HMS Matchless (G52): The Destroyer Ordered to Finish Off Her Own Burning Sister

Into the Arctic Convoys

HMS Matchless was laid down at Alexander Stephen and Sons' Linthouse yard on 14 September 1940, launched on 4 September 1941 and completed on 28 February 1942, an M-class fleet destroyer built for the Royal Navy amid the darkest and most demanding stretch of the naval war, and was straight into anti-submarine exercises at Scapa Flow by that March, before being committed almost immediately to convoy operations to and from northern Russia between April and May 1942, some of the most gruelling and dangerous escort work the Royal Navy undertook throughout the entire conflict.

Distant and Close Cover Through the Arctic Night

HMS Matchless served as part of the distant cover force provided by the Home Fleet, screening Convoy PQ 14 and the returning Convoy QP 10 in April 1942 alongside the battleships HMS King George V and HMS Duke of York, along with supporting aircraft carriers and cruisers.

She was then assigned to the close cover force that departed Seidisfjord on 29 April 1942 to escort Convoy PQ 15 on the perilous run to Murmansk, ferrying vital war supplies to the Soviet Union through waters plagued by German aircraft, surface raiders and U-boats alike.

Scuttling HMS Trinidad

HMS Matchless's most difficult moment came in May 1942, when she was among the destroyers escorting the badly damaged light cruiser HMS Trinidad away from northern Russia.

HMS Trinidad had already been crippled, struck by one of her own malfunctioning torpedoes earlier in the year and further damaged by German air attack, and when a fire aboard her finally spiralled out of control beyond any hope of saving the ship, the grim decision was taken to scuttle her rather than risk her capture or a slower, more dangerous loss.

HMS Matchless was given the task once Trinidad's own crew had abandoned ship, firing torpedoes that sent her to the bottom at 0120 hours, a remarkably painful duty for any crew even with the ship already empty, being ordered to finish off a stricken fellow escort rather than continue trying to save her.

The wound Matchless was finishing had a particularly grim history behind it. Trinidad had been hit by one of her own torpedoes in the Arctic in March, a failure that is set out in the article on HMS Trinidad (46), and when the Junkers found her again in May the fire it started killed men who had already survived the sinking of HMS Edinburgh (16) and been taken aboard her. By the time Matchless was ordered to do it, sinking her was the kindest thing left on the list.

Mined, Bombed and Escaping in Disguise

HMS Matchless left the Arctic behind for the Mediterranean that summer, taking part in Operation Harpoon, one of the hard-fought convoy operations mounted to resupply besieged Malta, departing the Clyde on 4 June 1942 for a passage that, like so many Malta convoys of the period, ran a gauntlet of Axis air and submarine attack in order to keep the island fed, fuelled and fighting. She traded fire with the Italian destroyers Vivaldi and Marocello on 15 June, then struck a mine of her own entering Grand Harbour the following day, damage serious enough to keep her in Malta's dockyard for the best part of two months while the island endured 265 further air raids around her.

By August she was patched up enough to make a run for it, escorting the surviving merchantmen from her original convoy, Orari and Troilus, back towards Gibraltar under Operation Ascendant. For the trickiest stretch of the passage, close along the North African coast, her crew painted false Italian recognition markings onto her hull, a properly cheeky piece of wartime improvisation that got her home without having to fight a battle she was in no state to survive.

The Battle of North Cape

HMS Matchless spent the following eighteen months back on the Arctic run, escorting a long string of convoys through into 1943, and on Boxing Day that year found herself caught up in one of the Royal Navy's most celebrated wartime actions. Detached from convoy JW55B along with HMS Musketeer, HMS Opportune and HMS Virago to help finish off the German battleship Scharnhorst, already battered by gunfire from HMS Duke of York, Matchless closed in for the kill alongside her fellow destroyers.

Days of high-speed steaming through Arctic weather had other ideas, however: storm damage left her unable to fire a single torpedo of her own, and it was left to her three companions to deliver the final blows that sent Scharnhorst under. Matchless still played her part in the action's aftermath all the same, pulling six survivors from the freezing water out of a German crew of nearly 1,900 that mostly went down with their ship.

The arithmetic of that rescue is worth setting down plainly. Scharnhorst went into the water with 1,968 men aboard. Thirty-six came out: thirty picked up by HMS Scorpion and six by Matchless. Not one of the thirty-six was an officer. Everybody else was in an Arctic sea in December, and the difference between the two figures is not really a matter of luck or seamanship, it is a matter of how long a human being lasts in water at that temperature.

So Matchless finished the most famous action of her career unable to fire the weapon she had been sent in with, and what she contributed instead was six men. Given how the rest of it went, that is not the worst way to have spent the evening.

A Second Career Under the Turkish Flag

She went on to further convoy escort work into 1944 and a spell of Mediterranean bombardment duty in early 1945, including operations off the Gulf of Genoa, before finally paying off at Portsmouth in April 1946 and heading into reserve.

HMS Matchless survived the war and went on to a second career far from British waters, sold to the Turkish Navy in 1957 and renamed Kılıç Ali Paşa, struck from their list in 1971, joining the not inconsiderable ranks of former Royal Navy destroyers that spent their later years serving allied fleets rather than heading straight to the breakers, a quietly fitting continuation for a ship whose wartime service had already asked so much of her.

The name they gave her is worth knowing, because it is one of the great stories of the sixteenth century and the Royal Navy had no idea it was handing its destroyer to a Calabrian. Kilic Ali Pasa was born Giovanni Dionigi Galeni, a fisherman's son from the Calabrian coast, around 1519. Corsairs took him as a young man and he spent years chained to an oar as a galley slave before converting to Islam and going to sea on the other side, where he turned out to be extremely good at it.

At Lepanto on 7 October 1571, the worst day the Ottoman navy ever had, he commanded the left wing. He kept his squadron together in a melee where nobody else could, out-manoeuvred Gian Andrea Doria opposite him and took the flagship of the Knights of Malta along with its great banner. Then, when the battle was plainly lost, he did the thing nobody else on his side managed: he got out. He extricated his own ships, picked up scattered survivors as he went, and arrived at Constantinople with eighty-seven vessels and the Maltese banner.

The Sultan gave him the honorific Kilic, meaning sword, and on 29 October, three weeks after the disaster, made him Kapudan Pasha, commander of the entire Ottoman fleet. Cervantes, who was at Lepanto himself and lost the use of his left hand there, put him into Don Quixote under his Italian name. There is a mosque and a bathhouse in Istanbul with his name on them still.

Matchless went to Turkey in August 1957 with three of her sisters, under an agreement signed at Ankara on the 16th, and carried his name until 1971. A destroyer that had spent her war in the Arctic being ordered to sink her own side's cruiser, escaping Malta in false Italian paint and pulling six Germans out of a freezing sea, ended up named after a man who was captured by his enemies, changed sides, and got away from the worst defeat in his navy's history with the fleet intact. It is hard to think of a better fit.