HMS Obdurate (G39): First Shots at the Barents Sea, a Gnat Off Bear Island

Slow Into the Water

HMS Obdurate was ordered from William Denny and Brothers at Dumbarton on 3 September 1939, the day Britain went to war, as one of the 1st Emergency Flotilla, the O class. She was laid down on 25 April 1940, but she was not launched until 19 February 1942.

Nearly two years on the slip is a long time for a destroyer in wartime, and it tells you how stretched the Clyde yards were in 1940 and 1941, with priority work, bomb damage across the river at Clydebank, and the constant shortage of everything.

She was built so that she could be turned into a minelayer if she was needed as one, and with machinery problems that delayed her acceptance trials. The photograph at the top of this page was taken on 26 August 1942, a week before she commissioned, in a pale disruptive camouflage meant to break up her outline against the sea and the sky.

Warrington had adopted her during its Warship Week that February, the month she was launched.

North, Straight Away

She commissioned on 3 September 1942, three years to the day after she was ordered, into the 17th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet. Within a fortnight she was in North Russia, sailing with the cruiser Argonaut to carry a British medical unit out to North Russia and bring RAF men home.

In November she screened the operation to resupply the Norwegian garrison on Spitsbergen and brought home the empty ships of convoy QP 15.

On Christmas Day 1942 she joined the escort of JW 51B, fourteen merchant ships bound for Kola with six fleet destroyers, two corvettes, a minesweeper and two trawlers to protect them. Her captain was Lieutenant Commander Claude Sclater.

On 30 December she and Obedient went after U-354, which had found the convoy, and did not get her. Next morning the U-boat's report brought out the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, the pocket battleship Lützow and six destroyers.

The First Ship to See Them

On the morning of 31 December 1942 Obdurate was stationed about ten miles south of the convoy. In the Arctic twilight, with the sun not due to rise at all, the corvette Hyderabad reported unidentified destroyers astern, and Obdurate saw them a few minutes later and was sent across to find out who they were.

She flashed the challenge. Nobody answered it. Then one of them opened fire on her, and that was how the Battle of the Barents Sea began.

What followed belongs to the whole escort, and it is told in the articles on HMS Achates (H12) and HMS Obedient (G48). Captain Robert Sherbrooke in Onslow turned his destroyers towards the enemy and for hours kept a heavy cruiser and a pocket battleship away from the convoy by threatening torpedo attacks he could not afford to make, until the cruisers Sheffield and Jamaica arrived from the north.

Obdurate was in it all morning. She was under fire from Hipper, took splinter damage, and came through. Sherbrooke was terribly wounded in Onslow and got the Victoria Cross. Achates was sunk making smoke for the convoy. Not one merchant ship was lost.

On New Year's Day Obdurate went to the trawler Northern Gem, which had picked up Achates' survivors from the freezing water and had no doctor. Obdurate's medical officer went across and operated on the wounded in a trawler in the Barents Sea in heavy seas. Northern Gem's part is told in the article on HMS Northern Pride (FY105). Obdurate took the wounded home herself a fortnight later.

A Year of Everything

1943 sent her everywhere. She was back on the Russian run with JW 53 and RA 53 in February and March, then went into the Atlantic with the 5th Support Group, working with the escort carrier Biter in the spring battles for the convoys, when the U-boats were finally beaten.

In August she screened the carriers Illustrious and Unicorn, and then took the damaged carrier HMS Indomitable (92) across the Atlantic to the American yard at Norfolk, Virginia, for repairs.

In September she was one of the escorts that brought HMS Renown home from Halifax with Winston Churchill aboard, on his way back from the Quebec Conference. HMS Saumarez had escorted him out a month earlier. Then it was the Arctic again, covering JW 54B in November and escorting King George V to the Azores in December.

The Gnat

JW 56A sailed from Loch Ewe in January 1944 into a storm so bad that the convoy had to shelter in Akureyri in Iceland, and Obdurate joined it on 20 January. On the evening of 25 January, north of Bear Island, the U-boats found it.

The ship hit first was the American Liberty ship Fort Bellingham. Obdurate went after the U-boat that had done it, U-350, with depth charges and lost her. Two hours later, at 18:33, her radar picked up U-360 on the surface.

As she turned to attack, U-360 fired a T5 acoustic homing torpedo, the weapon the British called the Gnat, which was designed to steer itself into a ship's propellers by following their noise.

It went off astern of her, apparently a little short of the hull. A second torpedo eleven minutes later missed. The first was close enough to wreck her starboard propeller and shaft, flood the shaft space and buckle her structure, but not to sink her, and she rejoined the convoy on one shaft and limped into Murmansk.

Five days later, escorting the next convoy, the destroyer leader HMS Hardy (R08) was hit in the stern by the same kind of torpedo and lost, which is what usually happened when a Gnat got close enough.

A Year on the Tyne

Russian yards patched her enough to get home, and in February 1944 she was paid off on the Tyne for permanent repairs. When they opened her up, the damage was much worse than anyone had thought: both main engines had to be replaced, along with the outer bottom plating on her starboard side.

The work took the rest of 1944 and into 1945, and she missed the whole of the invasion summer.

She came back in March 1945, worked up at Scapa and went straight back north. On 12 May 1945, four days after the war in Europe ended, she sailed with the escort of JW 67, the last Arctic convoy of the war, in case anyone in a U-boat had not heard.

She had been at the first great battle on that route in her first winter and she was there for the last convoy on it.

Kings, Presidents and Peace

The last summer of the war was full of ceremony. In June she escorted the cruisers Norfolk and Devonshire carrying King Haakon of Norway and his family home to Oslo after five years in exile.

In July she was in the Channel escorting the American cruisers that brought President Truman to Europe on his way to the Potsdam Conference. In August she was guardship at Kiel, in the middle of what had been the German navy's home.

After the war she spent time at Portsmouth with the torpedo school, went into reserve at Harwich in 1948, and was refitted twice at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead. She recommissioned at Liverpool on 21 July 1953 for the Chatham local flotilla, and there was a plan to rebuild her as an anti-submarine frigate, as so many of her contemporaries were. It never happened.

Blown Up on Purpose

She went into reserve at Portsmouth in 1957 and onto the disposal list, and then she found one more job. From April 1959 she was at Rosyth being used for structural destruction trials, in which her hull was deliberately damaged so that the Navy could see how a warship's structure stood up to it. There is no other way to find that out, short of a war.

The trials went on until November 1964, when what was left of her was handed to the shipbreakers and towed across the Forth to Inverkeithing. It was an unusual end for a ship whose war had been spent trying very hard not to be blown up, and a useful one.