HMS Obedient (G48): From the Battle of the Barents Sea to Scuttling U-boats After Victory

Adopted by Lymington

HMS Obedient was built by William Denny and Brothers in Dumbarton, laid down on 22 May 1940, launched on 30 April 1942 and commissioned on 30 October that year, an O-class destroyer that was formally adopted by the civil community of Lymington during that town's Warship Week fundraising drive in 1942, a scheme through which towns across Britain raised money to help fund the war effort in exchange for a symbolic bond with a particular ship.

She joined the 17th Destroyer Flotilla with the Home Fleet on commissioning.

Fighting at the Battle of the Barents Sea

HMS Obedient escorted Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union through 1942, 1943 and into 1944, and on 31 December 1942 took part in one of the most significant surface actions of the entire Arctic convoy campaign, the Battle of the Barents Sea, in which a heavily outgunned British escort force successfully defended Convoy JW 51B against a much stronger German surface squadron, a properly important defensive success that helped preserve the flow of vital supplies to the Soviet Union at a critical stage of the war. Under her own commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander David Kinloch, Obedient joined the fight directly, opening fire on the German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper at a range of 8,500 yards, an exchange that cost her own wireless set, knocked out by splinter damage within minutes. Kinloch was promoted to Commander with effect from the New Year, just two days later.

What came out of that action is worth knowing, because it is out of all proportion to the shooting. Hitler was so enraged that two heavy cruisers and six destroyers had failed to destroy a lightly escorted convoy that he ordered the German surface fleet scrapped and its guns landed, which cost Grand Admiral Raeder his job and put Donitz in his place. The full story is in the article on HMS Achates (H12). A handful of destroyers standing between a convoy and a pair of cruisers effectively ended the German surface navy as a strategic idea.

She went on to escort further Arctic convoys through 1943, including JW 53 and the homeward-bound RA 52 and RA 53, and took part in Operation FH that June, a relief and resupply mission to the Allied garrison on Spitsbergen and onward to North Russia.

Spitsbergen is worth a moment too, because the reason anybody wanted it was the weather. Whoever holds the archipelago can forecast conditions over the whole northern approach, and weather forecasting decided when convoys sailed, when they were spotted and when the Luftwaffe could fly. There was very little else there: a coal settlement, some huts and a wireless station. Both sides wanted it badly enough to keep taking it off each other.

Three months after Obedient's resupply run the Germans came for it in earnest. On 6 September 1943 Tirpitz and Scharnhorst left Altafjord with nine destroyers, six of them carrying six hundred men of the 349th Grenadier Regiment, and on the 8th they shelled the settlements in Isfjorden and put the troops ashore at Barentsburg.

That eight-hour raid is the only offensive operation the Tirpitz ever carried out. The most feared battleship in Europe, which pinned down a very large part of the Royal Navy for three years simply by existing in a Norwegian fjord, fired her main armament in anger exactly once in her career, at a coal mine and a weather station on an Arctic island with a few hundred Norwegians on it. The Allies came back and rebuilt the station.

Patrolling the Channel for D-Day

HMS Obedient continued Atlantic convoy escort duties through 1943 under a new commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Harold Unwin, and deployed to the English Channel in June 1944 to provide patrol support for the Normandy landings, before being converted to minelaying duties in the North Western Approaches that April 1945, adapting to whatever task the shifting demands of the war's final months required.

Celebrating Victory, Then Destroying the Enemy's Fleet

Now under her third and final wartime captain, Lieutenant Commander Henry Kirkwood, HMS Obedient took part in King's Birthday celebrations at Kiel alongside HMS Offa in June 1945, a proud moment marking victory in the very heart of what had so recently been enemy territory.

Following the German surrender, she undertook further minelaying duties as part of Operation Deadlight, the systematic Allied programme to destroy the great bulk of the surrendered German U-boat fleet by scuttling, a fittingly thorough final wartime task for a destroyer that had spent so much of the preceding years fighting against exactly the kind of vessels she now helped send to the bottom under entirely different circumstances. One of the boats she towed out to the scuttling grounds northwest of Ireland was U-299, a Type VIIC submarine that had surrendered at Kristiansand having completed six wartime patrols without sinking a single Allied ship; Obedient delivered her to the bottom, without ceremony, on 4 December 1945.

Coronation Duty and Air-Sea Rescue

HMS Obedient served with the Portsmouth Torpedo School before being reduced to reserve at Sheerness in October 1947, refitting in 1949 and recommissioning on 17 October 1952. She took part in Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation Fleet Review in 1953, and subsequently carried out air-sea rescue operations, a useful peacetime role for a wartime destroyer still very much capable of putting in a full day's work.

Broken Up at Blyth

HMS Obedient was laid up at Hartlepool in 1957, placed on the disposal list in 1961, and sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation for demolition, arriving in tow at the breakers' yard in Blyth on 19 October 1962, closing out the career of a destroyer whose service had ranged from one of the Arctic convoy campaign's most celebrated defensive victories to the systematic dismantling of the enemy fleet she had once fought so hard against.