HMS Skate (H39): The Great War Destroyer That Fought at Normandy

Built on the Clyde for the First War

HMS Skate was built at the John Brown shipyard in Clydebank, ordered under the Admiralty's 7th War Programme in December 1915, laid down in January 1916, launched on 11 January 1917 and completed the following month, one of sixty-two Admiralty R-class destroyers rushed into service to meet the demands of the First World War's North Sea campaign. Commander John Hodgson took her to sea as her first captain that January.

Sixty-Two Ships Built Around One Idea

The R class is worth understanding, because the single design decision behind it is the reason Skate had the career she did. They were the preceding M class redrawn around fuel consumption. In July 1915 the Admiralty Board ruled that future destroyers would be built with two shafts and geared turbines rather than three direct-drive ones, Brown-Curtis for choice, on the grounds that the fleet was burning oil faster than it could be brought across the Atlantic and that a destroyer which had to go home to refuel was a destroyer not on patrol. Sixty-two ships were ordered on that basis between 1916 and 1917.

It worked better than anyone expected. The geared installation gave the same speed on less fuel, and it threw in two things nobody had asked for: less cavitation and a quieter ship, which was becoming a live concern in 1916 as German submarines began carrying hydrophones. Hold that thought for twenty-five years. When Skate turns up escorting convoys from Halifax and from Freetown, and getting a troopship convoy the whole way to Brazil, she is doing it on the endurance that a committee argued about in the summer of 1915. Very little else about her had been modern for a long time.

Torpedoed in the North Sea

Skate joined the 11th Destroyer Flotilla before transferring to the Harwich Force's 10th Destroyer Flotilla, and on 12 March 1917, off the Maas Lightship in the North Sea, she was struck in the stern by a torpedo from the German submarine UC-69, an attack that cost one of her crew their life. She was towed into Harwich the following day, photographed limping home by Lieutenant Geoffroy Hooper in an image that survives today in the National Maritime Museum's own collection.

The Harwich Force she belonged to is one of the more distinctive commands of that war and two of her contemporaries in it have their own accounts here: HMS Sceptre (F79) and HMS Redgauntlet (F97). Tyrwhitt's ships spent the war in the southern North Sea, in shallow water, within reach of German bases and German mines, doing short sharp patrols out of a small Essex port rather than the long grey waiting of the Grand Fleet. It is a fair guess that being torpedoed off the Maas Lightship in March 1917 surprised nobody aboard very much.

She survived the damage and returned to duty under a new captain, Lieutenant-Commander Joseph Yorke, and it was under his command that she took part in one of the war's most extraordinary spectacles: the surrender of the German U-boat fleet. On 20 November 1918, nine days after the Armistice, the first of more than 160 U-boats crossed the North Sea to give themselves up to Rear-Admiral Sir Reginald Tyrwhitt's Harwich force, at one point stretching in a line some two miles long, and the Imperial War Museum's own photo archive credits Skate by name among the destroyers that brought them in, a striking bookend for a ship that had herself been a torpedo victim only months before.

A Quiet Interwar Life

With the war over, Skate settled into a much quieter role, serving as a torpedo school tender attached to HMS Vernon before being reduced to reserve status and transferred to the depot ship HMS Dido on 12 March 1920, the kind of unglamorous administrative posting that saw many veteran destroyers out their days. She came back into full commission on 16 November 1926, one of well over a dozen different commanding officers to pass through her wardroom across the 1920s and 30s as she rotated between active and reserve duty, and in June 1933 her own ship's bell was quietly declared surplus and put up for sale for as little as a pound, a small, almost comic indignity for a ship that would go on to outlast every one of her sixty-one sister ships.

Why She Was the Only One Left

The sixty-one sisters did not go down fighting. A handful were lost in the war, but the great majority were simply sold, in the twenties and thirties, because a destroyer built in an emergency programme to a wartime standard is worn out in a decade and there was no money. The Geddes economies took a scythe to the fleet in the early twenties and the London Naval Treaty of 1930 finished the job, and by the middle of that decade the R class had effectively ceased to exist. Skate survived the cull by not being at sea for most of it, which is the sort of luck that only looks like luck afterwards.

Being tender to the torpedo school was the first part of that, and HMS Vernon is where the trade she had been built for was taught. The second part was a conversion in the late 1930s that turned her into a small minelayer: her after 4-inch gun was landed and rails for forty mines were fitted in its place. That is what saved her. A worn-out destroyer is surplus, but a ship that can lay mines is a capability, and capabilities do not get sold for scrap when a war is obviously coming.

