HMS Sorceress (G94): A Rescue in the North Sea During the Great War

Built on the Tyne

HMS Sorceress was built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend on the Tyne, laid down on 13 November 1915, launched on 29 August 1916 and completed that December, an R-class destroyer commissioned straight into the Fifteenth Destroyer Flotilla of the Grand Fleet during the First World War under her first captain, Lieutenant-Commander Henry James. She carried the pennant number G93 throughout her active wartime service, only becoming G94, the number she is remembered by today, once the fighting itself was already over in January 1918.

The pennant number change is less arbitrary than it looks. British warships of that era carried a letter, the flag superior, followed by a number, and the letters were reshuffled periodically as flotillas were reorganised, ships were lost and new construction came in. A destroyer could go through three or four numbers in a decade without anything happening to her at all, which is why identifying a Great War destroyer from a photograph is a specialist skill and why so many of them are catalogued under a number they wore for only part of their lives. Sorceress is one of sixty-two Admiralty R-class destroyers, a class explained at length in HMS Restless (H82), and the only one of them to see the Second World War was HMS Skate (H39).

Action Against the German Sixth Flotilla

On the night of 22-23 January 1917, Sorceress took part in an engagement in which a British flotilla led by HMS Grenville confronted the German Sixth Destroyer Flotilla, an action that resulted in the loss of HMS Simoom, torpedoed by the German destroyer S50. Her magazine exploded and forty-seven of her crew were killed, including her own captain, Commander Edward Inman, who went down with his ship; Sorceress herself played only a minor supporting role in the fighting.

Catching a Flotilla on the Move

That January action was not a chance meeting, it was an interception, and the thing being intercepted matters. The German 6th Flotilla was not out looking for trouble in the North Sea; it was being transferred from its home ports in Germany to Zeebrugge, to reinforce the destroyer force based on the Belgian coast that was making a nuisance of itself against the Dover barrage and the cross-Channel troop route. Eleven modern German destroyers moving down the Dutch coast in one body was an opportunity, and Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt took the Harwich Force out on the evening of 22 January to be in their way.

The two forces found each other at a quarter to three in the morning off the Schouwen Bank, in the dark, at close range, which in 1917 meant everybody firing at shapes. The German destroyer S50 came out of it straight into a line of four British boats with Simoom at the head of them, exchanged salvoes and fired a torpedo. It hit Simoom forward and detonated her magazine. Forty-seven of her people were killed including her captain, and what was left of her was still afloat later that day, so HMS Nimrod sank the wreck. Sorceress was in the same line of destroyers, a little further back, and came through it untouched. Night destroyer actions were like that: the difference between the ship that blows up and the ship that does not is frequently a hundred yards and the order the enemy happened to fire in.

Rescuing Survivors from the Livingstone

The following month, Sorceress rescued three survivors from the naval trawler Livingstone after a German attack on a convoy running between Britain and Norway, a small but valuable act of service amid the grinding attrition of a convoy route that German destroyer raids would go on to target repeatedly through 1917, most seriously in October and again in December, when two separate raids destroyed most of two convoys and three of the four destroyers escorting them.

The Convoys That Proved the Point

The convoy she was escorting the following month deserves its own explanation, because the Norwegian run was not a sideshow. Britain needed Scandinavian iron ore, timber and fish, and Norway needed British coal, and by early 1917 the U-boats were sinking merchant ships faster than the world could build them. The Admiralty had spent two years insisting that convoy was impractical. In April 1917 it was tried anyway on the Lerwick to Bergen route, largely because there was nothing left to lose there, and the losses on that route collapsed almost immediately. It is one of the pieces of evidence that finally forced convoy on the rest of the war, and it worked so well that the Germans stopped using submarines against it and started sending surface ships instead.

That is what made the route lethal. It runs between Shetland and Norway, in reach of the German bases, across open water with no cover, and a convoy on it is a line of slow merchant ships escorted by two destroyers and a couple of armed trawlers. On 17 October 1917 the German minelaying cruisers Brummer and Bremse, chosen for the job because they looked like British light cruisers and could make thirty-four knots, came out of the morning haze onto a westbound convoy. The escorting destroyer signalled them for identification and got no answer. They sank both escorts, Mary Rose and Strongbow, and nine of the merchant ships, and killed something like two hundred and fifty men in under an hour before turning for home.

They did it again on 12 December, at eleven in the morning, with four destroyers of the Third Half-Flotilla under Korvettenkapitän Hans Kolbe. The escorts, Partridge and Pellew, were under orders not to engage a superior force and engaged anyway to buy the convoy time. Partridge was shot to a standstill and then hit by three torpedoes, going down with seventy-four of her crew; Pellew, badly damaged, found a rain squall and got into Norway. Everything they were escorting was sunk. After that the Admiralty stopped treating the route as a destroyer job and began covering the convoys with divisions of battleships, which is a remarkable thing to have to do to get coal to Bergen, and it is the measure of what these small ships were up against on what the article calls a convoy route.

Strongbow, incidentally, was one of Sorceress's own sisters, another of the sixty-two. Three survivors off a trawler is the sort of entry that reads like a footnote until you know what the rest of that year looked like on the same stretch of water.

A Quiet Postwar Decade

With the Grand Fleet disbanded after the war, Sorceress transferred to the Nore Destroyer Flotilla in September 1919 and was recommissioned that November under Commander Charles Bunbury, the first of half a dozen different captains who would pass through her wardroom across the 1920s as she rotated between active commission and reserve, settling into the quieter, less eventful pace of interwar service that awaited most of her surviving sisters.

Scrapped in the Modernisation Drive

As the Royal Navy modernised its destroyer fleet through the 1920s, the ageing Sorceress was decommissioned and sold to Thos. W. Ward of Sheffield to be broken up on 29 April 1927, a decade after the North Sea actions and rescue work that had defined her brief but particularly active wartime career.