HMS Manchester (15): Scuttled, and Her Captain's Career Ended by the Longest Court Martial in Modern Royal Navy History

Hebburn-Built

HMS Manchester was laid down on 28 March 1936 by Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn, launched on 12 April 1937 and commissioned on 4 August 1938, the first Royal Navy ship to carry the name, a Town-class light cruiser displacing 9,400 tons standard, deployed initially to the East Indies before returning to Home Fleet duties in November 1939 as war approached.

She was not quite a Southampton, either. Manchester, Gloucester and Liverpool made up the third and last group of the 1936 Towns, built to a revised design after the earlier ships had been looked at properly: turret armour doubled to four inches, a thicker deck over the machinery, a second director control tower to give the main armament another channel of long-range fire, extra beam to carry the additional weight and 82,000 shaft horsepower to stop any of it costing her speed. They were the best-protected cruisers of the type Britain built between the wars.

It did not help any of them very much. Gloucester was caught by Stukas in the Kythira Channel on 22 May 1941 during the battle for Crete and went down with something like 722 of the 807 men aboard her, the only British ship lost in that battle from which the Royal Navy picked up nobody at all; the few who survived were fished out by the enemy and spent the war as prisoners. HMS Liverpool (C11) was torpedoed twice and spent most of the war in dockyard hands. Manchester lasted fifteen months longer than Gloucester and was sunk by a boat that would have fitted on her quarterdeck.

912 Shells, Not a Single Hit

HMS Manchester took part in Operation Collar in November 1940, escorting a convoy to Alexandria, and fought at the Battle of Cape Spartivento during that same operation, an action in which she fired 912 shells from her main guns without scoring a single hit, a remarkably sobering illustration of just how difficult accurate long-range naval gunnery could be, while nonetheless sustaining splinter damage from the Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto.

A 60-Foot Hole From a Torpedo

HMS Manchester was struck by an aerial torpedo on 23 July 1941 while taking part in Operation Substance, an operation to resupply Malta, a hit that blew a 60-foot-long hole in her hull, killed 38 of her crew and caused severe flooding.

She underwent extensive repairs that ran until April 1942, a substantial period out of action for a cruiser whose services were badly needed in an increasingly desperate Mediterranean campaign.

Scuttled During Operation Pedestal

HMS Manchester took part in Operation Pedestal in August 1942, one of the largest and most heavily contested Malta convoy operations of the entire war, and at around 1.20am on 13 August, just two miles off Kelibia Light on the Tunisian coast, she was struck by a torpedo from an Italian motor torpedo boat. The hit knocked out three of her four propeller shafts, disabled her main armament and left her listing at 11 degrees, a list her crew fought back down to 5 degrees through emergency counter-flooding, though main power could never be restored.

That motor torpedo boat is worth naming, because there were two of them and they are among the best-documented small craft of the Mediterranean war. MS 16 and MS 22 were Italian motosiluranti of the CRDA type: sixty-two and a half tons, twenty-eight metres of wooden hull, two 21-inch torpedo tubes, thirty knots. MS 16 was commanded by capitano di corvetta Giorgio Manuti, who led the squadron, MS 22 by sottotenente di vascello Franco Mezzadra. They came out from the Tunisian coast in the dark and fired from under six hundred metres, which is knife-fighting range at sea, and hit her aft on the starboard side.

Which of them actually hit is still argued about eighty years later. Italian naval command gave the credit to Manuti on the strength of his own stopwatch timing of the torpedo run; the historian Francesco Mattesini has since argued from British accounts of two hits arriving close together that at least one of them came from Mezzadra's boat. What nobody disputes is the arithmetic. At 11,350 tons full load, Manchester is the largest warship sunk by motor torpedo boats of any nationality, in any theatre, in the whole of the Second World War.

There is a pedigree to those boats that is worth a moment. The CRDA design was a straight copy of six Orjen-class boats that Lurssen of Bremen had built for the Royal Yugoslav Navy to an early Schnellboot pattern, and which Italy took over when Yugoslavia was overrun in 1941. A German design, ordered by Yugoslavia, copied by Italy, sinking a British cruiser off Tunisia. The Mediterranean war in one sentence.

Manchester was also not the only ship they had that night. Off Cape Bon in the same few hours the Italian boats went through the convoy: MS 31 sank the Glenorchy, MAS 553 the Wairangi, MAS 554 the Almeria Lykes, and MAS 557 and MAS 564 left the Santa Elisa and the Rochester Castle badly holed. What the rest of Operation Pedestal cost, and what it bought, is set out elsewhere.

