HMS Tartar (F43): The Lucky Tartar, Present at Every Turning Point of the War

Built on the Tyne

HMS Tartar was built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend, ordered on 19 June 1936, laid down that August, launched on 21 October 1937 and commissioned on 10 March 1938, a Tribal-class destroyer that would go on to earn the nickname the Lucky Tartar for a notably remarkable string of narrow escapes across nearly every major theatre of the Second World War.

Capturing an Enigma Machine

Tartar took part in Operation Claymore, the 1941 raid on the Lofoten Islands, during which the German trawler Krebs was captured along with an Enigma machine, a particularly significant intelligence coup that contributed to the Allied codebreaking effort at Bletchley Park.

What Was Really Taken From the Krebs

The Enigma capture is worth being precise about, because "an Enigma machine" gives the wrong impression. The machines themselves were not especially secret; the Poles had reconstructed one before the war and Bletchley Park had several. What made a captured machine useless on its own was that the daily settings changed, and without them the machine tells you nothing. What the boarding party took out of the armed trawler Krebs on 4 March 1941 was the valuable part: a set of rotor wheels and the code books with the settings, which let Bletchley read German naval traffic for a period rather than for an afternoon.

The consequence was larger than the haul. A young analyst in Hut 4 named Harry Hinsley, going through what Claymore had produced, worked out something nobody had thought about: German weather ships, sitting alone in the North Atlantic and the Arctic sending routine meteorological reports, had to be carrying the same cipher material as the fleet, and unlike the fleet they had nothing to protect them. Two of them, the Munchen and the Lauenburg, were duly captured that year, and between those seizures and the taking of U-110 in May the naval Enigma was opened up properly. A commando raid on a Norwegian fish oil factory therefore ends up being one of the reasons the Atlantic was won, and Tartar was one of the ships that took the commandos there.

Present at the Sinking of the Bismarck

Later that year, Tartar was present at the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck, and rescued 229 survivors of HMS Mashona, before surviving one of the most intense air attacks any Royal Navy destroyer faced during the entire war, a sustained assault by around fifty aircraft over thirteen hours on 28 May 1941, during which she managed to shoot down a Heinkel He 111 bomber.

Arctic Convoys, Malta, and North Africa

Through 1942, Tartar escorted the brutal PQ and QP Arctic convoy series, took part in Operation Pedestal, the desperate effort to resupply besieged Malta, supported Operation Torch in North Africa, and depth-charged Italian submarines, an exhausting run of some of the most dangerous convoy work of the entire war.

Rescuing a Hospital Ship's Survivors

During Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, in 1943, Tartar rescued two hundred survivors from the hospital ship Talamba, and went on to support Operation Avalanche at Salerno, where she came under attack from German glider bombs, a new and properly terrifying weapon.

The glider bombs deserve naming, because Salerno is where the guided missile arrived in warfare. The Germans deployed two weapons there: the Henschel Hs 293, a small rocket-boosted glide bomb steered by radio from the launching aircraft, and the Fritz X, an armour-piercing bomb of nearly a ton and a half with control surfaces and a radio link, designed to be dropped from twenty thousand feet and guided onto a warship's deck. They were the first precision-guided munitions ever used in action and they worked immediately: a Fritz X sank the Italian battleship Roma on her way to surrender, another crippled the American cruiser Savannah, and one went through HMS Warspite (03) at Salerno and very nearly finished her. Ships in that anchorage had no defence against them at all beyond making smoke and hoping.

D-Day and the Battle of Ushant

Tartar supported the D-Day landings in June 1944 and fought at the Battle of Ushant on 9 June, an action in which she was damaged and lost four of her crew, with twelve more wounded. She continued English Channel patrols and coastal raids through the rest of that year.

Leading the Flotilla at Ushant

Ushant is worth more than a line, because Tartar was not simply present at it: she was leading it. Captain Basil Jones had the 10th Destroyer Flotilla and flew his broad pennant in her, and in the early hours of 9 June 1944, three days after the landings, the flotilla was sent to intercept a German destroyer force coming up from the Gironde to attack the invasion shipping. There were eight Allied destroyers, British, Canadian and Polish, against four German. It was fought at close range in the dark at high speed, and everything about it was confused.

Tartar took a shell on the bridge early on, which killed four of her people, wounded a dozen more and knocked out her communications with the rest of the flotilla, so the leader spent much of the action out of touch with the ships she was leading. She kept fighting. The German destroyer ZH1 was engaged by Tartar and by her sister Ashanti, which fired two torpedoes at point-blank range and blew her bows off; Z32 was driven ashore on the Ile de Batz and wrecked. It was one of the last destroyer surface actions ever fought in the Channel, and it ended the German surface threat to the invasion beaches for good.

Four out of sixteen is the figure to hold on to. The Tribals were the best-armed destroyers Britain had and they were spent accordingly, put into every dangerous corner of the war from Narvik to Okinawa, and three quarters of them were sunk. HMS Mashona (F59), whose people Tartar pulled out of the water in May 1941, was one of them.

Rangoon, and the Japanese Surrender

In 1945, Tartar deployed to the Eastern Fleet, took part in Operation Dracula, the amphibious assault on Rangoon, and was present at the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, a fitting final chapter for one of only four Tribal-class destroyers to survive the entire war out of the sixteen originally built for the Royal Navy.

Scrapped After the War

HMS Tartar was paid off in January 1946 and sold to BISCO for scrap, demolished at J. Cashmore's Newport yard after arriving there in February 1948, closing the career of a ship whose extraordinary run of survivals across six years of war fully earned her nickname.