HMS Jupiter (G85): The Unlucky J, a Japanese Submarine off Krakatoa and a Dutch Mine in the Java Sea

A Troubled Start

HMS Jupiter was ordered from Yarrow at Scotstoun on the Clyde in March 1937 as one of the J Class destroyers, a class of eight ships that were the first British destroyers with a single funnel, six 4.7 inch guns in twin mountings and ten torpedo tubes.

She was laid down that September and launched on 27 October 1938, the sixth ship of the name since a fourth rate of 1778; the one before her had been a battleship of the 1890s, sold in 1920. She was completed on 25 June 1939, at a cost of £389,511, and her badge showed the head of Hera, the wife of Jupiter, between two wavy bars for the sea.

She was unlucky from the start. Her work-up at Portland had to be stopped in July 1939 because of trouble with her turbines, and she went into Devonport for repairs, finishing her trials only on 1 September, two days before war was declared.

Mason's history of her says simply that she was plagued with machinery defects throughout her service, and the record bears it out. Her first captain was Lieutenant Commander Derek Wyburd.

The North Sea

She joined the 7th Destroyer Flotilla in the Humber, alongside Jackal, Javelin, Jersey and the leader Jervis. The first weeks were a run of accidents.

On 22 September she escorted Javelin to the Tyne after Javelin and Jersey had collided at sea, and on 30 September she herself collided with Jervis at Rosyth. On 9 October, on a sweep towards the Skagerrak with the cruiser Edinburgh, she and Jervis were sent to look for a small Danish steamer, the Teddy, which had picked up the crew of a German flying boat.

They were bombed by German aircraft and escaped damage, but an hour and a half later Jupiter's engines broke down and Jervis had to tow her.

So it went on. She had a refit at the Humber in February 1940, and in April, when the Germans invaded Norway, she sailed with the battleships but was sent back to Scapa and taken in hand again.

The dockyard stiffened her hull and modified her boiler feed tanks, work that most of the class needed after hard steaming in heavy seas, and she missed the whole Norwegian campaign.

The Texel Minefield

In June 1940 she joined the 5th Destroyer Flotilla, under Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, with Javelin, Jackal, Kelvin, Kashmir and Kipling, working from Immingham and then Harwich through the invasion summer. On 24 August Mountbatten was aboard her for exercises off the Humber, and the photograph above was taken that day from Kelvin, with Jupiter in her camouflage and a flotilla mate close astern.

A week later she was at one of the worst disasters of the year for the east coast destroyers. On the night of 31 August she, Kelvin and Vortigern sailed from the Humber to cover the five ships of the 20th Destroyer Flotilla, Express, Esk, Icarus, Intrepid and Ivanhoe, on a minelaying operation off the Dutch island of Texel.

The minelayers ran straight into a new German minefield. Esk blew up and sank, Ivanhoe was mined and later had to be sunk, and Express had her bow blown off.

Jupiter and Kelvin went in to rescue the survivors, and Jupiter took the crippled Express in tow from Kelvin and brought her slowly towards home until the tugs arrived.

The Channel with Mountbatten

In October the flotilla moved to Plymouth to deal with the German destroyers that had arrived in the French ports.

On the night of 10 October she was in the screen of the battleship Revenge as she bombarded the shipping in Cherbourg, and a week later, on 17 October, she was with Jackal, Kashmir and Kipling screening the cruisers Emerald and Newcastle when they caught a group of German destroyers to the west of Brest. Once again her engines let her down.

She could not keep up when the cruisers opened fire, and the German ships escaped into Brest behind a smoke screen. Her new captain, Lieutenant Commander Norman Thew, took over at the end of the month.

On the night of 28 November the flotilla, led by Mountbatten in Javelin, met the German destroyers Karl Galster, Hans Lody and Erich Steinbrinck off the coast between Start Point and the Lizard, as they made off after attacking a convoy.

Javelin was hit by two torpedoes, which blew away both her bow and her stern, and Jupiter was one of the ships that turned back to escort her as a tug towed her into Plymouth under air attack.

