HMS Ithuriel (H05): Turkey's Destroyer, Spitfires for Malta and the Ramming of the Cobalto

Built for Turkey

In 1939 the Turkish government ordered two destroyers from Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, to a design based closely on the Royal Navy's own I Class. The first of them was laid down on 24 May 1939 as Gayret.

When war broke out a few months later the Admiralty took over both ships on the slip, as it did with the other foreign warships building in British yards, and Gayret was launched on 24 February 1941 as HMS Ithuriel. Her sister became Inconstant.

Her new name came from Milton's Paradise Lost. Ithuriel is the angel who finds Satan crouched like a toad at the ear of the sleeping Eve, and with one touch of his spear forces him back into his true shape; her badge showed a golden winged spear.

She was the second ship of the name, after a flotilla leader of the First World War that had been sold in 1921. She was completed on 3 March 1942, with four 4.7 inch guns and eight torpedo tubes, and commissioned under Lieutenant Commander David Maitland-Makgill-Crichton, who had already won the Distinguished Service Cross and who commanded her for the whole of her short life.

Spitfires for Malta

She was meant for the Eastern Fleet, but the Mediterranean needed her more. After the briefest of work-ups on the Clyde and a few days of anti-submarine exercises off Lough Foyle, she was sent to join the 13th Destroyer Flotilla at Gibraltar.

Malta was being bombed day and night that spring, and its fighter squadrons were being worn down faster than they could be reinforced. The only way to get fighters to the island was to carry them most of the way on an aircraft carrier and fly them off when they were in range.

On 14 April 1942 she sailed from the Clyde with Inglefield, Echo, Partridge and the American destroyers Lang and Madison as the screen for the American carrier Wasp, which was carrying 47 Spitfires on Operation Calendar. They were met off Gibraltar by Renown and the cruisers Cairo and Charybdis, and the fighters were flown off on 20 April.

In May she was out again for Operation Bowery, with Wasp and Eagle together, and then for Operation LB with Eagle and the old carrier Argus. In June she sailed twice more with Eagle and Charybdis, and on each trip a little over thirty Spitfires took off for Malta. On 9 June all 32 arrived safely.

Between the runs she was escorting Malaya and the convoys in and out of Gibraltar.

Harpoon

In June the Navy tried to fight two convoys through to Malta at once, one from each end of the Mediterranean. Ithuriel was in Force X, the close escort for the six merchant ships of Operation Harpoon from Gibraltar, with the anti-aircraft cruiser Cairo, the fleet destroyers Bedouin, Marne, Matchless and Partridge and four Hunts, Blankney, Middleton, Badsworth and the Polish Kujawiak.

The convoy was bombed all day on 14 June after the heavy covering force turned back at the Sicilian Narrows.

At dawn on 15 June, south of Pantelleria, two Italian cruisers, Eugenio di Savoia and Raimondo Montecuccoli, came down on the convoy with their destroyers. The five fleet destroyers turned to attack them with torpedoes, strung out in a line with Bedouin leading, then Partridge, then Ithuriel.

Within a quarter of an hour Bedouin and Partridge had been hit and stopped by the cruisers' 6 inch guns. Ithuriel held her fire until the range was down to 15,000 yards, then engaged one of the cruisers and hit her at 8,000 yards, while Marne and Matchless drove off two of the Italian destroyers.

The cruisers kept their distance behind smoke and eventually drew off. Bedouin was later sunk by an Italian torpedo bomber, and of the six merchant ships, only two reached Malta.

The Ramming of the Cobalto

In July she was out twice more with Eagle, for Operations Pinpoint and Insect, and on the second trip torpedoes from an Italian submarine exploded close to the carrier. Then came Operation Pedestal, the largest and most desperate of all the Malta convoys, fourteen merchant ships with three carriers, Indomitable, Victorious and Eagle, two battleships and a ring of cruisers and destroyers.

Eagle was torpedoed and sunk by U-73 on the afternoon of 11 August.

On 12 August, north of Bizerta, the destroyers Pathfinder and Zetland detected an Italian submarine on the port bow of the convoy and hunted her with depth charges. Ithuriel, stationed on the quarter, came up and joined the attack, and the submarine was forced to the surface.

Ithuriel went straight at her and rammed her. She was the Cobalto, and she sank, Ithuriel picking up 41 of her crew. Ramming was a sure way to sink a surfaced submarine, but hard on a destroyer's light bow, and Ithuriel's was crumpled. She hurried back towards the convoy, but could do no more.

She went back to Gibraltar, arriving on the 14th, and that was the end of her part in the battle; the convoy went on to lose nine of its fourteen merchant ships, while Nigeria, Cairo and Foresight were among the warships hit.

After temporary repairs she escorted the damaged Indomitable home from Gibraltar to Liverpool with Lightning, arriving on 28 August. Her bow was rebuilt at Liverpool and she was refitted at Portsmouth, and on 24 October she sailed to rejoin the flotilla at Gibraltar in time for the landings in North Africa.

Broken at Bone

She escorted the assault convoys for Operation Torch on 8 November, and then the build-up convoys along the coast of Algeria as the Allied armies pushed east towards Tunisia. Bone, the port nearest the front, was within easy reach of the German and Italian airfields in Tunisia and Sardinia and was bombed again and again.

In late November she, Quentin and the Australian destroyer Quiberon were working with the cruisers out of Algiers and Bone.

Just after midnight on 28 November 1942, as she lay at anchor off Bone, two bombs fell close alongside and exploded underneath her. Her hull was blown in aft and she began to flood.

Quentin came alongside to help pump her out and then towed her into shallow water, and when her after guns were taken off to lighten her it was found that her back was broken. The next day she was beached.

There were few materials for repairs at Bone, and her 4.7 inch guns are said to have been mounted ashore for the defence of the port. In February 1943 she was towed to Algiers, where she was found to be beyond repair, and that summer she was towed on to Gibraltar to serve as an accommodation and training ship.

In the summer of 1944 she was towed home to Plymouth, paid off and sold to be broken up at Bo'ness on the Firth of Forth. She had been at sea for less than nine months, and in that time had earned three battle honours, Atlantic 1942, Malta Convoys 1942 and North Africa 1942.

After the war Britain gave Turkey another destroyer to take her place, and Oribi was handed over in 1946 under the name Ithuriel had been laid down with, Gayret. Her sisters are in the I Class destroyers collection.