Edward Fegen

Edward Stephen Fogarty Fegen was a career officer of the Royal Navy who in almost forty years of service won no renown and then passed into history in a single evening. On 5 November 1940, as commanding officer of the armed merchant cruiser HMS Jervis Bay, the sole escort of convoy HX 84, he turned his weakly armed ship towards the German heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer so that the ships of the convoy could scatter and escape. He was killed along with most of his crew, but of more than thirty merchant ships the Germans managed to sink only five. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, and his fight became one of Britain’s symbols of the Battle of the Atlantic at its most difficult time.

Family and youth

He was born on 8 October 1891 in Southsea, the seaside district of Portsmouth, the Royal Navy’s principal base. He was one of the four children of the naval officer Frederick Fogarty Fegen, who rose to the rank of vice admiral. The family had Irish roots, and his middle name, Fogarty, was a family surname. In such a family the choice of career was obvious: in 1904, at the age of twelve, Edward entered the Royal Naval College at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, where future naval officers began their training, and then continued it at Dartmouth.

In 1909 he joined, as a midshipman, HMS Dreadnought, the battleship which a few years earlier had transformed warship design throughout the world and which gave its name to a new class of capital ships. Service in the flagship of the Home Fleet was a distinction for a young officer and a good school.

The First World War

The First World War began for Fegen with a disaster. According to his biographers he was serving in the scout cruiser HMS Amphion, which in the first days of the war, on 6 August 1914, struck a mine laid by a German minelayer in the North Sea and sank, the first Royal Navy ship lost in that war. Fegen survived. He spent the rest of the war in destroyers and small escort vessels, commanding among others the torpedo boat TB 26 and later the destroyer HMS Garland.

On 24 March 1918, in the English Channel, the British freighter War Knight, sailing in convoy, collided with the American tanker O.B. Jennings. The tanker’s inflammable cargo caught fire, and both ships and the water around them went up in flames. Some of the tanker’s crew got away in boats, but one of them was swamped, while the master, several officers and seamen remained on the burning ship. Lieutenant Fegen brought Garland up to the sinking boat, then alongside the blazing tanker to take off her men, and finally picked up those who had got away in the boats. In all he rescued four officers and 22 seamen. For this action he and Garland’s coxswain received the silver Sea Gallantry Medal, awarded for saving life at sea. Even then Fegen displayed the quality that all his biographers later emphasised: a readiness to take risks upon himself in order to save others.

Between the wars

After the war Fegen stayed in the Navy, even though it was being drastically cut back. For much of the 1920s he worked in training: he was a divisional officer in a boys’ training ship at Devonport and at the college in Dartmouth. On 30 June 1926 he was promoted to commander. In 1928–1929, on loan to the Royal Australian Navy, he was executive officer of the Royal Australian Naval College, which was then located on Jervis Bay on the coast of New South Wales, in what is now the Jervis Bay Territory. The cadets nicknamed him “Fogarty”. By coincidence, the ship in which he died bore the name of the same bay.

In the early 1930s Fegen served in the heavy cruiser HMS Suffolk on the China Station, then the Royal Navy’s outpost in the Far East. There he again distinguished himself in a rescue: he directed the rescue of the crew of the Dutch steamer Hedwig, which had run onto the Pratas Reef in the South China Sea. For this he received a commendation from the Admiralty and a Dutch life-saving decoration.

He remained a commander until the war. When the Second World War broke out he was 48 and executive officer of the light cruiser HMS Emerald.

The Jervis Bay

The war brought the Royal Navy many new ships, but not necessarily good ones. In August 1939 the Admiralty requisitioned dozens of passenger liners and converted them into armed merchant cruisers, armed with old guns and intended for blockade patrols and convoy escort. One of them was Jervis Bay, built in 1922, which for years had carried emigrants from England to Australia. At the end of February 1940 Fegen took command of her with the acting rank of captain. Her crew consisted mostly of reservists and merchant seamen; the commanding officer was essentially the only regular naval officer on board.

