HMS Hereward (H93): She Evacuated a Queen, Then Went Down Off Crete

Built on the Tyne

HMS Hereward was laid down on 28 February 1935 at the High Walker yard of Vickers-Armstrongs on the Tyne, launched on 10 March 1936 and completed that December, at a cost of £249,591 excluding government-supplied armament, a properly substantial sum for a single destroyer.

She was one of the H class, nine destroyers of the 1934 programme built on a design the Royal Navy had settled into and was content with: fast, seaworthy, well armed for their size, and cheap enough to build in numbers. The design was good enough that Brazil ordered six more of them from British yards in 1938, and good enough that Britain simply took all six when war came, as described in the article on HMS Havant (H32). Of the original nine, most did not survive the war. That is the underlying fact about interwar British destroyers: they were extremely good ships used far past what any peacetime planner had imagined, in a war where a destroyer was the thing you sent when there was nothing else to send.

She joined the Mediterranean Fleet on completion, before transferring to the South Atlantic in October 1939 to help hunt German commerce raiders and blockade runners as the newly declared war began to bite.

Capturing a Blockade Runner, Rescuing a Queen

HMS Hereward's early war record included a genuine success: on 5 November 1939, she captured the German blockade runner Uhenfels, a valuable interception denying Germany a shipment of goods it badly needed. Hereward was one of the destroyers screening Force K, built around the battlecruiser Renown and the carrier Ark Royal, when one of Ark Royal's own aircraft spotted the blockade runner around 300 miles west-southwest of Freetown; Uhenfels's crew tried to scuttle her rather than let her be taken, but a boarding party from Hereward got aboard in time to save the ship, which was brought into Freetown as a prize the following day.

Early 1940 brought a mix of routine convoy screening, everything from troopships to, rather more solemnly, the ashes of Canada's own Governor General on their way home for burial, followed by two much sharper jobs off Norway: escorting the cruiser Suffolk during Operation Duck's bombardment of the German-held airfield at Stavanger on 17 April, an operation Suffolk barely survived after German bombers caught her on the way home, and then helping cover the Royal Navy's evacuation of troops from Namsos in early May as the Norwegian campaign collapsed.

Her most historically striking moment, however, came on 13 May 1940, when she took part in the evacuation of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and her family from their country as German forces overran it, a particularly dramatic piece of naval diplomacy carried out amid the chaos of the German invasion. Hereward collected the Queen and her family from the Hook of Holland, itself already burning under German attack, and sailed for Harwich that evening while a company of Royal Marines held a bridgehead ashore to cover the departure, only withdrawing themselves the following day without loss despite heavy air attacks of their own. Wilhelmina reached England to a personal welcome from King George VI, helping preserve the Dutch royal family and government in exile for the remainder of the war.

What actually happened aboard that morning is better than the official version. Wilhelmina did not intend to leave the Netherlands at all. She boarded Hereward at the Hook of Holland meaning to be landed further south in Zeeland, the last corner of her country still holding out, so that she could stay with her army and her people; she was fifty-nine and she had no intention of running. Once she was aboard, her captain told her that he was under orders not to make contact with the Dutch coast, because Zeeland was under sustained air attack and he was not prepared to take a British destroyer and the Queen of the Netherlands into it. He turned for Harwich. She went to England having been, in the plainest terms, overruled by a Royal Navy officer doing his job, and she spent the rest of the war furious about how she had left and determined that nobody should mistake it for flight.

What that decision preserved is easy to underrate. A monarch in London was a government; a monarch in German hands was a signature on whatever the occupiers wanted signed, as the Danish and Belgian experiences showed in different ways. Wilhelmina made her first broadcast to the Netherlands from London on 24 May and went on making them throughout the war, and the Dutch government followed her into exile, first under Dirk Jan de Geer and then under Pieter Gerbrandy. The practical dividend was enormous and had almost nothing to do with royalty. The Netherlands had the fifth-largest merchant fleet in the world, and about ninety-five per cent of it happened to be outside Dutch waters when the Germans crossed the border: something like five hundred ships and fifteen thousand merchant seamen, including a large tanker fleet. A legitimate Dutch government in London could order those ships into Allied service, and did. A destroyer trip of a few hours on 13 May 1940 is one of the better returns the Royal Navy ever got on an afternoon's work.

The Mediterranean War

HMS Hereward was reassigned to the Mediterranean Fleet on 24 May 1940, and went on to fight in several of the campaign's key actions: she took part in the Battle of Calabria that July, and on 13 December, together with her sister ship HMS Hyperion, sank the Italian submarine Naiade, stopping afterwards to pick up the survivors from among her own crew. The month before, Hereward had played a screening role in two of the Mediterranean Fleet's biggest set pieces of 1940: escorting the carrier HMS Illustrious during the famous night raid on the Italian battlefleet at Taranto, a strike whose success was studied with considerable interest by Japanese naval planners drawing up their own attack on Pearl Harbor a little over a year later, and then helping see off an Italian sortie against a Gibraltar-bound convoy at the Battle of Cape Spartivento.

