HMS Matabele (G26): Namsos, Hurricanes for Russia and Two Minutes off the Kola Inlet

A Tribal from Greenock

HMS Matabele was one of the sixteen Tribal Class destroyers ordered for the Royal Navy in 1936 and 1937, big, fast ships designed to match the large destroyers then being built abroad. Where earlier British destroyers had concentrated on torpedoes, the Tribals had four twin 4.7 inch gunhouses, two forward and two aft, and they were the most heavily gunned destroyers the Navy had yet built.

Matabele and her sister Punjabi were placed with the Greenock firm of Scotts on the same day, 19 June 1936, and the two ships were launched on the same day, 6 October 1937. Matabele was completed on 25 January 1939, at a tender cost of £343,005.

She was the first, and so far the only, ship of the Royal Navy to carry the name, which is that of the Matabele or Ndebele people of what was then Southern Rhodesia. Her badge was an elephant, and her motto was Hamba Gahle, Go in Peace.

She was manned from Devonport, and she joined the 2nd Tribal Flotilla, soon renumbered the 6th Destroyer Flotilla, with her sisters Somali, Ashanti, Mashona, Bedouin, Punjabi, Eskimo and Tartar.

Thetis and Spearfish

Her first emergency came before the war. On 1 June 1939 the new submarine Thetis failed to surface during her trials in Liverpool Bay, and Matabele was one of the ships sent to help. The stern of the submarine was found sticking out of the water the next morning, but only four men escaped, and ninety nine died.

On 25 September 1939, three weeks into the war, she sailed with Somali and Mashona to find the submarine Spearfish, which had been so badly damaged by depth charges in the Heligoland Bight that she could not dive, and the destroyers brought her safely home under the cover of the Home Fleet.

Norway

After a winter of patrols in the North Sea and a spell in Devonport having new turbine blades fitted, she went to Norway with her flotilla in April 1940.

On 9 April she was one of the destroyers detached with four cruisers to attack the German ships reported at Bergen, an operation the Admiralty cancelled, and on the way back to the fleet the destroyers came under heavy air attack in which her sister Gurkha was sunk.

On 11 April she sailed again from Scapa Flow with Afridi, Sikh, Somali and Mohawk to sweep the Norwegian coast north of Ålesund for German ships, and two days later the destroyers were bombed off Ålesund without being hit. On 14 April they covered the first landing at Namsos, by seamen and Royal Marines put ashore from the cruisers to seize the town before the army arrived.

The troopships followed, and at Lillesjona, an anchorage in the islands to the north, the transports were attacked from the air for hours on end on 16 April.

The next day Matabele and the other destroyers took the soldiers off the big ships and ferried them into Namsos themselves, running in and out of the fjord under almost constant attack from German bombers, which within a fortnight had burned the little wooden town to the ground and forced the expedition to leave.

In May she was in the far north, supporting the troops trying to hold back the German advance towards Narvik. On 17 May the cruiser Effingham, carrying troops and equipment to Bodø with Matabele and other ships in company, ran at speed onto the Foksen shoal in the Vestfjord.

Matabele touched the same shoal and managed to get off with damage to her hull. The soldiers were taken off Effingham, which could not be saved, and it was Matabele that finished off the wreck with a torpedo and gunfire so that the Germans could make no use of it.

She went to Falmouth for repairs, and the opportunity was taken to replace her X mounting with a twin 4 inch high-angle gun to give her some defence against aircraft. At the same time her pennant number, painted on the hull as F26, was changed to G26.

Her new captain was Commander Robert Sherbrooke, who two years later, in command of Onslow, would win the Victoria Cross at the Battle of the Barents Sea.

The Home Fleet

Back with the Home Fleet in the autumn of 1940, she raided the Norwegian coastal traffic, sinking a coaster off Åndalsnes with Somali on 22 October, and searched for the Admiral Scheer when the German raider broke out into the Atlantic.

In January 1941 she screened the destroyer minelayers Intrepid and Icarus as they laid a field off the Norwegian coast, and on 16 January she was in the escort of King George V as the new battleship set out to carry Lord Halifax, the new ambassador, across the Atlantic to the United States.

In April she went to Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow for a refit in which her mainmast and the top of her after funnel were removed to give her close range guns a clearer field of fire, and an early air warning radar was fitted. On 5 June, leaving Barrow to rejoin the fleet, she ran aground and badly damaged her shaft brackets and propellers, and it was August before she was ready again.

Hurricanes for Russia

Germany had invaded the Soviet Union in June, and Britain had promised help. At the end of August 1941 Matabele, Punjabi and Somali sailed as escort for the old carrier Argus and the cruiser Shropshire in Operation Strength, carrying the Hurricane fighters of No 151 Wing with their ground crews and equipment to North Russia, with Victorious and two more cruisers in distant cover.

On 7 September the Hurricanes were flown off to the airfield at Vaenga near Murmansk, the first British aircraft to be sent to fight on the Eastern Front, and the ships went on into the Kola Inlet before returning to Scapa Flow.

PQ 8

In January 1942 she and Somali sailed with the cruiser Trinidad to join the escort of convoy PQ 8, eight merchant ships from Iceland to Murmansk, and on 11 January they joined the convoy and its two minesweepers, Harrier and Speedwell. By the 17th the convoy was in the approaches to the Kola Inlet, almost at the end of its voyage, but U-454 was waiting.

That evening she torpedoed the British merchant ship Harmatris, which was damaged but reached port, and at 2221 she fired at Matabele.

The torpedo struck Matabele aft, and a magazine blew up. She sank in about two minutes. Many of her men got off the ship alive, but the Carley floats were frozen into their lashings and could not be freed, and the men had to jump into a sea only just above freezing.

Some were killed when her depth charges exploded as she went down; most died of the cold within minutes. Harrier came through the wreckage and picked up four men, and only two of them lived. Commander Arthur Stanford and 235 of his men were lost.

In proportion to her company it was one of the worst losses of any British destroyer in the war. Up to then the convoys to Russia had sailed almost unmolested, and Matabele is generally recorded as the first British warship to be sunk on the Arctic convoy route; the U-boats and bombers that would make the run so costly in the year ahead were only just arriving in northern Norway.

Matabele won two battle honours, Norway 1940 and Arctic 1941-42. Of the sixteen Tribals of the Royal Navy, twelve were lost in the war; her sister Punjabi was sunk in a collision with King George V four months after her, and Cossack, Afridi, Sikh and Mashona all have their histories on this site.