HMS Zephyr (R19): Damaged Off the Pentland Firth, Present at Copenhagen's Liberation

Built on the Tyne

HMS Zephyr was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at their High Walker shipyard on the Tyne, ordered on 10 February 1942, laid down that July, launched on 15 July 1943 and entering service on 6 September 1944, joining the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla that October after working up at Scapa Flow.

Striking Norwegian Shipping

Zephyr took part in offensive operations against German shipping in Norwegian waters, screening escort carriers during mine-laying and anti-shipping strikes near Alesund and Trondheim, precisely the kind of aggressive coastal operations that kept German supply lines under constant pressure in the war's final year.

The Norwegian Coast in Winter

Offensive operations against German shipping in Norwegian waters is the right phrase and it does not convey what those months were actually like.

Germany depended on Swedish iron ore, and the ore came south by sea down the Norwegian coast, inside the leads, the sheltered channel between the mainland and the thousands of offshore islands. It was almost impossible to attack from the air at long range and comfortably out of reach of surface ships. The Home Fleet's answer through 1944 and 1945 was to take escort carriers up there, in winter, and fly Wildcats and Avengers and Barracudas over the islands to mine the channels and bomb whatever was in them.

Zephyr's job was the screen. That means sitting on the edge of a small carrier force, a hundred miles or so off a hostile coast, in a Norwegian Sea winter, at night, in weather that regularly stopped the flying and never stopped the ships. It is cold, wet, monotonous and dangerous in about equal parts, and the only people who ever hear about it are the ones who were there. Similar operations off Alesund and Trondheim from a carrier's point of view are in HMS Striker (D12).

A Mysterious Explosion Off the Pentland Firth

On 31 December 1944, Zephyr sustained significant damage off the Pentland Firth from either a torpedo fired by the German submarine U-1020 or a mine, the exact cause never fully resolved, killing one crew member and forcing her into dock at Scapa Flow and then Caledon Shipbuilding in Dundee for repairs that kept her out of action until April 1945, a dangerous close call so close to home waters.

Whatever It Was, Off the Pentland Firth

The explosion of 31 December 1944 is the most interesting unanswered question in her record, and there is now rather more to say about it than there used to be.

Start with the place. The Pentland Firth, between Caithness and Orkney, is one of the fiercest tideways in the world. Six or seven miles wide, with the whole North Atlantic emptying through it into the North Sea and back twice a day, it runs at up to sixteen knots in places, and it has named races and overfalls, the Merry Men of Mey and the Swelkie, that have been killing sailors since the Norse. Every ship going in and out of Scapa Flow had to use it. Being damaged in there in a winter gale is a bad place to be damaged.

Now the culprit. The choice offered is a torpedo from U-1020 or a mine, and the modern record has moved on. The U-boat archive credits U-1020 with no ships sunk or damaged at all across her entire operational life, which is a considerable difficulty for the torpedo theory. And her own end is now known: she was lost on or after 9 January 1945 in the North Sea east of Dundee, having struck a mine in a British defensive field, with all fifty-two of her crew. Her wreck was found in September 2007 and the identification confirmed two years later.

So the likeliest reading is that both ships were mined, within a fortnight of each other, in the same corner of the North Sea, and that the two events got attached to one another afterwards because it made a tidier story than the truth. There is a certain grim symmetry in it. Zephyr was towed in to Dundee to be repaired; U-1020 went down a few miles off the same town, and stayed there for sixty-two years before anybody found her.

One of Zephyr's men was killed. The ship was out of action for four months and came back in April 1945 with three weeks of the European war left to run.

Witnessing the German Surrender at Copenhagen

Once repaired, Zephyr escorted Arctic convoys to Russia and put in at Copenhagen on 9 May, there to accept the surrender of several German warships, among them the cruiser Prinz Eugen, before taking part in occupation duties and U-boat scuttling operations in the immediate aftermath, a notably significant front-row seat to the liberation of Denmark.

Copenhagen, and What Happened to Prinz Eugen

The 9th of May 1945 in Copenhagen is one of the stranger days of the war and worth setting in place.

Germany surrendered on 8 May, and Denmark had been occupied for five years. A British naval force went straight to Copenhagen to take possession of the German warships lying there, and it went in past minefields that had not been cleared, into a harbour still full of armed German sailors, on the word of a surrender document signed the day before. The account of that entry, from the cruiser that led it, is in HMS Dido (37).

The prize was Prinz Eugen, and she was a genuine prize. A heavy cruiser of fourteen thousand tons, she had sailed with the Bismarck in May 1941 and was in company when HMS Hood blew up, she had run the Channel Dash in 1942, and she had spent the rest of the war shelling the Red Army along the Baltic coast. She was the only major German warship to survive the war more or less intact.

What happened to her afterwards is the part worth knowing. She was handed to the Americans, taken across the Atlantic, and expended in 1946 in the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. She survived both explosions, was towed to Kwajalein too radioactive to repair, and capsized there in December 1946. Her hull is still visible above water in the lagoon, upside down, with one propeller showing. A ship that watched Hood die ended as a radioactive wreck on a Pacific reef, and part of her is still there.

The U-boat scuttling that Zephyr then took part in was Operation Deadlight, in which a hundred and sixteen surrendered U-boats were towed out into the Atlantic north-west of Ireland through the winter of 1945 and sunk, mostly by gunfire and aircraft, because nobody could think of anything else to do with them. It is described in HMS Hesperus (H57).

A Quiet Postwar Career

Between 1946 and 1953, Zephyr served with various flotillas in training and gunnery roles, suffering collision damage in 1952 before being paid off to reserve status that December. Peru expressed interest in purchasing her in 1956, but no sale materialised, and Zephyr was instead transferred to BISCO for scrapping on 27 June 1958, broken up at Dunston from that July.

The Peruvian interest in 1956 is a footnote with a wider point in it. All through the 1950s, small navies came shopping in Britain, because the Reserve Fleet was full of nearly new destroyers nobody could man and the price was right. Egypt bought two of her sisters, Israel bought two more, South Africa took three W-class ships, and India, Pakistan, Norway, Yugoslavia and Chile all bought British-built warships in the same decade. Peru looked at Zephyr and did not buy her, and there was no second offer. She went to Dunston on the Tyne in July 1958 to be cut up, about eight miles upriver from the slipway at High Walker where she had been launched fifteen years earlier.