HMS Kingston (F64): Sunk in Dock After Surviving the Battle at Sea

Built at Cowes

HMS Kingston was laid down on 6 October 1937 by J. Samuel White and Company at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, one of six similar destroyers ordered together, launched at East Cowes on 9 January 1939 and named by the Mayoress of Kingston upon Thames.

She commissioned on 14 September 1939 under Commander Philip Somerville, who had taken command that July, before she had even finished fitting out, and who would remain her captain for the whole of her career, joining the 5th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet for escort and anti-submarine duties in the opening weeks of the war.

Philip Somerville is worth pausing on, because a destroyer command of that length in that theatre was not a common thing to survive, and he did not. He was born on 5 December 1906 and took Kingston on 22 July 1939 as a lieutenant commander of thirty-two, before she had been handed over by the builders, and he was still in her when he was killed on 4 April 1942 at the age of thirty-five. In the two years and eight months between, he collected the Distinguished Service Order on 23 December 1939, the Distinguished Service Cross on 11 February 1941, a Bar to the Cross on 8 January 1942 and a Bar to the Order on 8 September 1942, the last of them awarded five months after he was dead, along with the Greek Order of the Phoenix. Four decorations for one ship in one commission is a considerable tally, and the first of them arrived three weeks after the action described below.

That November, on the 29th, Kingston joined HMS Kashmir and HMS Icarus in an attack on the German U-boat U-35, an early taste of the anti-submarine work that would come to define much of her opening years at war.

The U-35 attack was more than an early success and it has an epilogue that is worth telling. She was found north-west of Bergen on 29 November 1939 and depth-charged by the three destroyers until her commander, Kapitänleutnant Werner Lott, brought her up and scuttled her; every one of the forty-three men aboard got out alive. What happened next has become one of the better-known pieces of chivalry of the early war. Lott and his crew reached the Tower of London on 3 December, where he was put in a cold cell on his own and announced that he would go on hunger strike until an officer came to see him. The officer who came was Lord Louis Mountbatten, whose flotilla the three destroyers belonged to. Mountbatten got Admiralty permission to take Lott and his second-in-command out to dinner at Scott's restaurant on their word that they would not try to escape, which they gave and kept, and the two men went on writing to each other until Mountbatten was murdered in 1979. Mountbatten's own ship is described in the article on HMS Kelly (F01).

The Red Sea and East Africa

HMS Kingston transferred to the Red Sea in May 1940, taking part in the sinking of the Italian submarine Torricelli that June and attacking the submarine Perla in the same campaign, before supporting the landings at Berbera in March 1941 as British forces fought to reclaim British Somaliland from Italian occupation. Weeks later she finished off the Italian destroyers Pantera and Tigre, which had run for the Arabian coast south of Jeddah after the Red Sea Flotilla's last sortie fell apart and had been abandoned and scuttled by their own crews; Kingston shelled Pantera's hulk and then torpedoed it to be certain, before she redeployed to Alexandria to join the main Mediterranean Fleet.

The Torricelli action is the one that ought to be remembered, and not for the reason you would expect. Early on 23 June 1940, off Perim at the mouth of the Red Sea, the Italian submarine was caught on the surface, damaged and with an exhausted crew, and her captain, Salvatore Pelosi, chose to fight rather than dive. The odds are worth stating plainly. Kingston, Kandahar and Khartoum, with the sloops Shoreham and Flamingo, mounted between them twenty-two guns of 100mm or 120mm and something like fifty machine guns. Torricelli had one 100mm gun and four machine guns. She opened fire at half past five in the morning at five and a half thousand yards, and her second shot struck Shoreham forward. The British ships fired nearly seven hundred rounds before a 120mm shell hit her forward trim box at five past six and wounded Pelosi in the ankle; her rudder failed three minutes later; she was scuttled at ten past six and gone by twenty-four minutes past. Of fifty-nine men aboard, six died and fifty-three were pulled out of the water by the three destroyers.

What followed is the part that has kept the story alive in Italy. Commander Robson of Kandahar received Pelosi aboard with military honours and told him, according to the Italian account, that he was sorry he had lost his ship but this was war, and asked leave to express the highest admiration for such valiant conduct. The two commanders then shared a cognac. Pelosi was awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour for the action, spent the rest of the war in a prison camp at Ahmednagar in India, was repatriated in January 1945 and retired from the Italian navy as a rear admiral; a submarine of the Sauro class was later named after him, and in 2007 she laid a wreath over the spot where Torricelli went down, the first Italian submarine to return to the Red Sea in sixty-six years. It is a reminder that the courtesies between professional sailors survived rather longer into this war than the popular version allows, and Kingston was present for two of them inside seven months.