It was an almost exact repeat of the hit she had taken thirteen months earlier during Operation Substance, but that time she had been out in the open sea and, under Drew's own command, had limped safely home to Gibraltar. This time she lay crippled two miles off a hostile coast, in waters thick with enemy aircraft, submarines and torpedo boats, with her secret radar equipment aboard and no realistic prospect, in Drew's judgement, of reaching a friendly port before daylight brought a renewed and likely fatal attack; he later said he feared losing as much as 75 per cent of his roughly 800-strong crew if she were caught again undefended.

The destroyer HMS Pathfinder came alongside first to take off 172 men judged non-essential to fighting the ship. When it became clear Manchester could not be saved, Captain Drew ordered her scuttled at 02:50 on 14 August, and she finally went down shortly after 06:47 that morning. Remarkably, casualties were low given the scale of the disaster: eleven men were killed in the initial strike and one drowned during the abandonment, with the rest of the crew swimming ashore or being pulled from the water by the destroyers HMS Eskimo and HMS Somali.

The Longest Court Martial in Modern Royal Navy History

HMS Manchester's loss triggered genuine controversy back in Britain. A Court of Enquiry convened at Portsmouth on 16 September 1942, at which the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, concluded that "Manchester was sunk prematurely and that this shows a lack of determination on the part of the Captain which renders him unfit to command," a judgement delivered before Drew himself had even made it home from internment to answer for his decision.

Drew's own crew had fared little better in the interim: those who swam or rowed ashore were promptly arrested by pro-Axis Vichy French authorities and marched off to the Laghouat internment camp deep in the Algerian desert, where they joined roughly 150 men from the destroyer HMS Havock, before finally reaching home in November 1942. Drew himself later said he had gone into the subsequent proceedings believing he faced a routine enquiry, only learning at the very end that he was in fact standing trial for negligence.

The formal court martial assembled at Admiralty House, Portsmouth, on 2 February 1943 and did not deliver its verdict until 20 February, an eighteen-day proceeding that stands as the longest court martial in the modern Royal Navy's history. The court found that HMS Manchester had, in fact, still been capable of steaming at 10 to 13 knots on her surviving port outer propeller shaft, that her main and secondary armament had remained largely intact at the time of the scuttling order, and, most damningly of all, that the Emergency Stations order Drew had given within ten minutes of the torpedo strike had done almost as much to sink the ship as the torpedo itself.

Captain Drew was dismissed his ship, severely reprimanded and prohibited from any further sea command; his gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Duff, was also severely censured, along with three further officers and one petty officer, a truly painful and prolonged reckoning for a decision made in the chaos and darkness of a single desperate night.

One thing the court did not weigh, because it was not asked to, was the cost of the exchange. A ten-thousand-ton cruiser and the career of a post captain went into the ledger against a sixty-two-ton wooden boat with a crew of about twenty, which got away clean and was still in service the following year.

A Captain Vindicated, Six Decades Late

Barred from the sea, Drew's naval career carried on regardless and rather more distinguished than the verdict might suggest: a maintenance command at Scapa Flow, a staff posting with the Indian Navy in Bombay, a CBE in the 1946 New Year Honours for chairing the Victory Celebrations Committee, a spell as Director of Naval Recruiting, an appointment as ADC to King George VI in 1948, and finally Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Navy with the acting rank of Commodore, before he retired on 1 September 1952 and went home to Oswestry.

By his family's account the affair never really left him. He raised it once with the First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander, who told him nothing further could be done, and Drew accepted that, his daughter later recalled, "provided he was not considered a coward." His grandson put it more plainly still: "He was very hurt by the way he was treated. I don't think he ever recovered." Drew died in Oswestry in 1987, aged 92.

The controversy resurfaced in 2002, when divers finally located the wreck off the Tunisian coast and found damage so severe that the expedition's leader concluded Manchester could never have made it to port. Former gunner Ben Haywood, who had been aboard as a young man, launched a campaign to clear his captain's name soon afterward, crediting Drew's decision with the extra decades of life, children and grandchildren he had gone on to have; the Admiralty declined to reopen the case in 2004. No formal exoneration ever came, but the wreck itself may have made Drew's case rather more convincingly than any court martial did.