HMS Loyal (1913): The Action off Texel, the Harwich Force and a U-Boat Driven into Ferrol

Orlando Becomes Loyal

HMS Loyal was laid down at the Dumbarton yard of William Denny and Brothers on 16 September 1912 as one of the destroyers of the 1912 programme, and she was to have been called Orlando. In the autumn of 1913 the Admiralty decided to give each new class of destroyers names beginning with the same letter, and the twenty two ships of her class became the Laforey Class, or L Class, every one with a name beginning with L.

Orlando became Loyal. She was launched in November 1913 and completed in May 1914, three months before the outbreak of war.

The Ls burned oil in four Yarrow boilers, and their Parsons turbines gave them 29 knots. They carried three 4 inch guns and four 21 inch torpedo tubes on a hull of a little under a thousand tons, with a crew of about seventy five.

When war came Loyal was in the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla at Harwich, which with the light cruisers of Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt formed the Harwich Force, the striking force that watched the southern North Sea from the Thames estuary to the Dutch coast.

The Action off Texel

On 17 October 1914 the new light cruiser Undaunted, Captain Cecil Fox, was on patrol off the Dutch coast with four destroyers of the flotilla, Lance, Lennox, Legion and Loyal. Loyal was commanded by Lieutenant Burges Watson.

At about two in the afternoon, some fifty miles south-west of the island of Texel, they sighted smoke ahead, and it turned out to be four German torpedo boats, S115, S117, S118 and S119 of the 7th Half Flotilla, under Korvettenkapitän Georg Thiele in S119. They had been sent out to lay mines off the English coast.

The German boats were old and lightly armed, and they were outgunned and outpaced. Fox made the signal for a General Chase and opened fire with Undaunted's 6 inch guns at about 8,000 yards.

The destroyers were sent after the Germans in pairs: Lance and Lennox went for S115, Legion for S117 and S118, and Loyal was ordered to head off S119 and stop her escaping out to sea. Thiele turned to fight, and S119 fired at Loyal, but within a few minutes Loyal's guns had reduced her to a wreck, her funnels, bridge and deck fittings shot away and most of her crew dead.

Loyal then turned to help with the other two. By half past four all four German boats had been sunk.

About two hundred and twenty German sailors were killed, Thiele among them, and only about thirty were picked up from the water. The British force came through almost unscathed; Loyal had an officer and two men wounded, one of whom later died. Fox's signal, as it was reported, was simply that he had "sunk the lot".

It was one of the first clear British successes of the war at sea. The photograph above was taken on the day of the action.

A Box from the Sea Bed

The action had a remarkable sequel. Before S119 sank, Thiele had thrown his secret papers overboard in a weighted box. On 30 November 1914 a British trawler fishing in the same area brought the box up in her nets, and it was found to contain a German naval codebook.

Together with the codebooks taken from the cruiser Magdeburg in the Baltic and from a German merchant ship in Australian waters, it was passed to the new codebreaking section at the Admiralty, Room 40, and helped the British to read German naval signals for the rest of the war. A few days after the action the Germans sent out the hospital ship Ophelia to look for survivors.

The Royal Navy stopped her, decided from her papers and her behaviour that she had been scouting, and detained her.

U-Boats in the Irish Sea

Loyal's war after Texel was mostly made up of the patrols, escorts and hunts that took up most of a destroyer's time. In January 1915, when U-21 appeared in the Irish Sea and shelled Walney Island, she was one of twelve destroyers of the flotilla sent round to Milford Haven to hunt for her, but the U-boat had already gone home.

In February she was based at Pembroke with Lance, Legion and Lennox to search for U-30, and with Legion she escorted two horse transports from Queenstown to Liverpool.

In March she escorted the liner Megantic, and later the first transports taking the 29th Division out to the Dardanelles, and in May she was one of the destroyers ordered to see the great Cunarders Mauretania and Aquitania, newly taken up as troopships, out from Liverpool. When the collier Morwenna was sunk by U-41 off Pembrokeshire that month, Loyal and Louis were sent to the scene but found nothing.

In the autumn of 1915 she was back in the North Sea, supporting a minelaying operation off the Amrum Bank in September and taking part in Tyrwhitt's sweeps into the Heligoland Bight. During one of these, on 30 November, a man was washed off Lance as the line turned, and Loyal, the next ship astern, picked him up without having to lower a boat. In October the 3rd Flotilla was renumbered the 9th.

The Loss of Arethusa

On 11 February 1916 the light cruiser Arethusa, which had been Tyrwhitt's flagship at the Battle of Heligoland Bight, struck a mine off Felixstowe on her way back into Harwich. The destroyer Lightfoot tried to take her in tow and her hawser parted, and then Loyal tried, and hers parted too.

Arethusa drifted aground, broke in two and became a total loss. In April Loyal was at sea during the German battlecruiser raid on Lowestoft, and in October 1916 she and three of her sisters were sent to reinforce the Dover Patrol.

UC-48

From April 1917 Loyal served with the 7th Flotilla on the East Coast, and later that year she went to Devonport to join the 4th Flotilla, hunting U-boats and escorting convoys in the Western Approaches and the Channel. Her most successful action came in March 1918.

UC-48, a minelaying submarine of the Flanders Flotilla which had sunk some thirty five ships, had already survived a depth charge attack by an American destroyer and the American armed yacht Isabel when Loyal found her on 20 March. Loyal's depth charges left her so badly damaged that she could not get home.

Three days later her captain brought her into the Spanish port of El Ferrol, where she and her crew of twenty nine were interned for the rest of the war.

Two Loyals

When the war ended Loyal was at Devonport, and by November 1919 she had been reduced to a care and maintenance party in the reserve. She was sold for breaking up in November 1921.

Her name passed to the second HMS Loyal, an L Class destroyer of the Second World War, laid down in 1938 and completed in 1942, which fought at Sicily, Salerno and Anzio before being wrecked by a mine in the Adriatic in 1944. The name of her partner at Texel likewise went to the second HMS Lance, which served with Force K at Malta in 1941. Photographs of all three ships are available as prints.