HMS Mohawk (F31): The Destroyer Sunk by a Ship She Had Already Beaten

Built at Woolston

HMS Mohawk was built by John I. Thornycroft & Co. at Woolston, Southampton, ordered on 10 March 1936, laid down that July and launched on 5 October 1937, commissioning on 7 September 1938 as one of the sixteen Tribal-class destroyers that gave the Royal Navy some of its most powerfully armed and best-looking destroyers of the interwar years. She displaced 1,891 tons standard, could make a genuinely brisk 36 knots, and carried eight 4.7-inch guns in four twin mounts, a formidable broadside for a ship her size, backed up by a quadruple 2-pounder pom-pom, quadruple machine guns and a single set of torpedo tubes. She joined the 1st Tribal Destroyer Flotilla at Malta in October 1938 and spent her first months on the rather less glamorous business of the Non-Intervention Patrol off Spain, where in March 1939 she rescued five German airmen from the sea, a small act of maritime courtesy that the coming war would make considerably rarer.

A Grim Beginning

Mohawk's war started badly and personally. On 16 October 1939, while operating near the Firth of Forth, she was attacked by Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 88 bombers during one of the first German air raids on the British mainland. Fifteen of her men were killed and thirty wounded, and among the dead was her own commanding officer, Commander Richard Frank Jolly, who died of his wounds. It was a sobering reminder, barely six weeks into the war, of just how exposed even a well-armed destroyer could be to attack from the air, and it fell to her new captain, Commander John Willson Musgrave Eaton, to lead her through everything that followed.

Norway and the Mediterranean

Under Eaton, Mohawk went on to escort troop convoys to Namsos, Åndalsnes and Molde during the Norwegian Campaign of April and May 1940, before transferring that May to the 14th Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean Fleet, where she would spend the rest of her career. She was present at the Battle of Calabria in July 1940, and at the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941 she took part in the rescue of survivors from the Italian cruisers Zara and Pola, sunk in one of the most one-sided night actions of the naval war, a task that required her crew to fish drowning enemy sailors from the same waters where, within weeks, their own ship would go down.

The Battle of the Tarigo Convoy

On the night of 15 to 16 April 1941, Mohawk sailed with the rest of the 14th Destroyer Flotilla, HMS Jervis under Captain Philip Mack, HMS Janus and HMS Nubian, to intercept an Italian convoy of five transports and three escorting destroyers, Luca Tarigo, Baleno and Lampo, running supplies to Axis forces in North Africa near the Kerkennah Bank off Sfax, Tunisia. The action that followed, fought in darkness at close range, was a comprehensive British victory: all five merchantmen and all three Italian destroyers were sunk or driven ashore. But Mohawk did not escape unscathed. In the chaos of the battle, the Luca Tarigo, already ablaze and sinking, her captain Pietro De Cristofaro mortally wounded and most of her officers dead, somehow had one torpedo tube worked by a small band of survivors under a junior officer, and fired a salvo that struck Mohawk twice, first abreast her aft gun mount and then between her boiler rooms. It is a genuinely remarkable, faintly tragic footnote to the engagement, that the fatal blow came not from a ship in the fight but from one already being beaten in it. Mohawk flooded rapidly and sank at approximately 34°56'N, 11°42'E.

Loss and Legacy

Forty-one men of Mohawk's ship's company were killed, a figure given consistently by uboat.net, Wikipedia and naval-history.net, with some other secondary accounts citing 42 or 43; readers should treat 41 as the best-supported total while noting the discrepancy has never been fully resolved in the literature. Some 168 of her crew were rescued. Sources also differ over exactly which of her sister ships fired the finishing shots into her wreck, with Janus credited in some accounts and Jervis in others, a small but genuine disagreement worth flagging rather than glossing over. It was a costly end for a ship whose short career had already seen her lose one captain to enemy bombs and see her crew pull enemy sailors from the sea barely a month before her own men needed the same mercy, and it stands as a striking illustration of how even a lopsided victory at sea can still exact a heavy and very personal price.