HMS Oakley (L98): Sold to Germany, Renamed Gneisenau After the Battleship She Once Hunted

Renamed to Free Up a Name for Poland

HMS Oakley was ordered on 20 December 1939 from Yarrow and Co Ltd at Scotstoun, laid down on 19 August 1940, launched on 15 January 1942 and commissioned on 7 May that year, a Type II Hunt-class destroyer.

She was originally to have been named HMS Tickham, but was renamed Oakley after the first ship to carry that name was transferred to the Polish Navy as ORP Kujawiak on 3 April 1941, freeing the name up for this second vessel.

That first Oakley did not have long left under any flag. As Kujawiak, she was sunk barely fourteen months later, on 16 June 1942, after striking a mine off Malta during Operation Harpoon while going to the aid of another convoy ship that had already hit one; she went down in under half an hour, with thirteen Polish sailors killed. Her wreck was not found until 2014, rediscovered on the seabed 97 metres down.

Screening the Arctic Convoys

HMS Oakley sailed for Scapa Flow on 22 June 1942 following the correction of defects found during sea trials, and took on escort duties for minelaying operations and diversionary manoeuvres connected with the ill-fated Convoy PQ 17.

She went on to escort Convoys PQ 18 and QP 15 to and from the Soviet Union later that year, earning her first battle honour for Arctic service in some of the most dangerous convoy waters of the entire war.

Sicily, Salerno and a Submerged Wreck

HMS Oakley joined the 59th Destroyer Division in the Mediterranean from February 1943, taking part in the Operation Retribution blockade that May, aimed at preventing the evacuation of Axis forces from Tunisia under Admiral Andrew Cunningham's own uncompromising instruction: "sink, burn and destroy, let nothing pass." It worked. No organised Axis evacuation by sea ever got underway, and the last Axis forces in North Africa surrendered on 13 May. She went on to escort a landing ship convoy during the invasion of Sicily that July, shelling Italian coastal defences in support of the landings.

She struck a submerged wreck at the entrance to Taranto harbour on 12 December 1943, seriously damaging both her hull and her propellers and keeping her under repair at Taranto itself until April 1944, before a further refit at Malta saw her rejoin the 59th Destroyer Division that June.

Supporting France and Greece

HMS Oakley supported the Allied invasion of southern France during Operation Dragoon in August 1944, and took part in Operation Manna that October, supporting Greek operations and the re-occupation of Athens as German forces withdrew.

Operation Manna deserves a good deal more than a clause, because it is where the next Greek war begins. The Germans pulled out of Athens on 12 October 1944 and British paratroops of the 2nd Independent Parachute Brigade dropped onto Megara airfield the same night; two days later British troops paraded through the city with the returning prime minister at their head. The purpose was not only to liberate Athens. It was to get there first. Most of the actual fighting against the Germans in Greece had been done by ELAS, the communist-led resistance army, and nobody in London wanted to find out what a Greece administered by ELAS would look like.

It held for seven weeks. On 3 December police fired on a demonstration in Athens and killed several people, and by the following day British soldiers were in action against the men they had come to liberate the country alongside. Churchill's instruction to General Scobie was to treat Athens as a conquered city with a rebellion in progress. The fighting, the Dekemvriana, ran from 4 December to 11 January, went badly for the British for the first fortnight and then, once reinforcements arrived, went the other way. Churchill flew out himself at Christmas to try to settle it.

So Oakley's October escort work, which reads on paper like any other Mediterranean job, was the leading edge of the only occasion in the war on which British forces fought a sustained battle against an allied country's own resistance movement, three months before Germany surrendered. The Greek civil war that came out of it ran until 1949. None of which is Oakley's doing. It is simply what the job turned into.

She rounded out her wartime service on East Coast patrol duty with the 21st Destroyer Flotilla at Sheerness between January and March 1945, earning further battle honours for South France 1944 and North Sea 1945.

Sold to Germany, Renamed for a Battleship

HMS Oakley entered Category B reserve at Portsmouth in December 1945 and underwent a refit in 1947, but remained largely idle until 11 November 1957, when she was purchased by West Germany.

Following a refit at Harland and Wolff in Liverpool, she was handed over on 2 October 1958 and commissioned into the German Navy at Bremerhaven on 18 October that year under a striking new name: Gneisenau, shared with the famous German battleship that had once been hunted across the Atlantic by ships very much like HMS Oakley herself. She was one of seven former Royal Navy escorts transferred to West Germany in this same batch, three Hunt-class destroyers and four Black Swan-class sloops, all somewhat incongruously redesignated Type 138 frigates by the Bundesmarine regardless of their rather different origins, and she now carried the German pennant number F212.

She served as a training ship for the German Naval Gunnery School alongside a fellow former Royal Navy escort renamed Scharnhorst, after the second of the two legendary German capital ships. That ship was in fact the Black Swan-class sloop HMS Mermaid rather than a Hunt-class sister, which if anything sharpens the irony: two quite different former Royal Navy escorts, sailing together under the names of the very battleship pair the Royal Navy had spent so much of the war trying to sink.

Rebuilt as a Modern Gunnery Trainer

HMS Oakley, as Gneisenau, was extensively modified between 1958 and 1964, fitted with stabilisers, new radar and a distinctive cowl funnel, before undergoing a major rebuild at Howaldtswerke in Kiel between 1962 and 1964 that removed her original British armament entirely, replacing it with a single French 100mm gun forward and four 40mm Bofors guns, along with modern Dutch radar and fire control systems, re-entering service in her rebuilt form on 5 March 1964, a ship almost unrecognisable from the wartime Hunt-class destroyer she had once been.

Scrapped at Wilhelmshaven

HMS Oakley became a stationary training ship in 1965, entered reserve in 1968, and was formally stricken from the German naval register on 30 September 1972, subsequently cannibalised at Wilhelmshaven before being scrapped from 18 January 1977 onward, closing out the career of a British-built destroyer that ended her days serving, and honouring the name of, one of the very warships the Royal Navy had once fought so hard to sink.