HMS Kelly (F01): Mountbatten's Unluckiest, Luckiest Destroyer

Built on the Tyne

HMS Kelly was laid down on 26 August 1937 and launched on 25 October 1938 by Hawthorn Leslie and Company at Hebburn on the River Tyne, entering service on 23 August 1939, a mere eleven days before Britain went to war.

Named after Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Kelly, she served as flotilla leader of the K class, and would soon come under the command of Lord Louis Mountbatten, a cousin of the King, who commanded her for most of her short but eventful career.

The admiral she was named for is one of the more interesting choices the Admiralty ever made, because his great achievement was not a battle. In September 1931 the Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon refused duty over a twenty-five per cent cut in basic pay, in what remains the most serious breakdown of discipline in the modern Royal Navy; the news caused a run on the pound and Britain came off the gold standard within a week. The man sent to put the fleet back together was Sir John Kelly. He was not the Admiralty's preferred candidate, he was popular with George V and had friends in the Cabinet, and he had a reputation for being extremely blunt and genuinely liked by the lower deck. What he did was go to every ship in the fleet in person and speak to her whole company, without notes and without cant, about what had gone wrong and what was going to happen next, and then write a report to the Admiralty that was a good deal franker about the officers than about the men. It worked. The mutiny of 1931 and the law that surrounds the word are described in the article on HMS Iveston (M1151). Kelly was made Admiral of the Fleet in 1936 and died that November, and the destroyer was named for him two years later.

Mountbatten's involvement began well before he ever set foot on her bridge. Although he had no official design role, he spent much of his spare time at the Admiralty poring over the drawings with naval constructor Arthur Cole, who had devised a genuinely innovative single-funnel layout for the K class by trimming the boiler count from three to two, and Mountbatten later took some credit for pushing the design past a sceptical Navy Controller and for improvements to the bridge layout besides.

Mined, Rammed and Torpedoed, All Within a Year

Hours after Britain declared war, Mountbatten addressed his new crew with a line that set the tone for her whole career: "Whenever we leave harbour we shall be right in the face of the enemy." He was proved right almost immediately. On an anti-submarine exercise the very next morning, HMS Kelly detected and evaded torpedoes from a U-boat before counter-attacking with depth charges for what was logged at the time as a probable kill, a promising start her next twelve months did rather less to live up to.

HMS Kelly's first year of war otherwise reads almost like a catalogue of every misfortune a destroyer could suffer short of actually sinking. On 14 December 1939, while engaged in a rescue operation off the Tyne Estuary, she struck a German-laid mine and needed three months of repairs at her builder's yard.

She had barely returned to service, completing repairs on 28 February 1940, before colliding with HMS Gurkha just two days later, on 2 March, sending her back into dry dock on the Thames for a further eight weeks.

Then, at 22:44 on 9 May 1940, while returning from covering the Namsos evacuation in Norway, a campaign in which she had led her flotilla through fog-bound fjords to help lift some 7,000 troops to safety under near-constant Luftwaffe attack, HMS Kelly was torpedoed amidships in her forward boiler room by the German E-boat S 31, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Hermann Opdenhoff, who was awarded the Knight's Cross for the shot. Steaming at 28 knots when she was hit, Kelly took on a 13-degree list, lost all power, and briefly threw a tongue of flame to masthead height, a blow severe enough that she survived only thanks to what was later credited as excellent workmanship in her original construction, which kept her compartments intact.

Worse followed within hours. Just after midnight, a German E-boat rammed the destroyer HMS Bulldog, which had taken charge of the rescue, then struck Kelly's own starboard side, wrecking her whaler, motor cutter, davits and guardrails and leaving wreckage from the smaller vessel lodged on her deck, an almost farcical postscript to an already serious night. The tug Great Emperor took her under tow at a crawling three knots, and for four days she and her escorts fought off repeated E-boat and bomber attacks all the way home, with Lieutenant Commander J.P. Wisden's seamanship in managing the tow singled out for praise. Mountbatten, as Captain (D) of the flotilla, spent the weeks Kelly was under repair leading from whichever ship was available, for a time from HMS Javelin, until she too was damaged and put out of action. Kelly herself was not fit for active service again until December 1940.

