HMS Intrepid (D10): From Hunting the Bismarck to Sunk at Leros

The Build: Cowes

HMS Intrepid was built by J.S. White and Co. at Cowes, laid down on 13 January 1936, launched on 17 December that year and commissioned on 29 July 1937, one of nine I-class destroyers built for the Royal Navy during the 1930s.

The I class was the last of the interwar destroyer flotillas, ordered under the 1935 programme, and it is worth knowing what happened to them as a group because it says a good deal about the job. Nine were built for the Royal Navy, and they introduced the quintuple torpedo tube mounting, ten tubes in two banks, the heaviest torpedo armament any British destroyer had carried. They were fast, lightly built, worked extremely hard from the first week of the war, and they were slaughtered. Six of the nine were sunk and a seventh was written off after damage too heavy to repair, which is to say that a man who joined the flotilla in 1937 had rather better than an even chance of losing his ship. Four more of the same design were ordered by Turkey, and Britain took two of those over on the outbreak of war as HMS Inconstant and HMS Ithuriel, a piece of appropriation described in the article on HMS Inconstant (H49). That casualty rate is not exceptional for a destroyer flotilla of that generation; it is roughly what the Royal Navy expected and got.

She got off to a strong start in the war: in October 1939, she helped sink the German submarine U-45 southwest of Ireland alongside the destroyers HMS Ivanhoe and HMS Inglefield, a solid early success against the U-boat threat.

What the article skips over is that she then had the busiest twelve months of her life. Her battle honours include Norway 1940 and Dunkirk 1940, and neither appears above. Norway meant working the fjords in April and May 1940 under German air attack with no fighter cover at all, in an operation that cost the Royal Navy an aircraft carrier, two cruisers and seven destroyers and taught it, at considerable expense, that command of the sea means very little without command of the air over it. Dunkirk meant taking troops off an open beach and a shattered mole for nine days at the end of May, ferrying them back to Dover, turning round and going straight back, under bombing throughout; six British destroyers were sunk at Dunkirk and nineteen more damaged. A ship that has done both of those inside two months has had a harder war by June 1940 than most ships have in six years, and Intrepid still had three years to go.

A Collision and a Bismarck Hunt

HMS Intrepid suffered a tragic accident in March 1940, colliding with the fishing trawler MV Ocean Drift during naval manoeuvres, an incident that cost two lives, though eight survivors were rescued, a sobering reminder that naval exercises carried genuine risks quite apart from enemy action.

HMS Intrepid went on to take part in the pursuit and eventual destruction of the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941, part of the substantial escort and screening force assembled for one of the most significant single naval operations of the entire war.

The other absent honour is Arctic 1941 to 1943, which covers rather more time than everything else on the list put together. Escorting to Russia meant a fortnight each way in the worst sea conditions in the world: temperatures cold enough to ice a destroyer's upper works until she became dangerously top-heavy and the ice had to be chipped off with axes by men on a rolling deck, permanent daylight in summer so that U-boats and aircraft could work round the clock, and permanent darkness in winter when the weather itself did the damage instead. Destroyers of Intrepid's generation had a low freeboard forward and were miserable in the North Atlantic, let alone the Barents Sea. The convoys got through, at a cost of something over a hundred merchant ships and a couple of dozen warships across the whole campaign, and the ships that escorted them did it over and over again for two years.

Adopted by Uxbridge, Bound for Malta

HMS Intrepid was adopted by the town of Uxbridge as part of a wartime fundraising scheme, a popular civic arrangement that saw communities across Britain raise money in support of a particular ship in exchange for a formal affiliation.

Warship Week deserves explaining properly, because it was one of the more successful pieces of civilian mobilisation in the war and it is largely forgotten. Between October 1941 and the end of March 1942 there were 1,178 of them, covering 1,273 districts, and each was a fundraising campaign in which a town or village was set a target and encouraged to reach it by putting money into National Savings. The target was scaled to the place: a village might be asked to fund a motor launch, a market town a corvette or a minesweeper, a city something like two million pounds for a battleship. When a district reached its target it adopted the ship, and the arrangement was made real: plaques went both ways, the town sent letters and comforts to the ship's company, and the ship visited when it could. More than twelve hundred vessels were adopted in that six months, and the campaign raised £955,611,589, which is a very large number in 1942 money and an extraordinary one from a country that had been bombed for two years. Uxbridge took Intrepid, and when she went down at Leros the town knew about it.

