HMS Hesperus (H57): The Destroyer That Rammed Two U-boats and Sank Two More

Ordered by Brazil, Claimed by Britain

HMS Hesperus began life under yet another flag entirely: she was ordered by Brazil as the Juruena on 16 December 1937, laid down by John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston, Hampshire, on 6 July 1938 and launched on 1 August 1939 by Senhora Heitora Gallienz.

With war looming, Britain purchased the still-fitting-out destroyer on 5 September 1939, just two days after declaring war, renaming her HMS Hearty and commissioning her on 22 January 1940 under Commander Donald Macintyre, a former Fleet Air Arm pilot who would go on to become one of the Royal Navy's most celebrated escort group commanders.

She received her permanent name, HMS Hesperus, on 27 February 1940, changed to avoid confusion with the existing destroyer HMS Hardy.

She was not a one-off acquisition. Brazil had ordered six modified H-class destroyers from British yards in 1938, named after Brazilian rivers, and Britain took every one of them on the outbreak of war and renamed them; the story of that wholesale appropriation of a neutral country's destroyer flotilla is set out in the article on HMS Havant (H32). The renaming from Hearty to Hesperus, and Handy to Harvester, happened because somebody in the Admiralty finally listened to a radio and realised how many H names in the fleet now sounded alike over a poor circuit in bad weather, which is a mundane detail that has probably saved lives.

The name to follow is her first captain, because Donald Macintyre finished the war as the most successful U-boat killer the Royal Navy had. Seven boats were credited to him across three commands, Hesperus, Walker and Bickerton, which is more than any other British escort captain managed. His most famous night came in March 1941, before he ever took Hesperus into action: commanding Walker in defence of convoy HX 112, he sank U-99 and took prisoner her captain, Otto Kretschmer, who was and remains the highest-scoring submarine commander of the whole war. Kretschmer came over the side still wearing his cap and with a pair of Zeiss binoculars round his neck, made specially to Donitz's own order; he tried to throw them into the sea and a young British officer caught them first. Macintyre kept them, quite openly, as a prize of war, and wore them for the rest of his career. He wrote the whole thing up in 1956 in a book called, without any modesty at all, U-Boat Killer.

Damaged Off Norway

HMS Hesperus was damaged by Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers during the Norwegian Campaign in May 1940, an early and painful lesson in just how dangerous unescorted air attack could be for a destroyer without adequate air cover, before going on to a long and distinguished career of convoy escort and anti-submarine duty across multiple commands. Years before she earned her reputation as a submarine killer, Hesperus put in a long apprenticeship of unglamorous convoy work, including a garrison run to the Faroe Islands and support for the Allied evacuation from Aandalsnes in April 1940, escort duty for the battleship HMS Prince of Wales in January 1941, less than a year before that famous ship's own loss off Malaya, and a spell shepherding a Malta-bound supply convoy through heavy Italian air attack during Operation Tiger in May 1941.

A Serial U-boat Killer

HMS Hesperus went on to compile one of the most impressive individual anti-submarine records of any Royal Navy destroyer in the entire war. On 7 December 1941, she sank U-208 in company with HMS Harvester, and on 15 January 1942, now under a different captain, Lieutenant Commander Arthur Tait, rammed U-93 while defending convoy HG 78, a collision so violent it flung the U-boat's own captain and first lieutenant clean off her conning tower and into the motorboat stowed on Hesperus's deck. A further battering with depth charges and 4.7-inch gunfire persuaded the rest of U-93's crew to abandon ship, and Hesperus pulled 40 of them from the water, an outcome so satisfying to the Admiralty that Tait was awarded the DSO for it.

Her most dramatic action came on 26 December 1942, when HMS Hesperus and the destroyer HMS Vanessa sank the German submarine U-357 by ramming her outright, an attack so violent that Hesperus's own bottom was ripped open for nearly a quarter of her length, a notably severe price to pay even for a successful kill, one that put her into dockyard hands at Liverpool for three months of repairs.

