HMS Haydon (L75): Escorting the Fleet Through Force H's Mediterranean Campaign

Built on the Tyne

HMS Haydon was ordered on 28 July 1940 and built by Vickers-Armstrong at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, laid down on 1 May 1941, launched on 2 April 1942 and commissioned on 24 October that year, a Type III Hunt-class escort destroyer, one of a class traditionally named after British fox hunts, designed for exactly the kind of demanding, unglamorous convoy and fleet escort work that made up the bulk of naval service during the Second World War.

The Type III part of that description matters more than it looks. The Hunts had begun badly, with a design fault that made the first of them dangerously unstable and had to be corrected on ships already being built, a story set out in the article on HMS Eglinton (L87). By the third batch the Admiralty had not only fixed the problem but changed the ship's purpose, taking out one of the twin 4-inch mountings and putting torpedo tubes in its place, as described in the article on HMS Goathland (L27). That is why a small escort of this kind could be sent to work with battleships and carriers in the Mediterranean rather than plodding up and down the East Coast: she had the legs, the anti-aircraft armament and now the torpedoes to be useful in a fleet screen.

Lieutenant Roland Chisnell Watkin commanded her from July 1942 through to November 1943, seeing her through the busiest stretch of her wartime career.

Force H in the Mediterranean

Before heading south, HMS Haydon spent November 1942 working up with the fleet at Scapa Flow, escorting the battleship HMS Howe on local passages and taking part in underway refuelling exercises with her, a useful rehearsal for the job she would spend most of the next two years doing much further afield.

HMS Haydon spent the bulk of 1942 and 1943 operating in the Gibraltar and North African theatre as part of the famous Force H, the powerful Royal Navy squadron responsible for controlling the western Mediterranean throughout the war.

Force H was an unusual formation and worth understanding properly, because it existed only because France had collapsed. Until June 1940 the western Mediterranean had been the French Navy's responsibility; the armistice removed that at a stroke and left a hole between Gibraltar and Malta that nobody was filling. The Admiralty's answer, put together at the end of that month under Vice Admiral James Somerville, was a self-contained squadron based at Gibraltar with its own battleships, its own carrier and its own escorts, reporting directly to London rather than through any station commander-in-chief. That independence was the point: Force H could be sent east into the Mediterranean or west into the Atlantic at a few hours' notice, and it was used as the theatre's fire brigade for three years. It destroyed the French squadron at Mers-el-Kebir, it provided the carrier whose aircraft crippled Bismarck's steering, it fought the Malta convoys through, it covered the Madagascar landings and it covered Sicily. It was disbanded in October 1943, a few months into Haydon's time with it, once the Italian surrender meant there was no longer anybody to contest the sea it had been created to hold.

In between, that December, she escorted the giant troop convoy WS 25 out past the Azores, refuelling at Ponta Delgada before handing over to other escorts as the convoy pressed on toward Freetown and Durban, a reminder that even a Mediterranean-based escort destroyer's working life could stretch across half the Atlantic when the job demanded it.

The WS series she picked up in the Atlantic had a name of its own in the fleet: they were the Winston Specials. These were the fast troop convoys that ran from Britain round the Cape of Good Hope to the Middle East and India, because the Mediterranean was too dangerous to send an army through, and they were made up of the great prewar passenger liners taken up as troopships. A WS convoy could carry ten or twelve thousand men in a dozen or so hulls, moving at over twenty knots, which was fast enough that no U-boat could follow one; the risk was not being chased but being intercepted, which is why they went out under battleship and carrier escort. Getting a division from Liverpool to Suez that way took upwards of two months and something like twelve thousand miles of steaming. Haydon took WS 25 as far as the Azores and handed over, which was how the system worked: escorts joined for the leg they were fuelled for and passed the convoy on like a baton.

Her duties included escorting major capital ships such as the battleship HMS Howe and the aircraft carrier HMS Formidable, both part of Force H's heavy covering group on operations such as its 30 May 1943 passage from Gibraltar to Algiers, during refuelling and flying exercises, properly important work protecting the fleet's most valuable assets from submarine and air attack while they carried out their own operations.

