HMS Savage (G20): The Destroyer With a Carrier's Spare Gun Turret That Helped Sink the Scharnhorst

A Destroyer Built With a Carrier's Spare Parts

HMS Savage was built by R&W Hawthorn, Leslie and Company at Hebburn on the Tyne, laid down in December 1941, launched in September 1942 and completed in June 1943, an S-class destroyer distinguished from her sisters by a particularly unusual piece of engineering improvisation: her forward twin 4.5-inch gun mount had originally been built as a spare turret for the aircraft carrier Illustrious, repurposed to give Savage heavier forward firepower than her single-gunned sisters while her after armament remained conventional.

Calling it a spare part undersells what was going on. Savage was a test bed. The Admiralty wanted to know whether a destroyer could carry a proper power-worked twin 4.5-inch turret, because the next generation of fleet destroyers, the Battles, were going to be built round one, and somebody had to find out first. So Savage got the twin RP10 Mark IV forward, modified from a mounting originally made as a spare for the carrier HMS Illustrious, and two single 4.5-inch mountings aft, which were also prototypes. She was the only ship in her class to carry either, let alone both, and she looked wrong next to her sisters for the whole of her life.

It worked. The Mark IV went on to arm the Battle class, and the fault the trials found was never really cured: oil leaked down through the decks under the mounting, and it was still annoying at least one Battle-class destroyer when she paid off in 1962. That is what a trials ship is for, and it is a slightly more interesting distinction than heavier forward firepower. The rest of her was standard: ordered on 9 January 1941 with the 5th Emergency Flotilla, laid down that December, and adopted by the town of Buxton in March 1942 after a Warship Week savings campaign. Her badge was a savage holding a club, and two of the four battle honours she carried, Guadaloupe 1810 and Dardanelles 1914-15, she had never been anywhere near: they came with the name, the second of them earned by the coal-fired Beagle-class HMS Savage of 1910.

Bringing a Battleship Home From the Mediterranean

Savage's early service included Operation Camera, a diversionary manoeuvre off Norway intended to mislead German forces, and Operation Governor, before she was sent south on 7 October 1943 to bring the battleship HMS King George V home from the Mediterranean after the Salerno landings, joining her escort on the 13th for the passage from Gibraltar to Scapa Flow, a striking contrast to the harsh Arctic convoy work that would come to define most of her wartime career.

Guardian of the Arctic Convoys

For the majority of her war, Savage supported the Arctic convoys carrying vital supplies to the Soviet Union, among the most physically brutal duty any Royal Navy ship could draw, combining the ever-present threat of German air, submarine and surface attack with properly dangerous weather and sea conditions in the far north.

The list is longer than "the majority of her war" suggests. She covered or escorted RA54A, JW54B, JW55A and JW55B, JW56A, JW56B, RA56, JW57, RA57, RA61A, JW63, RA63, RA64, JW65 and RA65, which is most of the Russian convoy programme from the autumn of 1943 to the end. Between them she picked up the Arctic 1943-45 battle honour on top of North Cape.

Two of those runs were not convoys at all. In November 1944 she went to the Kola Inlet with HMS Scorpion carrying Norwegian troops, for a joint operation with Soviet forces against the German positions in the far north of Norway; the Norwegians were going home to fight for the top of their own country, and a British destroyer took them there. On the way back that month she escorted two liners, the Empress of Australia and the Scythia, home from Russia as convoy RA61A.

Torpedoing the Scharnhorst

Savage's defining moment came on 26 December 1943 at the Battle of the North Cape, when she formed part of the destroyer screen sent to engage the German battleship Scharnhorst, which had sortied to attack an Arctic convoy.

Savage launched eight torpedoes at a range of 3,500 yards, contributing directly to the damage that ultimately sent the German battleship to the bottom, one of the most significant surface actions of the naval war and a decisive moment in ending the threat German heavy units posed to the vital Arctic convoy route.

The attack is worth setting out properly, because it was a piece of choreography rather than a scramble. Four destroyers went in, in two pairs: Savage and Saumarez from one bow, Scorpion and the Norwegian-manned Stord from the other, so that whichever way Scharnhorst turned to comb one pair's torpedoes she presented her side to the other. Savage fired all eight of hers from three and a half thousand yards. Between the four of them they put at least three into her, and the hits that mattered were the ones that slowed her down, because a Scharnhorst at thirty knots was faster than the battleship chasing her and a Scharnhorst at twenty was not. HMS Duke of York (17) then closed and finished her. HMS Scorpion (G72) has her own account of the same twenty minutes.

It was not free. Saumarez took a hit in the exchange and Savage spent the following day escorting her, damaged, into the Kola Inlet. And three weeks before it all happened, on 3 December, coming south from Archangel on her own, Savage had lost a seaman overboard, which is the kind of line that appears once in a service history and never again. Of 1,968 men in Scharnhorst, 36 were pulled out of the water.

Watching the Flank of the Invasion

The article's jump from the Arctic to a gunnery school skips a summer. In June 1944 Savage was detached from the Home Fleet to Dover Command along with HMS Obedient, HMS Opportune and HMS Orwell, and given a patrol line between Dungeness and Worthing. The job was to sit on the eastern flank of the invasion and make sure nothing German and surfaced came down the Channel at it. On 6 June that meant being out there while the whole thing went across a few miles to the west, and seeing nothing, which was the entire objective.

It was not quiet throughout. On the night of 26 July the 6th German motor torpedo boat flotilla went for a westbound coastal convoy off Dungeness, and Savage, Obedient and Opportune went in after them. A fleet destroyer built to put torpedoes into a battlecruiser in the Arctic, chasing E-boats off the Kent coast in the small hours, is a fair summary of how the Royal Navy used what it had in 1944.

Taking the Crown Prince Home

She had one more errand after that, and it was the best one she ever drew. On 12 May 1945, four days after the German surrender, Savage was part of the escort that took the cruiser HMS Devonshire and the minelaying cruisers Apollo and Ariadne into Oslo. Aboard them were Crown Prince Olav of Norway and the British Flag Officer Norway, going home. Savage had carried Norwegian soldiers to the Arctic to fight for the north of their country six months earlier; now she brought their heir to the throne back to the capital. It is a considerably better last act than most destroyers get, and the article rather buries it under a gunnery school.

From Combat to Training

After the war in Europe ended, Savage was refitted as a gunnery training ship at Portsmouth from September 1945, before being reduced to reserve status in 1948 and recommissioned briefly for trials in 1950, a quieter continuation of service reflecting her transition from front-line combat duty to the ongoing business of training the next generation of naval gunners.

A Long Wait Before the Scrapyard

Savage was finally placed on the Disposal List in 1960 and arrived at Cashmore in Newport on 11 April 1960 to be broken up, work that ran on into 1962, closing out a career whose defining moment, launching torpedoes at one of Nazi Germany's most feared capital ships during the Battle of the North Cape, secured her a remarkably significant place in Royal Navy history.

A Destroyer That Helped End a Battleship's Threat

HMS Savage's unusual forward gun mount, borrowed from an aircraft carrier's spares, is a fitting symbol of a navy improvising its way through a desperate war, and her role in the destruction of the Scharnhorst stands as one of the clearest, most consequential contributions any single destroyer made to ending the German surface fleet's ability to threaten Britain's Arctic supply lines to the Soviet Union.