HMS Nith (K215): Struck by a German Drone Off Gold Beach, Sunk by British Guns a Decade Later

The Build: Leith

HMS Nith was laid down at Henry Robb Ltd in Leith on 5 September 1941, launched on 25 September 1942 and commissioned on 16 February 1943, a River-class frigate built for the demanding, unglamorous work of ocean escort that defined so much of the Royal Navy's Second World War at sea.

A Headquarters Ship Off Gold Beach

HMS Nith served as flagship of Assault Group G.1 under Captain John Wentworth Farquhar during Operation Overlord, the Normandy landings, delivering Brigadier Alexander Stanier and the 231st Infantry Brigade to the Jig sector of Gold Beach, a role significant enough that her bridge was painted orange to help other vessels identify her amid the chaos of the invasion, one of the largest and most complex amphibious operations ever mounted.

Struck by a Flying Bomb Built From an Old Fighter

HMS Nith suffered severe damage on 24 June 1944 in the Baie de Seine, struck by a German Mistel, an unusual composite weapon built by mounting an explosive-packed unmanned bomber beneath a piloted fighter aircraft that guided it towards its target before breaking away, an unusual weapon rarely encountered by Allied ships.

Rarely encountered is an understatement. Nith was the first ship in the world ever attacked by one. The night of 24 June 1944 was the Mistel's operational debut: IV/KG 101, under Hauptmann Horst Rudat, had five of the composites and put four of them up over the Bay of the Seine with Messerschmitt escort. Their intended target was the battleship HMS Nelson, which had already sailed.

The thing itself deserves describing properly, because it is stranger than the summary allows. A Junkers 88 had its entire crew compartment cut off and replaced with a hollow-charge warhead weighing several tonnes; a single-seat fighter was then bolted to struts on top of it. The fighter pilot flew the whole assembly to the target, lined it up, released, and went home. It is a cruise missile with a man in the loop, put into action three years before anybody had a better way of doing it.

Their aim was not good. One composite had to be dropped early because a Mosquito turned up. The ships below made smoke. The crews came back claiming hits that appear nowhere in Allied records, and at least one of those claims may have been scored against the hulk of the old French battleship Courbet, which had been sunk on purpose as part of the Mulberry breakwater at Arromanches and then carefully dressed up to look like a live warship. That is exactly what a decoy is for, and on its first night out the Luftwaffe's newest weapon appears to have bombed one.

What the four of them actually achieved, between them, was a headquarters frigate towed to Cowes, ten men dead and twenty-six wounded. Accounts differ on whether the warhead struck Nith squarely or went off very close alongside; the effect on the people on her upper deck was much the same either way.

The attack killed nine of her crew instantly, with one further man later dying of his wounds, and left twenty-six more wounded, evacuated aboard an American hospital ship.

HMS Nith was towed to White's shipyard at Cowes for repairs, a painful reminder that even a headquarters ship performing largely administrative duties close to the beachhead remained squarely within reach of German weapons.

Carrying Prisoners in the Far East

HMS Nith completed her repairs by October 1944 and deployed to the Far East, where she took part in Operation Bibber off the coast of Thailand, took on the task of transporting Japanese prisoners of war, and took part in the Rangoon victory fleet review under Lord Mountbatten in June 1945, a fitting, if considerably calmer, final wartime chapter for a ship that had already survived one of the more unusual attacks of the entire war.

Sunk by Her Own Former Fleet

HMS Nith entered the reserve fleet at Harwich in March 1946, before being transferred to the Egyptian Navy in 1948 and renamed Domiat. She met a striking end more than a decade later: on 31 October 1956, during the Suez Crisis, she was sunk following an engagement with the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Newfoundland and the destroyer HMS Diana, the very fleet she had once served as one of her own. Newfoundland had ordered the darkened ship to heave to; Domiat trained her own guns on the cruiser instead, and in the gun battle that followed one of Newfoundland's own sailors was killed and five wounded before Domiat's bridge was destroyed and Diana finished her off, apparently believing she was attempting to ram. Sixty-nine Egyptian sailors were rescued from the water and landed at Djibouti into French custody.

A little more of that action is worth recording. It happened in the Red Sea, south of the canal, which is a long way from where anybody was expecting a surface gun battle in 1956. Egyptian losses are given as six officers and fifty ratings, against one man killed and five wounded aboard Newfoundland. Domiat was outgunned by roughly ten to one and fought anyway, which is the same answer her original owners had given in rather more celebrated circumstances, and a curious thing to find in a ship that had spent D-Day off Gold Beach with her bridge painted orange so that the invasion fleet could find her.

It was an oddly full-circle end for a ship that had once helped deliver British troops onto the beaches of Normandy, ultimately sent to the bottom by British guns fighting under an entirely different flag.