The sting in the tail came five hours later. At ten to twelve that same morning, the compressed air flask of a torpedo in HMS Khartoum's after mounting burst without warning, throwing the warhead through the officers' mess, cutting a fuel line and starting a fire that reached a magazine. Khartoum was run into shallow water off Perim and was lost, with one man killed. The obvious explanation was a delayed effect of Torricelli's gunfire, and the obvious explanation was wrong: the court of inquiry ruled out both enemy action and sabotage, despite the fact that Torricelli's captured crew were aboard the ship at the time, and put the loss down to corrosion in the torpedo's own construction. Kingston had begun the day helping to sink an enemy submarine and ended it watching a sister ship destroyed by one of her own weapons, which is about as complete a summary of naval warfare as a single morning can offer.

The rest of the East African campaign and what came immediately after it filled out an extraordinary eighteen months. The Berbera landings on 16 and 17 March 1941, Operation Appearance, saw her escorting the armed boarding vessels Chakdina and Chantala in company with Kandahar and the cruisers Glasgow and Caledon, and she was at Massawa with Force G on 8 April as Italian East Africa collapsed. Within three weeks she was at the opposite end of the Mediterranean doing something entirely different. Between 26 and 29 April 1941 Kingston was one of the ships lifting the British army out of Greece: six hundred and fifty men embarked at Raphti on the 26th, six hundred and forty more from the same beach on the 27th, and thirty-nine at Kalamata on the 29th. One thousand three hundred and twenty-nine soldiers, taken off open beaches at night under air attack, in a ship designed to carry a company of a hundred and eighty.

Crete and the Battles of Sirte

HMS Kingston took part in the desperate fighting around the Battle of Crete in May 1941, engaging German invasion convoys and, together with HMS Kandahar, rescuing 523 survivors from the sunk cruisers HMS Gloucester and HMS Fiji, having picked up survivors from the destroyer HMS Greyhound the day before, a significant humanitarian achievement carried out in the middle of an active combat zone.

Crete was worse. On 20 May 1941 she joined Force C, the cruisers Naiad, Perth, Calcutta and Carlisle with the destroyers Nubian, Juno and Kandahar, whose job was to find and destroy the seaborne half of the German invasion. On the night of the 21st they ran into a convoy of caiques carrying mountain troops, escorted by the single Italian torpedo boat Lupo, who put herself between the convoy and the cruisers and fought until she was wrecked; ten caiques were sunk. Six Italian torpedo boats attacked the force unsuccessfully that night, and dawn brought the aircraft. A second convoy of some thirty caiques was hunted on the 22nd and the attack was called off because the force had shot away its anti-aircraft ammunition, which is the entire story of Crete in one sentence. It was in the days that followed, with Kandahar, that Kingston did the work she is best remembered for: survivors from the destroyer Greyhound on the 22nd, and then the long search on the 23rd that recovered five hundred and twenty-three men from the cruisers Gloucester and Fiji, whose own account of that day is worth reading alongside this one.

Between Crete and Sirte came two more campaigns that the record usually skips. From 17 June 1941 she was off the Syrian coast for Operation Exporter, the invasion of Vichy-held Syria and Lebanon, patrolling and firing in support of the army ashore; on 23 June she was one of five ships, with the cruisers Leander and Naiad and the destroyers Nizam and Jaguar, that engaged the Vichy French destroyer Guépard, who was faster than any of them and got away. On 2 July she bombarded the Damour position alongside HMAS Perth. Then, at the end of November, she went to Malta to join Force K, the cruiser and destroyer striking force that was making the Axis supply route to Libya extremely expensive. On 1 December she was in the attack off Benghazi that sank the ammunition ship Adriatico, and on the 2nd, off the Kerkenah Bank, in the action that accounted for the Italian destroyer Alvise Da Mosto and the tanker Mantovani. A month earlier an aircraft had hit her mast during exercises and gone into the sea with all its crew, a reminder that the Mediterranean did not need an enemy to kill people.

She fought at the First Battle of Sirte that December, and returned to action at the Second Battle of Sirte on 22 March 1942, where she was struck amidships, most accounts say by a 15-inch shell fired from the Italian battleship Littorio, though some historians have argued the hit more likely came from an 8-inch round fired by the cruiser Gorizia. Whichever gun fired it, the shell tore straight through her, wrecking her whaler, anti-aircraft guns, searchlight tower and torpedo tubes and killing fifteen of her crew, a devastating hit that left her briefly dead in the water and nonetheless failed to sink the ship outright; she still managed to fire three torpedoes of her own before withdrawing to Malta for repairs.

