HMS Hasty (H24): Eleven Battle Honours in Less Than Three Years

Built at Dumbarton

HMS Hasty was ordered from William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton on the Clyde on 13 December 1934, one of the nine destroyers of the H Class built under the 1934 programme. She was laid down on 15 April 1935, launched on 5 May 1936 and completed on 11 November 1936.

The H Class were a development of the G Class, about 1,340 tons with four 4.7 inch guns, eight torpedo tubes and a speed of 36 knots. Her motto was Certe ac celeriter, sure and swift.

She joined the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean, with her sisters Havock, Hostile and the rest, and served with it through the years of the Spanish Civil War and the Munich crisis. The photograph at the top of this page was taken in 1936, the year she was completed, moored to a buoy in pale grey paint with her pennant number large on the bow.

Force K and the Plate

In July 1939 she was given a new captain, Lieutenant Commander Lionel Tyrwhitt, who would command her for the next two and a half years, through every action of 1940 and 1941 described below, and was awarded the DSO and DSC. In October 1939 she was sent to Freetown in West Africa to join Force K, one of the hunting groups formed to track down the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee in the South Atlantic.

When Graf Spee was cornered in Montevideo after the Battle of the River Plate in December, Hasty was among the ships hurried south to the estuary, arriving just after the German captain had scuttled his ship. The story of the cruisers that got there first is told in the article on HMS Cumberland.

She came home in the New Year, and on 12 February 1940 intercepted and captured the German blockade runner Morea off the coast of Spain. After a refit at Devonport she joined the Home Fleet for the Norwegian campaign, came under heavy air attack on the way to Narvik and needed repairs at Dundee, and then escorted the carriers Glorious and Ark Royal off the Norwegian coast.

On 2 May she was at Namsos for the evacuation, under constant bombing.

Calabria and Cape Spada

On 16 May 1940 she was ordered back to the Mediterranean, and was at Alexandria when Italy entered the war in June. On 9 July she was with the fleet at the Battle of Calabria, the first meeting of the British and Italian battle fleets, while covering a Malta convoy.

Ten days later, off Cape Spada at the north west corner of Crete, she was one of four destroyers with the Australian cruiser Sydney when they met two Italian cruisers. Sydney's gunfire crippled the Bartolomeo Colleoni, the destroyers' torpedoes finished her, and the British ships between them picked up some 525 of her crew from the water before Italian bombers drove them off.

On 2 October, off the Egyptian coast, Hasty and Havock found and sank the Italian submarine Berillo, and picked up her crew, captain included. In November she screened HMS Illustrious on the night the carrier's Swordfish crippled the Italian battle fleet at Taranto.

Just before Christmas she was escorting Malaya through the Sicilian Narrows when her sister Hyperion was mined and lost, and she went on to Gibraltar.

1941

In January 1941 she came back east with Operation Excess, and was with the fleet when German dive bombers crippled Illustrious west of Malta; she was one of the two destroyers that escorted the burning carrier into Grand Harbour. In March she was at Cape Matapan, where the story of the night action is told in the article on HMS Greyhound.

In April she helped cover the bombardment of Tripoli and then joined in taking the army off Greece.

When the Germans invaded Crete in May, she was with Force D, the cruisers and destroyers sent to stop the seaborne invasion. On the night of 21 May they caught a convoy of caiques and small steamers carrying German troops north of Canea, and sank three ships and a dozen caiques.

A week later she was taking soldiers off the island under heavy air attack, in the evacuation that cost the fleet so many ships, among them Hereward. In June and July she was off Syria for the campaign against the Vichy French, giving gunfire support to the army ashore, and then for the rest of the year she was one of the destroyers on the Tobruk run, carrying men and supplies into the besieged port by night.

On 17 December she was in the First Battle of Sirte, when the escort of the supply ship Breconshire fought off the Italian fleet in the Gulf of Sirte, and on 23 December, under her new captain, Lieutenant Commander Nigel Austen, she and her sister Hotspur found and sank the German submarine U-79 with depth charges north of Sollum, on the Tobruk run.

U-79 had sailed from Salamis only two days before; on her previous patrol she had fired at the battleship Queen Elizabeth and missed. All forty four of her crew were picked up. She was the first U-boat sunk in the eastern Mediterranean.

The German submarines sent into the Mediterranean that autumn had already sunk the carrier Ark Royal and the battleship Barham.

Sirte and Vigorous

In February 1942 she was adopted by the people of Scarborough after the town's Warship Week. On 22 March she was part of the close escort of convoy MW10 for Malta when the Italian fleet, led by the battleship Littorio, came out to destroy it.

In the Second Battle of Sirte the cruisers and destroyers held the Italians off for hours, in a full gale, with torpedo attacks and smoke screens, and the convoy got through. Hasty was badly knocked about by the weather and needed repairs. Her sister Havock was hit by a near miss from Littorio in the same action.

In June 1942 two convoys were sent to Malta at once, Harpoon from Gibraltar and Vigorous from Alexandria. Hasty sailed with the Vigorous covering force on 12 June, and for two days the convoy was bombed almost without a break while the Italian fleet put to sea against it.

In the early hours of 15 June, west of Crete, German E-boats attacked. The cruiser Newcastle was torpedoed, and a couple of hours later the E-boat S-55 hit Hasty on the port side forward. Her bow was wrecked, fire broke out in her forward boiler room and she began to flood.

She could not steam ahead, and with the convoy under attack there was no chance of towing her. Her sister Hotspur took off her ship's company and then sank her with a torpedo. Thirteen of her men were lost. Vigorous itself was turned back to Alexandria that day.

Eleven Battle Honours

Her battle honours, Atlantic 1939, Norway 1940, Calabria 1940, Spada 1940, Mediterranean 1940 to 1941, Matapan 1941, Greece 1941, Crete 1941, Libya 1941 to 1942, Sirte 1942 and Malta Convoys 1941 to 1942, make eleven in less than three years of war, a remarkable record for any ship. Her sisters are in the H Class destroyers collection, among them Havock, which shared the Berillo with her and fought beside her at Sirte.