HMS Greyhound (H05): Dunkirk, Matapan's Searchlight and the Kithera Channel

Built at Barrow

HMS Greyhound was one of two G Class destroyers ordered from Vickers-Armstrongs on 5 March 1934 under the 1933 programme. She was laid down on 20 September 1934 alongside her sister Griffin, launched on 15 August 1935 and completed on 1 February 1936, at a cost to the builders of a little under a quarter of a million pounds before the Admiralty fitted her guns and equipment.

Her motto, Carte ac celeriter, means surely and swiftly. Like her sisters she carried four 4.7 inch guns and eight torpedo tubes, and could make 36 knots.

The Mediterranean Years

After a few months working up in home waters with the 20th Destroyer Flotilla she went out to Malta to join the 1st Destroyer Flotilla, and stayed with it for three years. They were the years of the Spanish Civil War, and like the rest of the flotilla she took her turn protecting British merchant ships and on the Non-Intervention patrols.

She came home for a refit at Portsmouth in the summer of 1938. During the Munich crisis that September she escorted the liner Strathnaver from Alexandria to Malta, and in October she took the cruiser Arethusa down the Red Sea to Aden.

Home Waters

She was at Alexandria when war came, and in October 1939 the flotilla, Glowworm, Grafton and the rest, was sent home. After a few weeks at Plymouth she moved to Harwich and the North Sea, and on 12 November, in fog, she collided with her sister Gipsy and went into Sheerness for repairs.

A week later she was picking up survivors from the Dutch liner Simon Bolivar and the collier Torchbearer, both sunk by German mines off the East Coast. On 14 January 1940 she captured the German merchant ship Phaedra, and on 11 February she lost a midshipman and six ratings when her sea boat capsized while taking a boarding party across to a merchant ship in rough weather.

After a refit at Hull she joined the Home Fleet at Scapa, and on 5 April sailed with Glowworm, Hero and Hyperion as the screen for the battlecruiser HMS Renown at the start of the Norwegian campaign. She was still with Renown on 9 April, when the battlecruiser fought Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off the Vestfjord, and stayed in Norwegian waters until the middle of the month. Damaged in an air attack, she was repaired at Gravesend.

Calais and Dunkirk

She came out of the yard on 20 May 1940 into the crisis in France. On 25 May she and Grafton were off Calais, firing in support of the garrison as German armour closed on the town, and two days later she was taken into the Dunkirk evacuation. She brought home 123 men on 28 May and 720 on the 29th.

On her last run, on 29 or 30 May (the records differ), she had several hundred soldiers aboard when German bombers hit her, killing and wounding men of her own company and the troops she was carrying. Unable to steam, she was taken in tow by the Polish destroyer Błyskawica and tugs and brought into Dover.

In all she had lifted some 1,350 men off the beaches and the mole. She was repaired at Chatham and back at Dover by the middle of June.

Force H and Dakar

In July she went south to Gibraltar to join the 13th Destroyer Flotilla and Force H. She escorted the old carrier Argus on the first delivery of Hurricanes to Malta, Operation Hurry, and screened the reinforcements sent through to the Mediterranean Fleet that August.

In September she went with the expedition to Dakar, and on the 23rd, with the Australian cruiser Australia and HMS Fury, drove the French destroyer L'Audacieuse ashore in flames. She escorted Ark Royal home for docking, patrolled off West Africa, and on 4 November attacked and damaged the Italian submarine Bianca off the Azores.

The Mediterranean Fleet

In November 1940 she passed through to Alexandria to join the Mediterranean Fleet, arriving in time to screen a Malta convoy and take part in the brief action with the Italian fleet off Cape Spartivento on the 27th.

In January 1941 she was with the fleet covering Operation Excess when the German dive bombers arrived in Sicily and crippled HMS Illustrious west of Malta, and she was one of the escort that later brought the carrier away to Alexandria.

On 19 January 1941, in the Aegean, she found and sank the Italian submarine Neghelli. On 6 March, escorting an Aegean convoy, she sank another, the Anfitrite, and picked up forty three of her crew. Few destroyers could claim two submarines in seven weeks.

Cape Matapan

On the night of 28 March 1941 the Mediterranean Fleet caught part of the Italian fleet south of Greece after aircraft from HMS Formidable had damaged the battleship Vittorio Veneto and stopped the heavy cruiser Pola.

Two more heavy cruisers, Zara and Fiume, had been sent back with destroyers to help her, and Admiral Cunningham's battleships, Warspite, Valiant and Barham, closed them in the dark without being seen. At the moment the battleships opened fire it was Greyhound's searchlight that swung on to the Italian cruiser Fiume and held her, so that the 15 inch guns fired at a lit target at under 4,000 yards. Within minutes Fiume and Zara were wrecked and burning.

Later that night Greyhound, with Griffin, Havock and the Australian destroyer Stuart, went in among the Italian destroyers, and between them they sank the Vittorio Alfieri and the Giosuè Carducci. On 17 April, sweeping the North African coast, she sank an Italian sailing vessel off Apollonia, and in May she escorted a convoy to Malta and joined the cover for the Tiger convoy taking tanks to Egypt.

22 May 1941

The German airborne invasion of Crete began on 20 May. The fleet's task was to stop the seaborne part of it, troops crossing from Greece in caiques and small steamers, and it had to do so within easy reach of the German dive bombers.

On the morning of 22 May Greyhound was with the battleships west of Crete when she was detached to sink a caique in the Kithera Channel. She had done so and was rejoining when Junkers 87 dive bombers caught her about eight miles north west of the island of Antikithera. She was hit by three bombs and sank within minutes.

About eighty of her men were killed. The destroyers Kandahar and Kingston were sent to pick up the survivors, under heavy air attack, and the cruisers Gloucester and Fiji were sent to support them.

Both cruisers had used most of their anti-aircraft ammunition already, and both were sunk that afternoon and evening; the story is told in the article on HMS Fiji.

Greyhound's captain, Commander Walter Marshall-A'Deane, had survived the sinking and been picked up by Kandahar. That evening Kandahar was again rescuing men from the water, this time from Fiji, and he saw a man struggling and dived over the side to help him. He was not seen again.

He was awarded a posthumous Albert Medal, gazetted in November 1941, to add to the DSO and DSC he already held. He had commanded the ship since July 1939, through every one of the actions above.

Her Sisters

Greyhound's sisters fared little better. Of the nine G Class ships, Glowworm, Grenade, Grafton, Gipsy, Grenville and Greyhound were all lost by the summer of 1941, and Gallant was wrecked by a mine off Malta that January.

Griffin, her yard sister, survived to serve the Royal Canadian Navy, and Garland spent most of the war manned by the Polish Navy. The prints in the G Class destroyers collection include several of them, from Glowworm's peacetime portrait to Gipsy in 1936.