HMS Lively (G40): Guildford's Destroyer, Both Battles of Sirte and Bomb Alley

An Anti-Aircraft L

HMS Lively was ordered from Cammell Laird at Birkenhead in the spring of 1938 and her keel went down shortly before Christmas, on 20 December. She was one of eight L Class destroyers in the 1937 programme.

While she was building, the Admiralty decided that the fleet needed more protection against aircraft than the new destroyers' 4.7 inch guns could give, since they could not elevate high enough to engage dive bombers. In 1940 four of the Ls, Lively among them, were altered on the slip to take high-angle 4 inch guns in their twin turrets instead, and they were known afterwards as the AA destroyers.

She was completed on 20 July 1941 at a tender cost of £458,132.

She was the twenty second ship of the name, which went back to a prize taken in 1689, and her predecessors had won honours at La Guayra in 1743, off Ushant in 1778 and at St Vincent in 1797. Her badge was an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life.

In February 1942 the people of Guildford in Surrey adopted her after their Warship Week. Her captain throughout was Lieutenant Commander William Hussey, who already held the DSC.

Radar Trials and the Rubis

Lively was something of a test ship. She carried an early outfit of high frequency direction finding equipment for taking bearings on radio signals, and during her work-up at Scapa Flow she was used to try out a modified version of the new centimetric surface warning radar, which went into production as the Type 273.

On 22 August 1941 she sailed with Lightning and the cruiser Curacoa to help the Free French minelaying submarine Rubis, reported damaged off Norway, but Lightning found her already on her way home to Dundee under her own power. Three days later Lively was exercising with the new radar sets of Prince of Wales and Repulse to the west of Scapa, a few weeks before both were sent east.

At the end of August she joined the escort of the troop convoy WS 11 out of the Clyde, and when Furious had to put into Bangor with an engine room defect Lively went with her.

From the convoy she went on to Gibraltar with Legion, joining the 4th Destroyer Flotilla there on 7 September, and in her first month in the Mediterranean she screened Ark Royal on two runs to fly off Hurricanes for Malta and took part in Operation Halberd, the big convoy of late September.

Force K

In October she and Lance were chosen to go to Malta with the cruisers Aurora and Penelope as Force K, a striking force to attack the convoys taking supplies to Rommel. They arrived on 21 October.

On the night of 8 November, steered by intercepted Italian signals, the force found the Duisburg convoy east of Sicily: seven merchant ships with six destroyers in company and two heavy cruisers in support. Guided by radar, which the Italians did not have, the four British ships sank all seven merchant ships and the destroyer Fulmine in under an hour and came home unscathed.

This photograph was taken the next day, as Lively steamed through Grand Harbour.

On 24 November, west of Crete, it was Lively and Penelope that first sighted the smoke of two German supply ships, Maritza and Procida. As the force closed, Lively dropped back to keep clear of Penelope's line of fire and to cover her against the Junkers 88s overhead, and both supply ships were set on fire and blew up.

A week later, on 1 December, Force K sank the Italian transport Adriatico and then caught the tanker Iridio Mantovani, already damaged by aircraft and under tow by the destroyer Alvise da Mosto. Penelope sank the destroyer as she came out of a smoke screen to attack, the tanker was finished off with a torpedo, and Lively picked up survivors from both actions.

A Minefield off Tripoli

On 17 December she was with the escort of the supply ship Breconshire when the Italian battle fleet came into sight, and she was one of the destroyers that formed up to attack with torpedoes before the Italians turned away at dusk, in what became the First Battle of Sirte.

The next night Force K, reinforced by Neptune and Kandahar, went after the convoy the Italian fleet had been covering, and ran into a minefield off Tripoli. Neptune, Aurora and Penelope were all mined within minutes.

Penelope ordered Lively in to help Neptune, but as she approached Kandahar, mined herself and drifting, signalled her to clear out of the field. Neptune hit a fourth mine and capsized, and Lively and Penelope had no choice but to leave.

For the rest of the winter Lively shuttled between Malta and the meeting points with the Alexandria ships, bringing in Glengyle in January and Breconshire on 27 January, the last supply ship from Egypt to unload her whole cargo at Malta for many months.

In the disastrous convoy MW 9 in February, when German bombers left the merchant ship Rowallan Castle dead in the water and there was no hope of towing her in, it was Lively that sank her with a torpedo. She then went on to Alexandria with Sikh and Zulu and joined the destroyers of the Mediterranean Fleet.

The Second Battle of Sirte

On 11 March 1942 the cruiser Naiad, flagship of Admiral Vian, was torpedoed by a U-boat off the Egyptian coast, and Lively, Jervis and Kipling picked up the survivors, the admiral among them.

Ten days later she sailed with the escort of convoy MW 10 for Malta, four ships with Breconshire among them, and on the afternoon of 22 March the Italian fleet, led by the battleship Littorio, came down on the convoy in rising seas. Vian laid smoke and sent his destroyers in again and again to threaten torpedo attack.

Lively went in with Sikh, Hero and Havock, fired her torpedoes and was holed by splinters from a 15 inch shell that burst alongside. She stayed in action, flooding forward, until the Italians gave up at nightfall.

It was one of the finest destroyer actions of the war, and the convoy was saved, though bombers caught most of its ships off Malta in the days that followed. Lively was damaged again by bombs the next day and had to put into Tobruk for repairs before going on to Alexandria.

Bomb Alley

The sea between Crete and the coast of Cyrenaica, within easy reach of German aircraft on both sides, was known to the sailors as Bomb Alley. On the evening of 10 May 1942 Lively sailed from Alexandria with Jervis, Jackal and Kipling to intercept an Italian convoy reported on its way to Benghazi, with orders to turn back if they were seen by aircraft, since there was little fighter cover to give them.

They were sighted the next morning and turned for home early in the afternoon, but at a quarter to five the Junkers 88s found them. Lively was hit forward and sank almost at once, in position 33°24'N 25°38'E, between Tobruk and Crete.

More than seventy of her men were killed or posted missing, among them Lieutenant Commander Hussey. That evening Kipling was sunk and Jackal so badly damaged that she had to be scuttled the next morning, and Jervis brought the survivors of all three ships, more than six hundred men, back to Alexandria.

Lively had been in service for less than ten months. In that time she had won five battle honours, Atlantic 1941, Mediterranean 1941, Malta Convoys 1941-42, Sirte 1942 and Libya 1942, and she had fought in almost every one of the surface actions around Malta that winter.