The passage home in May 1940 is the part of her story that deserves to be better known than the sinking. She was hit amidships at twenty-eight knots and everybody in the forward boiler room was killed instantly; twenty-seven men died in all, most of them in the space of a second. What was left was a destroyer with no power, a thirteen-degree list and a hole in her side, several hundred miles of North Sea between her and home, and a war going on. The tug Great Emperor got a wire aboard and started towing at three knots. It took ninety-one hours. For four days and nights a stationary target on the end of a tow rope crawled towards the Tyne while E-boats came out at her in the dark and German bombers found her in daylight, with her escorts fighting them off and her own company shoring bulkheads, counter-flooding to hold the list and doing it all with no lighting and no power. She reached the Tyne on 13 May and went into the yard that had built her, where the same men who had put her together took her apart and rebuilt her. Ships have been abandoned in far better condition than that.

Three separate near-disasters within a single year would have finished off many ships; HMS Kelly simply kept coming back.

Malta and the Evacuation of Crete

HMS Kelly recommissioned in December 1940 and arrived at Malta in April 1941 under Lord Mountbatten's command, taking part in Operation Tiger, escorting a vital supply convoy, and joining her fellow J and K class destroyers in bombarding Benghazi's docks and shipping, each ship firing some 200 rounds of high explosive into the harbour to disable the wharves and destroy transports supplying Rommel's Afrika Korps. She was then sent to support the evacuation of Crete, and on 21 May took part, alongside eight other destroyers, HMS Kashmir, Kipling, Kelvin, Kandahar, Kingston, Kimberley, Jackal and Juno, in a night action against a German seaborne invasion force, sinking transports while fending off Stuka attacks; HMS Juno was lost in the same engagement. It was two days later, on 23 May 1941, that Kelly's own run of luck finally ran out.

The naval battle for Crete needs setting out, because it is the context in which she was lost and it is one of the hardest things the Royal Navy has ever been asked to do. The Germans took the island from the air, and their plan required a seaborne echelon to bring in heavy weapons and reinforcements; the Royal Navy stopped that completely. Not one German soldier reached Crete by sea. The price was that the fleet had to operate for a week in daylight, in confined water, within twenty minutes' flying time of German airfields, with no air cover of its own, and the Luftwaffe simply came at it until ships ran out of ammunition. Three cruisers and six destroyers were sunk; four capital ships, eight cruisers and nine destroyers were damaged, which is to say that a large proportion of the Mediterranean Fleet was wrecked. Something approaching two thousand sailors were killed in a fortnight. When the army had to be evacuated and staff officers suggested the fleet could not take any more, Cunningham gave the answer that is carved on the whole episode: it takes the Navy three years to build a ship and three hundred years to build a tradition, and the evacuation will continue. Twenty-two thousand men were brought off. Kelly and Kashmir were sunk two days before that decision was taken.

Having spent the morning bombarding German positions near Maleme airfield alongside her sister ship HMS Kashmir, Kelly was heading south for Alexandria to replenish her ammunition when both destroyers came under sustained attack from Luftwaffe Stuka dive-bombers.

HMS Kashmir went down first, her back broken by a direct hit from a 1,000-pound bomb, though not before her gunner, Ian Rhodes, shot down one of the attacking aircraft, an act that earned him the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal and made him the only Australian sailor of either world war to receive that particular honour.

With HMS Kashmir gone, the German bombers turned their full attention on HMS Kelly, catching her mid-manoeuvre at 30 knots. A bomb struck her X Turret, penetrated through the hull, and detonated near the engine room, and the ship rolled over and capsized in roughly a minute, trapping many of her crew below decks; her propellers reportedly kept turning even as the capsized hull briefly remained afloat.

