HMS Hardy (R08): Lost Escorting an Arctic Convoy

Built on the Clyde

HMS Hardy was ordered on 1 September 1941 and built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down on 14 May 1942, launched on 18 March 1943 and completed on 14 August that year, a V-class destroyer fitted out as a flotilla leader and commissioned into a Royal Navy still deep in the grinding, unglamorous business of keeping the Arctic convoy route to Russia open against determined U-boat and Luftwaffe opposition.

The way she was built and named is worth explaining, because it says a good deal about how the Royal Navy fought the war. Wartime destroyer construction was organised into fourteen War Emergency Flotillas, each of eight ships to the same drawings, and each flotilla was given names beginning with the same letter so that everybody from the Admiralty down could tell at a glance which ship belonged with which. Hardy's flotilla was the V: Venus, Verulam, Vigilant, Virago, Valentine, Vixen and Volage. The eighth ship, the leader, was allowed a proper name out of the history books instead, and was built with extra accommodation in her for the flotilla commander, Captain D, and the staff he needed to run the other seven. That is why a destroyer of 1943 is carrying the name of Nelson's flag captain while her sisters are all called after the letter V, and it is why three of the ships that came to pull her people out of the water on the last morning of her life were Venus, Vigilant and Virago. They were her own flotilla.

Escorting Convoy JW 56A

Hardy's war centred on that gruelling Arctic run. Her first captain, Lieutenant Commander Richard Horncastle, worked her up from July 1943, before Captain William Geoffrey Arthur Robson took over on 10 December, flying his broad pennant aboard her as commander of the 26th Destroyer Flotilla, a job that had already cost him one ship: he had been in command of HMS Kandahar when she was fatally mined off Tripoli in December 1941 while trying to rescue the stricken cruiser HMS Neptune.

Robson had been through something considerably worse than most captains ever see. On the night of 19 December 1941, Force K, the Malta striking force, ran into an uncharted minefield off Tripoli in the dark. The cruiser Neptune hit four mines and went down with all but one of her ship's company, 764 men, and Kandahar, Robson's own ship, was mined while trying to get to her. He got most of his people off and the ship was sunk by a British torpedo the following day. What happened to Neptune is set out in the article on HMS Neptune (20). Two years later, in a different ocean and a worse climate, he was standing on the bridge of another ship that was about to be torpedoed under him.

As Robson's flagship, Hardy was serving as Senior Officer of the Escort for Convoy JW 56A, one of twenty merchant ships that had sailed from Loch Ewe on 12 January 1944 carrying vital war material to the Soviet Union, sheltering briefly at Akureyri in Iceland before pressing on toward the Kola Inlet with a cruiser covering force of HMS Kent and HMS Bermuda standing further off.

The convoy ran straight into a waiting line of ten U-boats, codenamed Gruppe Isengrim, on 25 January, and over the next twelve hours seven of them mounted seventeen separate attacks. The first ship hit was the destroyer HMS Obdurate, torpedoed by U-360 and damaged badly enough to have to leave the convoy; the Liberty ship Penelope Barker was sunk the same day by U-278, the very boat that would sink Hardy five days later. The following day U-716 sank the Andrew G. Curtin and U-360 crippled the Fort Bellingham, which was finished off a few hours afterwards by U-957.

That U-boat line existed because the Germans had run out of other options. A month earlier, on 26 December 1943, the battlecruiser Scharnhorst had gone after a convoy on this same route and been sunk off the North Cape with almost her entire crew. The Luftwaffe in northern Norway had been steadily thinned out for other fronts. What was left was the U-boat arm, and the ten boats of Gruppe Isengrim strung across the Norwegian Sea were the last serious German attempt to close the Arctic route. Seventeen attacks in twelve hours by seven boats, against a convoy with a strong escort and a cruiser force in support, produced three merchant ships sunk and two escorts hit. Set against what a wolf pack could have done to the same convoy in 1942, it was a failure, and JW 56A got to Kola on 28 January. That was the pattern of the last eighteen months of the campaign: the Germans kept coming and kept not achieving very much, and the price of that was paid one ship at a time by people like Hardy's.