What "influence minesweeper" meant in practice was another conversion, early in 1940, fitting her with magnetic sweeping gear and revising her armament again. The problem she was thrown at was genuinely new. German magnetic mines lay on the bottom and fired when a steel hull altered the local field above them, so there was nothing to catch with a wire and no way to sweep them until somebody worked out how to fake a ship. The answer, and the extraordinary business of getting hold of a live specimen to take apart first, is set out in HMS MMS 17 (J517). Skate spent the first part of her second war towing that answer up and down the east coast.

The Last of Her Class, and the Oldest Still Fighting

Remarkably, Skate was still around when the Second World War broke out, by which point she was the sole surviving ship of her entire class, earning her the distinction of being the oldest destroyer to see active service with the Royal Navy in that conflict, and, as a wartime press caption rather proudly noted when she was photographed at Liverpool in December 1942, the only three-funnelled destroyer left anywhere in the fleet. Fourteen months later, at Plymouth in February 1944, she marked her 27th birthday still on active service; a caption from that occasion, rather less reliably, went so far as to claim she had been "twice torpedoed" in the earlier war, and named her three longest-serving hands, Yeoman of Signals G. F. Braxtone, Chief Stoker A. E. Burnett and Able Seaman K. Tidey, who between them had clocked up sixty-two years in the Navy and fifteen aboard Skate herself.

She began the war as an influence minesweeper working against the new German magnetic mines, before being rearmed in 1941 for full convoy escort duty during the Battle of the Atlantic, and the results were immediate: in September 1940 alone she pulled 55 survivors from the torpedoed tanker Torinia and a further 45 from the merchantman Scholar, scuttling the latter's wreck herself, and in June 1941 she rescued another 70 men from the sinking Norfolk, real lives saved on top of the raw convoy mileage.

Her Atlantic convoy work through 1941 ranged from the Halifax run to the West African route out of Freetown and Gibraltar, and in October 1942 she picked up a troopship convoy at Oversay and shepherded it all the way to Bahia in Brazil, a detour forced by the demands of Operation Torch elsewhere in the Atlantic. By late 1943 she was old enough to have fought one world war and young enough to be sent into the next one's coldest theatre, escorting the Arctic convoy JW 54B out to Russia that November and bringing the homebound RA 54B safely into Londonderry that December.

One Last Fight, at Normandy

Extraordinarily, this First World War veteran was still active enough to take part in the Normandy landings that June, a remarkable feat for a destroyer that had first gone to sea nearly three decades earlier and had already survived being torpedoed in the previous war. On 6 June itself, D-Day, she picked up the crew of an American C-47 Skytrain of the 435th Troop Carrier Group after German anti-aircraft fire forced it to ditch in the Channel, a rescue plucked straight out of the invasion's chaos rather than routine escort work. She kept at it for months afterwards too, still shepherding capital ships home that September, escorting the battleship HMS Rodney from Plymouth to Scapa Flow and the battleship HMS Malaya into Rosyth.

It is worth saying plainly why a twenty-seven-year-old destroyer was anywhere near an invasion beach, because the answer is not sentiment. Britain went into the war without enough escorts and the shortfall was not close: the building holiday of the 1930s and the treaty limits had left the Navy with a fleet designed for battle and not for convoy, which is why fifty elderly American flush-deckers were taken over in 1940 and why anything with a hull, a gun and an asdic set was found a job. Skate was one of a good many First World War survivors pressed back into service. What distinguished her was that she was the oldest of the lot, and that she kept going to the end.

The September 1944 tasking makes the point better than anything. A destroyer laid down in January 1916 was escorting HMS Rodney (29) up to Scapa Flow and taking Malaya into Rosyth: a ship from the era of the Grand Fleet shepherding the battleships that had replaced it, in the last autumn of a war that began twenty-three years after she was launched. Her fellow Arctic escort HMS Scorpion (G72) on the JW and RA runs was twenty-six years younger than she was.

She returned to HMS Vernon in 1945, was sold for scrap on 4 March 1947 and broken up that July at Newport in Wales, closing out one of the longest and most improbable careers of any Royal Navy destroyer of her generation.

There is one loose end worth tying. The bell that was declared surplus and offered for a pound in June 1933 was written off because nobody expected the ship to be worth a bell for much longer. She went on to serve another fourteen years, fight a second world war, sweep magnetic mines, cross the Atlantic more times than anyone counted, go to Russia and then to Normandy, and outlast all sixty-one of her sisters, before being sold in March 1947 and taken apart at Newport that July. Somebody in the Admiralty accounts branch in 1933 was, on the evidence, a poor judge of a ship.