HMS Griffin (H31): Enigma off Norway, Matapan, and HMCS Ottawa

Built at Newcastle

HMS Griffin was one of the G Class destroyers of the 1933 programme, ordered from Vickers-Armstrongs in March 1934 and laid down at their Newcastle yard on 30 September 1934 as Yard No. 700. She was launched on 15 August 1935 and completed on 6 March 1936, at a cost to the builder's account of £248,528, the guns, ammunition and wireless being supplied by the Admiralty on top.

She was the sixth ship of the Navy to bear a name first used in 1656, and two merchant ships called Griffin had fought against the Spanish Armada; her battle honours began with Armada 1588 and ran through Beachy Head, Barfleur, Vigo, Velez Malaga and Cape Passaro. Her badge was a golden griffin on a blue field, and her motto, Dentibus ac rostro, means "With teeth and beak".

Before she joined the fleet she was used for comparative trials of propellers to Admiralty and commercial designs. The photograph at the top of this page shows her at anchor in 1936, in pale peacetime grey, before she went out to join the 1st Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean, where she spent the years of the Spanish Civil War.

In January 1939 Lieutenant Commander John Lee-Barber took command of her, and he would keep her for nearly three years.

Rescues in the North Sea

When war came she was escorting the first convoys between Gibraltar, Malta and the Levant, and in October 1939 she came home with Grenade, Grenville and Gipsy to join the 22nd Destroyer Flotilla at Harwich. Her first months there were marked by the losses of her sisters.

She was damaged at Harwich on 17 November and sent to a London shipyard for repair, and on 21 November she helped pick up the survivors of Gipsy, broken in two by a magnetic mine at the harbour entrance. On 19 January 1940, with Grenade, she searched for the survivors of the flotilla leader Grenville, mined 23 miles east of the Kentish Knock light vessel, and between them they picked up 113 men.

On 2 February, escorting the southbound East Coast convoy FS 84 with Gallant, she stood by the tanker British Councillor, torpedoed by a U-boat, while Gallant took off her crew.

The Polares

In April 1940 she went north with the Home Fleet for Norway, and on 14 April she was in the screen of the battleship Valiant and the repair ship Vindictive covering the troop convoy bound first for Narvik and then for Namsos. Late that month, off the Norwegian coast, a lookout in Griffin sighted a trawler with a large Dutch flag painted on her side, under the name Polares.

She was in fact the German Schiff 26, carrying mines and supplies for the German forces in Norway; the boat at her stern was a canvas dummy hiding a gun, and two torpedo tubes lay barely covered under her fishing nets.

The first lieutenant, Alec Dennis, led the boarding party. The Germans were brought on deck at pistol point and did not resist, but they had already thrown their confidential books, cipher papers and charts over the side.

Not all of them sank at once, and Griffin's gunner, Florrie Foord, dived from the quarterdeck to bring them back. Dennis made safe a booby-trapped magazine hatch, which one of the German crew warned him about in English, and sailed the prize to Scapa Flow himself, with a German helmsman beside him and a petty officer watching the German stokers.

On the way, a large Bavarian cook fed the prize crew from the stores the trawler had loaded in Denmark, and Dennis admitted that he "couldn't resist flying the White Ensign over the Swastika." Among the papers saved from the sea and found on board were settings for the German naval Enigma machine, and they helped Bletchley Park make its first break into the naval cipher, the start of the long road that led to the reading of the U-boat signals.

On 2 May Griffin was in the evacuation of Namsos, with the cruisers Devonshire, York, Carlisle and the French Montcalm.

Gibraltar

After the fall of France she covered the evacuations from the French ports and the Channel convoys, and was in action with German aircraft off Dover on 19 July. Lee-Barber received the DSO that month.

At the end of July she joined the 13th Destroyer Flotilla at Gibraltar, and at the end of August she screened the carrier Illustrious and the battleship Valiant as they passed into the Mediterranean to join Cunningham's fleet.

On 20 October, with Gallant and Hotspur, she sank the Italian submarine Lafolè north of Melilla, whose patrol line had been given away by papers taken from the Durbo by Firedrake two days before.

Matapan, Greece and Crete

In November she sailed for Alexandria and the 14th Destroyer Flotilla with the reinforcements for the Mediterranean Fleet, and from then until 1942 she was rarely out of action. In January 1941 she screened the battleships at the bombardment of Bardia, and on 10 January, during the Excess convoy, she helped bring the mined Gallant into Malta.

In March she escorted the Malta convoy MW 6 through sustained air attacks.

