HMS Kipling (G91): Rudyard Kipling's Destroyer, Mountbatten Pulled from the Sea and U-75 off Mersa Matruh

Named for a Poet

HMS Kipling was one of the eight K Class destroyers ordered under the 1937 programme, a repeat of the J Class with the same single funnel, six 4.7 inch guns and ten torpedo tubes. She was built by Yarrow at Scotstoun on the Clyde, and on 19 January 1939 she was launched by Mrs Elsie Bambridge, the only surviving child of Rudyard Kipling, who had died three years earlier.

She was the first ship in the Navy to carry his name, and her badge, an elephant's head holding a lotus flower, was a nod to the India of his stories. She was commissioned on 12 December 1939 under Lieutenant Commander Aubrey St Clair-Ford, who would command her for the whole of her life.

She joined the 5th Destroyer Flotilla under Lord Louis Mountbatten, with Kelly, Kashmir, Kelvin and her other sisters. Her first months were spent mostly in dockyard hands.

Faults in her turbine gearing were found as soon as she began her work-up at Portland in January 1940, and in February she was withdrawn again for leaks in her boiler feed water system, a fault common to the class.

Stavanger, April 1940

She was back at sea in April, in time for the Norwegian campaign. On 16 April she sailed from Scapa Flow with Hereward, Janus and Juno as the screen for the cruiser Suffolk, which was to bombard the airfield at Sola, outside Stavanger, now in German hands.

The bombardment went in at dawn on 17 April, and then the German bombers came. For seven hours, without any fighter cover, the force was bombed again and again as it withdrew.

Suffolk was hit and so badly damaged that she had to be beached when she reached Scapa, with 32 of her men killed, and Kipling was damaged by two near misses. The repairs, at Southampton and then on the Humber, kept her out of action until August, and her pennant number was changed in the meantime from F91 to G91.

The Channel

In October 1940 the flotilla went to Plymouth to protect the Channel convoys against the German destroyers based in the French ports, and on 17 October Kipling was out with Jackal, Jupiter, Kashmir and Kelvin screening the cruiser Newcastle against a group of them west of Brest.

In December she escorted the minelayer Adventure laying a field in the South Western Approaches, and at the end of the month she brought the cruiser Kent, damaged by an Italian torpedo bomber in the Mediterranean, into Plymouth for repair.

In February and March 1941 the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau came into Brest, and Kipling covered the destroyers and the new fast minelayer Abdiel as they laid mines off the port to hem them in. On 16 April, escorting a coastal convoy round Land's End, she was attacked by German aircraft in the night, and she picked thirteen survivors from the sunken steamer Bolette out of the water.

Malta and Crete

At the end of April the flotilla was sent to Malta as a striking force against the Axis convoys to North Africa. On 2 May, as they came in from their first patrol, Jersey was mined and sank in the harbour entrance.

Kipling, still outside, was sent with Kashmir to escort the damaged cruiser Gloucester to Gibraltar, and came back with the Tiger convoy. On 10 May the flotilla bombarded Benghazi.

On 21 May, with the Germans landing on Crete, Kipling sailed from Malta with Kelly and Kashmir to join the fleet. During the night sweep off the north coast a defect in her steering gear left her behind the other two, and on the morning of 23 May, when they were caught by German dive bombers off the west coast of Crete, she was seven or eight miles to the south.

She watched Kashmir go down and Kelly roll over at full speed, and saw the German aircraft come back to machine gun the men in the water. St Clair-Ford turned straight for them.

For more than three hours Kipling stopped and went slowly among the survivors, picking them up while she was bombed six times by high level bombers. She took on board some 280 officers and men, among them Mountbatten and the captain of Kashmir, and left the scene at eleven o'clock.

During the rescue she struck the submerged wreck of Kelly, which opened a leak in her fuel tanks, and on the way to Alexandria she was bombed again and finally ran out of oil. The netlayer Protector came out to fuel her, and she landed the survivors at Alexandria on 25 May.

Noel Coward later used the sinking of Kelly as the basis of his film In Which We Serve.

Tobruk and U-75

After repairs she supported the campaign against the Vichy French in Syria in June, and from the summer onwards she ran supplies and men into besieged Tobruk, escorting seven convoys there by the end of the year. In November she carried the Polish leader General Sikorski to Tobruk to visit the Polish troops in the garrison.

On 25 November she was in the screen of the battle fleet when U-331 sank Barham, and in the first days of December she brought Jackal home after an Italian aerial torpedo hit her, and picked up some 200 survivors of the armed boarding vessel Chakdina, sunk off the Libyan coast.

On 28 December 1941, off Mersa Matruh, the steamer Volo was torpedoed and sunk by U-75. Kipling hunted the U-boat for two and a half hours and sank her with depth charges; she and Legion picked up two officers and 28 men of her crew.

Admiral Vian's Convoys and Sirte

In the first months of 1942 she was with Admiral Vian's Force B of cruisers and destroyers, covering the supply ships and convoys from Alexandria to Malta. On 11 March, returning from a fruitless search for an Italian convoy, the cruiser Naiad, Vian's flagship, was torpedoed by U-565 north of Mersa Matruh and sank in twenty minutes; Kipling helped to pick up the survivors, but 77 of Naiad's men were lost.

On 22 March, with convoy MW 10 bound for Malta, the Italian fleet came out with the battleship Littorio and three cruisers. While the convoy turned away with Carlisle and the Hunts, Vian's cruisers Cleopatra, Dido and Euryalus laid smoke and his destroyers went in to attack.

Kipling was in the striking force with Jervis, Kelvin and Kingston, and in the Second Battle of Sirte she fired five torpedoes at the Italian ships from out of the smoke. The Italians drew off, but the delay meant the convoy arrived in daylight, and the bombers sank all its ships at or near Malta.

11 May 1942

On the evening of 10 May she sailed from Alexandria with Jervis, Jackal and Lively to intercept an Italian convoy bound for Benghazi. They were spotted by German aircraft the next day and turned back as their orders required, but the Junkers 88s from Crete caught them on the way home.

Lively was sunk at a quarter to five that afternoon. At seven minutes past eight, in a second attack, Kipling and Jackal were both hit about 60 miles north of Mersa Matruh. Kipling sank quickly.

Twenty five of her men were lost; Jervis picked up her survivors with those of Lively and Jackal, some 630 in all, and brought them home to Alexandria. She had earned seven battle honours in two and a half years. Her sisters are in the K Class destroyers collection.