HMS Hogue (D74): Wrecked by a Collision With an Indian Cruiser

Constructed at Birkenhead

HMS Hogue was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, construction beginning on 6 January 1943 and launched on 21 April 1944, a Battle-class destroyer designed around the hard-won lessons of earlier wartime destroyer operations, with a particular emphasis on heavy anti-aircraft armament to counter the growing threat of air attack.

The name is a small piece of naval bookkeeping and it repays a moment. Hogue is La Hougue, the anchorage on the Cotentin peninsula where, in the last days of May 1692, an Anglo-Dutch fleet finished off a dozen French ships of the line that had run themselves into the shallows, and with them Louis XIV's plan to put James II back on the English throne. The fleet action that began that week had been fought a few miles up the same coast off Cape Barfleur, and the Royal Navy has cheerfully commemorated both ends of the same fight as though they were two separate victories ever since. Which is how HMS Hogue and HMS Barfleur came to be lying in the same destroyer flotilla at Hong Kong in 1945, named for opposite halves of one week in 1692; Barfleur's own account is in the article on HMS Barfleur (D80). An earlier Hogue made the point with rather less restraint: the 74-gun ship of the line launched at Deptford in October 1811 carried a figurehead of a crowing cock with the British lion standing over it, in case anybody had failed to work out which nation had lost. She was cut down into a screw blockship in 1849, went to the Baltic in 1854, ended her days as a coastguard ship at Greenock and was broken up in 1865.

The Hogue immediately before this one had a very much worse time of it, and the name has been handled carefully ever since. The armoured cruiser HMS Hogue was one of three elderly Cressy-class ships patrolling the Broad Fourteens off the Dutch coast in September 1914, on a station that Jellicoe, Keyes and Tyrwhitt had all objected to and that the fleet had already christened the Live Bait Squadron. At about half past six on the morning of 22 September the German submarine U-9, under Otto Weddigen, torpedoed HMS Aboukir. Captain Nicholson took Hogue in to pick up survivors, stopped his ship and lowered his boats, which was the humane thing to do and precisely the wrong one; U-9 worked round the sinking Aboukir and put two torpedoes into Hogue from about three hundred yards. She went down in ten minutes. Cressy, doing the same thing for the same reason, followed her. One submarine, one morning, ninety minutes, three cruisers and 1,459 men dead, a great many of them reservists and boys under training. The Admiralty's response was a standing order that large ships were not to stop for torpedoed consorts, which is a cold thing to have to write down, and it was written down because of Hogue.

She commissioned on 24 July 1945, though her completion came just as the war was ending, and she was assigned to the 19th Destroyer Flotilla of the British Pacific Fleet, arriving on station too late to see any actual combat before Japan's surrender brought the war to a close.

Arriving too late is the defining fact of her whole generation, and it was not for want of trying. The Battle class had been drawn up with the Pacific specifically in mind: twin 4.5-inch mountings designed from the start for high-angle fire against aircraft rather than the low-angle 4.7-inch that earlier destroyers had carried, light guns wherever there was deck to bolt them to, and the endurance to work with a fleet operating thousands of miles from the nearest dockyard. It was a direct and expensive answer to what had happened to British destroyers under air attack off Norway and Crete, and the design is set out in the article on HMS Aisne (D22). The difficulty was that ships take years and wars do not wait. She joined the 19th Destroyer Flotilla at Hong Kong in October 1945, in company with Barfleur, Armada, Camperdown, Trafalgar and Lagos, and of that group only Barfleur had managed to reach the war at all before it stopped.

Peacetime Patrol and the Cod Wars

HMS Hogue remained with her Pacific flotilla until early 1947, undergoing a refit at Hong Kong in September and October 1946, before being placed in reserve at Devonport on 22 May 1947. She underwent extensive modernisation between March and December 1955, returning to active service in 1957 with the 1st Destroyer Squadron.

The decade she spent laid up looks like waste and was actually policy. Britain came out of the war with far more destroyers than she could crew, fuel or pay for, and a class of more than twenty brand-new fleet destroyers arrived into a Navy that was contracting every year. By late 1956 exactly four Battles were in commission anywhere: Armada, Barfleur and St Kitts with the 3rd Destroyer Squadron, and Vigo doing gunnery training duty at Portsmouth. Everything else in the class, Hogue included, was in reserve or under refit. The 1955 work on her was the standard treatment of the period, updated fire control and new asdic, and on ships that still carried the after anti-aircraft gun that mounting came out and a Squid anti-submarine mortar went in its place. A destroyer built to shoot down Japanese aircraft was being quietly rebuilt to hunt Soviet submarines, which is the whole of the early Cold War compressed into a single refit.

Her later peacetime service included patrols off Cyprus during a period of considerable regional tension, and off Iceland during the First Cod War in 1958, part of the long running series of confrontations between British and Icelandic vessels over fishing rights in the waters around Iceland, working alongside sister ships HMS Lagos and HMS Solebay to shepherd British trawlers clear of Iceland's own patrol boats.

What a destroyer actually did in the First Cod War is less dramatic and considerably more interesting than the name suggests. Iceland extended her fishery limit from four miles to twelve at midnight on 1 September 1958, Britain declined to recognise it, and British trawlers went on fishing inside the line under naval protection. The Navy's answer was not to chase gunboats about but to draw boxes: three declared areas, off the Westfjords, north of Horn and away to the south-east, inside which the trawlers worked and around which frigates and destroyers stationed themselves so that Icelandic patrol vessels could never get close enough to put a boarding party on anybody. It was policing by geometry, conducted in appalling weather with a great deal of very careful ship handling and almost no shooting, and it lasted until 12 November 1958. The wider dispute, and the ship that ran the show, are in the article on HMS Eastbourne (F73).