HMS Kelly's own gunners fought back fiercely, shooting down three of the attacking Stukas even as the ship went down beneath them. In total, 80 men were lost with HMS Kashmir and around 130 with HMS Kelly, accounts differ slightly on the exact figure, roughly half her crew, and German aircraft strafed survivors as they waited in the water for HMS Kipling to fish them out, a remarkably harrowing end to a ship that had already survived so much.

Mountbatten, who survived, is remembered for one particularly stiff-upper-lip line to the men who had just watched their ship go down: "We didn't leave the Kelly, the Kelly left us."

What happened to Mountbatten afterwards is a story in itself, and it began with the sinking. He had lost three ships in eighteen months and been criticised by his contemporaries for the way he handled his flotilla, but he came out of Crete as the public face of the destroyer war, promoted with startling speed: Chief of Combined Operations within a year, a Vice Admiral at forty-one, Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia at forty-three, and in 1947 the last Viceroy of India, charged with getting Britain out of it in five months. He was Chief of the Defence Staff by 1959. Professional opinion of him inside the Navy has always been divided and often sharp, and the criticisms made of his ship handling in 1940 followed him for the rest of his life. He was killed on 27 August 1979 when the IRA blew up his boat at Mullaghmore in County Sligo, along with his grandson, another boy of fifteen and an elderly relative. The pattern of his life was that he survived things other people did not, until he did not.

The Ship That Became a Film

HMS Kelly's story did not end with her sinking. Mountbatten suggested the idea to his old friend Noel Coward and served as an informal consultant throughout, and Coward's account of her loss went on to inspire the 1942 film In Which We Serve, in which the fictional HMS Torrin and her captain were closely modelled on Mountbatten's own experiences. Coward wrote, produced, scored and starred in the film, and brought in the young film editor David Lean to co-direct, Lean's first credit in the director's chair; the cast also gave early roles to Celia Johnson, John Mills, Bernard Miles and a very young Richard Attenborough, and Coward himself received a special Academy Award for the film in 1943.

In Which We Serve is worth understanding as a piece of history in its own right, because it very nearly did not get made. Coward's script did what British war films of 1942 were not supposed to do: it opened with a British warship being sunk, it showed her survivors clinging to a raft, and it told the story in flashback from the water. The Ministry of Information was uneasy, elements of the Admiralty were unhappy at the idea of a film about a defeat, and there was a good deal of press comment about whether Noel Coward, of all people, was the right man to portray a naval officer. He was, as it turned out. What made the film work was that it gave equal weight to the seaman's family in Plymouth and the captain's in the country, and treated both as the same story, which was an unusually democratic thing for a British film of that period to do. Coward, having never directed anything, sensibly hired an editor called David Lean to handle the technical side, which is how one of the great directors of the century got his first credit. Celia Johnson, John Mills, Bernard Miles and a nineteen-year-old Richard Attenborough are all in it. Coward got a special Academy Award, and Mountbatten got a monument.

The film became the second most popular picture at British cinemas that year, ensuring that a destroyer whose career had been defined as much by mishap and misfortune as by genuine heroism ended up as one of the most famous ships of the entire war, remembered on screen by millions who never set foot on a warship in their lives. A memorial to her stands today in Hebburn Cemetery, close to the Tyneside yard where she was built, a quieter but no less fitting tribute than the one the screen gave her.

The memorial at Hebburn is the right place for her, and it is worth saying why. She was built there, by men who lived within walking distance of the slipway; she came home to the same yard in May 1940 with a hole in her side and twenty-seven of her people dead, and those same men rebuilt her over seven months; and a year after that she was gone off Crete with about half her company. In a Tyneside town, a ship is not an abstraction. Something over two thousand people had a hand in making her and a good many of them knew somebody aboard. She lasted twenty-one months, was mined, rammed, torpedoed and finally bombed, spent a large part of her life in dockyard hands, and never once did anything that would ordinarily earn a ship a place in the national memory. She has one anyway, because Noel Coward wrote a film about her, and because the Navy that built her keeps its own count of the ships that would not go down easily.