HMS Lance (G87): Force K, the Duisburg Convoy and a Dry Dock at Malta

A Yarrow L

HMS Lance was ordered from Yarrow at Scotstoun on the Clyde on 31 March 1938 and laid down on 1 March 1939, on the same day as Laforey, the leader of her flotilla. The L Class were the biggest British destroyers yet built apart from the Tribals, with their main guns in fully enclosed twin turrets, and like most British warships of the time they took far longer to finish than planned.

Lance was launched on 28 November 1940 and completed on 13 May 1941, at a tender cost of £440,204 before the Admiralty supplied her guns and radios. Her captain for the whole of her short life was Lieutenant Commander Ralph Northcott.

She was the second ship of the name. The first Lance, a destroyer of 1914, is credited with firing the first British shot of the war at sea, on 5 August 1914 against the German minelayer Königin Luise, and that October she fought alongside Loyal in the action off Texel, in which four German torpedo boats were sunk.

The new ship inherited her battle honours, Heligoland 1914 and Belgian Coast 1917, and a badge of a red lance rising from wavy bars of white and blue. In November 1941 the people of Bexley and Welling in Kent adopted her after their Warship Week.

The Bismarck and the Malta Fighters

She had barely finished her trials when the Bismarck broke out into the Atlantic. On 22 May 1941 she put to sea with the screen of King George V, but machinery defects forced her back.

She put to sea again and rejoined the flagship on 28 May, the day after the German battleship had been sunk, to help bring the fleet home.

In June she and Legion escorted the old carrier Furious to Gibraltar with a deck load of Hurricanes for Malta, and in Operation Railway she screened Ark Royal and Renown while the fighters were flown off. As the plane guard she picked up the crew of a Swordfish that crashed into the sea.

In August she was back in the Western Approaches, escorting the big troop convoys out of the Clyde and then joining the escort of the Gibraltar convoy OG 71, which was under attack by U-boats.

In September she returned to Gibraltar for good, screening Ark Royal on two more fighter runs, and later that month she was in the screen of Nelson, Rodney and Prince of Wales for Operation Halberd, when Nelson was torpedoed by an Italian aircraft but the convoy got through to Malta.

Force K

By the autumn of 1941 the Axis armies in North Africa depended on convoys from Italy, and Malta lay right across their path. In October the Admiralty sent two cruisers, Aurora and Penelope, and two destroyers, Lance and Lively, to the island as a striking force.

The destroyers left Gibraltar on 19 October and began their service with Force K at Malta two days later.

They did not wait long. Italian signals, read by the British codebreakers, revealed a large convoy on its way to Tripoli, and Force K sailed at a quarter to six on the evening of 8 November.

Shortly after midnight the cruisers found it on radar: seven merchant ships, among them the German Duisburg, with six destroyers in close escort and two heavy cruisers, Trento and Trieste, in distant cover. The Italians had no radar and could see almost nothing in the dark.

Fire was opened twenty minutes after the first contact, and in about three quarters of an hour every one of the seven merchant ships had been set ablaze and the destroyer Fulmine sunk. Force K was back in Grand Harbour by early afternoon on 9 November without a man hurt.

On 24 November, west of Crete, the force caught two German supply ships, Maritza and Procida, bound for Benghazi with fuel and stores. The ships of Force K were spread five miles apart to search, Lance between Penelope and Aurora, and when smoke was sighted Aurora and Lance worked up to full speed.

The two Italian torpedo boats with the convoy made off under a smoke screen, the crews of the merchant ships abandoned them, and both were left burning and blew up. On her return to Malta Lance went into dock for repairs, and so missed the sinking of the transport Adriatico and the tanker Iridio Mantovani at the start of December.

Sirte and the Tripoli Minefield

She was back in time for the next convoy. On 16 December Force K sailed to meet the supply ship Breconshire, coming in from Alexandria loaded with fuel oil, and the following evening the escort ran into the Italian battle fleet, which was covering a convoy of its own.

In the brief action known as the First Battle of Sirte the Italians fired at long range and then turned away as night fell, unwilling to risk a destroyer torpedo attack in the dark, and Breconshire reached Malta.

That same evening Force K sailed again, now with Neptune, Kandahar and Havock, to catch the Italian convoy before it reached Tripoli. Just after one in the morning of 19 December Neptune, in the lead, struck a mine, and within minutes Aurora and Penelope had both hit mines as well.

The force had run into a minefield laid in deep water, where no one had expected one. Aurora, badly damaged, turned back for Malta with Lance and Havock as her escort, Kandahar signalling to Lance to take charge of the destroyers as she went in to help Neptune.

Kandahar was mined in her turn, Neptune hit two more mines and sank, and of her company of more than seven hundred only one man survived. It was the end of Force K as a striking force.

The Supply Runs

For the next two months Lance and Lively, with the few other ships left at Malta, escorted the supply ships to and from a meeting point with the ships from Alexandria.

On the night of 6 January 1942 she sailed with Lively, Jaguar and Havock to take Breconshire out to sea, exchanged her for the fast supply ship Glengyle and brought Glengyle in to Grand Harbour at eight in the morning of 8 January, the day this photograph was taken.

On 19 January she came in with the three ships of convoy MW 8, the last convoy from Egypt to reach the island for many months, and at the end of the month she went on to Alexandria with the escort of the empty ships.

In February she joined the 22nd Destroyer Flotilla and sailed with the AA cruiser Carlisle and the Hunt Class destroyers Eridge, Avonvale and Heythrop as close escort of convoy MW 9, three merchant ships for Malta. It was a disaster.

The German bombers from Crete and Libya hit Clan Campbell, which had to turn for Tobruk, set Clan Chattan on fire so that she had to be sunk, and crippled Rowallan Castle, which was sunk by Lively when the attempt to tow her was given up. Not a ton of cargo reached Malta.

Lance went on to the island with Penelope, Lively and Legion, arriving on 15 February.

Wrecked in Dry Dock

She was in need of repair, and on 25 February she was docked in No 2 Dock in the dockyard at Malta. By then the Luftwaffe had returned to Sicily in strength and the dockyard was a daily target.

On 5 April 1942 a bomb burst in the dock beside her and she was knocked off the blocks and partly flooded, and on 9 April she was hit again. Work on her was abandoned.

She was later raised and towed home to Chatham for survey, but she was found to be beyond economical repair and declared a constructive total loss. In 1944 she was placed on the disposal list, and in June that year she arrived at the yard of T W Ward at Grays in Essex to be broken up.

In less than a year of active service she had chased the Bismarck, screened the fighter runs that kept Malta in the air, and helped Force K to the most complete victory over an Italian convoy of the whole war. She earned the battle honours Mediterranean 1941 and Malta Convoys 1941-42, which passed with her name to the ships that came after her.

Her partner in Force K, Lively, went to Alexandria in February 1942 and was sunk by bombers off the coast of Libya that May. The other destroyers that shared the Malta runs, among them Jervis, Kipling, Sikh and Havock, have their own histories on this site, and their photographs are available as prints alongside this one.