From May 1940 Jervis Bay escorted convoys from Bermuda and Halifax to Britain. An armed merchant cruiser with a convoy was meant to deter armed German merchant raiders. Against a warship with heavy guns she was defenceless, as the Admiralty had known since November 1939, when German battleships sank the Rawalpindi. There were not enough warships, however, to give the convoys stronger protection, and the U-boat attacks on convoy HX 72 in September and on convoys SC 7 and HX 79 in October showed how few of them the Royal Navy had in the autumn of 1940.

The last fight

On 28 October 1940 convoy HX 84 sailed from Halifax, joined at sea by ships from Bermuda. According to different tallies it numbered 37 or 38 ships. On the open ocean Jervis Bay was its only escort. Towards evening on 5 November, halfway across the North Atlantic, the convoy ran into the Admiral Scheer under Captain Theodor Krancke, which a few days earlier had slipped out unobserved into the ocean through the Denmark Strait.

Fegen had no illusions about the outcome. The German ship had six 280 mm guns, armour and modern fire-control equipment; Jervis Bay had seven 152 mm guns dating from the late 19th century, of which only four could fire on one broadside, and at a shorter range. Fegen ordered the merchant ships to turn away and scatter behind a smokescreen, transmitted a raider report, and took his own ship out of the formation and headed her straight for the enemy to draw his fire. The first German salvoes wrecked the wireless room and the steering gear. Fegen, whose arm had been shattered by a shell splinter, continued to command until he was killed when another hit destroyed the bridge. After about twenty minutes of fighting the ship was a blazing wreck; she sank after dark. Some 190 men were killed; 65 survived, picked up during the night by the Swedish ship Stureholm, whose master turned back to the scene of the fight.

The Jervis Bay’s fight and the onset of darkness meant that the Admiral Scheer sank only five ships of the convoy. The rest escaped, among them the tanker San Demetrio, which was abandoned by her crew and then reboarded by a dozen or so of them, and later reached Scotland.

The Victoria Cross and remembrance

On 22 November 1940 The London Gazette announced the posthumous award of the Victoria Cross to Fegen, Britain’s highest decoration for gallantry in the face of the enemy. The citation spoke of his valour “in challenging hopeless odds and giving his life to save the many ships it was his duty to protect” and described how the ship, “crippled, in flames, unable to reply”, held the enemy’s fire for nearly an hour. Fegen’s body was never found; his name is inscribed on the naval memorial at Chatham, which commemorates sailors who have no grave.

The memory of Fegen and his ship soon spread beyond Britain. On 5 November 1941 a memorial to the ship was unveiled in Hamilton, Bermuda, from where Jervis Bay had set out on her last voyage, and the commander of the British station said on that occasion that Fegen had been brought up in the belief that an escort’s duty was to protect its convoy at any cost. Memorials and plaques to him and his crew were put up in Saint John, Canada, where the ship had been refitted in the summer of 1940, in Owen Sound, Ontario, and in 2006 also in Wick, Scotland, the home of many of the crew. The Jervis Bay’s fight was the subject of a ballad by the Australian poet Michael Thwaites and featured in the 1943 film San Demetrio London.

On 13 May 1945, in a radio broadcast reviewing five years of war, Winston Churchill named Fegen among the “Irish heroes” who had fought in the British ranks. He sharply criticised the neutrality of Ireland, which had refused the British access to its ports, but added that, remembering such men, he could feel no bitterness towards the Irish people.

Significance

Fegen commanded no great fleets and took no ground-breaking strategic decisions. His place in the history of the Second World War is defined by a single decision, taken within a few minutes: to sacrifice his ship and his own life to save the ships entrusted to him. For the British of the autumn of 1940, enduring night raids and heavy losses in the Atlantic, he came to embody the spirit of the Navy on which the island’s survival depended. At the same time, his death showed how slender were the means with which Britain was then defending its supply lines. In the following months the Admiralty began assigning old battleships to the Halifax convoys, so that no German warship could again attack with impunity a convoy guarded only by an armed merchant cruiser.