HMS Hostile (H55): Narvik, Calabria and a Mine off Cape Bon

Built at Greenock

HMS Hostile was one of the H Class destroyers of the 1934 programme, ordered from Scotts at Greenock on 13 December 1934. She was laid down on 27 February 1935, the same day as her sister Hotspur in the neighbouring berth, launched on 24 January 1936 and completed on 10 September 1936, at a cost to the builder's account of £253,262, the guns and wireless being supplied by the Admiralty on top.

She was the first and so far only ship of the Royal Navy to carry the name. Her badge showed two hands holding crossed swords on a black field, and her motto was Vultus ad hostem, "Face to the enemy".

The photograph at the top of this page shows her a month after completion, in October 1936, under way through a choppy sea in pale peacetime grey.

She joined the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean, with Havock, Hasty, Hunter and the rest, just as the Spanish Civil War began, and spent much of the next three years on the patrols off the Spanish coast, protecting British shipping and enforcing the Non-Intervention agreement. In August 1938 Commander John Wright took command of her, and he would take her through the first year of the war.

In May 1939 she came home to refit at Sheerness, and then went back out to Malta to work up.

Hunting the Graf Spee

When war came she was patrolling off Crete and escorting the first convoys from Port Said to Gibraltar.

In October 1939, with Hardy and Hasty, she joined the battlecruiser Renown and the carrier Ark Royal off Gibraltar and went south with them to Freetown, as the destroyers of Force K, one of the hunting groups formed to find the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, which was sinking British merchant ships in the South Atlantic.

Through the autumn she swept the ocean towards Ascension and St Helena with the big ships, refuelling from Renown at sea, and patrolled the gap between Freetown and the bulge of Brazil for German merchant ships trying to slip home.

In December, after the Battle of the River Plate, Force K raced south in case the damaged Graf Spee broke out of Montevideo, and Hostile was off the estuary when her captain scuttled her instead.

Hostile and Hardy then spent Christmas searching the coast of Brazil, from Bahia up towards Pernambuco, for the Graf Spee's supply ship Altmark, and met Renown, Ark Royal and the tanker Cherryleaf on the equator on Christmas Day. In January 1940 she came home with the escort of the convoy SL 16F, and went into Chatham for refit.

Narvik

She rejoined the flotilla in March 1940, escorted Repulse and Renown from Plymouth to the Clyde, and at the beginning of April was searching for German ships reported off Iceland with the cruiser Birmingham.

When the Germans invaded Norway on 9 April she was sent to join the flotilla under Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee in Hardy, and that evening the Admiralty ordered the five H Class destroyers up the Vestfjord to attack the German ships at Narvik.

In the snow and darkness before dawn on 10 April, Hardy, Hunter, Havock, Hotspur and Hostile went up the Ofotfjord to Narvik, where ten German destroyers had landed troops the day before. Hostile fired torpedoes into the merchant ships in the harbour and hit the German destroyer Diether von Roeder repeatedly with her guns.

On the way out the British ships met five more German destroyers coming out of the side fjords. Hardy was beached, her captain mortally wounded, Hunter was sunk and Hotspur badly damaged, and Hostile and Havock turned back to cover the cripple and bring her out.

With Havock she boarded the abandoned German ammunition ship Rauenfels, and she then towed Hotspur to Skelfjord in the Lofoten Islands for temporary repairs, where the two ships lay at anchor that night. The full story of the battle is told in the articles on Havock and Hunter.

She stayed off Norway through April. On the 14th she and Ivanhoe escorted the destroyer Eskimo, whose bow had been blown off in the second battle of Narvik, as Bedouin towed her to Skelfjord, and on 24 April she was in the anti-submarine screen of Warspite as the battleship and three cruisers bombarded the Narvik area.

She then went to Rosyth for repairs. In early May she sailed with the cruiser Birmingham and Mountbatten's Kelly to intercept German minelayers reported off Jutland. By the summer her captain had been awarded the DSO.

The Mediterranean

With Italy about to enter the war, she was ordered back to the Mediterranean, sailing from Portsmouth on 16 May with Hasty, Hyperion, Nubian and three K Class destroyers, and reached Alexandria by way of Malta. On 10 June, the day Italy declared war, she was out on an anti-submarine sweep west of Alexandria.

At the end of June the Mediterranean Fleet captured documents giving the patrol positions of Italian submarines, and on 1 July Hostile and the Australian Stuart found one of them. Hostile attacked first with depth charges, using only her throwers because the depth charge traps at her stern had jammed, and Stuart followed with a full pattern.

The two destroyers believed they had sunk her. In fact the submarine, the Salpa, was damaged badly enough to give up her patrol and limp home.

On 9 July 1940 she was with the fleet at the Battle of Calabria, the first action between the British and Italian battle fleets, when aircraft from Eagle and a hit from Warspite on the Italian flagship Giulio Cesare sent the Italians home behind a smokescreen. On 18 July Commander Wright handed over to Lieutenant Commander Anthony Burnell-Nugent.

In August she was in the Aegean covering convoys with the cruisers Liverpool and Gloucester, and on 17 August she was one of the destroyers that bombarded the Italian positions around Bardia.

Cape Bon

A few days later she sailed with Nubian, Mohawk and Hero as Force A, sweeping through the southern Aegean and then going on to Malta, from where the four destroyers were to pass through the Sicilian Narrows to Gibraltar to strengthen Force H for the operations that would bring the carrier Illustrious out to Alexandria.

On 23 August 1940, on passage through the Narrows, she struck a mine eighteen miles south east of Cape Bon. The explosion broke her back abaft the engine room, and she was soon awash forward and had to be abandoned. Five of her men were killed and three injured.

Mohawk took off her ship's company, and Hero sank the wreck with two torpedoes.

She had been in commission for less than four years, and at war for less than one, but she earned the battle honours Atlantic 1939 to 1940, Narvik 1940, Norway 1940 and Calabria 1940. Her sisters are in the H Class destroyers collection.