HMS Walpole (I41): The Destroyer That Evacuated Dutch Diamonds Ahead of the Nazis

Built at Sunderland

HMS Walpole was built by Doxford Shipyard in Sunderland, ordered on 9 December 1916, laid down in May 1917, launched on 12 February 1918 and commissioned on 7 August 1918, an Admiralty W-class destroyer that arrived in the final months of the First World War.

Escaping IJmuiden With the Crown Jewels of Commerce

In May 1940, as German forces overran the Netherlands, Walpole took part in the evacuation of a substantial cargo of diamonds from the port of IJmuiden as part of Operation Amsterdam, a wartime intelligence operation to keep the city's industrial diamond stocks out of German hands. Lieutenant Commander H.G. Bowerman had her carry the MI6 officer Montagu Chidson along with two representatives from the diamond trade, Willem Woltman and Jan Kors Smit, who together secured gems worth somewhere between half a million and two and a half million pounds at 1940 prices, a truly dramatic wartime episode that saw a Royal Navy destroyer pressed into service smuggling out both people and precious cargo just ahead of the advancing enemy.

She was given a badge of a silver antelope's head on a black field, and a town: Ely, in Cambridgeshire, adopted her. The interesting part is what happened afterwards. Warship Week adoptions usually faded once the ship was gone, and a good many towns could not have told you by 1960 which ship they had bought. Ely kept the connection up after Walpole was lost in 1945 and has maintained it since, which is unusual and says something about both of them.

Dover Strait 1942

One of her five battle honours is Dover Strait 1942, and there is nothing in the article about it, which is a pity, because what she was ordered to do that day was close to suicidal and the reason she did not do it is almost comic.

On 12 February 1942 the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen broke out of Brest and ran up the English Channel in daylight, under a fighter umbrella, past the whole of southern England. Everything Britain had within reach was thrown at them. Six Swordfish of the Fleet Air Arm went in and every one was shot down, which is described in HMS Victorious (R38). The Royal Air Force lost a great many aircraft for nothing.

And then Captain Mark Pizey was ordered to take six destroyers of the 21st and 16th Flotillas out of Harwich and attack three German capital ships with torpedoes, in daylight, in the North Sea, with no air cover of his own worth the name. Campbell, Vivacious, Worcester, Mackay, Whitshed and Walpole sailed. They were First World War destroyers of 1918 and 1919, they were going against ships that could destroy any of them with one salvo, and every man in them knew it.

Walpole did not get there. Her condensers failed on the way out, which was so common a complaint in the V and W class that the flotillas had a nickname for it, and she had to turn back and go home. The other five went in at twenty-eight knots, were bombed by the Luftwaffe and by the RAF, and made their attack at about a quarter to four in the afternoon at between two and three thousand yards. Worcester was hit repeatedly, set on fire and lost twenty-seven men. No torpedo hit anything. The Germans got through.

It is a strange thing to be awarded a battle honour for a battle your ship broke down on the way to. It is also entirely correct that she has it. She sailed.

Bombs, Mines, and the Atlantic Convoys

Walpole suffered bomb damage in July 1940 and further damage from a magnetic mine that October, requiring repairs that kept her out of action until April 1941. Once back in service, she carried out extensive convoy escort duty across the Atlantic, including the HX convoy series, and on the demanding Arctic route to northern Russia, supporting convoys including PQ 18 and QP 14.

PQ 18, and the Convoy That Fought Back

PQ 18 is not just another number. It was the first Arctic convoy after PQ 17, which had been ordered to scatter in July 1942 and had lost twenty-four ships out of thirty-five, and it was run on the opposite principle: instead of a covering force at a distance and a convoy left to its own devices, PQ 18 sailed in September 1942 with an escort of unprecedented strength, including the escort carrier HMS Avenger and a fighting destroyer force that was told to stay with the merchant ships whatever happened.

It was attacked more heavily than any Arctic convoy before or since. Thirteen merchant ships were lost, which sounds like a defeat until you set against it forty-odd German aircraft shot down and three U-boats destroyed. The Luftwaffe torpedo squadrons in northern Norway were effectively wrecked as an offensive force in the course of one week and never recovered their strength. QP 14, the return convoy Walpole also escorted, brought home the survivors of PQ 17 who had been sitting in Archangel since July.

It is the point at which the Arctic run stopped being something the Germans could win.

Mined Off Flushing

On 6 January 1945, in the war's final winter, Walpole was heavily damaged by a mine off Flushing in the Netherlands, an explosion that killed two of her crew and seriously injured five more. The damage was severe enough that she was declared a constructive total loss.

A Floating Mine in January 1945

The mine that finished her is worth explaining, because by January 1945 the Scheldt should have been safe. Antwerp had been taken in September 1944 and the approaches had been cleared at enormous cost that autumn, and convoys were running up to the port. The Germans responded by putting mines back into the estuary faster than they could be swept, using aircraft, midget submarines and, increasingly, mines simply released to drift.

A drifting mine cannot be swept, because it is not moored to anything and is not where it was an hour ago. Walpole was on an anti-E-boat patrol off Flushing on 6 January when she found one with her port side, abreast the forward boiler room. Two of her company were killed and five seriously injured. The flooding put a list on her and took away her engines and all her electrical power, so that she lay in the dark with the water coming in and no way of doing anything about it. The frigate Rutherford got a line aboard and started her towards Sheerness, and tugs took over.

She reached Chatham on the 10th and was surveyed, and the survey said what everybody knew: a twenty-seven-year-old destroyer with a hole in her boiler room, in the fourth month of the last winter of the war, was not going to be repaired. She was sold on 8 February and towed to Grays in Essex to be taken apart. The war in Europe ended thirteen weeks later.

Sold for Scrap

HMS Walpole was sold to be broken up for scrap on 8 February 1945, just months before the war in Europe ended, bringing to a close the career of a destroyer whose service had ranged from smuggling diamonds out of occupied Holland to the icy convoy routes of the Arctic.