HMS Jersey (F72): Sunk Blocking Malta's Own Front Door

Built on the Isle of Wight

HMS Jersey was laid down on 20 September 1937 and launched on 26 September 1938 by J. Samuel White and Company at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, and commissioned on 28 April 1939, a J-class destroyer that went through her workup exercises at Portland before joining the 7th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow that August, arriving on station just weeks before the outbreak of war.

There is a bitter coincidence in the name that is worth noticing. Jersey is the largest of the Channel Islands, and on 1 July 1940 it was occupied by German forces, along with Guernsey, Alderney and Sark, in the only occupation of British soil in the entire war. The islands were demilitarised and abandoned by the British government in the last days of June as indefensible, several thousand islanders were evacuated to England, and those who stayed spent five years under German administration, with deportations to internment camps in Germany and, in the final winter, near starvation until the Red Cross ship Vega arrived. The ship named for the island was mined and sunk in a Maltese harbour ten months after the island itself fell. Neither was liberated until 1945.

Torpedoed in Her First Winter

HMS Jersey's war began badly. On the night of 7 December 1939, off Haisborough Sands, the German destroyers Z10 Hans Lody and Z12 Erich Giese were slipping away unseen after laying a minefield off Cromer when they spotted two British destroyers, Jersey and the leading HMS Juno, some 8,000 metres off; closing to under 5,000 metres while still themselves undetected, Hans Lody fired three torpedoes at Juno and missed, while Erich Giese sent four at Jersey and hit with one. That single torpedo killed ten of her sailors and left her needing roughly 25 days of repairs at the Henry Robb shipyard in Leith.

Further damage sustained in 1940 sent her back into dockyard hands on the Humber, and it was not until 28 October 1940 that she finally returned to flotilla operations, a remarkably rough introduction to wartime service for a ship not yet two years old.

That torpedo hit in December 1939 belongs to a campaign the Royal Navy was, at the time, largely failing to notice, and the figures are worth setting out. Between the middle of October 1939 and February 1940 German destroyers ran eleven minelaying operations against the estuaries and ports of the British east coast, laying something like eighteen hundred mines. Those mines sank sixty-six merchant ships of about 238,000 tons, along with three destroyers and a trawler, which in the opening months of the war was a very large return for very little risk. The Germans went out and back through the same swept channel through their own defensive minefield every time, and nobody interfered with them. The remarkable part is that even after Erich Giese put a torpedo into Jersey off Haisborough Sands on 7 December, killing ten men, the Admiralty did not conclude that German destroyers were operating routinely a few miles off the Norfolk coast. It took months and a good deal more damage before the penny dropped, and it is a useful corrective to the idea that the Royal Navy began the war with a firm grip on its own doorstep.

Lost at Malta's Front Door

HMS Jersey was posted to the Mediterranean, where her service came to a sudden and rather cruelly ironic end. On 2 May 1941, returning from a mission, she struck an Italian aircraft-dropped mine at the entrance to Malta's Grand Harbour and sank directly alongside the breakwater, killing 35 of her crew, a heavy loss inflicted not in open battle but within sight of the safety of harbour itself.

What she was doing in Maltese waters that spring is the whole reason Malta mattered and the whole reason the Axis were trying so hard to close it. Rommel's army in North Africa was supplied entirely by sea from Italy, and Malta sits directly across that route; a striking force of cruisers and destroyers based in Grand Harbour, operating at night against convoys crossing to Tripoli and Benghazi, could cut the supply line more cheaply than any other method available. Jersey and the rest of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla had arrived in April 1941 to do exactly that, and she was coming back from one of those interceptions when she was mined. The Axis answer to Malta was air power: German dive bomber units had moved to Sicily in January 1941, and their first serious demonstration was an all-out effort to destroy a damaged aircraft carrier in Grand Harbour, described in the article on HMS Illustrious (87). Part of that effort was mining, night after night, from aircraft, into the harbour entrance and the approaches. The mine that killed Jersey had been dropped the previous night.

Her sinking created an immediate and serious operational headache: her wreck blocked the harbour entrance so effectively that three other destroyers, HMS Kelly, HMS Kelvin and HMS Jackal, found themselves trapped inside until clearance work could get underway, a properly awkward situation for a besieged island fortress that depended on Grand Harbour remaining open for its own survival.

Blocking Grand Harbour is a more serious matter than it sounds, and the geography explains why. Grand Harbour is a deep natural inlet with a single seaward entrance, and that entrance had been narrowed further in the 1900s by a pair of breakwaters built out from either side to keep the swell out. There is no back door. Everything that came into Malta, every convoy, every tanker, every crate of ammunition and every submarine, came through that one gap, and so did every warship going out to attack Rommel's convoys. A destroyer sunk in the middle of it, in a hundred feet of water, breaking in two three days later, therefore did something no air raid could manage: it shut the island. Jackal, Kelly and Kelvin sat inside unable to get out; the rest of Force K, unable to get in, had to go all the way back to Gibraltar. For an island under siege, whose whole value was that ships could operate from it, that is close to the worst thing that could happen, and it happened by accident.

Jersey's own flotilla, the 5th, flagshipped by HMS Kelly under Lord Louis Mountbatten, had only reached Malta the previous month. Barely three weeks after Jersey went down blocking their own harbour, the same flotilla sailed on to Crete, where Kelly herself was bombed and sunk on 23 May 1941 with the loss of half her crew, a grim reminder of just how costly that whole spring in the Mediterranean was proving for the Royal Navy's destroyer squadrons, quite apart from any damage inflicted by mines sitting quietly at anchor.

The flotilla she belonged to had a spectacularly bad 1941, and it is worth following. Mountbatten had already come close to losing HMS Javelin off Plymouth the previous November, an action in which she had both her bow and her stern blown off, described in the article on HMS Javelin (F61). Jersey was mined at Malta on 2 May. Three weeks later, off Crete, Kelly and Kashmir were both caught by Stukas in the same attack on the morning of 23 May and sunk within minutes of each other, with heavy loss of life; Mountbatten spent some time in the water and came out of it a national figure, largely because Noel Coward made a film about it. Three ships of the flotilla were sunk and a fourth very nearly lost inside seven months. That is not remarkable bad luck; it is the ordinary attrition rate for destroyers operating within range of German dive bombers without air cover, which is what the Mediterranean was in 1941.

A Wreck That Took Decades to Clear

HMS Jersey's wreck proved stubbornly difficult to remove, breaking into two separate sections within days of sinking. Major demolition work took place across 1946 to 1949, with further salvage efforts continuing as late as 1968, nearly three decades after she went down.

Today only scattered remains of the 109-metre destroyer lie between the breakwater arms at the entrance to Valletta's harbour, resting at depths of around 15 to 19 metres, a site now visited by experienced divers who come to see what is left of a ship whose final resting place caused nearly as much trouble for Malta's wartime garrison as any single air raid. The site is a protected war grave today, managed by Heritage Malta, a quiet postscript for a ship whose short life was rather busier than most.

She was two years old, just past her second commissioning anniversary, when she was sunk, and she had been in dockyard hands for a good part of that. She was torpedoed in her first winter by a German destroyer nobody believed was there, patched up, damaged again, patched up again, sent to the Mediterranean, and then killed within a few hundred yards of the harbour she was trying to reach by a weapon dropped out of the dark by an aircraft that never saw her. Thirty-five men died with her. Her wreck then closed the most important harbour in the central Mediterranean for several days, trapped three of her own flotilla inside it, and took until 1949 to be cleared properly, with salvage work still going on in 1968. There are very few ships whose sinking did more damage than their existence, and it is not remotely their fault.