HMS Marne (G35): Harpoon, the Minelayer Ulm and a Stern Blown Off by U-515

Tyne Built

HMS Marne was one of the eight destroyers of the M Class, the successors to the L Class, with the same powerful armament of six 4.7 inch guns in three enclosed twin turrets. Her order was placed with the Parsons turbine company on the Tyne, which sub-contracted the hull to the Vickers-Armstrongs yard at High Walker, and she was laid down there on 23 October 1939, seven weeks into the war.

She was launched on 30 October 1940 and completed on 2 December 1941, at a cost of £457,512 before the Admiralty fitted her guns and radios.

She was the second ship of the name. The first Marne, a destroyer of 1915 named after the battle that saved Paris in 1914, had fought at Jutland, and the new ship inherited Jutland 1916 as her first battle honour. Her badge was a dolphin within a gold chaplet.

In March 1942 the town of Keighley, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, adopted her after its Warship Week.

The Arctic Begins

She worked up at Scapa Flow in December 1941 and joined the 17th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet, escorting convoys to and from Iceland. In February she had trouble with her boilers and leaks forward and spent a month under repair at Barrow, and by the end of March she was at Reykjavik and screening the Home Fleet's heavy ships as they covered the convoys to North Russia.

In April she joined the ocean escort of the homeward convoy QP 10 from the Kola Inlet with Fury, Punjabi and Oribi; the convoy was attacked by U-boats and by more than fifty German aircraft, and four merchant ships were lost.

At the start of May she was screening King George V and the American battleship Washington in thick fog when the fleet nearly came to grief. Marne only just avoided colliding with Washington, but Punjabi was cut in two by King George V and sank, her depth charges exploding under the battleship as she went.

This photograph was taken in May 1942, during the weeks between the Arctic operations and her next, very different, task.

Harpoon

In June she was sent south as escort for the Harpoon convoy, six merchant ships for Malta that were to sail from Gibraltar at the same time as a larger convoy from Alexandria. After refuelling at Gibraltar she joined Force X, the close escort that would take the convoy through the Sicilian Narrows, with Bedouin, Matchless, Ithuriel, Partridge and the Hunt Class Blankney and Badsworth.

On 14 June the bombers sank the Dutch merchant ship Tanimbar and damaged the cruiser Liverpool, and Marne's Oerlikon gunners shot down one of the attackers.

Early the next morning an Italian squadron of two cruisers, Raimondo Montecuccoli and Eugenio di Savoia, with five destroyers, came out to attack the convoy. The fleet destroyers turned towards them and engaged at long range while the convoy, with only the smaller ships to protect it, was left to the bombers.

Bedouin and Partridge were both crippled by Italian gunfire, and Bedouin was later sunk by an aircraft torpedo. The Italians eventually drew off, but only two of the six merchant ships got through to Malta, and as the escort entered Grand Harbour the Polish destroyer Kujawiak was sunk on a mine.

Those two cargoes kept the island going until Pedestal in August. Marne reached Gibraltar again on 19 June with only eighteen per cent of her fuel left after days at high speed.

The Minelayer Ulm

She was back in the north in time to screen the Home Fleet during the disaster of PQ 17 in July, and later that month she and her sister Martin, with the Hunts Middleton and Blankney, ran a cargo of ammunition and stores to Kola for the ships waiting there to escort the next homeward convoy.

In August she, Martin and Onslaught escorted the American cruiser Tuscaloosa and two American destroyers to Archangel carrying air force ground crews and equipment for the Hampden torpedo bombers being sent to North Russia, and a British medical unit.

On the way home the three British destroyers were detached on the strength of decrypted German signals to look for a German minelayer believed to be at sea. At 2151 on 25 August, south-east of Bear Island, Marne, the port wing ship, sighted her.

She was the Ulm, a former Norddeutscher Lloyd fruit carrier of 3,100 tons converted to carry mines, on her way to lay a field across the convoy routes. Marne was told to head her off to the eastward, and her salvoes fell around the German ship, which fired back and hit Marne aft, causing casualties, though she could still make 25 knots.

At 2232 a torpedo from Onslaught struck Ulm abreast her foremast and she blew up and sank. The destroyers picked up sixty one prisoners before they had to leave the area. It was the first German minelayer of the war to be sunk with prisoners taken from her.

PQ 18 and U-515

In September Marne transferred to the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla with Meteor, Milne and Musketeer, and sailed in the fighting escort of PQ 18, the first Arctic convoy to have its own escort carrier, and then with the homeward QP 14. After a short refit on the Humber she was sent to Gibraltar for the North African landings.

On the night of 11 November 1942 she and the destroyer Venomous were escorting the destroyer depot ship Hecla and the cruiser Vindictive west of Gibraltar when U-515, under Werner Henke, attacked. Hecla was hit in the engine room shortly after midnight, and while Marne was close by her, picking up survivors, Henke fired again.

At 0211 one of his torpedoes struck Marne in the stern. Thirteen of her men were killed and her after part, with X turret, was blown away. Hecla was sunk with the loss of 279 men.

Venomous took Marne in tow but had to slip the tow when the U-boat came back, and the tug Salvonia eventually towed her into Gibraltar, escorted by the corvette Jonquil.

A New Stern

She spent three months at Gibraltar being made seaworthy, and in February 1943 the tug Eminent towed her home to the Tyne, where Swan Hunter built her a new stern, overhauled her turbines and gave her a lattice foremast with the Type 272 surface warning radar and a heavier close range armament.

She was back in service in January 1944, now under Lieutenant Commander Peter Withers, and in April she screened the carriers for Operation Tungsten, the Fleet Air Arm attack on the Tirpitz in Altenfjord.

She then sailed for Kola with the force that brought home convoy RA 59, carrying Russian naval officers and men going to Britain to take over ships lent to the Soviet Navy, and she was in the screen of the escort carrier Activity on the way back.

In July she screened the carriers again for another strike on the Tirpitz, in August she escorted JW 59 with Jamaica, Striker and Vindex, and in September JW 60 with Campania.

The Aegean and Turkey

In November 1944 she joined her flotilla in the Mediterranean, and on 5 December she bombarded Rhodes, still held by the Germans, with the cruiser Arethusa, Musketeer and Meteor. On 16 December she captured a German boat off Symi and took its men prisoner.

In 1945 she patrolled the Ligurian Sea between Leghorn and Toulon, and in August, after the war had ended, she visited Istanbul with the cruiser Ajax and Meteor, a visit that may have planted the idea of the sale that followed.

She came home to Portsmouth in April 1946, and in 1952 she was laid up at Penarth. A plan to convert her into an air direction frigate was dropped, and in August 1957 she was sold to Turkey with her sisters Meteor, Matchless and Milne.

After a refit on the Tyne, in which modern radar was fitted and a Squid anti-submarine mortar replaced her after torpedo tubes, she was handed over at Portsmouth on 9 September 1959 and renamed Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak, after the Turkish field marshal. She was broken up in 1971.

Her five battle honours were Jutland 1916, Arctic 1942-44, Malta Convoys 1942, North Africa 1942 and Aegean 1944.