Ramming needs putting in context, because the article makes it sound like a tactic and it was really an admission of failure. A destroyer is a thin-skinned ship built for speed; driving her bow into anything at twenty knots does enormous damage to the ship doing the ramming, and the Admiralty actively discouraged it. Hesperus's attack on U-357 on Boxing Day 1942 opened her own bottom for a quarter of her length and put her in a Liverpool dry dock for three months, which is three months in which she was not escorting a convoy in the worst winter of the Atlantic war. The reason captains did it anyway is that in 1941 and 1942 the alternatives were often no better: depth charges had to be dropped almost on top of a boat to be lethal, gunfire was useless once she dived, and a U-boat caught on the surface at close range would be gone in forty seconds. Ramming was what you did when you had one chance and no time to set up a proper attack. It worked twice for Hesperus, and both times it cost her a refit.

HMS Hesperus continued her run of success into 1943, sinking U-191 with a Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar attack on 23 April, and destroying U-186 on 12 May that year, giving her a final tally of four confirmed U-boat kills, two by ramming and two by weapons fire, a genuinely exceptional record for a single destroyer, and one built by two different commanding officers rather than one: Tait's ramming of U-93 and joint kill of U-208, and Macintyre's own ramming of U-357 and Hedgehog and depth-charge kills of U-191 and U-186 during a second spell in command from July 1942, a testament to just how sharp Hesperus's whole ship's company, not any single captain, had become at hunting U-boats.

The kill on U-191 in April 1943 was made with a very different sort of weapon, and it is the reason the second half of her record looks so different from the first. Hedgehog fired a pattern of twenty-four small bombs ahead of the ship, which detonated only on contact, so a hunting escort could keep her asdic on the target all the way in instead of losing contact in the last few hundred yards as a depth-charge attack required. It was a genuine step change, and it took a long time to be trusted; how it worked, and the accident that killed men aboard one of the ships carrying it, is described in the articles on HMS Enchantress (L56) and HMS Escapade (H17). Between them, ramming in 1942 and Hedgehog in 1943 describe the whole change in the Atlantic war in the space of one ship's commission.

A Quiet End to the War

HMS Hesperus's final wartime duty came in May 1945, when she and her sister ship HMS Havelock escorted the exiled Norwegian government home to Oslo, a fittingly dignified assignment marking the war's end after years of brutal anti-submarine combat. There was a certain irony to her very last active duty: in the weeks that followed, HMS Hesperus helped escort surrendered German U-boats from Lochalsh to Loch Foyle for disposal under Operation Deadlight, a dedicated U-boat killer seeing her old adversaries safely to the scrapheap ahead of her. She subsequently served as an aircraft target ship, before being approved for scrapping on 18 February 1946.

That last job was the closing of a circle that had begun five years earlier. The Norwegian government under Johan Nygaardsvold reached Oslo from London on 30 May 1945, and King Haakon followed on 7 June aboard the cruiser HMS Norfolk, escorted by HMS Devonshire, the same ship that had taken him out of Tromso in June 1940. He arrived exactly five years to the day after he left, and on the fortieth anniversary of the Storting resolution that had dissolved the union with Sweden and put him on the throne in the first place. The Royal Navy had lifted him off a burning quay at Molde in 1940, carried him into exile, kept his merchant fleet at sea for five years and then brought his government home; the first part of that is described in the article on HMS Glasgow (C21). Hesperus escorting the ministers back to Oslo is the last act of a job the Navy had been doing since April 1940.

The irony of her final duty is sharper than the article lets on. Operation Deadlight was the destruction of 116 surrendered U-boats, taken out into the Atlantic north-west of Ireland in the winter of 1945 and sunk, most of them by gunfire because the weather wrecked the tidy plan to scuttle them with charges; the story is in the article on HMS Hardy (R08). Hesperus had spent four years trying to kill these boats one at a time, at considerable cost to herself, and finished by shepherding them meekly up a Scottish loch to be disposed of. She outlasted her enemies by about eighteen months, and was on the list for scrapping herself in February 1946.

She was towed to Grangemouth, though breaking up did not actually begin until 17 May 1947, closing out the career of a destroyer whose name, ordered originally for a South American navy, had ended up etched into the history of the Battle of the Atlantic.