HMS Jervis (F00/G00): The Destroyer That Fought 13 Battles Without Losing a Man

Constructed at Hebburn

HMS Jervis was laid down on 26 August 1937 and launched on 9 September 1938 by R. and W. Hawthorn, Leslie and Company at Hebburn-on-Tyne, commissioning on 8 May 1939, barely four months before the outbreak of war.

Named after Admiral John Jervis, the eighteenth-century admiral who won the Battle of Cape St Vincent, she was built as a J-class flotilla leader, carrying the pennant number F00 until 1940 and G00 thereafter.

The man she was named after is one of the two or three most consequential officers in Royal Navy history and is remembered, unfairly, mostly as Nelson's superior. John Jervis fought his fleet action off Cape St Vincent on 14 February 1797 with fifteen ships of the line against twenty-seven Spanish, and when a subordinate pointed out the odds he is supposed to have replied that a victory was very essential to England at that moment, and that he would not leave off the action while he had a ship that would swim. He won it, was made Earl St Vincent, and had the good sense not to object when a commodore named Nelson broke the line without orders and boarded two Spanish ships in succession. What made Jervis matter, though, was not the battle. He was the hardest disciplinarian in the service and the most thorough reformer of it: he took a Mediterranean fleet that was on the edge of the mutinies of 1797 and held it together by a combination of ferocity and scrupulous attention to his men's food, health and pay, and he went on as First Lord of the Admiralty to take the dockyards apart over corruption, making himself extremely unpopular in the process. A flotilla leader named for him carries a reasonably heavy standard.

North Sea Duty Under Philip Mack

HMS Jervis began the war as leader of the 7th Destroyer Flotilla based in the Humber under Captain Philip Mack, spending her first six months on North Sea sweeps in thoroughly unpleasant conditions, capturing three blockade runners in the process.

A collision with the Swedish freighter Tor in March 1940 put her in dock for three months, an early setback that did nothing to foreshadow the remarkable run of good fortune that would follow.

Cape Matapan and the Mediterranean Cauldron

HMS Jervis followed Mack to the Mediterranean when he took command of the 14th Destroyer Flotilla, arriving at Malta by July 1940 and plunging almost immediately into the thick of the naval war there.

At the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941, she helped destroy the crippled Italian cruiser Zara, and then boarded the stricken Italian cruiser Pola to take off her wounded before HMS Jervis and HMS Nubian finished her off with torpedoes, a dramatic episode combining ruthless efficiency with a degree of old-fashioned chivalry towards a defeated enemy.

Matapan deserves the detail, because it was one of the most complete victories in British naval history and it turned on two things nobody could see. The first was intelligence: Bletchley Park had broken the Italian naval Enigma, and Cunningham knew a sortie was coming and roughly where. The second was radar. On the night of 28 March 1941 the Italian squadron had stopped to help the crippled cruiser Pola and had no idea a British battle fleet was five miles away, because they had no radar and it was pitch dark; Cunningham's ships found them on their screens, closed to about three thousand yards, and opened fire with searchlights and 15-inch guns at point-blank range. The heavy cruisers Zara and Fiume were reduced to burning wrecks in about three minutes. Two Italian destroyers followed. That is where Jervis came in: she went alongside Pola in the dark, took off her surviving crew, and then torpedoed her. Cunningham afterwards signalled the Italian authorities the exact position of the survivors in the water so that hospital ships could come out for them, at some risk to himself, and rather more than a thousand Italians were picked up as a result. The carrier whose aircraft had crippled the Italian ships in the first place has her own account in the article on HMS Formidable (67).

She went on to lead forces at the Action off Sfax that April, fought at the Battle of Crete in May, where her sister ship HMS Kelly was lost, resupplied besieged Tobruk that summer, and led destroyers at the First Battle of Sirte in December, an extraordinary run of major actions inside a single year.

She had one more brush with disaster before that remarkable year was even out: on the night of 19 December 1941, while refuelling at Alexandria, she was damaged in the same audacious raid in which Italian frogmen riding manned torpedoes crippled the battleships HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Valiant at their moorings, a rare instance of HMS Jervis herself being caught out rather than dishing out the punishment. She was back in action by the end of January 1942 after six weeks of repairs.

The Alexandria raid was the single most audacious operation of the Mediterranean war and it very nearly changed its course. The Italian submarine Scire sailed from La Spezia on 3 December 1941 carrying three manned torpedoes, slow electric machines that two divers sat astride in breathing sets, universally known in the Italian navy as maiali, pigs. She collected her six operators at Leros and released them in the small hours of 19 December about a mile from the harbour entrance, and they got in through the anti-submarine boom by following three British destroyers through it as the gate was opened. Luigi Durand de la Penne got his charge under the battleship Valiant, and was then caught and taken aboard her. Fifteen minutes before the charge was due he asked to see the captain and told him the ship was about to blow up, and refused to say where the charge was; he was sent below, into a compartment above the warhead, and survived. Queen Elizabeth and Valiant both settled on the bottom of the harbour and were out of action for nine and six months. Both sat upright in shallow water, and the Royal Navy kept up the fiction that they were operational for months, with colours hoisted and routine carried on. In the same three weeks Britain had lost the battlecruiser Barham and Force K had run into a minefield off Tripoli. Six Italians in diving suits had effectively removed the Mediterranean Fleet's battle squadron.

