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

Laid Down 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 truly 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.

That raid was a first, and worth setting out properly. It was the first Luftwaffe attack on Britain of the war. Ju 88s of KG30 under Hauptmann Helmuth Pohle came for the warships at Rosyth; the main target was the cruiser HMS Southampton, where the bombs missed the ship herself but sank two boats alongside her, one of them the admiral's barge. Mohawk was attacked separately, off Elie on the Fife coast.

Two Scottish auxiliary squadrons went up after them, 603 City of Edinburgh from Turnhouse and 602 City of Glasgow from Drem, part-time airmen flying at a real enemy over their own homes on a Monday afternoon, and between them they brought down the first German aircraft to fall on British soil in the war. The survivors were fished out of the Forth by Cockenzie fishermen and became the first German prisoners of war held in Britain. Seven months earlier, off Spain, Mohawk had pulled five German airmen out of the sea herself.

And Commander Jolly deserves considerably more than a line. He was hit in the stomach by a bomb splinter on his own bridge. He refused to be taken below and refused treatment, telling the men around him to leave him and go and look after the others, and he stayed where he was and conned his ship the thirty-five miles back up the Forth to Rosyth, a passage of about eighty minutes with fifteen of his people dead and thirty wounded.

By the end of it he had not enough voice left to be heard, so his orders were relayed by his navigating officer, who was wounded himself. He collapsed once she was alongside, and died about five hours after being landed. He was awarded the Empire Gallantry Medal posthumously, and when the George Cross was instituted the following year his family exchanged it for one. He is buried in the churchyard at Boughton Monchelsea in Kent, a very long way from the Firth of Forth.

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 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 and by naval-history.net, though some secondary accounts cite 42 or 43 and the discrepancy has never been fully resolved. 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.