She took part in Operation Pedestal in August 1942, escorting the desperately needed supply convoy to besieged Malta, one of the most fiercely contested convoy operations of the entire war, carried out under sustained and heavy Axis air and submarine attack.

Pedestal, which she escorted that August, was the convoy operation that kept Malta in the war and very nearly did not. Fourteen merchant ships went in with an escort amounting to most of the Home Fleet, and five got through, at a cost of nine merchantmen, an aircraft carrier, two cruisers and a destroyer over three days of continuous attack. The detail is set out in the article on HMS Indomitable (92). A destroyer's role in that was to screen, to put up anti-aircraft fire, to hunt submarines and, when a merchantman was hit, to go alongside and take her people off, all in a formation being bombed from three directions.

Sunk at Leros

HMS Intrepid's war came to an end on 26 September 1943, when, under the command of Commander Charles Arthur de Winton Kitcat, she was sunk by German Junkers Ju 88 bombers in Leros harbour in the Dodecanese, part of the ill-fated British campaign to hold the Dodecanese islands against German counterattack in the aftermath of the Italian armistice, a campaign that would go on to cost the Royal Navy several ships in the difficult, hard-fought waters of the Aegean.

The campaign that killed her is worth setting out honestly, because it was a bad idea pursued past the point where anybody could pretend otherwise. Italy surrendered in September 1943, and Churchill, who had wanted the Dodecanese since 1940, saw a chance to grab the islands off the Turkish coast, put pressure on the Germans in the Balkans and perhaps persuade Turkey into the war. The Americans wanted nothing to do with it and would not lend the aircraft. Britain went ahead anyway, landing small garrisons on Kos, Leros and Samos. The Germans took Rhodes at once, and then Kos in early October, and Kos was the only island with an airfield capable of taking fighters. From that moment the Luftwaffe had the entire Aegean to itself and the Royal Navy was operating in daylight, in confined water, within easy range of German bombers, with no air cover whatever. It ended in November with Leros overrun after four days of fighting and Samos abandoned without a shot. The bill was over five thousand soldiers, most of them prisoners, about five hundred naval dead and missing, and three submarines and fifteen ships sunk. Historians generally record it as the last German victory of the war.

Her own end came right at the beginning of that, before the Germans had even taken Kos. She was lying in Port Lakki on Leros on 26 September 1943 when Junkers Ju 88s came over, and she was hit and disabled; the Greek destroyer Vasilissa Olga, the Queen Olga, was hit in the same attack and sank at once with heavy loss. Intrepid stayed afloat through the day with her people fighting the flooding, and went down in the early hours of the 27th. There is a particular cruelty in the command arrangement: her captain, Commander Charles de Winton Kitcat, had already had a destroyer shot from under him in the same sea. He had commanded HMS Imperial off Crete in May 1941, when she was so badly damaged by near misses while evacuating troops that her steering failed and she had to be sunk by her own side. He therefore lost two destroyers to German aircraft in the eastern Mediterranean, two years apart, in campaigns that failed for exactly the same reason.

HMS Intrepid's loss came after six years of properly active wartime service that had ranged from hunting U-boats in the Atlantic to running the gauntlet to Malta, a solid and consistent record brought to an end not by a single dramatic action, but by the kind of sustained, determined air attack that proved so costly to Allied ships throughout the Aegean campaign.

There is a memorial on Leros to the men who died in her, and the wreck itself lies in Lakki bay, where divers still visit her. It is worth setting her whole record out plainly, because at 465 words nobody would guess at it: a U-boat sunk in the sixth week of the war, the Norwegian campaign, nine days off Dunkirk, the hunt for the Bismarck, two years of Arctic convoys, Pedestal, and then the Aegean. Six years, six battle honours, and a town in Middlesex that had paid for her out of its own pocket. She was sunk at anchor in a harbour by aircraft nobody had provided any defence against, in an operation that should not have been attempted, which is a wretched way to lose a ship that had done all of that.