HMS Thisbe (F82): The Destroyer That Towed a Flying Boat Into Battle

Laid Down at Hebburn

HMS Thisbe was built by Hawthorn Leslie and Company at Hebburn, laid down on 13 June 1916, launched on 8 March 1917 and completed that June, an R-class destroyer that improved on the preceding M-class design with more fuel-efficient geared turbines, capable of 36 knots and armed with three 4-inch guns and torpedo tubes.

Her class is worth a line for context. Thisbe is one of sixty-two Admiralty R-class destroyers, ordered on the strength of a decision taken in July 1915 to give all future destroyers two shafts with geared turbines instead of three, purely to save fuel. It is the least glamorous design change imaginable and it is why these ships had the endurance to be doing anything a hundred miles into the Bight in the first place. The reasoning is set out in HMS Restless (H82), and the one member of the class that survived to fight a second world war is HMS Skate (H39).

Joining the Harwich Force

On commissioning, Thisbe joined the Tenth Destroyer Flotilla of the Harwich Force, one of the Royal Navy's most active North Sea commands during the First World War, tasked with patrolling and striking against German shipping and naval movements.

Towing a Flying Boat Towards Heligoland

In August 1918, Thisbe took part in an operation off Heligoland involving an inventive piece of wartime improvisation: towing a flying boat on a lighter as part of an attack on German shipping, an early experiment in extending the range of naval aircraft by having surface ships haul them closer to their targets before launch.

The Barge That Launched a Fighter

The towed lighter deserves proper explanation, because it is one of the cleverest improvisations of the entire war and it is usually reduced to a clause. The problem was straightforward. The Royal Naval Air Service had large, capable Felixstowe flying boats that could patrol the German Bight, but a flying boat needs relatively flat water to unstick from, and the open North Sea very rarely provides any. Getting the aircraft out to where it was needed was therefore the whole difficulty.

The answer was a fifty-eight foot lighter, effectively a shallow barge, on which a flying boat could be floated and secured, and which a destroyer could then tow at twenty knots. The barge sits low, the water flattens in its wake, and the aircraft can be floated off and started in the sheltered water the tow itself creates, a hundred miles from anywhere. It worked. And then somebody, either Commodore Tyrwhitt of the Harwich Force or Colonel Charles Samson, went a step further: put a plank deck on top of the lighter, sit a Sopwith Camel on it, tow the whole assembly at speed into the wind, and the fighter has a runway.

The aircraft failed to get airborne on this occasion, but the attempt itself stands as an interesting glimpse of the Royal Navy's willingness to experiment with naval aviation even in its infancy.

What Happened on 11 August 1918

The operation Thisbe was part of is the one where all of that came together, and it is worth knowing what it looked like. The Harwich Force went out into the Bight with six coastal motor boats to attack German minesweepers, three Felixstowe flying boats on their lighters, and one further lighter with a wooden deck built on it, towed astern of the destroyer HMS Redoubt, carrying a Sopwith Camel and Lieutenant Stuart Culley.

Zeppelin L53 came out to look at the British ships. Culley's Camel was towed up to speed, took off from the deck of a barge in the open sea, and then spent the better part of an hour climbing. He got above eighteen thousand feet, which for a Camel is close to the ceiling and is extremely cold in an open cockpit, found the airship above him, came up underneath her and set her on fire with two drums of ammunition. L53 was the last Zeppelin destroyed in the First World War. Culley then ditched alongside the fleet and was fished out, and the flagship made a signal to the squadron consisting of the words: see Hymn 224, verse 7. The verse begins, "O happy band of pilgrims, look upward to the skies".

His aeroplane survives and is on display in the Imperial War Museum in London, which makes it one of the very few First World War aircraft still in existence with a confirmed kill to its name. The article's note that "the aircraft failed to get airborne on this occasion" refers to one of the flying boats, not the Camel: on that particular morning the F2as could not get off, and the whole operation was salvaged by the fighter on the plank deck. HMS Danae (D44) was there as well and covers the airship's end from another deck.

Compass Trials and a Royal Review

After the Armistice, Thisbe was placed in reserve at the Nore in February 1920, took part in a naval review before King George V in July 1924, and underwent compass trials with the Admiralty's Compass Department the following year, quiet but useful technical work in the years between the wars.

Broken Up at Pembroke Dock

HMS Thisbe was sold to Thos. W. Ward of Sheffield on 31 August 1936 and subsequently broken up at Pembroke Dock, closing out the career of a destroyer whose brief experiment with airborne warfare remains one of the more memorable footnotes of her service.