What happened to her at Second Sirte is best understood alongside what the rest of the force was doing, and that is set out in the article on HMS Kelvin (F37), who was in the same division. Kingston was in the 1st Division with Jervis, Kelvin and Kipling, and she was hit while turning to run in for the torpedo attack, which is to say at the worst possible moment, with the ship heeling and the upper deck crowded. The shell passed clean through her before exploding, which is why she was not simply destroyed, and the damage was still catastrophic: fifteen of her company killed and twenty injured, the whaler, the after guns, the searchlight tower and the torpedo tubes wrecked, and the ship brought to a stop. She nonetheless got three torpedoes away before she lost the way off her, and she was still afloat when it was over. HMS Havock escorted her into Malta, and on 27 March the dockyard survey came back with the answer nobody wanted: a long repair, in the most heavily bombed harbour on earth, in the worst month of the siege.

Destroyed at Her Own Repair Berth

HMS Kingston limped into Malta for repairs following her battle damage, only to find herself in one of the most heavily bombed places on earth at exactly the wrong moment. Between 4 and 11 April 1942 she endured a sustained series of German air attacks while sitting largely helpless in dock.

April 1942 was the point at which Malta came closest to being finished. The Luftwaffe had moved Fliegerkorps II back to Sicily and was flying against the island in numbers the defences could not match, and the dockyard, with its docks, workshops and the ships lying helpless in them, was the target that mattered most. The Corradino tunnels, cut into the rock behind the yard, were where the dockyard workers and the ships' companies went when the sirens sounded, and they had kept a great many people alive; the story of what the same raids did to another ship in the same harbour is told in the article on HMS Illustrious (87). A ship under repair is the most defenceless thing in a dockyard: no power, no guns manned, plating open, and a crew who have nowhere useful to be. Kingston spent eight days in that position and did not survive it.

On 4 April, at the height of a raid by some thirty-five German dive-bombers that also sank the Greek submarine Glaukos and damaged the destroyer Lance and the cruiser Penelope, a bomb struck the entrance to the Corradino Tunnel where sheltering crew members had gathered, killing fourteen of Kingston's sailors outright, among them Commander Somerville himself, still directing his men to shelter when he was killed, alongside Lieutenant Peter Hague, Yeoman of Signals John Murphy, Telegraphist Frank Naylor and Able Seamen Percy Bristow, George Metcalfe, Walter Stanley and George Taylor.

Further attacks followed on 5 and 8 April, the latter seeing an unexploded bomb pass straight through her hull without detonating, before a final strike on 11 April finally rolled the ship over and sank her in dry dock.

Fourteen of her company were killed in the April raids, and 21 of her dead in all lie in Malta, between the Imtarfa Military Cemetery and the Capuccini Naval Cemetery at Kalkara, the rest of them men killed at the Second Battle of Sirte, a painful toll for a ship whose crew had already fought and survived so much at sea, and for a captain who had commanded her, without a break, from before she was even commissioned.

A Wreck Put to One Last Use

HMS Kingston was declared a constructive total loss, and once her dock had finally been pumped dry, her wreck was towed in January 1943 to St Paul's Bay and deliberately scuttled as a blockship between Selmun and St Paul's Island, finding one final piece of usefulness even in destruction.

The blockship duty was not a gesture. St Paul's Bay is one of the few sheltered anchorages on the north coast of Malta, and an obstruction at its entrance denied it to anybody arriving uninvited, so the hulk of a destroyer that could not be repaired was worth more sunk in the right place than sold for scrap. She stayed there until 1947, when the wreck was raised and the bulk of her broken up in Malta, which is why so little is left at the site now. It is a plain ending to an unusually crowded five years. Kingston sank a U-boat in the North Sea, helped sink a submarine off Perim, finished a scuttled Italian destroyer in the Red Sea, took soldiers off Greek beaches, pulled more than five hundred men out of the water off Crete, bombarded Vichy France, sank an ammunition ship and a tanker with Force K, and fought a battleship. She was never sunk by an enemy at sea. She was killed alongside, in dock, with her guns unmanned.

The remaining hull was scrapped years after the war, and today only a few scattered pieces of metal remain at the site, a quiet, largely forgotten memorial to a destroyer whose story is a stark reminder that for so many Royal Navy ships defending Malta, the greatest danger came not from the enemy at sea but from the bombs falling on the very dockyard meant to keep them safe.