HMS Loyal (G15): Cambridge's Destroyer, Force Q, Salerno, Anzio and a Mine in the Adriatic

The Last of the Ls

HMS Loyal was one of the eight L Class destroyers ordered in the spring of 1938, and Scotts of Greenock laid her keel on 23 November of that year, alongside her sister Lookout.

The Ls were big, powerful ships for their day, with their 4.7 inch guns carried in enclosed twin gunhouses, and they were changed again and again on the slips as the lessons of the early war came in and the shipyards were given more urgent work. Loyal suffered more than any of them.

She was not launched until 8 October 1941, and she was completed on 31 October 1942, more than four years after she was ordered and the last of her class to enter service.

Her name had been carried once before. The first Loyal, a destroyer of 1913, had fought in the action off Texel in October 1914, when four German torpedo boats were sunk. The new ship's badge was a red rose bearing the Royal Crest.

In January 1942, while she was still fitting out, the people of Cambridge adopted her after their Warship Week. Her first captain was Lieutenant Commander Hugo Tweedie, who already held the DSC.

Force Q at Bone

After working up at Scapa Flow and a spell in the yard at Greenock to put right her defects, she sailed from the Clyde at the end of December 1942 with a convoy for Algiers. In January 1943 she joined her flotilla, the 19th, led by Laforey, at Bone on the Algerian coast, where the cruisers and destroyers of Force Q were based to attack the Axis supply routes to Tunisia.

On the night of 18 January she and her sister Lightning caught and sank the German supply ship Favor, a former Norwegian vessel, south of Sardinia.

Through the following weeks Loyal and Lightning escorted the fast minelayer Abdiel on her runs to lay mines across the Skerki Bank, the shallow water west of Sicily through which the Axis convoys had to pass, fighting off E-boats and aircraft as they went. In February she picked up the survivors of the Canadian corvette Louisburg, sunk by Italian torpedo bombers off Oran.

Bone itself was bombed almost nightly, and on 1 March Loyal had ten casualties in an air raid, two of whom later died.

On the night of 12 March 1943 she and Lightning were screening the cruisers Aurora and Sirius on a sweep against an enemy convoy when they came under attack from the air and then from E-boats. Lightning was hit by a torpedo and sank.

Loyal searched for her men through the night and the next morning and picked up more than 180 of them, landing them at Bone on the 14th.

Cape Bon and Pantelleria

In May, as the Axis armies in Tunisia collapsed, she was one of the destroyers of Operation Retribution, Admiral Cunningham's order to "sink, burn and destroy" anything that tried to carry the defeated troops from Cape Bon to Sicily.

With Tartar she bombarded the gun battery at Sidi Daoud, she sank small craft on the patrol line, and on 13 May she captured a boat with twelve Germans aboard trying to make the crossing to Europe. In June she bombarded Pantelleria with the fleet on 8 June and again on 11 June, the day the island surrendered without a fight.

She was in the escort of the cruiser Aurora when Aurora carried King George VI from Tripoli to Malta for his visit to the island in June.

Sicily and Salerno

For the invasion of Sicily on 10 July she was with Support Force East, screening the convoys to the beaches and giving gunfire support to the troops ashore. In September she bombarded the coast of Calabria before the Eighth Army crossed the Straits of Messina, and a week later she was with her flotilla in the Northern Attack Force at Salerno.

On 9 September, while giving gunfire support to the landings, she was hit by an 88 millimetre battery ashore; a shell put her No 2 boiler room out of action, but she stayed in the fight on her remaining boilers. After a quick visit to Malta she was back on the 12th, supporting the troops as the German counter attack came in, and was shaken by a near miss from one of the new German radio controlled bombs.

In October she bombarded the German positions north of the Volturno.

In November and December 1943 she was sent round to the east coast of Italy, patrolling against German coastal shipping and bombarding Civitanova, San Benedetto and Ancona in support of the Eighth Army.

Anzio

For the landing at Anzio she joined the Northern Attack Force under the cruisers Orion and Spartan, with Janus, Jervis, Inglefield, Urchin and Tenacious. Early on 22 January 1944 she and Laforey led the assault force in to the beaches, and she gave gunfire support through the landing.

The next day Janus was sunk by an aircraft torpedo, and on 29 January Loyal helped to rescue the men of Spartan, hit by a glider bomb in the anchorage. On 9 February a shell from a shore battery hit her boiler room and she had to limp back to Naples, from where she was towed to Taranto for repair.

She was back at Anzio in April, and on 9 May she was straddled by bombs off the beach head and damaged again, and went back to Taranto until August.

A Mine off Cesenatico

In September 1944 she joined the ships supporting the Eighth Army's advance along the Adriatic coast towards Rimini, working from Ancona with Undine, Urchin, Kimberley and the river gunboats Aphis and Scarab, bombarding German positions in front of the troops. On 11 October she bombarded targets near Cesenatico with Lookout, and on her way back on 12 October she struck a mine.

The explosion flooded her and wrecked her machinery, and Lookout towed her into Ancona. She was towed on to Taranto for survey, where it was decided that the repairs to her hull would take too long to be worth doing, and she was paid off in December 1944.

Her captain since June, Commander Godfrey Ransome, had commanded her at sea for only a few weeks between her repairs and the mine.

In 1946 she was towed to Malta and patched up for use as an accommodation ship, and in 1947, declared a constructive total loss, she was placed on the disposal list. On 15 July 1948 the tug Earner took her in tow for the passage home, and she arrived at the breakers' yard at Milford Haven on the last day of July.

In less than two years of service she had earned five battle honours: Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943, Mediterranean 1943, Anzio 1944 and Adriatic 1944. The flotilla leader she went in with at Anzio, Laforey, was sunk by U-223 north of Palermo two months later, and her history is told on this site.