HMS Sikh (L82): From the Bismarck Chase to a Doomed Raid on Tobruk

Built on the Clyde

HMS Sikh was ordered on 19 June 1936 from Alexander Stephen and Sons' Linthouse shipyard on the Clyde, laid down that September, launched on 8 June 1937 and commissioned on 12 October 1938 at a cost of £337,704 before weapons and communications equipment.

A Tribal-class destroyer, she carried eight 4.7-inch guns and a quadruple set of 21-inch torpedo tubes, and could make 36 knots on her Parsons steam turbines, a notably formidable fighting ship for her size.

Torpedoes at the Bismarck

Sikh joined the 4th Destroyer Flotilla and took part in the climactic pursuit of the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941, firing four torpedoes at the crippled ship during her final night under the command of Commander Stokes and initially being credited with a hit, a claim later disproven but no less a mark of how closely she was involved in one of the war's most famous naval actions.

She made the crossing alongside three of her own sister ships, Cossack, Maori and Zulu, the whole flotilla diverted from troop convoy escort duty to screen the Home Fleet's own capital ships, and all four were still there at dawn on 27 May to watch Bismarck finally go down.

The flotilla she was in that night is worth naming, because it is one of the most famous destroyer commands of the war. The 4th was Captain Philip Vian's, and it spent the hours of darkness on 26 and 27 May 1941 running in on a battleship in a rising sea, in the dark, on their own, with orders to keep her occupied until the heavy ships arrived at first light. There was a fifth ship with them: the Polish-manned Piorun, who found Bismarck first, made her number to her, and fought a private gun duel with a battleship for the better part of an hour without hitting anything or being hit, which tells you most of what you need to know about the temper of the Polish Navy in exile. That story is picked up in HMS Garland (H37).

Two more Tribals were in the same operation and came out of it worse. HMS Mashona (F59) was sunk by German bombers on the way home the following day, and HMS Tartar (F43) pulled 229 of her people out of the water and then survived thirteen hours of air attack herself. The Tribals were the best-armed destroyers the Royal Navy had and they were used accordingly, which is why so few of the sixteen built for the Royal Navy came through the war.

Sinking Two Italian Cruisers off Cape Bon

Transferred to Mediterranean operations with Force H, Sikh achieved her most significant combat success on 13 December 1941, when she joined HMS Legion, HMS Maori and the Dutch destroyer HNLMS Isaac Sweers in sinking the Italian cruisers Alberico da Barbiano and Alberto di Giussano at the Battle of Cape Bon, a decisive night action that removed two enemy cruisers from the board in a single engagement.

One detail usually passed over is whose action it was. Commander G H Stokes, who led the four destroyers in that night, was Sikh's own commanding officer, so she was not one of four ships present but the ship at the head of the line. The whole engagement lasted about five minutes and cost the Italians over nine hundred men and both cruisers without a single British ship being hit, for a reason that had nothing to do with courage on either side: the British had radar and the Italians did not. The full account is in HMS Legion (G74), who was third in the line behind her.

The following August, on the 4th, she helped destroy the German submarine U-372 off Haifa, sharing the kill with her old Bismarck-chase companion Zulu, the destroyers Croome and Tetcott, and an RAF Wellington bomber, adding a confirmed U-boat kill to her record.

Lost Covering the Tobruk Raid

On 14 September 1942, Sikh was landing Royal Marines of the 11th Battalion for Operation Agreement, a daring commando raid on the port of Tobruk, when a searchlight caught her at around five in the morning and shore batteries opened fire, striking her repeatedly with 152mm, 145mm and 120mm shells and possibly aircraft as well. Her own sister ship HMS Zulu made several attempts to take her under tow, succeeding once, only for the towline to part when a shell struck Zulu's own quarterdeck, leaving Sikh ablaze and beyond saving.

Six Plywood Boats and a Fleet Destroyer

The thing to understand about Tobruk is that Sikh had no business being there in that role at all. She was a fleet destroyer, built to screen capital ships at 36 knots and put torpedoes into things, and she was being asked to act as an assault ship. To make that possible the Navy took out two of her whalers and stowed six dumb lighters on deck in their place: flat-bottomed landing craft made of plywood sheets nailed together by local labour, with no engines of their own. The rehearsals off the Cyprus coast were, by the account of men who were there, close to farcical, and the lighters proved unseaworthy. Nobody who had watched those rehearsals can have gone into Tobruk harbour expecting the landing to be quick.

That is the reason for everything that followed. A destroyer trying to get plywood boats over the side in a swell has to stop, and a ship stopped a mile or two off a defended harbour in the dark is not a warship any more, she is a target waiting for somebody ashore to switch on a searchlight. At twenty-six minutes past five in the morning a heavy shell hit her and started a fire that reached the forward magazine. Larry Allen, an American war correspondent aboard her for the raid, reckoned she was hit around eighty times before it was over, and a later shell into one of her engine rooms took most of what speed she had left. Allen was taken prisoner along with almost everybody else who survived.

Her commanding officer, Captain St John Micklethwait, gave the order to abandon ship before seeing to her scuttling himself, then made a final tour of his own vessel before he too left her. The action cost 122 of her crew their lives, with Micklethwait among those taken prisoner, spending the rest of the war in camps in Italy and Germany, and further men captured after the small craft attempting to rescue them was itself seized by Italian forces.

Zulu herself did not survive much longer: having exhausted her attempt to save Sikh, she was crippled by German dive bombers that same day and foundered while under tow, meaning both Tribal-class sisters that had chased the Bismarck together sixteen months earlier were lost within hours of each other off the same stretch of Libyan coast.

The arithmetic of Operation Agreement is worth stating plainly, because the raid has largely dropped out of the popular memory of the desert war and it should not have. The Allies lost around 800 men killed and 576 taken prisoner, along with a cruiser, two destroyers, four motor torpedo boats, two motor launches and a number of landing craft. The Axis garrison lost fifteen Italians and one German killed. It is difficult to think of another British operation of the war where the ratio of losses ran so far the wrong way, and the fuller accounting, including what happened to the anti-aircraft cruiser sent to cover the withdrawal, is in HMS Coventry (D43).

A Destroyer That Fought to the Very End

HMS Sikh's career spans some of the Royal Navy's most famous Mediterranean and Atlantic actions of the war, from the hunt for the Bismarck to the destruction of two Italian cruisers at Cape Bon, and her loss during the Tobruk raid stands as a sober reminder of the cost borne by the destroyer crews who carried out these dangerous covering operations.

Micklethwait himself deserves the last word, because his war did not begin or end at Tobruk. Born in March 1901, he had commanded another Tribal, HMS Eskimo, at the second battle of Narvik in 1940, where she had her bow blown off and came home anyway, and he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order three separate times. After Tobruk he spent the rest of the war behind wire in Italy and then in Germany. He came back, stayed in the Navy, was appointed Naval Aide-de-Camp to the King in January 1950, was promoted Rear-Admiral that June, made a CB in 1952 and retired at the end of 1953.

What he did afterwards is the part nobody expects. He became High Sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1959, a Deputy Lieutenant the year after, and then spent nine years as chairman of the Cwmbran Development Corporation, which is to say that the officer who fired the scuttling charges in a burning destroyer off the Libyan coast spent the better part of a decade building a new town in South Wales. There are worse second acts, and there are few more useful ones.