Offshore where sea and skyline blend
In rain, the daylight dies;
The sullen, shouldering swells attend
Night and our sacrifice.
Adown the stricken capes no flare–
No mark on spit or bar–
Girdled and desperate we dare
The blindfold game of war.
(The Destroyers by Rudyard Kipling, 1898)
When Kipling penned The Destroyers in 1898, torpedo boat ‘destroyers’ had only just been introduced in the Royal Navy. Yet within 20 years, these diminutive warships became indispensable to Britain’s defence. Destroyer flotillas of the Dover Patrol and the less celebrated Harwich Force were primarily responsible for maintaining British dominion in The Channel and The North Sea by escorting merchant convoys, deterring sorties by German minesweepers and torpedo boats, and detecting and destroying U-boats. To the 3rd and 10th Destroyer Flotillas (DF) of the Harwich Force fell some of the most arduous and dangerous tasks of the Great War at Sea. And nowhere was the blindfold game of war more desperately contested than in the sullen seas off the Dutch coast.
By the beginning of the Great War, the Royal Navy destroyer was much altered from the early types Kipling had based his poem on. HMS Foam, which the author had been a guest on during the Spithead Naval Review of 1897, held to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, was a vessel of just 200 tons whose impressive trial speed of 30 knots could not be achieved in open seas due to her poor sea-keeping qualities. Starting with the River Class of destroyers in 1904, the Admiralty had sought a more realistic balance between speed, seaworthiness and armament. The end result was a standard destroyer of approximately 1000 tons armed with three 4-inch guns and two twin 21-inch torpedo tubes. The larger hull and use of oil-fuelled steam turbines produced more consistent speeds of around 30 knots with reduced engine vibration and much improved endurance.
Standard British destroyers were considerably larger and more powerful than contemporary vessels of the Imperial German Navy (IGN), which continued to build small and lightly armed ‘hochseatorpedoboote’ as battle-fleet escorts. Adequate sea-keeping was achieved by giving them high, trawler-style forecastles, and they generally matched their Royal Navy counterparts for speed. However, in straight shoot-outs with British destroyers in the North Sea, they were invariably to come off second best.
The Harwich Force came into being on, the port on the Essex-Suffolk border being considered the best base for guarding against possible German sorties against London and the East Anglian coast. Initially, it consisted of 22 units of the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla (later re-designated the 9th DF). Other destroyers detached from the 1st and 10th DF brought the total number up to 30 by the end of the year. The 3rd DF was composed entirely of units the L-Class, the last of the pre-war destroyer designs, all of which were given names commencing with the letter L. Commanding the Harwich Force was Rear Admiral Reginald Tyrwhitt, whose experience with destroyers pre-dated Kipling’s poem, and who would remain in post until war’s end.
It was a destroyer of the Harwich Force, HMS Lance, which fired the opening shots of the naval war on 5th August 1914, barely 12 hours after the official declaration of war between the two countries. Together with her sister Landrail, she was responsible for sinking the minelayer Konigin Luise in the vicinity of the Heligoland Bight. The former Hamburg America Line ferry was returning from minelaying operation off the Outer Gabbard shoal some 25 miles east of Harwich. Unfortunately, this success was marred shortly afterwards when the flotilla leader HMS Amphion fell victim to one of the freshly laid mines, becoming the first British warship lost in the war.
The Heligoland Bight was also the locus of the Royal Navy’s first major victory later the same month, when battlecruisers of the Grand Fleet preceded by Harwich Force destroyers intercepted a large German patrol comprising light cruisers, torpedo boats and minesweepers, and sank or heavily damaged a dozen of them for no loss to themselves. The heavy German losses, including more than 700 dead, led to a ‘muzzling’ of large-scale operations by the IGN in the North Sea, and a greater emphasis given to defensive minelaying of the German and Dutch coasts.
