HMS Lightning (G55): From the Arctic to Madagascar, Then Lost to a Torpedo Boat

The Build: Hawthorn Leslie

HMS Lightning was ordered on 31 March 1938 and built by Hawthorn Leslie and Company at Newcastle upon Tyne, laid down on 15 November that year and launched on 22 April 1940, though construction delays caused by the late delivery of her gun mountings meant she did not commission until 28 May 1941, at a tender cost of £440,807 excluding weapons and communications equipment supplied by the Admiralty.

Those gun mountings are worth a paragraph, because the delay was not a hiccup at one yard. The L class had been designed round six 4.7-inch guns in three of a brand-new twin mounting, the Mark XX, which was a considerable advance on anything a British destroyer had carried before and which the factories could not produce anything like fast enough. The hulls came off the slips faster than the guns came out of the works.

The Admiralty's answer, proposed in February 1940 and settled that July, was to give up on the new mounting for four of the eight and complete them instead with 4-inch guns in high-angle twin mounts, four of those rather than three of the others. So Gurkha, Lance, Legion and Lively went to sea as anti-aircraft destroyers with a lighter gun, while Lightning, Laforey, Lookout and Loyal waited for the mounting they had been drawn around. Lightning was launched in April 1940 and did not commission until the end of May 1941: thirteen months alongside, waiting for her armament.

One of the four is a small piece of naval bookkeeping in itself. Larne was renamed Gurkha before completion, the Tribal-class Gurkha having been sunk off Norway in April 1940.

She joined the 19th Destroyer Flotilla at Scapa Flow alongside her sister ship HMS Laforey, initially under the command of Commander Richard Graham Stewart RN.

Malta Convoys and a Narrow Escape

HMS Lightning took part in Operation Substance in July 1941, escorting convoys towards besieged Malta.

The following month she took part in Operation Gauntlet, a Canadian-led raid on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen between 25 August and 3 September 1941, deliberately wrecking the coal mines and stores at Barentsburg and Longyearbyen and evacuating around 2,000 Soviet miners to Arkhangelsk, all to deny the Germans a source of fuel and intelligence some six hundred miles from the North Pole.

She narrowly avoided being struck by a torpedo during a further Malta convoy operation that same September, an early close call in what would prove a particularly eventful and ultimately short career.

Adopted by Doncaster

On 25 March 1942, HMS Lightning was formally adopted by the borough of Doncaster during its National Savings Warship Week, a joint effort with the neighbouring districts of Adwick, Bentley and Tickhill that set out to raise £700,000 and comfortably passed £800,000. The connection outlived the ship herself: Doncaster's Sea Cadet unit, Training Ship Lightning, still carries her name today.

Diego Suarez and Force H

HMS Lightning served primarily with Force H out of Gibraltar between late 1941 and early 1943, taking part, under her new commanding officer Commander Hugh Greaves Walters DSC, in Operation Ironclad in May 1942, the assault on the Vichy French naval base at Diego Suarez in Madagascar, where she bombarded enemy positions and shore batteries in support of the landings.

She continued to provide escort duties for the vital Malta convoys throughout this period, work that remained every bit as dangerous as any single set-piece operation.

Sunk by German Torpedo Boats

HMS Lightning's own end came on the evening of 12 March 1943, while operating in the Western Mediterranean some 35 nautical miles north of Bizerte in Tunisia, when she was attacked by the German motor torpedo boat S-55. The first torpedo strike left her disabled, and a second hit destroyed both her boiler rooms and critical systems, causing her to sink rapidly.

The boats that did it deserve naming properly. They belonged to the 3rd S-boat Flotilla, which had moved into Bizerte on 8 November 1942, the week of the Torch landings, and which spent the following six months working the narrows between Tunisia and Sicily against exactly the sort of traffic Lightning was covering. S-55, the boat credited with sinking her, was commanded by Horst Weber, who had been in her since 1941.

It was not a free hit. S-55, S-60 and S-158 all came out of the action with casualties aboard or damage to show for it, which says something about how close a torpedo attack on a destroyer at night actually was. Weber was promoted and given the Knight's Cross on 5 July 1943. By then the flotilla had gone: Tunisia fell in May and Bizerte was an Allied port within two months of Lightning going down in sight of it.

Of her crew, 180 survivors, her commanding officer among them, were picked up some hours later by her sister ship HMS Loyal, a substantial rescue in its own right for a destroyer that had spent barely two years in service ranging from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean and back, ultimately lost not in any set-piece battle but to the very kind of fast, lightly built attack craft that so often proved deadly to larger warships operating close to enemy shores.

There is one more thing about that night, and it is the sort of detail the war produced more often than the histories admit. One of her men was not picked up by Loyal at all. He was pulled out of the water by the crew of S-158, one of the boats that had just attacked her. About forty-five of her ship's company did not come out of the water at all.