HMS Havock (H43): Narvik, Matapan, Sirte and a Prison Camp in the Sahara

The Sixth Havock

HMS Havock was ordered from William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton on 13 December 1934, one of the nine H Class destroyers of the 1934 programme. She was laid down on 15 May 1935, launched on 7 July 1936 and completed in January 1937, and was the sixth ship of the Royal Navy to bear the name since 1796; one of her forebears, the torpedo boat destroyer Havock of 1893, had been the first destroyer of all.

Like her sister Hasty, she joined the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean.

Fired On off Spain

She was in commission only a few months before she came under fire. In the late summer of 1937 the Italian navy, unofficially supporting Franco in the Spanish Civil War, was using submarines to attack shipping bound for Republican Spain, and on a dark night off the Spanish coast the submarine Iride fired a torpedo at Havock, which was on patrol under the Non-Intervention agreement.

It missed. Havock hunted the submarine with her depth charges without result, and the attack on a British warship helped bring about the Nyon Conference that September, at which the Mediterranean powers agreed to patrol the shipping lanes and sink any submarine found attacking merchant ships.

The First Battle of Narvik

When war came she joined Force K at Freetown, hunting raiders and blockade runners with Hasty and Hostile, and in December 1939 came home for a refit at Sheerness. At the end of March 1940 she sailed with Hardy, Hotspur and Hunter as Force WV to cover the laying of mines in the Vestfjord, and so was on the spot when Germany invaded Norway on 9 April.

That evening Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee, in Hardy, was ordered to Narvik, where German destroyers had landed troops. In the snow and darkness of the early morning of 10 April, five British destroyers, Hardy, Hunter, Havock, Hotspur and Hostile, went up the fjord.

Havock, under Lieutenant Commander Rafe Courage, was third into the harbour, where the British ships caught the German destroyers at anchor and refuelling. Her torpedoes are credited in many accounts with breaking the Anton Schmitt in two. On the way out the British ships met five more German destroyers.

Hardy was wrecked and beached, and Warburton-Lee was killed, winning the Victoria Cross; Hunter was sunk and Hotspur badly damaged. Havock turned back to cover them, forced the German ammunition ship Rauenfels ashore, where she blew up, and with Hostile shepherded the crippled Hotspur out of the fjord.

Three days later Warspite and her destroyers went in to finish the job, and on 24 April Havock screened the battleship as she shelled the town.

Holland

When the Germans invaded the Low Countries on 10 May, Havock and Hyperion were sent across to the Dutch coast. They bombarded German troops at Waalhaven airfield outside Rotterdam, picked up survivors of the Dutch ferry Prinses Juliana, sunk by bombing, and on 14 May helped carry refugees away from IJmuiden. Two days later she was ordered to the Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean, 1940

She arrived just before Italy declared war, and was at once screening the battleships and the old carrier Eagle on the fleet's sorties. On 19 July she was one of the destroyers with the Australian cruiser Sydney at Cape Spada, told in the article on HMS Hasty, and on the way home she was bombed and her boiler room flooded, which put her into the dockyard at Suez until September.

On 2 October she and Hasty forced the Italian submarine Berillo to the surface with depth charges off the Egyptian coast, and her crew scuttled her; seven officers and forty men were taken prisoner. In November she screened the fleet for the Taranto raid, and soon afterwards was damaged forward in a collision with the battleship Valiant, and spent the winter under repair at Malta.

Matapan, Greece and Crete

She was back with the fleet in time for the Battle of Cape Matapan on 28 March 1941. Late that night, after the battleships had wrecked the Italian cruisers, she went in with Greyhound, Griffin and the Australian Stuart among the Italian destroyers, and sank the Vittorio Alfieri.

A month later she was taking soldiers off the beaches at Megara and Raphina in the evacuation of Greece, under air attack, and on 7 May she joined Ajax, Hotspur and Imperial in bombarding Benghazi. On 23 May, patrolling off Heraklion during the battle for Crete, she was hit in an air attack that killed fifteen of her men and wounded ten.

The Tobruk Run

After repairs at Alexandria she supported the army in Syria, and then joined the Inshore Squadron, making eight supply runs into besieged Tobruk, voyages made by night along a coast covered by German aircraft. Damage to both her shafts and propellers took her out of service again that autumn.

In December she was in the screen of the cruisers Naiad, Euryalus and Carlisle at the First Battle of Sirte, and on 19 December she was with Force K when the cruisers Neptune, Aurora and Penelope ran into an Italian minefield off Tripoli; Neptune and the destroyer Kandahar were lost, and Havock was lucky to come through. In January 1942 she took off survivors from the supply ship Thermopylae before she sank.

Sirte

On 22 March 1942 she was in the escort of convoy MW10 at the Second Battle of Sirte, when the British cruisers and destroyers held off the battleship Littorio and her cruisers for an afternoon in a rising gale. A 15 inch shell from Littorio burst so close to Havock, if it did not hit her, that it flooded a boiler room and damaged her machinery.

She dropped out of the fight, got going again, and limped into Malta with the convoy.

Malta and Kelibia

Malta in the spring of 1942 was the most bombed place on earth, and the dockyard was the bombers' main target. Havock was hit again while under repair on 3 April, in the same weeks of raids that destroyed Legion, and it was decided to send her to Gibraltar to be finished there rather than lose her where she lay.

She sailed on 5 April with passengers aboard, alone and still not fully repaired, to run the length of the Sicilian Narrows at speed by night.

In the early hours of 6 April she ran aground at high speed on the Tunisian coast near the Kelibia lighthouse. One man was killed.

Her crew destroyed her secret equipment and went ashore, where the Vichy French authorities interned the ship's company and her passengers, as they were obliged to do under the armistice with Germany. They were taken to a camp at Laghouat in the Algerian Sahara, where conditions were later described as horrendous, and were not released until the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942.

Her wreck was left on the shore; a report that an Italian submarine later finished it off has never been confirmed.

Her Sisters

In five years of service she had been under fire in the Spanish Civil War, at Narvik, off Holland, at Spada, Matapan, Greece, Crete, Tobruk and both Battles of Sirte. Her sisters are in the H Class destroyers collection, among them Hunter, lost beside her at Narvik, and Hostile, which helped her get Hotspur away.