It was during one such mine-laying operation a few months later that the Harwich Force would achieve arguably its greatest independent success. In The Action off Texel, an island in North Holland, on 17th October, a patrol consisting of four destroyers of the 3rd DF and led by the light cruiser HMS Undaunted intercepted four elderly torpedo boats of the 7th Half-Flotilla commanded by Korvettenkapitän Georg Thiele. The German warships, all units of the S-90 class, had sallied from the port of Emden on a mission to lay mines in the mouth of the Thames, when the British flotilla was sighted. Thiele’s initial failure to recognise these ships as hostile gave the commander no chance of escape, and despite valiant efforts to counter-attack using torpedoes, all four TBs were quickly overwhelmed and sunk by British gunfire, resulting in the deaths of Thiele and 200 of his men.
Another dramatic encounter between Harwich Force destroyers and German torpedo boats occurred on 1st May 1915 in the vicinity of Noordhinder Bank, which lies off the Dutch coast on a latitude roughly equal to that of Antwerp. This unplanned encounter arose from two separate incidents. The sinking of HMS Recruit by the UB-6 near Galloper Shoal in the Thames Estuary prompted the despatch of a squadron of four units of the Harwich Force. Although they could not locate the U-boat, at sea they were well placed to respond to a distress call by a group of armed trawlers, which had been surprised and engaged by a pair of small torpedo boats of the IGN’s Flanders Flotilla. These ships had been sent out in search of the crew of a German seaplane. By the time the Harwich Force reached the trawler group, one had been sunk, but the lightly-armed torpedo boats had been successfully driven off. An hour-long pursuit ended with both TBs being sunk, providing further evidence to the German high command of the Harwich Force’s far-reaching potency.
Although Kipling envisioned his destroyers attacking the ‘laden prey’ of an enemy convoy, escorting merchant ships became one of the regular and most unglamorous duties of the Harwich Force. In fact, guarding the convoys that carried meat and other essential supplies between Rotterdam and ports in England – the so-called ‘Beef Run’ or ‘Beef Trip’ – was described by Tyrwhitt’s biographer as ‘the principal and often blasphemously execrated activity of the Harwich Force.’ Such runs took place every two to three days, in convoys typically of four to nine merchantmen. The convoying of this route was introduced in July 1916. Harwich destroyers were assigned to screen the freighters as they made often tortuous progress across the North Sea, each travelling at its own pace; a practice that led to vessels being strung out miles apart. The convoys were run in relays, the destroyers zigzagging and without lights to avoid the attention of U-boats. Approaching the sea channel to Rotterdam, marked by the Maas Lightship, the escorting destroyers would heave-to and await the England-bound convoy.
The principal enemy, apart from the weather, was the increasing presence of mines. Using U-boats and other minelaying vessels of the Flanders Flotilla based at Ostend and Zeebrugge, the IGN heavily mined areas of the German and Dutch coast. An estimated 195 fields were laid in 1916, a figure which increased to more than 500 by the end of the following year. Yet, in spite of this massive expansion in German minelaying, the Harwich Force safely escorted over 1,800 merchant sailings, from which there were only six documented losses.
In spite of these notable successes in offensive patrols and defensive escort duties, the Harwich Force suffered from an attritional loss, as individual ships fell victim to enemy torpedoes and mines. HMS Lance formed part of the convoy screen for a Beef Run on 13th August 1916, which resulted in the torpedoing of her sister HMS Lassoo as she approached the Maas Lightship. Her nemesis is now known to have been the UB-10 of the Flanders U-Boat Flotilla. HMS Simoon, one of the Royal Navy’s new R-Class destroyers, which formed the bulk of the Harwich Force in the later phase of the war, was torpedoed and sunk on the night of 23rd January 1917 close to the Schouwen light vessel in an otherwise inconsequential surface action with torpedo boats of the 6th Flotilla, which were attempting to reach Zeebrugge from German ports to the north.
