HMS Saumarez (G12): Hit by the Scharnhorst, the Haguro and an Albanian Mine

A Leader, Built on the Tyne

HMS Saumarez was ordered in January 1941, laid down by Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn that September and launched on 20 November 1942. She was one of the S class, the fifth of the war emergency flotillas, and she was fitted out to lead her seven sisters, with room for a Captain (D), his staff and the extra signalmen a flotilla leader needs to run a war from a destroyer's bridge.

The Navy gave its leaders names instead of letters, and hers belonged to James Saumarez, the Guernseyman who won the Battle of Algeciras in 1801 and spent his last command keeping the Baltic open in the teeth of Napoleon. Problems with her guns and fire control equipment held her up, and she did not commission until 1 July 1943.

Twickenham had adopted her during its Warship Week the year before, so the town had been paying for a ship it could not yet see.

Escort to the Queen Mary

Her first proper job was a famous one. In early August 1943 she and her sister Scourge sailed from Londonderry to meet the liner Queen Mary in the Atlantic and see her into Newfoundland.

The liner was carrying Winston Churchill and his staff to the Quebec Conference, where the date for the invasion of France was settled, and Saumarez spent her first operational week guarding the most important passenger afloat.

Then she went north. From October 1943 she was on the Arctic run with the Home Fleet destroyers, covering the convoys to Kola and Archangel and, in December, joining the cover for JW 55A and JW 55B. On 20 December she was in the Kola Inlet for talks with the Soviet Northern Fleet's commander, Admiral Golovko. Six days later she was fighting a battleship.

North Cape, From the Leader's Bridge

On 26 December 1943 the German battleship Scharnhorst came out to attack JW 55B and was caught between the cruisers and HMS Duke of York (17). The destroyers were sent in to slow her down. How the four of them went in, two from each bow, is told properly in the article on HMS Savage (G20), and HMS Scorpion (G72) has the other pair's view of it.

Saumarez was the one that paid. She closed in the dark under starshell and was hit by the battleship's return fire before and during her run. One shell went straight through her director control tower without exploding, which saved the ship and still killed three men inside it.

Splinters cut through her upperworks, her rangefinder was wrecked and she lost the use of one engine. She kept going, fired her torpedoes and came out of it at ten knots. One officer and ten ratings were dead and eleven more were wounded. She was the only one of the four attacking destroyers to be damaged.

Savage escorted her, limping, into the Kola Inlet, and Scharnhorst went down that evening. Of more than 1,900 men in her, 36 were pulled out of the water.

Normandy, and a Cargo of Men

She was repaired at Scapa Flow in the new year and was back on the Russian convoys by March 1944, with JW 58 and its return. In May she was given to Force S for the invasion, and on 6 June she was off Sword Beach bombarding the defences.

The next weeks were less glamorous and more dangerous: night patrols on the eastern flank of the anchorage against E-boats, one of which got through her screen on 8 June and sank two tank landing ships. In August she went in after a German minesweeper flotilla with British and American ships and came out needing repairs again.

In November she sailed with JW 61A, and the convoy's cargo was people. Among its passengers were Soviet citizens who had been captured in German uniform in Normandy, men of the Eastern battalions the Wehrmacht had raised in occupied Russia, now being sent home under an agreement reached with Moscow that autumn.

What waited for most of them on arrival is one of the darker corners of the war's end.

East of Suez

At the end of 1944 she was named leader of the 26th Destroyer Flotilla for the Eastern Fleet, refitted on the Tyne, escorted the carrier Formidable as far as Gibraltar and reached Trincomalee on 10 March 1945.

Her captain was now Manley Power, one of the best destroyer officers of the war, and the flotilla under him was some of the busiest ships in the Indian Ocean that spring: bombarding Sumatra, sweeping the Andamans and the Malacca Strait, covering the Rangoon landings.

On 19 March, off Stewart Sound in the Andamans, she found her sister HMS Rapid (F138) on fire and dead in the water after a hidden shore battery had put five shells into her, and towed her to Akyab.

Eight days later the flotilla caught a small convoy in the Malacca Strait and sank a freighter and a submarine chaser, though the Admiralty was afterwards less pleased about the ammunition and the eighteen torpedoes it had taken to do it.

The Haguro

In May the Japanese tried to get the heavy cruiser Haguro and the destroyer Kamikaze through to the Andamans. Aircraft from the escort carrier Shah found them, and on the evening of 15 May Power took his five destroyers into the entrance of the Malacca Strait to find them in the dark.

Radar found the cruiser at extreme range, and Power spread his ships in a crescent and brought them in from different bearings, the oldest destroyer tactic there is, against a ship that outgunned the five of them together.

Saumarez, leading, was hit just as she was about to fire. A shell came into No. 1 boiler room, severed a steam main and lodged in the boiler itself without fully exploding. Two stokers were killed and others scalded.

Accounts of the night disagree on whether she was hit once or three times; the boiler room hit is the one every account agrees on. Her engineers cross-connected the steam from No. 2 boiler room to both turbines, and she stayed in the fight on both shafts at reduced speed.

The torpedoes that finished Haguro came from her flotilla: Venus hit her at about twenty-five past one in the morning and Virago put two more into her minutes later. The cruiser sank south-west of Penang.

It was the last major surface action the Royal Navy has fought with guns and torpedoes, and the other ships' accounts are here too: HMS Venus (F50), HMS Verulam (F29) and HMS Vigilant. Power received a bar to his DSO. Saumarez went to Simonstown in South Africa to have her boiler room rebuilt.

The Corfu Channel

She came home in December 1945 and in 1946 went out again to the Mediterranean with the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla, based at Malta. That May, Albanian shore batteries had fired on two British cruisers using the Corfu Channel, a recognised international passage, and the story of that first incident is told in the article on HMS Superb (25).

Britain's answer was to send ships through again, to make the point.

On 22 October 1946 Saumarez was steaming north through the channel astern of the cruisers HMS Mauritius (80) and Leander, in waters that had been swept for mines after the war and were marked on the charts as safe. At just before three in the afternoon she struck a mine under her forward part.

The explosion tore her open, started a fierce fire and killed men in the forward messdecks outright.

The destroyer Volage came alongside, got a tow on her and began to pull her clear, stern first. An hour and a half later Volage herself struck a second mine, which blew her bows off. The two ships were brought to Corfu Roads, each going astern, about twelve hours after the first explosion.

Forty-four men were killed that day and forty-two injured, and most of the dead were from Saumarez.

The mines were new and had been laid recently in a swept channel, and Albania had said nothing. Britain took the case to the new International Court of Justice, which found Albania responsible in 1949 and awarded damages that were not settled for more than forty years.

It was the first case the Court ever decided, and the duty it laid down, to warn ships of dangers you know about in your own waters, is still quoted today.

Never Repaired

Saumarez was surveyed at Malta in 1947 and found not worth repairing. She was a ship that had come through a battleship's guns and a heavy cruiser's, and she was finished by a weapon nobody fired.

She lay on the disposal list until September 1950, when she was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation and towed to Charlestown in Fife to be broken up.

Her battle honours were Arctic, North Cape, Normandy, Malaya and Burma. She had about three years of war and was hurt badly in all three of the actions she is remembered for, and she led from the front in each of them, which is what a leader is for.