HMS Jervis Bay (F40): The Liner That Charged a Pocket Battleship

A Liner With Victorian Guns

HMS Jervis Bay was not built to fight anything. She was launched by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness on 17 January 1922 for the Aberdeen and Commonwealth Line, a 14,000-ton passenger and cargo liner named after a bay in New South Wales, and she spent the next seventeen years carrying emigrants out to Australia.

If you were a family leaving Britain for a new life between the wars, a ship like this was very probably how you got there.

In 1939 the Admiralty took her up, and on 15 October she commissioned as an armed merchant cruiser with the pennant number F40. The conversion was what the phrase implies and no more: they put eight six-inch guns and a pair of three-inch anti-aircraft guns into a merchant hull.

The six-inch guns dated from the 1890s. She had no armour, no fire control worth the name, and she could make fifteen knots downhill.

The reasoning behind ships like her is set out properly in the article on HMS Corfu (F86), which was another liner in the same trade. In short, Britain had far more ocean to escort across than it had escorts, and a big merchant ship with a few old guns could at least see off a submarine on the surface and shepherd a convoy.

Against a warship she was a target with a crew inside it, and everyone concerned knew it.

She Nearly Ended a Destroyer's Career Before It Began

Her first notable act was an accident. In October 1939, at Rosyth, she rammed the destroyer HMS Sabre (H18) and damaged her badly enough that it might have finished her. Sabre was repaired, went on to lift 5,765 men off the beaches at Dunkirk, and outlived the ship that hit her by five years.

That story is told from Sabre's side in her own article, and it is a small, strange piece of bad luck that connects the two.

In January 1940 she sailed for Freetown in Sierra Leone, calling at Dakar in Senegal on the way, where her people got ashore for a few hours. She came back to Dakar again in April.

One of her own crew, a signalman and keen amateur photographer, took the photograph at the top of this page on one of those two visits, which is why she is not in the grey most people picture. She had been repainted at Hebburn in her owners' colours, green hull, white superstructure and buff funnel, on the reasoning that it showed up less at sea than Admiralty grey.

By the middle of 1940 she was on the Halifax run, escorting convoys of merchant ships across the North Atlantic from Nova Scotia to Britain, which was the job she had been taken up for and the job she was doing when she died.

Fegen

Her captain from the spring of 1940 was Edward Stephen Fogarty Fegen, and he was born about a mile and a half from where these prints are made: 42 Nightingale Road, Southsea, on 8 October 1891. His father was a vice-admiral.

He went to Osborne at twelve and was a midshipman in HMS Dreadnought at eighteen, which is to say he had been in the Navy essentially since childhood and came from a family that had been in it before him.

He was forty-nine, unmarried, and by every account a quiet and rather formal man who was liked by his ship's company. He had been given a converted liner and a job that mostly consisted of steaming slowly back and forth across the Atlantic hoping nothing happened.

Convoy HX 84

Convoy HX 84 left Halifax on 28 October 1940: thirty-eight merchant ships carrying food, fuel, steel and munitions to a country that was, at that point, entirely dependent on their arriving. Jervis Bay was the escort. Not the senior escort, not one of several. The escort.

This was normal and it was known to be inadequate. There were not enough destroyers, the destroyers there were could not reach into mid-ocean, and the gap in the middle of the Atlantic had to be crossed by somebody. So thirty-eight ships crossed it behind one elderly liner.

What nobody in the convoy knew was that the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer was out. She had come through the Denmark Strait into the Atlantic and was looking for exactly this. She carried six eleven-inch guns in two triple turrets, she was armoured, and she could make twenty-six knots. Every one of those three facts was decisive on its own.

The Ship That Was Sunk So Nobody Would Hear

On the afternoon of 5 November the Scheer came upon a British steamer, the Mopan, sailing alone ahead of the convoy. She sank her without allowing her to make a signal, taking the whole crew off first, precisely so that no warning would reach anybody over the horizon.

It worked. About an hour later she found HX 84, and the convoy had no idea she was coming.

Twenty Minutes

It was late in the afternoon and the light was going. A ship was sighted on the horizon and closed, turning broadside on at around eight miles so that all six of her eleven-inch guns would bear.

Fegen did two things at once. He ordered the convoy to scatter and make smoke, which was the standing instruction and the only chance thirty-eight ships had of surviving in the dark. And then he turned his liner towards the pocket battleship and went at her at full speed, laying smoke floats behind him as he went.

He was not attacking. He could not attack. Her guns outranged his by roughly seven miles, which meant she could hit him for a quarter of an hour before he could reach a range at which his own 1890s six-inch guns might do something.

What he was doing was making himself the most obvious thing on the sea, so that the Scheer would shoot at him instead of at the convoy, for as long as he lasted.

The Scheer hit him almost at once. Shells took the foredeck, the bridge and the forward guns. Fegen lost an arm and went on directing the fight. She burned, she went on firing what she could still fire, and she went on making smoke. The Germans expended over three hundred shells on her.

How long the gunnery lasted is genuinely disputed, and it is worth saying so rather than picking a number. Careful research puts the exchange at about twenty-two minutes; the Jervis Bay Association says twenty-four; uboat.net says the best part of an hour.