In December she went out to Gibraltar with Kashmir and Jersey to bring the cruiser Manchester home after the Collar convoy to Malta, and at the end of the month she screened the minelayer Adventure laying a field in the South Western Approaches.

Force H and a Sabotage Enquiry

In January 1941 she was lent to Force H at Gibraltar, screening Ark Royal on 31 January for the air strike on the Tirso dam in Sardinia, and in February she sailed with Renown, Malaya and Ark Royal for the bombardment of Genoa.

After more repairs at Gibraltar she came home in March for a long refit at Devonport, and in May a board of enquiry sat at Plymouth after foreign material was found in her main steam system and sabotage was suspected. More work followed on the Clyde, where she was given 20mm Oerlikon guns, and at Liverpool, where her propeller shaft brackets were re-metalled.

To the Far East

On 3 August 1941 she sailed from the Clyde with the troop convoy WS 10, nineteen ships bound for the Middle East and Singapore, round the Cape by way of Freetown. At Cape Town she left the convoy and went on to Durban, where her bow was leaking and had to be repaired, and she joined the 14th Destroyer Flotilla at Alexandria on 24 September.

Her defects were blamed by now on poor riveting when she was built. In November she was sent on to the Eastern Fleet, and on 29 November she sailed from Colombo in the screen of the new battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse, with Electra, Express and Encounter, arriving at Singapore on 2 December.

It was her machinery that saved her. She was taken in hand at Singapore for repairs, and so was in dock on 8 December when Force Z sailed to attack the Japanese invasion convoys off Malaya. Two days later Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers.

I-60 off Krakatoa

In January 1942 she was escorting the convoys bringing reinforcements into Singapore. On 17 January, having seen the big American transport Mount Vernon through the Sunda Strait, she picked up a submarine contact about 25 miles north of the volcano island of Krakatoa.

She attacked with depth charges and forced the Japanese submarine I-60 to the surface, then fought it out with guns and torpedoes until the submarine sank. A shell from I-60 knocked out Jupiter's forward twin gun mounting, killing three of her men and wounding nine.

The mounting was replaced at Surabaya with a single 4.7 inch gun.

In February she escorted the last convoys into the Dutch East Indies with the cruiser Exeter, and made a run to Singapore under air attack in its final days before it fell on 15 February.

The Battle of the Java Sea

On 25 February she joined the Allied striking force under the Dutch Admiral Karel Doorman at Surabaya, with the cruisers De Ruyter, Java, Exeter, the American Houston and the Australian Perth, and the destroyers Electra and Encounter and others. On 27 February they sailed to stop the Japanese invasion fleet heading for Java.

They were bombed that morning, three bombs falling close to Jupiter without exploding, and in the afternoon they met the Japanese cruisers and destroyers in the Battle of the Java Sea. Exeter was hit and badly damaged, Electra was sunk, and the Dutch destroyer Kortenaer was torpedoed.

That evening Doorman led what was left of his force west along the north coast of Java, with Jupiter last in the line. At 9.25 pm there was a heavy explosion under her and she stopped dead. Her crew thought she had been torpedoed, but it is now known that she had run on to a mine.

The Dutch minelayer Gouden Leeuw had laid the field there earlier that very day, and the striking force had not been told. Jupiter stayed afloat for four hours and sank at about half past one in the morning in only eight fathoms of water, close to the shore.

Twelve of her men were killed by the explosion and two more died of their wounds. Five officers and 78 ratings managed to get ashore on Java. Lieutenant Commander Thew, one other officer and 95 ratings were taken prisoner by the Japanese, and four officers and 66 ratings were never seen again.

Of the Allied ships that sailed with her that day, De Ruyter and Java were sunk later that night, and Exeter, Encounter, Perth and Houston were all lost within the next two days. Her service in the Far East earned her the battle honour Malaya 1942, to add to Mediterranean 1941. Her sisters are in the J Class destroyers collection.