HMS Offa (G29): Pulling Torpedoed Tanker Crews From the Arctic Sea

The Build: Fairfield's Govan Yard

HMS Offa was ordered on 3 September 1939, built by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Co. at Govan, laid down on 15 January 1940, launched on 11 March 1941 and commissioned on 20 September that year, an O-class destroyer built directly into the teeth of the Battle of the Atlantic and the newly opened Arctic convoy route to the Soviet Union.

Minelaying and Fleet Escort

HMS Offa took part in a large minelaying operation on 30 and 31 October 1941, escorting the minelayers HMS Menestheus, HMS Port Quebec and the fast minelayer HMS Welshman as they sowed a field of 1,118 mines off the Faroes. Days later she was screening the battleship HMS King George V and carrier HMS Victorious on a hurried sweep into the Denmark Strait on 5 November, sent to intercept a suspected German capital ship breakout that, in the event, turned out to still be safely in the Baltic, before settling into what would become the defining work of her wartime career, escorting the perilous Arctic convoys carrying vital supplies to northern Russia.

Escorting the First Arctic Convoys

HMS Offa escorted Convoy PQ 4 in November 1941, sailing from Hvalfjord in Iceland on 17 November and reaching Arkhangelsk by 28 November, one of the earliest of the Arctic convoy runs, undertaken before the full scale of the German threat to that route had even become apparent.

Sinking Ships of Her Own at Vågsøy

HMS Offa took part in Operation Archery on 27 December 1941, the Combined Operations commando raid on the Norwegian port of Vågsøy, escorting the cruiser HMS Kenya and the landing ships carrying the raiding troops in. While HMS Onslow and HMS Oribi sank a German patrol vessel in Måløy Sound, Offa and the escort destroyer HMS Chiddingfold accounted for another armed trawler, the Donner, and the 4,621-ton German merchantman Anhalt, a rare chance for an Arctic escort destroyer to sink something herself rather than simply keep watch over ships that couldn't.

The raid's real result was not the trawler or the merchantman. Hitler concluded from Vaagso that the British were preparing to invade Norway, and reacted accordingly: two divisions, about thirty thousand men, were diverted there almost immediately, along with coastal artillery, and a field marshal was sent to look over the defences. The reinforcement never really stopped. By the time of the Normandy landings in June 1944 the German garrison in Norway had grown to something close to four hundred thousand men, sitting in fjords waiting for an invasion that was never going to come.

That is an extraordinary return on a one-day raid by a few hundred commandos and a handful of ships. Whatever the Vaagso raiders thought they were achieving as they burned a fish-oil factory in the snow, what they actually did was persuade the German high command to garrison an empty theatre with an army that would have been considerably more use almost anywhere else.

She was back on more familiar convoy-escort duty by March 1942, sailing with Convoy PQ 12 when the Admiralty received word that the German battleship Tirpitz had put to sea from Trondheim, a genuine invasion-fleet-sized scare that, in the end, came to nothing more than a change of course through the ice, though nobody escorting PQ 12 knew that at the time.

Two Rescues in the Barents Sea

HMS Offa, under the command of Lieutenant Commander R. A. Ewing, picked up survivors from the British tanker Atheltemplar on 14 September 1942, part of the same heavily contested Convoy PQ 18 that cost the Arctic route so dearly, after she had been torpedoed by the German submarine U-457 southwest of Bear Island. The tanker herself stubbornly refused to sink, drifting on fire until a second U-boat, U-408, finished her off with gunfire that same afternoon.

By the time she repeated the feat on 26 January 1944, rescuing 35 survivors from the merchant vessel Fort Bellingham in the Barents Sea north of North Cape, Offa was under a different captain, Lieutenant Commander R. F. Leonard, Ewing having since moved on (with a well-earned DSC, and eventual promotion all the way to Vice-Admiral). Fort Bellingham was no ordinary casualty: she had only just taken over as Convoy JW56A's commodore ship after the original commodore vessel, Penelope Barker, was torpedoed the previous day by one of a ten-strong U-boat wolf pack, and was herself crippled by U-360 before U-957 delivered the fatal blow, going down with 4,800 tons of war stores and 36 of her crew; two more survivors were taken prisoner by the U-boat itself rather than rescued.

Both rescues represented exactly the kind of unglamorous but lifesaving work that escort destroyers performed constantly throughout the Arctic convoy campaign, work that rarely made headlines but mattered enormously to the men whose lives depended on it.

Celebrating in Kiel

HMS Offa took part in King's Birthday celebrations at Kiel on 2 June 1945 alongside HMS Obedient, a proud moment of victory celebrated in what had so recently been the heart of enemy territory.

A New Life as Tariq

HMS Offa served as a submarine target ship in 1946, before entering reserve at Devonport in February 1948. Following a refit that April, she was transferred to Pakistan on 30 November 1949 and renamed Tariq, joining the fleet of the newly independent nation's fledgling navy.

Both of her names are worth a moment, and they make an unlikely pair. Offa ruled Mercia from 757 to 796, the best part of forty years, and by the end of it he was master of everything in England south of the Humber. He built the dyke that still carries his name, a hundred and forty-nine miles of bank and ditch along the Welsh border. He was the first Mercian king to strike coins and gave England the silver penny. And he dealt with Charlemagne as something close to an equal, the two of them falling out repeatedly over trade and a proposed marriage before signing a commercial treaty shortly before Offa died.

Tariq is a rather grander leap. The name honours Tariq ibn Ziyad, the commander who crossed from North Africa into Spain in 711 and began the conquest of the Iberian peninsula, and whose name is buried in the rock the Royal Navy has been sitting on ever since: Jabal Tariq, Tariq's mountain, which English has worn down to Gibraltar. A British destroyer named for a Mercian king went to Pakistan and was renamed for the man who gave the Royal Navy its most famous base.

She eventually returned to Portsmouth in July 1959 and was scrapped, arriving at Sunderland on 13 October that year, closing out the career of a destroyer whose wartime service had been defined above all by the patient, dangerous work of pulling survivors from freezing Arctic waters.