Disaster off Texel

On the night of 31 August/1 September 1940 five British destroyers adapted for minelaying put out into the North Sea to mine the waters off the coast of occupied Holland. North-west of the island of Texel they ran into a newly laid German minefield of which the British knew nothing. Within a quarter of an hour HMS Express had lost her entire bow section, HMS Esk had broken in two and sunk, and HMS Ivanhoe had been so badly damaged that she had to be finished off the next day. According to the most frequently cited estimates, some 300 sailors were killed and about a hundred were wounded or taken prisoner by the Germans. It was one of the Royal Navy’s heaviest single losses in coastal waters in 1940, and in Britain it was long known simply as the “Texel Disaster”. Two destroyers were sunk; the third, Express, survived only because she could be towed back to port.

The 20th Destroyer Flotilla

The ships belonged to the 20th Destroyer Flotilla, based at Immingham on the Humber estuary. It was a specialised unit: its destroyers – Express and Esk of the E class and Icarus, Intrepid and Ivanhoe of the I class – had been designed so that, with some of their guns and torpedo tubes removed, they could each carry about sixty mines and lay them quickly in enemy waters. The flotilla had been in action since the first days of the war. As early as the night of 9/10 September 1939 Esk and Express laid mines in the Heligoland Bight, and a field laid at the beginning of March 1940 near Terschelling sank, according to post-war findings, the submarine U-44. On 8 April 1940 the flotilla’s destroyers mined Norway’s Vestfjord in Operation Wilfred, the day before Germany invaded Norway. In May they laid mines off the Dutch coast, and at the end of the month they were thrown into the evacuation from Dunkirk, from which they carried thousands of soldiers. Ivanhoe was badly damaged by a bomb there on 1 June and rejoined the flotilla only at the end of August, converted back into a minelayer.

In the summer of 1940 mines took on a new significance. In the ports of Holland, Belgium and northern France the Germans were assembling barges and ships for the planned landing in Britain, and their convoys were moving along the coast. British minefields were meant to hamper these movements. The Germans, for their part, were laying extensive minefields in the southern North Sea in August to protect their own coastal routes and the flanks of the future crossing. According to some accounts, the field into which the 20th Flotilla sailed had been laid by German minelayers on the night of 7/8 August. The British did not know of it.

The night of 31 August

On the evening of 31 August Express, carrying the flotilla commander, Captain Jack Bickford, together with Esk, Icarus, Intrepid and Ivanhoe, left Immingham to lay a barrage north-west of Texel. The destroyers Kelvin, Jupiter and Vortigern covered them from a distance. During the passage aircraft reported German warships heading west from the direction of Terschelling, towards England. In the tense atmosphere of late August, when Britain expected an invasion any day, the report was taken seriously. According to Admiralty records cited by naval-history.net, the Nore command ordered the flotilla to jettison its mines and attack the enemy; according to other accounts, the order reached the ships when they were already laying the barrage. In reality it was a small German force on passage from Cuxhaven to Rotterdam.

At about 11.07 p.m. Express struck a mine. The explosion occurred abreast the second forward gun and tore away the entire fore part of the ship as far as the bridge. Several dozen men were killed, and a few sailors thrown overboard were later picked up by the Germans. Bickford was badly wounded. In accordance with standing orders, two ships, Icarus and Intrepid, turned back along their own track to get out of the minefield, while Esk and Ivanhoe closed to help. A few minutes later Esk struck a mine with her bow and came to a stop, and shortly afterwards a mine hit Ivanhoe, wrecking her bow. At about 11.20 p.m. another explosion shook Esk amidships. The ship broke in two, and both halves quickly went to the bottom. Between 127 and 135 of her crew were killed, according to various sources. A few survivors were picked up by Ivanhoe, and several dozen on rafts drifted towards the Dutch coast, where they were taken prisoner.

Saving Express and the end of Ivanhoe

Intrepid reported the disaster to headquarters. The Admiralty sent motor torpedo boats to help, and forbade the covering destroyers of Captain Louis Mountbatten’s 5th Flotilla to enter the minefield until it was clear where the damaged ships were. Meanwhile the crew of Express managed to raise steam, and at about 1.40 a.m. the ship got under way stern first, so that the water would not press against the shored-up bulkheads. In the morning a patrolling RAF Lockheed Hudson located both damaged destroyers. At about eight the torpedo boats reached them and took off the men of Express and most of Ivanhoe’s crew. Shortly afterwards Mountbatten’s destroyers arrived. Kelvin took Express in tow stern first, but the line fouled her propeller and had to be cut; Jupiter took over the tow and, towards evening, for fear of air attack, handed it over to tugs. The light cruisers Aurora and Galatea came out to meet them; on the way back Galatea herself struck a mine but suffered only minor damage. The hulk of Express reached Hull on 2 September – according to some sources a day later. Captain Bickford died of his wounds on 10 September.

Ivanhoe was less fortunate. The explosion left her without power for hours. At about 1.45 a.m. steam was raised and the ship, going stern first, made seven knots, but towards morning she lost propulsion: according to the accounts, her propellers dropped off or her shafts fractured. The hull was taking in water and listing ever more heavily. In the afternoon, when the pumps failed, the captain ordered the sea cocks opened and the ship abandoned. The wreck still stayed afloat; a German aircraft attacked it, and it was finally sunk by a torpedo fired from Kelvin. According to some sources the mine explosion killed more than fifty men aboard Ivanhoe; the nominal casualty lists give considerably fewer.

Losses and silence

The overall toll is usually given in round figures: some 300 killed and about 100 wounded or taken prisoner. The sum of the figures given for the individual ships is sometimes slightly lower, but there is no doubt that this was the heaviest loss of life suffered by the Nore command since Dunkirk. Two destroyers were lost, and the third, Express, was out of service for more than a year; her repairs at Chatham dockyard lasted until October 1941.

For a long time the Admiralty gave no details. The silence, the badly burned wounded in hospitals on the east coast and the bodies of sailors washed up by the sea fed rumours. Stories circulated in England that the Germans had already attempted a landing and that the British had repelled it by setting fire to oil spread on the sea. The legend of the “burning sea” and of German soldiers’ bodies on the beaches, associated especially with the hamlet of Shingle Street in Suffolk, outlived the war and was still being repeated half a century later. Part of the press and public opinion blamed Mountbatten for the disaster, although his ships had merely been covering the operation.

Place in the war

The Texel disaster did not change the course of the war, but it illustrates well its nature in coastal waters in 1940. The North Sea and the English Channel were thickly mined by both sides, and the mine, a cheap and invisible weapon, killed more men than many battles. Despite its losses the 20th Flotilla went on laying mines, and the British minefields, the RAF raids on the ports where the invasion barges lay and the presence of the fleet in the Channel were among the reasons why Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion on 17 September. Express returned to service in the autumn of 1941, and in December of that year, as part of Force Z in the South China Sea, she picked up survivors from the battleship Prince of Wales, sunk by Japanese aircraft. In 1943 she was transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy as HMCS Gatineau.