They are probably not measuring the same thing, because being silenced and sinking are different events. She did not go down until about eight in the evening, bow first, with her propeller clear of the water.

Somewhere around a hundred and ninety of her men were killed, Fegen among them. The exact figure is not settled either, and no honest account should pretend it is.

What He Bought

By the time the Scheer had finished with Jervis Bay and turned to the convoy, it was dark and the merchant ships were scattering across a wide arc of ocean.

She caught five of them. The Maidan went with all ninety-one of her crew. Trewellard, Kenbane Head and Fresno City were sunk.

And the Beaverford, a Canadian Pacific freighter, did the same thing Jervis Bay had done: she fought back with what she had and kept the Scheer occupied further still, and she was lost with all seventy-seven aboard.

The tanker San Demetrio was set on fire and abandoned. The next day one of her own lifeboats came upon her still afloat and still burning, and her crew climbed back aboard their burning ship, put the fire out, jury-rigged the steering, restarted a boiler and sailed her to the Clyde, arriving on 16 November.

Ealing Studios made a film of it in 1943 and did not need to invent much.

Thirty-two of the thirty-eight got through. That is the number Fegen bought, and the arithmetic is brutal but it is not complicated: about a hundred and ninety men, and one ship, for thirty-two ships and their cargoes and their crews.

He was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, gazetted that November, for what the citation called valour in challenging hopeless odds and giving his life to save the many ships it was his duty to protect. His sister received it from King George VI at Buckingham Palace on 12 June 1941.

He is commemorated on the Chatham Naval Memorial, and there are memorials to his ship's company at Saint John in New Brunswick, a sundial at Hamilton in Bermuda, and the Seamen's Institute in Wellington.

The Swede Who Went Back

There is one more ship in this story and she was not British.

The Stureholm was a Swedish motor merchant in the convoy, and Sweden was neutral. Her master, Captain Sven Olander, had scattered with everyone else and was about five miles clear when he called his crew together. He told them what Jervis Bay had just done.

He said he wanted to go back and look for survivors, that it was not something he would order, and he asked for a show of hands.

They went back. In the dark, with a pocket battleship somewhere over the horizon, an unarmed neutral freighter returned to the position and spent the night searching. By daybreak they had sixty-five men out of the water. Three of them died and were buried at sea.

Five weeks later, at about two in the morning on 12 December 1940, U-96 put a torpedo into the Stureholm's stern. She was carrying nearly seven thousand tons of scrap iron and she sank in eleven minutes. All thirty-two aboard were lost.

So the men who went back for the Jervis Bay's survivors were dead within five weeks, and there was nobody to go back for them.

The Hunt, and What It Proved

It is worth knowing what had done this, because it measures what Fegen was up against. Admiral Scheer had left Germany in October 1940 under Captain Theodor Krancke, and HX 84 was the first convoy she found.

She stayed at sea for a hundred and sixty-one days, steamed forty-six thousand miles, ranged as far as the Indian Ocean, and sank seventeen merchant ships of about a hundred and thirteen thousand tons before she got back into Kiel on 1 April 1941. No other German capital ship came near that record.

She was exactly the thing the convoy system existed to guard against, and on the evening of 5 November she had thirty-eight ships in front of her and one old liner in the way.

The Admiralty's response was immediate and futile. HMS Keppel (D84) sailed from the Faroes to sweep the North Atlantic for the Scheer and found, as everyone always did, a great deal of empty ocean. She was hunted again in the Indian Ocean the following year by HMS Enterprise (D52), and HMS Kent (54) describes what chasing a raider around the world's oceans on stale information was actually like.

The Scheer survived until 1945, when the RAF caught her at Kiel and capsized her at her moorings.

Convoy escort changed after HX 84, though not quickly and not because of one action. The armed merchant cruiser as a convoy escort was finished: fifteen of them were lost altogether, and the survivors were taken off the job as soon as there were proper warships to replace them. Corfu's article follows what happened to the type.

The lesson was the same one the Navy kept being taught that decade and kept having to pay for. A year earlier HMS Rawalpindi, another converted liner, had turned towards Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and been destroyed in about forty minutes.

Six months after Jervis Bay, HMS Hood (51) blew up in the Denmark Strait, and a year after that HMS Prince of Wales (53) went down off Malaya. Ships built for one job kept meeting ships built for a better one.

Twenty-Two Minutes and Thirty-Two Ships

She is the least warlike ship in this whole collection. No armour, no speed, no modern guns, no business being anywhere near a pocket battleship. Her sisters spent the war carrying troops and cargo and most of them survived it.

What she has instead is the clearest example anywhere of the thing convoy escort actually was. Not a battle between fleets, but a calculation done at speed in failing light by a forty-nine-year-old man from Southsea, who understood exactly what would happen to him and did it anyway, because thirty-eight ships behind him needed twenty minutes and darkness and there was nobody else to buy it for them.

HMS Rodney (29) sank a battleship. Jervis Bay did not sink anything at all. She is remembered better than most ships that did.