HMS Sardonyx (H26): Twenty-One Convoys Without Loss After the Battle That Sank Two U-Boats

A First World War Destroyer Built for a New Threat

HMS Sardonyx was built by Alexander Stephen and Sons at their Linthouse dockyard in Glasgow, laid down in March 1918 and launched in May 1919, entering service that July as the first Royal Navy ship to carry the name of the semi-precious stone.

Her interwar years mixed reserve status with periodic reactivations, including a deployment to Latvia in late 1919 during that country's war of independence, participation in the search for the missing submarine HMS M1 in 1925 and HMS M2 in 1932, and a dramatic rescue of the distressed steamer Brompton Manor during severe gales off Selsey Bill in 1935.

She was one of thirty-eight ships in a single order placed in June 1918, the twelfth of the 1917-18 programme, and she is a fair definition of a ship built for a war that ended without her. Her keel went down in March 1918 and she was launched in May 1919, six months after the Armistice, the first Royal Navy ship ever to carry the name. The Navy gave her a badge to match it: a gold pendant on a black field, set with a geometrical design in red and white, and the motto Clean cuts clean, which is a lapidary's joke about carving a banded stone and reads rather differently on the bow of a destroyer. She would collect exactly two battle honours in twenty-six years, Atlantic 1940 to 1942 and Arctic 1942, and in December 1941 the people of Coulsdon and Purley in Surrey adopted her after a Warship Week savings campaign.

That Latvian trip is worth a moment, because it is the least remembered campaign the Royal Navy has fought. In 1919 Britain sent a squadron into the Baltic to hold the ring while Estonia and Latvia fought for their independence against Bolsheviks, White Russians and German Freikorps units who had declined to go home, and the campaign is set out at length in HMS Inverness (M102), whose Estonian namesake still carries the name of the admiral who ran it. Sardonyx, brand new and with no war to fight, was sent out and arrived just after the shooting had stopped, which set the tone for the next twenty years rather well.

Rebuilt for the Battle of the Atlantic

With war looming, Sardonyx underwent extensive refitting for anti-submarine escort work, her torpedo tubes removed in favour of depth charge throwers carrying up to thirty charges, her midship and aft 4-inch guns stripped out for improved anti-aircraft armament, and Type 286M radar fitted in June 1940, part of the desperate technological race to keep pace with the U-boat threat.

Present at the Loss of the Empress of Britain

Sardonyx's early war service brought her close to some of the Atlantic campaign's most significant losses. On 27 October 1940 she escorted the damaged liner RMS Empress of Britain, only for the great ship to be torpedoed and sunk by U-32 despite evasive manoeuvres, a heavy loss that underlined just how dangerous the seas around Britain had become even for well-escorted vessels.

The sequence is worth having in full, because it took three days and two entirely different weapons. On the morning of 26 October 1940 a Focke-Wulf Condor of KG 40, flown by Oberleutnant Bernhard Jope, found the liner about seventy miles off the Donegal coast, strafed her and put two 250kg bombs into her. She burned, her people were taken off, and she obstinately failed to sink. On the 27th a party from HMS Broke got a tow across to her and the ocean-going tugs Marauder and Thames took the hulk in hand, with Sardonyx among the destroyers zig-zagging round the tow. At five minutes past two on the morning of the 28th, U-32 got in between the escorts and the ship, fired, and finished what the aeroplane had started. She went down north-west of Bloody Foreland.

At 42,348 tons the Empress of Britain was the largest liner lost in the war and remains the largest ship ever sunk by a submarine. It is fair to say she was not well escorted so much as escorted at all: a tow moving at a few knots on a fixed course is about the easiest target a U-boat captain will ever be offered, and the screen around her was a handful of elderly destroyers. U-32 did not enjoy the credit for long. Two days later she was hunted down and sunk by HMS Harvester and HMS Highlander, and her captain, Hans Jenisch, spent the rest of the war a prisoner.

The Battle of Convoy HX 112

Sardonyx's defining moment came in March 1941, after joining the Fifth Escort Group under the celebrated Commander Donald Macintyre. Escorting Convoy HX 112 from Halifax, the group came under sustained wolfpack attack as evening fell on 15 March, with U-boats including U-99, U-100 and U-110 among the attackers.

