HMS Neptune (20): The First to Sight the Italian Fleet, Lost Five Days Before Anyone Knew a Survivor Remained

Built at Portsmouth

HMS Neptune was laid down at Portsmouth Dockyard on 24 September 1931, launched on 31 January 1933 and commissioned on 12 February 1934, the fourth ship of the Leander-class light cruiser, displacing 7,270 tons standard.

She carried a crew drawn predominantly from the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy, alongside South African personnel, giving her a remarkably Commonwealth character that would make her eventual loss felt especially keenly on the other side of the world.

Chasing the Graf Spee

HMS Neptune patrolled the South Atlantic in December 1939 in pursuit of the German heavy cruiser Admiral Graf Spee, part of the wider hunt that would culminate in the famous Battle of the River Plate, though HMS Neptune herself was not directly involved in that decisive action.

The First Sighting in Over a Century

HMS Neptune achieved a truly remarkable piece of naval history on 9 July 1940, during the Battle of Calabria, becoming the first British ship to spot the Italian fleet and transmitting the signal enemy battle fleet in sight, the first such signal sent by a Royal Navy ship since the days of the Napoleonic Wars.

During the engagement that followed, Italian shellfire damaged her aircraft beyond repair, though her own guns scored three hits on the Italian heavy cruiser Bolzano at 16:07, temporarily jamming her rudder and killing two of her crew in the torpedo room, a creditable performance in a fast-moving, long-range gunnery duel.

Leading Force K

HMS Neptune took command of Force K in 1941, a hard-hitting raiding squadron of cruisers and destroyers tasked with intercepting the vital German and Italian convoys supplying Field Marshal Rommel's forces in North Africa, a role that made her and her squadron feared adversaries along one of the most contested supply routes of the entire Mediterranean campaign.

Feared is the right word, and there is a specific reason for it. On the night of 8 and 9 November 1941, Aurora and Penelope with two destroyers found a Tripoli-bound convoy and destroyed the entire thing, seven merchant ships and an escorting destroyer, without losing a man; the action is described in the article on HMS Ajax (22). Force K went on cutting the line through November and December until Rommel's fuel and ammunition position in North Africa became genuinely critical.

The Italians could not protect the convoys with the escorts they had, so they did the other thing available to them. On 3 June 1941 their 7th and 4th Divisions laid two minefields north-east of Tripoli, originally to keep British cruisers from shelling the coast. They were laid deep, in water where the Royal Navy did not believe mines could be effectively moored, and as far as the British were concerned they did not exist. Force K went into them at about one in the morning on 19 December, thirty kilometres off Tripoli, at speed, in the dark, and with no reason at all to expect them.

The bill for that night was not just Neptune. Kandahar had her stern blown off trying to close her to take people off. Aurora and Penelope were both damaged, Aurora badly. Something like 950 British seamen were lost between the ships, and the hundred and fifty New Zealanders in Neptune remain the heaviest single loss in the history of their navy. A squadron that had spent six weeks destroying the enemy's supply line was effectively destroyed itself in ninety minutes, by mines laid six months earlier for a different purpose.

Four Mines in the Dark

HMS Neptune sailed from Malta with Force K on the evening of 18 December 1941, alongside the cruisers Aurora and Penelope and a destroyer escort, to intercept a Tripoli-bound convoy. Early the next morning, at 0106, she struck the first of what would become four mines from a field the Italians had laid earlier that year. While attempting to reverse clear of danger, she struck a second and third mine in quick succession, wrecking her propellers and steering gear and leaving her completely dead in the water, a desperate situation to be in at night in the middle of a minefield.

The destroyer HMS Kandahar came alongside to help and struck a mine of her own in the process, a second calamity within the same few hours that would eventually cost 77 more lives. Neptune struck a fourth mine at around 0400 and capsized within minutes, leaving her crew with almost no chance of escape.

One Survivor From 764

HMS Neptune's loss was one of the most devastating single disasters suffered by the Royal Navy during the entire war: only 16 of her 764-strong crew reached a carley float alive, and by the time that float was recovered five days later by the Italian torpedo boat Generale Achille Papa, fifteen of them had succumbed to thirst, exposure and exhaustion, leaving just one man alive. Even her own captain, Rory O'Conor, survived the initial sinking only to die on the raft on 23 December, a single day before rescue finally came.

Rory O'Conor deserves rather more than a clause. He had been the youngest captain on the Navy List, and as executive commander of HMS Hood in 1933 he wrote down his rules for running a large ship's company, published as Running a Big Ship on Ten Commandments. It is not a technical manual, it is a book about how to make several hundred men in a steel box function willingly, and it is still read. He went from there to the plans division at the Admiralty and took Neptune in May 1940.

What happened on the float is worse than the summary allows. Sixteen men got onto it. Over the following five days they died one at a time, of thirst and exposure, with the coast in sight and nothing to be done about it. Their captain was among them, and lasted until the 23rd. When the Italian torpedo boat Generale Achille Papa finally came alongside on the 24th, the same accounts record a second man still alive, and too far gone to be got aboard; he drowned in the attempt. Norman Walton went from the float to fifteen months in an Italian prison camp, and lived to unveil the memorial in Nelson fifty years later.

That sole survivor, Norman Walton, spent the following 15 months in an Italian prisoner of war camp, and decades later, in 1991, unveiled a memorial to his lost shipmates in Nelson, New Zealand. Of the 763 men who died, 150 were New Zealand sailors, including four from Nelson itself and twin brothers Bruce and William Anderson from Auckland, a devastating loss for a small nation that had sent so many of its sons to serve aboard a single ship.

The wreck itself stayed lost for 75 years, until HMS Enterprise located her in 2016 lying on her port side some 160 metres down off the Libyan coast, missing around 40 metres of stern near her X gun turret, silent confirmation of just how violently those four mines had torn her apart.