HMS Laforey (G99): Ark Royal, Diego Suarez, the Eagle Rescue and a Last Fight with U-223

Leader of the L Class

HMS Laforey was ordered from Yarrow at Scotstoun on 31 March 1938 as the flotilla leader of the L Class destroyers, and laid down on 1 March 1939. The Ls were bigger than the J and K Classes before them and were the first British destroyers to carry their main guns in fully enclosed turrets, six 4.7 inch guns in three twin mountings, with the extra cabins and offices for a flotilla captain and his staff built in.

Building went slowly in wartime, and she was not launched until 15 February 1941, or completed until 28 August, at a cost of £445,684.

She was named after Sir Francis Laforey, who commanded the Spartiate at Trafalgar, and was the second ship of the name; the first, a destroyer of 1913, had been mined in 1917. Her badge was a golden lion's paw holding a flaming torch. In November 1941 the town of Northampton adopted her after its Warship Week.

Her first captain, and Captain (D) of the 19th Destroyer Flotilla, was Captain Reginald Hutton.

Halberd and the Loss of Ark Royal

Within a month of completion she was in the Mediterranean. In September 1941 she sailed with Prince of Wales, Rodney, the cruiser Kenya and her sister Lightning with the Halberd convoy to Malta.

On 27 September, as the Italian torpedo bombers came in south of Sardinia, Nelson was hit, but the convoy went on, and Laforey was one of the destroyers of Force X that took it through the Sicilian Narrows into Malta.

From October she was with Force H at Gibraltar. In November she was in the screen of Ark Royal and Argus as they flew off fighters for Malta, and on the afternoon of 13 November, on the way back to Gibraltar, U-81 torpedoed Ark Royal.

Laforey and Lightning stood by the stricken carrier through the night as tugs tried to tow her home, but early the next morning, only 25 miles from Gibraltar, she rolled over and sank. Only one of her men was lost.

In January 1942 Laforey was with the anti-submarine striking force out of Gibraltar when Hesperus sank U-93 north east of Madeira.

Courier Bay, Diego Suarez

In the early months of 1942 she escorted Eagle and Argus as they carried the first Spitfires to be flown in to Malta, and then she was sent south for Operation Ironclad, the seizure of the Vichy French naval base at Diego Suarez in Madagascar before the Japanese could use it.

She sailed from Freetown with the troop convoy on 9 April, and on the night of 4 May she, Anthony and Lightning went in ahead of the invasion fleet to mark and buoy the approach channel through the reefs. On 5 May she led Lightning and the landing ships into Courier Bay for the assault, and gave the troops gunfire support as they went ashore.

On 6 May she screened the battleship Ramillies, and on the 7th she covered the daring landing of fifty Royal Marines from Anthony right inside the harbour at Antsirane, which led to the town's surrender that evening.

From Madagascar she went on to Colombo to join the Eastern Fleet, screening Warspite, Formidable and Illustrious on a sweep into the Indian Ocean in June, and then went to Mombasa. In July she was called back to the Mediterranean with the carrier Indomitable, refuelling at Pointe Noire in French Equatorial Africa and at Freetown on the way, for the biggest Malta convoy of all.

Pedestal and the Eagle

For Operation Pedestal she and Lookout were given the job of escorting the old carrier Furious, which was to fly off another load of Spitfires for Malta while the convoy passed. At a quarter past one on the afternoon of 11 August, U-73 hit Eagle with four torpedoes, and she rolled over and sank in eight minutes.

Laforey, Lookout and the tug Jaunty were sent to her, and between them they pulled 927 of her 1,160 men out of the water. Laforey transferred her survivors to Keppel, refuelled and went back to the convoy, attacking the Italian submarine Brin with Foresight and Fury on the way.

On 12 August she was in the screen of the heavy ships through a day of air attacks in which Indomitable was badly damaged and Foresight was torpedoed, and that evening she turned back with them at the entrance to the Sicilian Narrows while the convoy went on towards Malta.

After a refit at Southampton in the autumn she escorted the convoys for North Africa, and on 21 December 1942 she helped rescue the men and women of the troopship Strathallan, torpedoed by U-562 off Algeria with more than four thousand troops and nearly three hundred nurses aboard.

Force Q at Bone

In January 1943 she joined Force Q, the cruisers and destroyers based at Bone to attack the Axis convoys to Tunisia, under constant air attack in the harbour. On 6 January she sank the tanker Empire Metal, which had been set ablaze in an air raid and had become a danger to the port.

On the night of 28 April, on patrol with Tartar, she ran into six E-boats, rammed and sank one of them and damaged two more, crumpling her own forepeak. In May, during Operation Retribution, when the Navy's orders were to sink, burn and destroy anything trying to carry the Axis armies out of Tunisia, she was hit in the engine room by a shore battery near Cape Bon.

After repairs at Malta she went back to the patrols, and on 15 May she found 23 enemy soldiers on Plane Island and took them prisoner.

Sicily and Salerno

In June she bombarded Pantelleria and covered the landing that took the island on 11 June. In July she escorted the assault convoys for Sicily to the Bark beaches, and on 15 July she carried General Alexander, the Allied land commander, to Augusta.

On 23 July, after the cruiser Newfoundland was torpedoed off Augusta by the Italian submarine Ascianghi, Laforey and Eclipse hunted the submarine down and sank her; Inglefield had attacked her earlier that day. At Salerno on 9 September she was hit by five shells from the shore batteries while bombarding in support of the landings.

One of her men was killed and two injured, and one of her boiler rooms was put out of action. Repaired at Malta, she was back off the Italian coast in October with the Dutch gunboat Flores, supporting the army on the Volturno, and at the end of December she bombarded Gaeta.

Anzio

For the landings at Anzio in January 1944, now under Captain Harold Armstrong, she and Loyal led the assault force in to the beaches on the morning of 22 January.

In the weeks that followed she gave gunfire support to the troops, fought off air attacks and patrolled at night against the E-boats, and twice she picked up the survivors of ships sunk by the German glider bombs, Janus on 23 January and the cruiser Spartan on 29 January. In February she carried the survivors of Inglefield to Malta, and on 26 February a German acoustic torpedo exploded in her wake.

U-223

On 29 March she was sent to lead a hunt for U-223, which had been reported north of Palermo. With Tumult, Wilton, Tuscan, Urchin, Hambledon and Blencathra, she held the U-boat down through the night with depth charge attack after depth charge attack, waiting for her air to run out.

In the early hours of 30 March U-223 came to the surface, was lit up by searchlight and engaged by all the ships at about 1,500 yards. Even as she was being hit, the U-boat fired her last torpedoes, and they struck Laforey. She sank in a few minutes.

U-223 went down soon afterwards. Hambledon, Tumult and Blencathra picked up the survivors of both ships. Fewer than seventy of Laforey's men were saved, and about 180 were lost, among them Captain Armstrong, who had won the DSO and two Distinguished Service Crosses. Twenty seven Germans survived.

Laforey had earned seven battle honours in two and a half years, from Malta Convoys 1942 to Anzio 1944. Her sisters are in the L Class destroyers collection.