On the night of 28 March she was at the Battle of Cape Matapan. After the battleships had smashed the Italian heavy cruisers, the destroyers went in to finish the cripples, and with Greyhound and Havock, Griffin helped sink the Italian destroyers Vittorio Alfieri and Giosuè Carducci in the darkness.

In April she bombarded Sollum with the Australian Stuart and the river gunboat Gnat, and then went to the evacuation of Greece.

Sent with the cruiser Coventry to bring troops out from Megara, near Corinth, in the transports Pennland and Thurland Castle, she came under heavy air attack in which the Pennland was sunk, and rescued some three hundred of her men, with about fifty more from the destroyers Diamond and Wryneck, both sunk off Nauplia.

She towed the damaged store carrier Glenearn out of Suda Bay and escorted the damaged submarine Rover to Alexandria. In May she was in the evacuation of Crete, taking troops off from Suda Bay and Sphakia; on one passage she carried 720 soldiers. Alec Dennis received the DSC for his service in Greek waters.

Syria, Tobruk and the Fleet

In June and July she supported the campaign against the Vichy French in Syria, shelling vehicles on the coast road between Haifa and Beirut and screening the cruisers as they bombarded. Through the late summer and autumn she was on the Tobruk run, carrying troops, mail and supplies into the besieged port by night under air attack, and helping to replace the Australian garrison with Polish and British troops.

On 21 October, with Jaguar, she took off men from the gunboat Gnat, torpedoed north of Bardia, and towed her until tugs arrived off Mersa Matruh.

On 19 November Lee-Barber, who had won a bar to his DSO, handed over to Captain Hugh Nicolson. Six days later Griffin was in the screen when U-331 torpedoed the battleship Barham, which blew up and sank in less than five minutes with the loss of 862 men, and on 14 December she picked up 144 survivors of the cruiser Galatea, torpedoed by U-557 off Alexandria.

Four days later, after Italian human torpedoes had crippled Queen Elizabeth and Valiant inside Alexandria harbour, she was hunting for more of them.

The Indian Ocean and Vigorous

In January 1942 she escorted a Malta convoy from Alexandria, and in February she covered the disastrous MW 9 convoy, whose ships were overwhelmed by air attack.

That month she was sent with Decoy, Havock, Hasty, Hotspur and Hero to the Eastern Fleet in Ceylon, and at the end of March she was in Force B, with the old battleships and the carrier Hermes, searching for the Japanese carrier force that raided Ceylon in April; the fleet was then withdrawn to East Africa.

In May she brought the old battleship Centurion, disguised as a modern King George V class battleship, round to Alexandria to act as a decoy for the next Malta convoy, and in June she was in the screen of that convoy, Operation Vigorous, which was turned back after days of air and E-boat attack in which Hasty, the cruiser Hermione and the Australian Nestor were lost.

HMCS Ottawa

After another spell in the Indian Ocean she came home by way of Freetown, and from November 1942 she was refitted at Southampton as an anti-submarine escort: two of her guns gave way to a Hedgehog forward and extra depth charges aft, with Type 271 and 286 radar and more Oerlikons.

On 1 March 1943 she was transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy, commissioned as HMCS Griffin on 20 March, and on 10 April renamed Ottawa, in memory of the Canadian destroyer of that name sunk by a U-boat in September 1942, though her captain objected to giving up her old name. She was formally handed over to Canada as a gift on 10 June 1943.

She led the 5th Canadian Escort Group from St John's on the mid-ocean convoys between Newfoundland and Britain through 1943 and into 1944, and in May 1944 she became senior officer's ship of the 11th Escort Group, with the Canadian destroyers Chaudière, Gatineau, Kootenay and St Laurent, sent to Plymouth to keep the U-boats out of the Channel during the Normandy landings.

Her sister Foxhound, by then HMCS Qu'Appelle, was in the same work.

That summer she had her greatest successes. On 6 July 1944, with Kootenay and the corvette Statice, she sank U-678 south west of Brighton with depth charges; none of the 52 men aboard survived.

On 18 August, with Kootenay and Chaudière, she sank U-621 in the Bay of Biscay west of La Rochelle, with all 56 of her crew; U-621 had sunk four merchant ships in her career.

Two days later the same three ships attacked another U-boat off Brest, long credited as U-984, though later research by Axel Niestlé and Innes McCartney found that U-984 had probably been lost in the Channel some weeks before, from a cause still unknown.

She refitted at St John's that winter, was damaged in a collision with the corvette Stratford during an anti-submarine sweep off Halifax in March 1945, and after VE Day was used to carry Canadian servicemen home from Britain. She was paid off at Sydney, Nova Scotia, on 31 October 1945 and sold in August 1946 for breaking up, after one of the longest and most varied war records of any of her class. Her sisters are in the G Class destroyers collection.