at 55 miles, went through a heavily mined stretch that had to be cleared first. That left Route Y, which was 87 miles: east along the coast to Bray-Dunes, north-east to the Kwinte Buoy off Ostend, then an enormous turn to the west and round the Goodwin Sands to Dover. It was the easiest to navigate and it carried most of the traffic, and it took a crowded, slow, deep-laden ship on a predictable course past a stretch of the Belgian coast that German E-boats and U-boats could reach very easily indeed. The Kwinte Buoy is where the trouble was.

Torpedoed While Rescuing Survivors

HMS Grafton's own end came just two days later, on 29 May 1940, in one of the more harrowing episodes of the entire evacuation. While pulling survivors from the sinking destroyer HMS Wakeful out of the water off Nieuwpoort in Belgium, she was herself struck by a torpedo fired by the German submarine U-62.

What had happened to Wakeful is the part of this story that ought to be better known. She had come out on Route Y with 640 soldiers aboard, most of them asleep below decks because there was nowhere else to put them, and at about twenty to one in the morning, just past the Kwinte Whistle Buoy, the German E-boat S-30 put two torpedoes into her amidships. She broke in two and went down in fifteen seconds. Her captain got off, twenty-five of her ship's company got off, and of the 640 soldiers exactly one survived. Grafton, coming up astern on the same route, stopped in the middle of that to pick men out of the water, which is why she was lying motionless in a known submarine area when U-62 found her.

And she was not empty when she stopped, which is the detail that makes the decision so hard to read about. Grafton had lifted around eight hundred men off the beach at Bray-Dunes and still had every one of them aboard. So what her captain actually did, in the dark, twenty-five miles north-east of Dunkirk, in water where a destroyer had been torpedoed minutes earlier and where whatever did it was presumably still present, was stop a ship carrying eight hundred soldiers, because there were men in the sea. Nobody who has ever had to make that decision describes it as a difficult one at the time, and everybody who studies it afterwards can see exactly what it costs.

The boat that found her was a very small one, and her record is worth setting beside the result. U-62 was a Type IIC coastal submarine, built at Kiel and commissioned on 21 December 1939 under Kapitänleutnant Hans-Bernhard Michalowski. She made five war patrols in the whole course of the war and sank precisely two things: HMS Grafton on 29 May 1940 and one merchant ship that July. Michalowski died in the military hospital at Bielefeld in May 1941, in circumstances nobody recorded. The boat was taken off operations in October 1941 and spent the rest of the war as a training boat with the 21st Flotilla, and was scuttled at Wilhelmshaven on 2 May 1945, days before the end. A coastal submarine that achieved almost nothing else in six years of war accounted for a modern British destroyer, and did it because that destroyer had stopped.

The blast tore off her stern, though remarkably the ship remained afloat and on an even keel, before a second, unexplained explosion tore through her bridge, killing her commanding officer, Commander Cecil Edmund Charles Robinson, another officer, thirteen ratings and the ship's canteen manager.

The chaos that followed was itself tragic: in the confusion after the second explosion, friendly fire from nearby vessels sank the small drifter Comfort, which had been attempting to assist. HMS Ivanhoe managed to take off HMS Grafton's remaining survivors, but with her hull broken and no realistic prospect of towing her to safety, HMS Grafton was finally sunk, her wreck today lying in around 24 metres of water off the Belgian coast, a stark reminder that even the act of rescue itself carried mortal danger during the desperate days of Dunkirk.

Her loss had a consequence that reached well beyond one ship. Grafton, Wakeful and Grenade were all sunk on 29 May and six more destroyers were damaged, and the Admiralty, watching its modern destroyer force being spent on a beach, ordered the newest ships withdrawn from the operation altogether. Vice Admiral Ramsay at Dover protested that this took away more lifting capacity than the evacuation could survive, and he got six of them back. A very large share of the men brought home from Dunkirk came out in destroyers, so the argument mattered a great deal. HMS Grenade went the same day, in Dunkirk harbour itself, as told in the article on HMS Grenade (H86), and HMS Ivanhoe, which took off Grafton's survivors and then sank her, was herself bombed at Dunkirk days later and lost off the Texel that autumn, as described in the article on HMS Ivanhoe (D16).

The name went back to sea twice more. A Type 14 anti-submarine frigate carried it through twelve quiet Cold War years hunting Soviet submarines out of Portland and Londonderry, as set out in the article on HMS Grafton (F51), and a Type 23 frigate carried it from 1997 until she was sold to Chile, which is covered in the article on HMS Grafton (F80). Of the three, this is the one that stopped to pick people up.

The confusion in the dark that night is worth setting down in full, because it is as bleak an illustration of the fog of war as the whole operation produced. The drifter Comfort had picked up twenty-two men from Wakeful, among them Wakeful's own captain, Commander Ralph Fisher. When Grafton was torpedoed, the ships around her began looking for an E-boat, and what they found in the darkness was the low silhouette of Comfort. She was fired on, and the minesweeper Lydd ran her down and rammed her. Fisher, who had already been sunk once that night, went into the water a second time, swam clear of his second sinking ship of the night, and was picked up some hours after that. He survived the war, retired as a Rear Admiral in 1957 and wrote the whole thing up himself. Whether the second explosion aboard Grafton, the one that killed her captain on the bridge, was another torpedo or gunfire from her own side has never been settled.

Both ships are still where they went down, and both are war graves. Wakeful lies off the Belgian coast towards Zeebrugge with something over seven hundred people in her, most of them soldiers who had already got themselves off one beach. Grafton lies in about twenty-four metres not very far away. Under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986 the Ministry of Defence can designate the wreck of a British military vessel as a protected place, which may be dived but not disturbed, or as a controlled site, which may not be entered at all without a licence.

That Act exists because of nights like 29 May 1940. Two destroyers went to the bottom within a few hours of each other in the same few square miles of shallow, busy water, a drifter was rammed and sunk by her own side in between, and a great many of the dead were men whose war had consisted of walking to the coast and getting into a boat. There was never any realistic question of recovering any of them. The sea keeps the graves, and since 1986 the law has at least kept the sea.