Five or six merchant ships were lost in the fighting, depending on which account you follow, but the escort group struck back decisively. U-99 was so badly damaged by depth charges from Walker and Vanoc that her captain, Otto Kretschmer, by then the highest-scoring U-boat ace of the entire war, scuttled her and surfaced into captivity along with most of his crew. U-100 fared even worse: detected on radar rather than by sound, she was rammed by Vanoc and went down with her own celebrated captain, Joachim Schepke, killed as the destroyer's bow crushed the conning tower he was standing in. Sinking both boats on the same night, against two of Germany's most feared commanders, ranks among the most significant Allied victories of the Battle of the Atlantic to that point, a battle whose lessons directly shaped how convoy escort tactics developed for the rest of the war.

Sardonyx herself, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Robert Tennant, claimed no direct hits, but her presence within the escort group that achieved this double kill places her at the heart of a remarkably pivotal engagement.

The Fifth Escort Group had been formed that same month, and Sardonyx was one of its six original ships along with the destroyers Walker, Vanoc and Volunteer and the corvettes Bluebell and Hydrangea. U-110 found the convoy on 16 March and called the others in; U-99 and U-100 attacked on the 17th and both were destroyed. Sources do not agree on the convoy's own bill: Mason's service history says five merchant ships including three tankers, other accounts make it six totalling around fifty thousand tons. The five that U-99 is credited with were the Venetia, the J B White, the Ferm, the Beduin and the Korshamn.

The wider story of that fortnight is not really Sardonyx's to tell and it is told properly elsewhere here. HMS Camellia opened it by sinking U-70 on 7 March, Prien and U-47 were killed the following night, and nine days later Walker and Vanoc accounted for the other two. In under a fortnight the U-boat arm lost all three of the commanders its own propaganda had been built around. Macintyre's own account of taking Kretschmer prisoner, binoculars and all, is in HMS Hesperus (H57).

Twenty-One Convoys, Not One Lost

In the months that followed, Sardonyx went on to escort twenty-one convoys through the remainder of 1941 without losing a single merchant ship under her protection, including HX 143, ON(S) 23 and ON 30, an outstanding record that speaks to the tactical lessons absorbed from HX 112 and the hard-won experience of her crew.

The Night She Sank One of Her Own

The clean record has a hard edge on it. On the night of 22 November 1941, north-west of the Isle of Lewis, Sardonyx ran down the anti-submarine trawler HMS St Apollo and sank her. St Apollo was a 580-ton Beverley-built trawler, launched in December 1939 and commanded by Temporary Lieutenant Rupert Marchington of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. The record of how it happened is unsparing: the trawler was seen, briefly, by Sardonyx's starboard watch, and missed by the officer of the watch. Sardonyx was damaged badly enough forward that she turned round and made for Londonderry.

It does not sit comfortably next to twenty-one convoys without a loss, and it is not meant to. Escorts spent their nights manoeuvring hard, in company, without lights, in weather, and collision killed a great many more men on the British side of the Atlantic war than most accounts admit. A destroyer that has spent a year keeping merchant ships alive and then cuts a trawler in half in the dark is not an aberration in that war; she is a fairly typical night in it.

A Brush With the Malta Convoys

In the summer of 1942, Sardonyx was attached to the escort screen assembling around the carrier HMS Argus for Operation Pedestal, the famous and famously costly convoy that fought its way through to a starving Malta that August at the cost of over 500 Allied lives. Her own part was in the build-up and initial passage south rather than the climactic battle through the Sicilian Narrows itself, Argus having peeled off before the convoy's final, bloodiest stretch, but even a supporting role in an operation of that scale says something about how few corners of the war this one small destroyer's service failed to touch.

Minding the Northern Barrage, and the Queen Mary

A good deal of her 1942 and 1943 was not convoy work at all. She was repeatedly detached to escort the 1st Minelaying Squadron, four converted merchantmen named Agamemnon, Menestheus, Port Quebec and Southern Prince, while they laid the Northern Barrage: an enormous minefield strung across the gaps between Scotland, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, intended to make it expensive for a U-boat to get into the Atlantic at all. She was on Operation SN88 in April 1942, SN72 in the Denmark Strait in May, SN3C on the Faeroes Bank in July, and SN222B in the Faeroes-Iceland Gap as late as September 1943. It is slow, cold, precise work, and it is the reason her second battle honour reads Arctic.

