HMS Legion (G74): From the Lofoten Raid to a Magazine Explosion at Malta

The Build: Hawthorn Leslie

HMS Legion was ordered on 31 March 1938 from Hawthorn Leslie and Company in Newcastle upon Tyne, laid down on 1 November that year and launched just over a year later, on 26 December 1939.

She entered service on 19 December 1940 at a cost of £445,684, excluding weapons and communications equipment supplied separately by the Admiralty, and underwent early trials that revealed defects requiring repair at Greenock before she could properly join the fleet, an inauspicious but hardly unusual start for a wartime destroyer built at pace.

The Lofoten Raid and a Dramatic Rescue

HMS Legion supported Operation Claymore in March 1941, the commando raid on Norway's Lofoten Islands that destroyed fish-oil processing facilities supplying the German war effort with vital glycerine for explosives, a daring early example of the kind of combined operations raiding that would become an increasingly important part of British strategy.

The fish oil was not the important part, as it turned out. While the commandos were ashore at Lofoten the destroyer HMS Somali took the German armed trawler Krebs, and out of her came Enigma rotors and settings that went straight to Bletchley Park. It is one of the more consequential things anybody carried home from a raid in the whole war, and the story is told in the article on HMS Tartar (F43), who was there as well.

The following month, in April 1941, she took part in one of her most significant humanitarian actions, rescuing 177 survivors from the armed merchant cruiser Rajputana after she was torpedoed, a substantial rescue carried out under difficult wartime conditions.

Rajputana is worth knowing about. She was a P and O liner, completed in 1925 for the India run, requisitioned by the Admiralty four days after the war began and commissioned that December as an armed merchant cruiser, which meant a passenger ship with old guns bolted to her and a job patrolling the Denmark Strait. Before the war she had carried Gandhi, the yogi Paramahansa Yogananda and T. E. Lawrence as passengers.

U-108 first sighted her on 11 April 1941 and then spent two days working out how to hit a large ship zigzagging at speed. She managed it on the 13th, west of Iceland. Between Legion and the Polish destroyer ORP Piorun, two hundred and eighty-three of Rajputana's people were taken out of the water and the boats, some of them after twelve hours crammed into overcrowded lifeboats in the North Atlantic in April. The convoy commodore, Commander Cyril Richardson RNR, four officers and thirty-seven ratings were lost.

That May she screened Home Fleet capital ships during the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, only to be detached to refuel at Iceland before the action reached its conclusion, missing by a matter of days one of the most famous naval engagements of the war.

That November, the people of Cheltenham adopted her during their Warship Week appeal of 22 to 29 November 1941, raising £1,046,951, more than double her actual build cost, a striking vote of civic confidence in a ship that had barely four months left to live.

The Battle of Cape Bon

HMS Legion took part in the Battle of Cape Bon in December 1941, an action that saw British forces intercept and sink the Italian light cruisers Alberto di Giussano and Alberico da Barbiano, a sharp and decisive night engagement that dealt a real blow to Italian naval strength in the central Mediterranean.

The Battle of Cape Bon deserves setting out, because it is one of the most one-sided actions of the naval war and it lasted about five minutes. The Italian 4th Cruiser Division, the light cruisers Alberto di Giussano and Alberico da Barbiano with the torpedo boat Cigno, was running just under two thousand tons of aviation fuel to North Africa, a good deal of it stowed in drums on deck because that was the only way to get enough of it there. The division was commanded by Rear-Admiral Antonino Toscano.

Four destroyers came up astern of them in the dark off Cape Bon at twenty-five past three in the morning on 13 December 1941: Sikh, Maori, Legion and the Dutch Isaac Sweers, under Commander G. H. Stokes. The British ships had radar. The Italians did not, and never saw them. Torpedoes went in from close range, the petrol on the cruisers' decks caught, and both ships went up in a way that men watching from miles off never forgot.

Over nine hundred Italian sailors died, Toscano among them. No British ship was hit. It is worth being clear about why: not seamanship, not courage, and not the quality of the Italian navy, which was frequently very good. It was a set of aerials. One side could see in the dark and the other could not, and by the end of 1941 that was the whole difference in the Mediterranean.

She went on to engage Italian forces again at the Battles of Sirte in December 1941 and February 1942, adding to an already busy record of Mediterranean surface actions.

Lost in Malta's Own Harbour

HMS Legion's career came to its end at Malta in March 1942. On 23 March she was detached to escort the merchant ship Clan Campbell alongside HMS Eridge, and during the sustained German and Italian air attacks that were by then a near-daily feature of life on the besieged island, she sustained damage severe enough to force her to be beached.

While awaiting repairs in Grand Harbour, she was struck by two further bombs, and the resulting damage triggered an explosion in her forward magazine, a catastrophic combination that caused her to roll over and sink in the harbour itself, her bridge and funnel left protruding onto the jetty, a stark daily reminder of the siege for the dockyard workers who passed her wreck each morning.

Her loss adds her to the long and sobering list of Royal Navy ships destroyed not by enemy action at sea, but by the relentless bombing that made Malta's own dockyard nearly as dangerous as any battle.