HMS Somali (G33): The First Prize of the War, the Enigma off Lofoten and Four Days Under Tow in the Arctic

Swan Hunter's Tribal

HMS Somali was one of the sixteen Tribal Class destroyers, big, handsome ships designed to carry twice the gun armament of earlier destroyers, with eight 4.7 inch guns in four twin mountings. She was ordered from Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend on the Tyne in June 1936, launched on 24 August 1937 and completed on 7 December 1938, the first and only ship of the Royal Navy to carry the name.

Her badge showed a kudu, the striped antelope of the Horn of Africa. She was fitted as a leader and commissioned as the flagship of the 2nd Tribal Flotilla, soon renamed the 6th Destroyer Flotilla, under Captain Randolph Nicholson.

The photograph shows her at anchor on 29 July 1939 in her plain pre-war grey, with F33 on her bow, her twin mountings forward and her two raked funnels. Within five weeks the country was at war. Her peacetime months had not been quiet.

In February 1939, during the combined fleet exercises, the Dutch liner Sibajak dragged her anchor at Gibraltar and ran into her, and in June she was among the ships sent to Liverpool Bay in the vain attempt to save the men trapped in the submarine Thetis.

The First Prize of the War

On 3 September 1939 the 6th Flotilla was screening the battlecruisers south of Iceland. About two hours after war was declared, Somali sighted a merchant ship that was being disguised at sea.

She was the German freighter Hannah Böge of Hamburg, 2,377 tons, trying to slip home, and Somali put a boarding party aboard her and took her as a prize. She was the first enemy merchant ship captured in the war.

That autumn Somali hunted for the U-boat that had sunk Royal Oak inside Scapa Flow, was at the anchorage for the first German air raid on it, and screened the Home Fleet in its long winter of sweeps.

Norway, 1940

When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940 Somali was in the thick of it. On 15 April she was at Namsos, where she landed seamen and Royal Marines from the cruisers Sheffield and Glasgow to seize the port ahead of the Army, and carried General Carton de Wiart to take command ashore; under constant bombing she fired off every round of her anti-aircraft ammunition.

At the end of the month she took troops off at Andalsnes, and in May she supported the landings at Bodo. On 14 May, while she was carrying Brigadier Fraser up the coast to Mo, she was sent to help the troopship Chobry, bombed and burning in Vestfjord, and in the attacks that followed a bomb hit her at the waterline under her starboard anchor.

She limped home at ten knots and was repaired by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, coming out with a twin 4 inch anti-aircraft mounting in place of one of her main gun turrets.

The Enigma Rotors from the Krebs

On 4 March 1941 she was one of the four Tribals escorting the commando raid on the Lofoten Islands, Operation Claymore. While the commandos destroyed the fish oil factories ashore, Somali engaged the armed German trawler Krebs off Svolvaer and set her on fire.

Her boarding party found two spare rotor wheels for the Enigma cypher machine and papers with the settings, a prize of great value to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. In May she was part of a force sent to capture the German weather ship München off Iceland for the same reason; the crew threw their machine overboard, but the documents she carried helped Bletchley read the German naval traffic for weeks.

Later that month she screened the Home Fleet in the search for the Bismarck after the loss of Hood, until shortage of fuel sent her home.

In August 1941 she sailed with Prince of Wales when the battleship took Winston Churchill across the Atlantic to meet President Roosevelt, but the weather was so bad the destroyers could not keep up and were sent back. At the end of the month she escorted Argus to Archangel with RAF Hurricanes for Russia, and at Christmas she was off Lofoten again for the second raid, Operation Anklet.

The Arctic

This photograph, taken from her sister Ashanti in March 1942, shows her close inshore off a hilly coast, with a long bow wave and the White Ensign at her mainmast. By then she was a veteran of the Arctic convoys.

In January 1942, escorting PQ 8 to Murmansk, she saw Matabele torpedoed and blown up with the loss of all but two of her men, and found that her own depth charge gear had frozen solid when she tried to attack the U-boat. In May she went to Murmansk with PQ 15, the convoy on which Punjabi was cut in two by King George V in fog, and on the way home she escorted the damaged cruiser Trinidad.

When German bombers set Trinidad on fire and she had to be abandoned, Somali went alongside and took off her survivors, among them Rear Admiral Bonham Carter. In July she was in the cruiser covering force for the ill-fated convoy PQ 17.

Pedestal

In August 1942 she went south for Operation Pedestal, the convoy fought through to Malta. On 13 August, after Manchester had been torpedoed by Italian motor torpedo boats and scuttled off Cape Bon, Somali stood by her and picked up some of her men, but fire from the shore stopped her rescuing more from the beach.

She also pulled survivors of the merchant ship Wairangi from the water, and her anti-aircraft mounting was damaged in the air attacks before she escorted the battleship Rodney home.

QP 14 and the Long Tow

In September she was part of the fighting escort that took PQ 18 to Russia, and then turned for home with the empty ships of QP 14. On the evening of 20 September, north-east of Iceland, she took Ashanti's place on the inner screen while Ashanti dropped back to refuel, and was almost at once hit in the engine room by a torpedo from U-703.

Five men were killed. The explosion blew her torpedo tubes over the side, cut her port side open and sent her port engine through the bottom of the ship, leaving her held together by little more than her upper deck and the starboard side.

Most of her company were sent across to the trawler Lord Middleton, and eighty men stayed aboard while Ashanti took her in tow at seven knots for Iceland. When her own power failed, the destroyers rigged an electric cable from Ashanti to keep her pumps going.

For four days Ashanti towed her, 420 miles in all, but the weather got worse. Late on 24 September, in a snow squall, the men on Ashanti's bridge saw a blue flash as the tow and the cable parted. Somali had folded in the middle; her stern sank quickly and her bow rose vertically and went down after it.

In the freezing water most of the men still aboard died of cold before the rescuers could reach them. The casualty lists name 83 of her company lost, five on 20 September and 78 when she sank, and only 35 were pulled from the sea, among them her captain, Lieutenant Commander Colin Maud, who would be the beachmaster at Juno Beach on D-Day.

She was the last Royal Navy Tribal lost in the war. Of her sisters Afridi, Mashona, Matabele, Punjabi and seven others had already gone; only Ashanti, Eskimo, Nubian and Tartar survived. Her battle honours were Norway 1940-41, Bismarck Action 1941, Arctic 1941-42 and Malta Convoys 1942.