On 23 May 1942 she drew a rather different job. With the cruiser HMS Cairo and the destroyers Beagle, Douglas and Keppel she took the first twenty-four hours of RMS Queen Mary's passage out of the Clyde, sailing as convoy WS19W with troops aboard for the Eighth Army in Egypt. A twenty-three-year-old destroyer with a coal-era silhouette, minding the fastest liner in the world for a day and then handing her over to somebody else because she could not begin to keep up. It was the same job she had done ten weeks later for military convoy WS21S, the Pedestal convoy: see it out of the Clyde, hand it on, and turn back for the north-west approaches.

A Future Admiral Aboard

Among those who served aboard Sardonyx was midshipman Henry Leach, later to become an Admiral and First Sea Lord, promoted to sub-lieutenant while serving on the ship in October 1942, one small but notable thread connecting Sardonyx's unglamorous convoy work to the future leadership of the Royal Navy.

That midshipman had already had a worse war than most men twice his age. Henry Leach was appointed to the battleship Prince of Wales in 1941 and taken off her before he could join, because his own father, Captain John Leach, was given command of her. He was sent instead to the cruiser Mauritius, and was working as a plotting officer in the war room at Singapore that December when Prince of Wales was sunk off Malaya and his father was lost with her. Survivors remembered an eighteen-year-old midshipman going round the shore asking after him. Sardonyx was where the Navy sent him next.

He was promoted sub-lieutenant on 1 October 1942 and went on in January 1943 to HMS Duke of York (17), the Home Fleet flagship, and was aboard her for the sinking of the Scharnhorst that December. Forty years after his year in a First World War destroyer he was First Sea Lord, and it was Leach who walked into the House of Commons in April 1982, in uniform because he had come straight from elsewhere, and told the Prime Minister that a task force could be assembled and the Falklands could be taken back. The ship at the head of that task force has her own account in HMS Hermes (R12).

A Last Year on the Coastal Convoys, Then Training Submariners

As newer escort vessels entered service, Sardonyx's operational tempo eased, and from October 1943 she was taken off Atlantic escort work altogether and put onto coastal convoys in home waters, which is what she was doing on 8 June 1944 when she escorted shipping carrying troops for Normandy, a fitting final major duty for a ship whose war had already spanned the most desperate years of the Atlantic campaign.

The Naval Staff History does not list her among the escorts deployed in support of the landings, and she was awarded no Normandy battle honour, so what she was doing on 8 June was the coastal convoy work she had been doing since the previous October rather than any part of the assault itself. That is not a demotion. By June 1944 the Atlantic escort groups were full of purpose-built frigates and the twenty-five-year-old destroyers had been moved onto the traffic that still had to keep moving up and down the British coast while everybody looked at Normandy, which is a job somebody had to do and nobody was going to write about.

One detail from her last full year is worth keeping. In January 1943 she was sent to Iceland as part of the 21st Escort Group, alongside HMS Saladin, HMS Sabre, HMS Scimitar and HMS Shikari. Every one of the five was a First World War destroyer. In the fourth year of the second war, a whole escort group in the North Atlantic was made up of ships that had been ordered to fight the Kaiser, and they were still doing it because there was nothing else to do it with.

That October she was withdrawn from operational service and allocated to training duties at Preston with the Third Submarine Flotilla, helping prepare submarine crews for the war's final push.

A Veteran's Long, Hard-Won War

HMS Sardonyx was handed over to Thos. W. Ward for breaking up at Inverkeithing on 23 June 1945, closing out a career that stretched from the final months of the First World War to the pivotal battles of the Second, and whose crew's part in the destruction of two German U-boats at HX 112 stands among the more consequential single actions any escort destroyer contributed to the entire Battle of the Atlantic. She had got through seven different commanding officers along the way, one for roughly every two and a half years of a service life that spanned two world wars almost end to end.