Exercise JET, the Commonwealth Joint Exercise, had been run annually out of Trincomalee in Ceylon since the early 1950s and was by 1959 the largest naval gathering in the Indian Ocean. The version held the following February was the tenth of the series and the one after that brought six navies together: Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India and Pakistan. Its political value was at least the equal of its tactical value. Getting Indian and Pakistani warships to manoeuvre inside the same formation twelve years after partition was not a small piece of diplomacy, and it worked because almost everybody taking part had come out of the same service, used the same signal book and in many cases had been trained by the same instructors. That shared professional grammar is exactly why what happened on the night of 25 August 1959 caused so much unhappiness on both sides of it.

Wrecked Off Ceylon

HMS Hogue's career came to an abrupt and unexpected end on 25 August 1959, during Exercise JET'59 off Ceylon, when she collided with the Indian light cruiser INS Mysore, formerly the Royal Navy's own HMS Nigeria, causing catastrophic damage to her bow. The two ships were forming up into a battle group when Hogue came round on a 30-degree turn to starboard; Mysore, by most accounts, held her own course, and Hogue struck her stern head-on, buckling her own bow back almost 90 degrees just forward of A gun while Mysore came through almost unscathed. Radio Operator John Revill was killed in the collision and three of his shipmates seriously injured, with the wounded transferred to the carrier HMS Centaur for treatment; a subsequent Board of Inquiry laid the blame squarely on Hogue herself, whatever some of her own crew felt about the Indian cruiser's own helm orders that night.

There is a bleak coincidence buried in the identity of the ship that hit her. INS Mysore had been HMS Nigeria, a Fiji-class light cruiser commissioned in September 1940 that spent her war on the Russian and Malta convoy routes before going out to the Eastern Fleet. Her sale to India was announced in April 1954, and she was given a major rebuild before handover, between October 1954 and April 1957, by Cammell Laird of Birkenhead. That is the same yard, on the same stretch of the Mersey, that had built Hogue a decade earlier. The two ships that met in the dark off Ceylon in August 1959 had both, at different times, been in the hands of the same Birkenhead workforce, and one of them wrote off the other.

The manoeuvre that went wrong deserves explaining, because it reads like carelessness and is in fact the accepted cost of doing the job. A fleet altering course at night does it together, every ship putting the wheel over at the same moment on the executive signal, which keeps the formation intact and leaves no margin whatever if one ship does something different from the rest. The squadron was making better than thirty knots. At that speed a Battle-class destroyer covers her own length in about seven seconds, and the gap between two ships in a screen closes very much faster than anybody can discuss it on a voice circuit. Hogue put her wheel thirty degrees to starboard as ordered; Mysore, according to a good many people who were standing on deck at the time, did not, and Hogue went into the cruiser's stern bow first. Her stem folded back to port through nearly ninety degrees just forward of A gun. Mysore, better than eight thousand tons of cruiser with a stern built to take punishment, came away barely marked. The Board of Inquiry blamed Hogue, and the Admiralty confirmed it in the Commons the following March, whatever her own people went on thinking about it for the rest of their lives.

The damage was so extensive that HMS Hogue was judged a constructive total loss; rather than being repaired, she was towed stern-first to Trincomalee for temporary patching and then on to Singapore, her ship's company transferring to HMS Finisterre, a sister ship hurriedly recommissioned from reserve to take them on, while Hogue herself sat laid up until finally being broken up in 1962, an unglamorous and rather abrupt end for a destroyer whose active service career, delayed by the war's timing at the very start, was ultimately cut short by a peacetime accident rather than enemy action.

Constructive total loss is an insurance phrase and it means precisely what it says: the ship could have been repaired, but not for less than she was worth. The tow says a good deal about how bad the damage really was. Solebay and Lagos took her first and could not hold her, because the folded bow was acting as a rudder and flapping about underneath her; a Trincomalee harbour tug did no better, and in the end an ocean-going tug had to come up from Singapore and drag her there stern-first over three days, a job that has its own article in HMS Lagos (D44). The seriously injured had already gone across to HMS Centaur, which was carrying the only proper hospital in the exercise. Her ship's company were put ashore in a disused hospital building while the Navy worked out what to do with them, and buried John Revill with senior officers from every navy present at the graveside. HMS Finisterre, a sister ship pulled out of reserve for the purpose, reached the Far East in late October, the turnover took place on 1 and 2 November 1959, and the same men went on to Australia with the squadron as though nothing had happened, which is roughly what the Navy expects of people.

The Commons took an interest, and the written answers of 18 March 1960 are as flat as only a written answer can be. Hogue had cost £830,000 on completion in July 1945. She had been in commission for a little over five years out of the fourteen she had existed. She was not refitted after the collision and no estimate for repairing her was ever prepared. Asked what compensation would be paid to the three men injured, the Civil Lord replied that compensation is not paid to servicemen for injuries received in an incident of service. Asked what she might fetch as scrap, he replied that prices fluctuated widely and he could not say. She was sold for breaking up at Singapore on 1 March 1962, not quite eighteen years after she went down the ways at Birkenhead, having spent most of her life in reserve and never once fired a gun at an enemy. Her name has been carried by a ship of the line, by a cruiser lost in the worst single morning the Royal Navy had in 1914, and by a destroyer wrecked in peacetime by a ship built in the same yard. It is a name that has had a remarkably unlucky run for one commemorating a victory.