HMS Haydon shuttled between Gibraltar, Mers-el-Kebir and Algiers as part of Force H's regular operations, and provided escort for numerous troop convoys in the WS, KMF and KMS series, the vital supply and reinforcement lifelines that kept Allied forces in North Africa and the Mediterranean fed, armed and reinforced throughout the campaign.

She also took part in regular anti-submarine exercises alongside other Allied vessels, the steady training routine that kept escort crews sharp for the real thing.

Sicily, Salerno and the Aegean

Haydon's Mediterranean service went on to earn her battle honours for Sicily and Salerno in 1943, as the Allies carried the war from North Africa onto the Italian mainland, and for the Aegean that same year, as British forces contested the Dodecanese islands with Germany in one of the war's less celebrated campaigns.

That Aegean posting produced one of her more unusual jobs: in January 1944, together with HMS Tetcott, she carried a Turkish naval officer, Commander Orbay, toward the Aegean, rendezvousing with the cruiser HMS Penelope off Cyprus to complete the handover, a small footnote in the wider, largely unsuccessful wartime effort to bring neutral Turkey into the war on the Allied side.

That Aegean battle honour was earned in one of the least successful British operations of the war. After Italy surrendered in September 1943 Churchill pushed for a rapid seizure of the Dodecanese, and British troops took Kos, Leros and Samos without much difficulty. They could not take Rhodes, which had the airfields, and the aircraft that might have covered them had all been committed to Italy and were not released. The Germans then took the islands back one at a time under complete air superiority. The Royal Navy lost six destroyers sunk and several more ships damaged in ten weeks, running men and supplies into islands it could not defend, and the campaign is set out in the article on HMS Eclipse (H08). Haydon came through it. A good many ships doing exactly the same work did not.

The Turkish officer she carried belongs to a diplomatic campaign that ran for two years and got nowhere. Turkey sat on the Dardanelles, bordered the Aegean and had an army of some size, and both sides spent the war courting her. Churchill met President Ismet Inonu in a railway carriage near Adana on 30 and 31 January 1943 and offered a long list of military equipment, the Adana Lists, in exchange for Turkish belligerence; Inonu declined. Churchill tried again at Cairo in December 1943, with Roosevelt present, and was refused again. The Turkish position was entirely rational: they had been ruined by the last war, they were not confident the Allies could protect them from German retaliation or, later, from the Soviet Union, and neutrality was working. Turkey broke off relations with Germany only in August 1944 and declared war on 23 February 1945, by which point the declaration was a formality required for a seat at the United Nations. Ferrying a Turkish commander towards the Aegean in January 1944 was a small piece of a courtship that had already failed twice.

She earned two further battle honours before the war ended, for the invasion of southern France in August 1944 and for North Sea operations in 1945, a fitting final act for a destroyer whose war had begun with a spell in home waters and ended, appropriately enough, back there too.

Later War and Peacetime

HMS Haydon passed through the hands of two further commanding officers as the war progressed, Lieutenant David Arthur Dunbar-Nasmith from November 1943 to January 1944, and Lieutenant Richard George Ralph Clay from January 1944 through to June 1945, seeing her safely through to the war's end still engaged in the same kind of steady escort and patrol work that had defined her entire career.

One of those later captains is worth a note. David Arthur Dunbar-Nasmith took command in November 1943 at the age of twenty-two, and his father was Admiral Sir Martin Dunbar-Nasmith, who had been awarded the Victoria Cross in 1915 for taking the submarine E11 through the Dardanelles minefields and spending ninety-six days loose in the Sea of Marmara sinking Turkish shipping almost within sight of Constantinople. The son won a Distinguished Service Cross of his own for recovering cryptographic material from an Italian submarine off Malta, a job that meant going aboard a sinking enemy boat to get the codebooks before the sea did. He reached rear admiral in 1967 and died in 1997. There is a certain symmetry in a Dunbar-Nasmith commanding a ship in the Aegean thirty years after his father had made his name under it.

The End

HMS Haydon survived the war intact and remained in existence for well over a decade afterward, before finally being scrapped at Dunston on 18 May 1958, closing out the career of a destroyer whose service, while never marked by a single dramatic headline action, had been essential to keeping the Mediterranean sea lanes open during some of the most demanding years of the entire war.