HMS Mashona (F59): Sunk by German Bombers the Day After Helping Chase Down the Bismarck

Built on the Tyne

HMS Mashona was ordered on 19 June 1936, built by Vickers-Armstrong at High Walker on the Tyne, laid down on 5 August 1936, launched on 3 September 1937 and commissioned on 1 April 1939, a Tribal-class destroyer that cost £341,108 excluding her weapons and communications equipment, entering service just months before the war she would spend her entire, brief career fighting in.

Seizing Swedish Warships

HMS Mashona carried out convoy escort duties in the early months of the war and took an active part in the Norwegian Campaign of 1940, before playing an unusual role on 20 June that year in what became known as the Psilander affair. Four Swedish destroyers, newly bought from Italy and sailing from La Spezia to Gothenburg, put in at Skálafjørður in the neutral Faroe Islands, only for the Royal Navy to seize them anyway on the grounds of "right of angary", a wartime legal principle allowing a belligerent to commandeer neutral shipping rather than risk it falling into enemy hands. HMS Mashona and HMS Tartar took two of the four, HSwMS Romulus and Remus, along with a Swedish passenger liner and a tanker caught up in the same sweep, a curious little episode of Faroese-adjacent diplomacy and naval brinkmanship rather than outright combat. Sweden, unsurprisingly, objected loudly, and after a fortnight of diplomatic wrangling the ships were handed back on 2 July, reaching Gothenburg under their own steam on 10 July 1940.

Rather less diplomatically, HMS Mashona collided with her sister ship HMS Sikh at Scapa Flow in January 1941, after a signal ordering her out to sea failed to specify which boom gate to use; in the resulting confusion she ran into Sikh, moored at a buoy near a floating dock, and spent the following weeks under repair at Hartlepool, work that was finished by 3 March 1941. HMS Mashona then returned to escorting Home Fleet units through the North Atlantic.

Chasing the Bismarck

HMS Mashona formed part of the escort for the battleship HMS Rodney and the ocean liner MV Britannic as they set sail for Halifax, Canada, on 22 May 1941, only to be swept up into one of the most dramatic naval pursuits in modern history when the German battleship Bismarck sank HMS Hood days later.

HMS Mashona joined the chase, and by 26 May was tasked with relaying HMS Rodney's position to Admiral Tovey as the net closed around the German raider.

That evening, however, HMS Mashona, together with HMS Tartar and HMS Somali, was forced to turn back for lack of fuel, missing the climactic final action against the Bismarck by the narrowest of margins.

The fuel was not a footnote. It very nearly decided the whole thing. Tribals were designed to out-gun other people's destroyers, not to cross oceans, and by the fifth day of a high-speed pursuit across the Atlantic the escorts were running dry one after another. Mashona and Tartar were detached together on 27 May and told to make their own way back at economical speed, which is the naval phrase for as slowly as you can stand.

That is why she was where she was the next morning. A destroyer with plenty of fuel in the Western Approaches in May 1941 does not go home at fifteen knots in daylight in a straight line. She zigzags, and she does it fast, because that is what makes a bomber's job difficult. Mashona could not afford to. She was killed by the arithmetic of her own oil tanks, a day after the ship she had been chasing went down.

Sunk Returning to Port

HMS Mashona was returning to port at 15 knots on 28 May 1941, the very day after the Bismarck's own destruction, when she was attacked by Luftwaffe bombers off the coast of Galway, Ireland.

A Heinkel He 111 from the first group of Bomber Wing 28 struck her port side abreast the forefunnel; the bomb punched down into No.1 Boiler Room and exploded there, blowing a huge hole in the ship's side, causing severe flooding that killed 46 of her crew outright, with a further number of survivors subsequently dying of hypothermia in the water before rescue could reach them all. Bodies from her ship's company later washed up along the coasts of Counties Galway and Mayo.

Ireland was neutral, which in practice meant that a country formally out of the war spent a good deal of it burying other people's sailors. Bodies came ashore all along that stretch of coast through 1941, from Mashona and from ships nobody could always identify, and were buried by whoever found them. Members of her ship's company lie in Irish ground still.

Even the count is uncertain. The Admiralty record gives thirty-six dead. Other accounts of the loss put it at forty-six or forty-eight. That gap is not carelessness. It is what happens when men go into the water a long way from anywhere, in the dark, off a coast belonging to somebody else's country.

HMS Tartar, HMS Sherwood and the Canadian destroyer HMCS St Clair pulled 184 survivors from the sea between them and carried them to Greenock, after which Tartar tried to put the listing, disabled hulk out of her misery with a torpedo of her own, only to miss. It was left to Sherwood and St Clair (both former American four-stackers acquired the previous year under the destroyers-for-bases deal, St Clair having gone to the Royal Canadian Navy in September 1940) to finish the job with gunfire, opening her hull to the sea until the trapped air finally escaped and she slipped under.

A Cruelly Ironic Fate

HMS Mashona's loss stands as a particularly bitter footnote to one of the Royal Navy's proudest moments of the war, a destroyer that had helped hunt down and relay position reports on one of the most feared warships afloat, only to be sunk by aircraft within a day of that hunt's triumphant conclusion, a stark reminder that victory at sea rarely came without a price paid somewhere along the way.

She was also in company, in the worst possible sense. Twenty-seven Tribals were built, sixteen of them for the Royal Navy, and twelve of those sixteen did not come home: six to aircraft, four to torpedoes, one to shore batteries off Tobruk and one, remarkably, to a collision with a British battleship. Three quarters of the class, gone. Only Ashanti, Eskimo, Nubian and Tartar survived the war, and all four were sold for scrap in 1948 and 1949.

There is one small mercy in the arithmetic. Tartar, who had spent the previous week beside Mashona on the Rodney screen, gone into the Bismarck chase with her, run short of fuel with her and turned for home with her, was one of the four that lasted. She was also the ship that pulled most of Mashona's people out of the water.