Without doubt the blackest day for the Force occurred on the night of 22nd-23rd of December 1917, when two divisions of the 10th DF, including HMS Valkyrie, Sylph, Surprise, Torrent and Tornado, put to sea to pick up another Beef Run in what were later described as ‘near Arctic conditions’. Unbeknownst to the departing flotilla, more than a hundred mines had been laid the previous month in the approaches to the Hook of Holland. The flotilla leader Valkyrie detonated one of these mines on the outward journey. The initial detonation killed a number of crewmen, with several more later succumbing to their wounds, bringing the total death toll to 21. However, the ship remained afloat, enabling her to be taken in tow by Sylph and safely got home.
The remaining escorts were ordered continued to their rendezvous point off the Maas Lightship. In hindsight, this would prove a costly and tragic decision for at around 03.15 HMS Torrent struck another mine in the same vicinity and quickly went down in the darkness. Only six minutes later, HMS Surprise, closing to rescue those left in the water, detonated yet another of the infernal German mines, sinking within minutes and leaving even more men in a drowning state. HMS Tornado was the next victim, detonating two mines in quick succession. By good fortune, the last survivor of this destroyer division, HMS Radiant, managed to avoid hitting any further mines. Her crew bravely managed to extract a few survivors from the frigid seas, but more than 200 sailors ultimately perished in a triple sinking that recalled the loss of the cruisers HMS Hogue, Cressy, and Aboukir off the Dutch coast in the early months of the war.
The Harwich Striking Force continued to lose ships engaged in Beef Trips late in the war. On 15th August 1918, HMS Ulleswater, another R-Class destroyer from the 10th DF, and her flotilla leader, HMS Scott, were lost together in Dutch waters while on convoy duty, the latter while striving to rescue sailors of the former. The area was known to have been recently mined by U-71, although it seems equally possible that both ships were destroyed by torpedoes from this submarine; a case in Kipling’s words of the ‘Brides of Death’ being slain by the groom.
The Destroyers
THE strength of twice three thousand horse
That seeks the single goal;
The line that holds the rending course,
The hate that swings the whole:
The stripped hulls, slinking through the gloom,
At gaze and gone again —
The Brides of Death that wait the groom —
The Choosers of the Slain.
Offshore where sea and skyline blend
In rain, the daylight dies;
The sullen, shouldering swells attend
Night and our sacrifice.
Adown the stricken capes no flare–
No mark on spit or bar,- —
Girdled and desperate we dare
The blindfold game of war.
Nearer the up-flung beams that spell
The council of our foes;
Clearer the barking guns that tell
Their scattered flank to close.
Sheer to the trap they crowd their way
From ports for this unbarred.
Quiet, and count our laden prey,
The convoy and her guard!
On shoal with scarce a foot below,
Where rock and islet throng,
Hidden and hushed we watch them throw
Their anxious lights along.
Not here, not here your danger lies
(Stare hard, 0 hooded eyne!)
Save where the dazed rock-pigeons rise
The lit cliffs give no sign.
Therefore – to break the rest ye seek,
The Narrow Seas to clear
Hark to the siren’s whimpering shriek
The driven death is here!
Look to your van a league away, –
What midnight terror stays
The bulk that checks against the spray
Her crackling tops ablaze?
Hit, and hard hit! The blow went home,
The muffled, knocking stroke
The steam that overruns the foam-
The foam that thins to smoke-
The smoke that clokes the deep aboil –
The deep that chokes her throes
Till, streaked with ash and sleeked with oil,
The lukewarm whirlpools close!
A shadow down the sickened wave
Long since her slayer fled:
But hear their chattering quick-fires rave
Astern, abeam, ahead!
Panic that shells the drifting spar
– Loud waste with none to check-
Mad fear that rakes a scornful star
Or sweeps a consort’s deck.
Now, while their silly smoke hangs thick,
Now ere their wits they find,
Lay in and lance them to the quick–
Our gallied whales are blind!
Good luck to those that see the end,
Good-bye to those that drown–
For each his chance as chance shall send–
And God for all Shut down!
The strength of twice three thousand horse
That serve the one command;
The hand that heaves the headlong force,
The hate that backs the hand:
The doom-bolt in the darkness freed,
The mine that splits the main;
The white-hot wake, the ‘wildering speed–
The Choosers of the Slain!
Bow Creek to Anatahan 