Torpedoed by U-278

On 30 January 1944, at 3.57 in the morning and at a position north of the Arctic Circle, 73 degrees 40 minutes North, 24 degrees 30 minutes East, Hardy was struck by a G7es acoustic homing torpedo, nicknamed the Gnat, fired by the German submarine U-278.

Her fellow destroyers HMS Venus, HMS Vigilant and HMS Virago moved in to rescue survivors from the freezing waters, a race against time in conditions that gave little margin for error. Among those helped off her was Engineering Artificer Fred Pearce, who by his own family's account went back down below more than once after the torpedo struck to make sure his junior engine room ratings had got out safely before he himself left the sinking ship.

The phrase little margin for error is doing a great deal of work there. A man in the water off Bear Island in January could expect to live two or three minutes; not to be rescued in two or three minutes, but to be alive at the end of them. Air temperatures went below minus thirty, spray froze as it landed, and ships' companies had to go out onto the upper deck in the dark with hammers and steam hoses to chip ice off the superstructure, because the accumulated weight up high would eventually roll a destroyer over. The route itself was dictated by the ice. In summer the pack retreated north and a convoy could keep its distance from the German airfields in Norway, but there was no darkness to hide in; in winter there was darkness, but the ice pushed the whole convoy south into the aircraft and the waiting submarines. There was never a good time to make the passage, only different kinds of bad, and Hardy was making it in the worst month of the year.

The weapon that killed her was the one thing the Germans had introduced that genuinely worried the escort commanders. The G7es was an acoustic torpedo that steered itself towards the loudest propeller noise it could hear, and it had been designed specifically to kill escorts rather than merchant ships, on the reasoning that a convoy with no escort could be destroyed at leisure. What it was and how the Royal Navy learned to defeat it, by towing a set of noisy metal bars astern to give it something more attractive to chase, is described in the article on HMS Asphodel (K56). It also explains the confusion in the German records that night. An acoustic torpedo that fails to find a target eventually runs out of fuel and detonates, and to a submarine listening on hydrophones several miles away that sounds exactly like a hit. Three separate boats logged a destroyer sunk. Only one of them was right.

Hardy herself finally went down at 5.24am, almost ninety minutes after being hit, sunk by a coup de grace torpedo from HMS Venus once it was clear she could not be saved. The German side never quite worked out who deserved the credit: at least three separate U-boats independently logged what they believed was their own successful hit on a destroyer that night, when in truth only U-278's original torpedo had actually found its mark, the rest either missing entirely or mistaking the sound of Venus's own final shot for one of theirs.

The attack claimed the lives of 35 of her crew, a sober reminder of just how costly the Arctic convoy route proved even for the escorts meant to protect it.

HMS Virago herself sustained bow damage during the rescue effort, later repaired by Russian dockworkers once the convoy reached Murmansk, a small footnote that speaks to the genuine Allied cooperation underpinning the entire Arctic convoy effort.

The convoy's escorts took a measure of revenge that same day: depth charges from HMS Whitehall and HMS Meteor, aimed at a different U-boat entirely, sank U-314 almost exactly where Hardy herself had gone down. Her survivors, Pearce among them, were carried home from the Kola Inlet aboard HMS Savage, while Robson went on, remarkably, to a long and highly decorated career, eventually retiring as a Vice-Admiral and serving as Lieutenant-Governor of Guernsey, having somehow parlayed the loss of two ships under his own command in barely two years into a knighthood rather than a court martial.

The boat that sank her outlived her by nearly two years and then died in a peculiarly bleak way. U-278 had been commissioned in January 1943 under Joachim Franze, who commanded her for her entire career and was still aboard at the German surrender; he spent the next two years in a prisoner of war camp in Northumberland and went home in June 1947. His boat was brought to Loch Eriboll in May 1945 with the rest of the surrendered fleet, and was one of 116 U-boats the Allies decided simply to destroy rather than divide up, taken out into the Atlantic north-west of Ireland in the winter of 1945 and sunk. The plan had been to scuttle them tidily with demolition charges; the weather was so bad that roughly half foundered under tow before they got there and most of the rest had to be shot to pieces. U-278 went down on 31 December 1945 under gunfire from a British destroyer and a Polish one. Her last recorded act as a warship had been to put a torpedo into a British destroyer in the dark off Bear Island, and thirty-five men are still where she left them.