Her chaplain, George Sherlock, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, cited for "outstanding zeal, patience and cheerfulness" and for setting "an example of wholehearted devotion to duty," an unusual honour for a naval chaplain and a small but telling sign of just how demanding HMS Jervis's operational tempo had become.

Sirte, Sicily, and Salerno

HMS Jervis came under the command of Captain A. L. Poland in March 1942 and fought at the Second Battle of Sirte that same month, before going on to support the invasions of Sicily and Calabria, the landings at Salerno and Anzio, and operations in the Adriatic supporting both the British Eighth Army and Yugoslav partisans.

In the autumn of 1943 she operated in the Aegean in support of the Dodecanese campaign, adding yet another theatre to an already exceptionally busy war.

Losing Her Bow and Keeping Her Crew

HMS Jervis suffered her most dramatic single blow on 23 January 1944, while operating alongside HMS Janus, when a German Fritz X guided bomb blew off her entire bow. Remarkably, not one member of her crew was harmed in the attack, and HMS Jervis herself went on to rescue more than 80 survivors from HMS Janus, which was lost in the same action.

What hit her at Anzio was not an ordinary bomb, and it is worth knowing what it was. The Fritz X was an armour-piercing bomb of about 1,400 kilograms fitted with four stubby wings and a tail control unit, dropped from a Dornier at high altitude and then steered onto the target by an operator in the aircraft, who watched flares burning in its tail and flew it with a small joystick transmitting by radio. It was, along with the Henschel 293 glide bomb, the first guided weapon ever used in action, and in the autumn of 1943 it was terrifyingly effective: two of them sank the brand-new Italian battleship Roma on 9 September as she sailed to surrender, taking 1,393 men with her, an episode described in the article on HMS Howe (32). The same weapon put HMS Warspite out of action for months, sank the cruiser Spartan, and killed HMS Janus alongside Jervis at Anzio. The Allied answer was jamming: scientists worked out the control frequencies and built transmitters to swamp them, the jammers arrived in service at the end of September 1943, the Germans changed their frequencies, and the Allies changed theirs. That exchange, begun over the Gulf of Salerno in 1943, is the beginning of electronic warfare as every navy now understands it, and it started with a man in a Dornier flying a bomb with a joystick.

She was patched up in Naples and fitted with an entirely new bow at Gibraltar before returning to Britain in time to take part in the Normandy landings, heading for Gold Beach under Lieutenant Commander Roger Hill on the night of 5 and 6 June 1944 to provide gunfire support for the troops going ashore, closing out an already remarkable war with one final major operation. Hill later wrote up his time in command, including his years aboard Jervis, in his own memoir, Destroyer Captain.

Roger Hill is worth a note, because Destroyer Captain is one of the more honest books written by a British naval officer and it is not a comfortable read. Hill commanded Jervis for the Normandy landings and had earlier commanded HMS Ledbury, in which he made himself briefly famous during Operation Pedestal by going back, against the odds, to stand by the crippled tanker Ohio and by searching for survivors of a sunk destroyer long after he had been ordered to rejoin. His book is unusual in describing the fear, the exhaustion, the drinking and the strain of command in plain terms, and in being openly critical of senior officers when he thought they had got it wrong. He was not universally popular in the service afterwards. Jervis's last major operation, off Gold Beach on the morning of 6 June 1944, was under a captain who had been at sea more or less continuously since 1939 and said so.

A Particularly Unique Record

HMS Jervis was decommissioned for refit in September 1944, recommissioned in May 1945 for Mediterranean policing duties, and finally paid off into reserve at Chatham in May 1946, subsequently serving as a Sea Cadet training ship before being placed on the disposal list in October 1947.

She was used for explosives trials in Loch Striven in 1948, before finally being handed to Arnott Young for breaking up at Troon in September 1949.

Across five and a half years of war and thirteen major actions, earning thirteen battle honours in the process, an exceptional tally that made her the most decorated Royal Navy destroyer of the entire conflict, HMS Jervis lost not one single crewman to enemy action, a record shared among Mediterranean-based destroyers only by HMS Orion and HMS Nubian, and one that stands as a notably extraordinary achievement for a ship that spent so much of the war in the very thick of the fighting.

The record at the end of the article deserves both admiration and a small caveat. Thirteen battle honours is the highest of any Royal Navy destroyer of the war, and coming through Matapan, Crete, the Tobruk runs, two battles of Sirte, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, the Aegean and Normandy without losing a man to enemy action is genuinely extraordinary. It is not the same as coming through unscathed. She was rammed by a merchantman in 1940, damaged by the Alexandria explosion in 1941, and had her entire bow blown off by a guided bomb in 1944, and she spent a considerable part of the war in dockyard hands as a result. Men aboard her were injured. What she never suffered was the thing that happened to most of her sisters, a hit in a magazine or a boiler room or a messdeck full of people, and there is no skill involved in avoiding that. Kelly, Kashmir, Jersey, Juno, Jaguar, Janus and Jupiter were all sunk. Jervis came out of five and a half years of it without losing a man to the enemy, and the only honest explanation is a very large amount of luck.