HMS Hunter (H35): Almería, Narvik and a War Grave in the Ofotfjord

Built on the Tyne

HMS Hunter was one of the H Class destroyers of the 1934 programme, ordered from Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend on 13 December 1934. She was laid down on 27 March 1935, launched on 25 February 1936 and completed on 30 September 1936, at a cost to the builder's account of £253,167.

She was the seventeenth ship of the Navy to bear a name first used in the seventeenth century, which carried battle honours from the Dutch wars, Beachy Head, Barfleur, Vigo and the taking of Louisbourg and Quebec; the last Hunter before her had been a destroyer of 1895. Her badge was a golden crossbow between two silver arrows on a green field, and her motto was "Follow on".

She joined the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean, with Havock, Hostile and their sisters, just as the Spanish Civil War began. She should not be confused with the escort carrier Hunter of 1943, which carried the name on and has her own article.

Almería

On the afternoon of 13 May 1937, on patrol for the Non-Intervention Committee off the south coast of Spain, she struck a mine a few miles south of Almería. The explosion wrecked her forward boiler room and the mess decks above it.

Eight of her men were killed and some two dozen injured, and for a time it seemed she would founder.

Lieutenant Patrick Humphreys at once led a rescue party down to the mess decks of the stoker petty officers and torpedomen. The ladder had been blown away, so they jumped some eight feet down into three feet of fuel oil, onto a deck that might not hold them, in a ship they believed was sinking, and for five or ten minutes they dragged the living and the dead out of the wreckage and passed them up on deck.

Men who had swallowed fuel oil would certainly have died if they had been left. Humphreys, Petty Officer James Smail and Able Seamen James Collings, Ernest Thomas and Herbert Abrahams received the Empire Gallantry Medal, and two more, Stoker Petty Officer Peter Perring and Acting Leading Seaman Sidney Bevington, received it for their work in keeping the ship afloat.

When the George Cross replaced the Empire Gallantry Medal in 1940, the living holders exchanged their medals for it, and Humphreys received his George Cross in February 1942.

The Spanish Republican destroyer Lazaga and Hunter's sister Hyperion came to her aid, and she was towed into Almería, where her injured were taken to hospital. The cruiser Arethusa then towed her to Gibraltar, where she was given temporary repairs from 15 May to 18 August.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken in the dry dock at Gibraltar on 9 July 1937, with the damaged destroyer shored up with timber props and her flotilla-mate Greyhound lying alongside beyond the dock gate. She was then towed to Malta and rebuilt, and she was not back in service until November 1938, some eighteen months after the explosion.

Freetown, Bermuda and Halifax

In August 1939 she was refitting at Devonport, and in the last days of peace she was ordered to Freetown, with Lieutenant Commander Lindsay de Villiers in command. In September and October she escorted the first Sierra Leone convoys out of Freetown and joined the cruiser Neptune and her sister Hyperion in a sweep for German merchant ships said to be meeting a U-boat in the South Atlantic.

At the end of October she was sent on to Bermuda for the West Indies station.

In December she was at Halifax, Nova Scotia, exercising against the submarine Cachalot, and on 10 December she sailed with Hyperion in the cover of TC 1, the first troop convoy to carry the 1st Canadian Division to Britain, five great liners including Aquitania and Empress of Britain, before going back to Halifax with the local escort.

In January 1940 she and Hereward escorted the battleship Valiant through her exercises off Bermuda and brought her up to Halifax, and in February she came home for a refit at Falmouth.

Norway

In March she escorted Warspite from Greenock to Scapa Flow and joined the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla in the Home Fleet under Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee in Hardy. On 6 April, with Hardy, Hotspur and Havock, she sailed from Sullom Voe as escort for the destroyers that laid mines in the Vestfjord in Operation Wilfred, Britain's attempt to stop the German iron ore traffic in Norwegian waters.

On 8 April she rejoined Renown off the Lofotens, and was there at the start of the battlecruiser's action with the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau before the destroyers fell behind in the heavy seas.

Narvik, 10 April 1940

On 9 April the Germans seized Narvik with ten destroyers carrying mountain troops. That evening Warburton-Lee was ordered to attack, and before dawn on 10 April, in snowstorms, five destroyers, Hardy, Hunter, Havock, Hotspur and Hostile, went up the Ofotfjord into the harbour and caught the German ships at anchor.

Two German destroyers were sunk and others damaged, and the merchant ships in the harbour were torpedoed.

As the British ships came back down the fjord they were caught between five more German destroyers coming out of the side fjords. Hardy was hit on the bridge, Warburton-Lee mortally wounded, and she was beached.

Hunter was hit again and again; her steering was wrecked and fire broke out, and as she slowed, Hotspur, her own steering also put out of action by a hit, ran into her. Hit again, Hunter rolled over and sank in the Ofotfjord.

One hundred and seven of her ship's company were killed in the action, among them Lieutenant Commander de Villiers, and five more died of their wounds. Forty six survivors were picked up by the Germans and taken prisoner; three days later, after Warspite and her destroyers had destroyed the rest of the German flotilla in the second battle of Narvik, they were released and made their way home through neutral Sweden.

The story of the battle from the other ships' side is told in the articles on Havock and Hostile.

The War Grave

For sixty eight years Hunter lay undisturbed. In 2008 her wreck was located by the Royal Norwegian Navy, lying at great depth in the fjord, and she is protected as a war grave.

Her own battle honour is Narvik 1940, and she shares Atlantic with the escort carrier that took the name on, which added Salerno, the South of France, the Aegean and Burma. Her sisters are in the H Class destroyers collection.