On 10 January 1941 she helped finish off the Italian torpedo boat Vega in the Sicilian Channel, a joint effort in which the cruisers Bonaventure and Southampton first crippled Vega with gunfire before Hereward went in with a torpedo, while Vega's sister ship Circe made good her escape. She fought at the Battle of Cape Matapan in March that year, one of the most significant British naval victories of the Mediterranean campaign, and helped evacuate Allied troops from Greece in April 1941 as the German invasion of the Balkans forced a fighting withdrawal, including, on 27 April, taking off her share of some 2,500 Australian and British troops from the Dutch transport Costa Rica after German dive bombers sank her off Kalamata, an evacuation completed, remarkably, without a single life lost.

The Costa Rica business deserves a sentence of its own, because it is genuinely remarkable. She was a Dutch transport carrying around 2,500 Australian and British troops out of Greece when Stukas found her off Kalamata on 27 April 1941 and put a bomb close enough alongside to open her up. She stayed afloat long enough for three destroyers, Hereward among them, to come alongside a sinking, crowded ship in the open sea and take every single person off her. Not one life was lost. Getting two and a half thousand soldiers off a foundering transport and onto destroyers, under air attack, without losing anybody, is the sort of seamanship that never makes a headline because nothing went wrong.

Sunk Off Crete

By 21 May 1941, Hereward was part of Force D, a cruiser and destroyer squadron patrolling the waters north of Crete to intercept the German seaborne invasion force; that day she helped sink a number of caiques crammed with German mountain troops northwest of Suda Bay, a small but sharp reminder that the battle for Crete was being fought as much at sea as in the air.

HMS Hereward's own end came on 29 May 1941, hours after taking part in one of the most demanding evacuations of the whole Crete campaign. Overnight on 28-29 May, she had been one of six destroyers screening the cruisers Orion, Ajax and Dido, under Rear-Admiral Rawlings, as they lifted some 4,500 Australian and British troops off the beaches at Heraklion. The withdrawing force came under sustained air attack the following morning, and at around 6.25am a bomb hit Hereward and knocked her out of the line; rather than risk the rest of the heavily laden squadron by stopping to help, Rawlings pressed on, and Hereward was last seen making slowly for the Cretan coast five miles away, every gun still firing back at the aircraft overhead. Further German Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers finished the job soon after, sending her down off Cape Sideros.

The decision to leave her is the hardest thing in her whole story and it was the correct one. Rawlings had three cruisers and six destroyers carrying about 4,500 soldiers, in daylight, in the Kaso Strait, under an air force that had already sunk a great many British ships that month and had nothing to fear from them. Stopping to take Hereward's people off would have meant halting the entire squadron in the middle of an air attack; a stopped ship is a target that cannot miss, and the arithmetic said that trying to save one destroyer's company would very likely cost several thousand men aboard the others. So he went on, and Hereward turned for the Cretan coast alone and firing. What that fortnight cost the Mediterranean Fleet altogether, and why Cunningham kept sending ships in anyway, is set out in the article on HMS Fiji (58).

Four officers and 72 crewmen were killed in the sinking, a heavy toll, though the 89 survivors, along with the majority of the troops she had been evacuating, were pulled from the water and taken prisoner, not by the Germans who had sunk her, but by Italian MAS torpedo boats and the destroyer Francesco Crispi, a notably strange twist for men who found themselves prisoners of one Axis power after being bombed by another. It was a measure of just how costly that single night off Crete had been that even the flagship, HMS Orion, limped back into Alexandria with her own captain dead and hundreds more of her ship's company killed, Hereward's loss being only the sharpest single blow in a far wider tally.

The rescue that followed has a bleak logic to it. Hereward went down close inshore off the eastern end of Crete, in water controlled by the Axis and within easy reach of the Italian-held Dodecanese, and it was Italian light forces that got there first: MAS torpedo boats and the destroyer Francesco Crispi. The Italians took survivors out of the water, and behaved perfectly properly in doing so; the men then spent the rest of the war in prison camps, and a good many of them ended up in Italy rather than Germany, which for most was the better outcome. The 89 who were picked up were the lucky ones. Four officers and seventy-two ratings died in her, and the soldiers she had lifted off the beach at Heraklion a few hours earlier, who had already survived Greece and then the siege of Crete, went into captivity with them.