The sinking of HMS Barham

On the afternoon of 25 November 1941, in the Mediterranean north of Sidi Barrani off the coast of Egypt, the German submarine U-331, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Hans-Diedrich von Tiesenhausen, slipped through the destroyer screen and fired four torpedoes at the battleships of the Mediterranean Fleet from a range of a few hundred metres. Three of them struck HMS Barham. Within minutes the old battleship rolled over onto her port side and was then torn apart by the explosion of her magazines. According to British figures 862 officers and men were killed, about two-thirds of her crew. The explosion was filmed by a Pathé newsreel cameraman aboard the neighbouring battleship Valiant, and the footage became one of the best-known images of the war at sea. For two months the British concealed the loss from both the enemy and their own public.

It is often said that Barham was sunk “while covering convoys in the Mediterranean”. In fact the battleships were not escorting a convoy: they had sailed from Alexandria to cover British cruisers hunting Italian convoys carrying supplies to Libya.

A veteran of Jutland

Barham was one of the five fast battleships of the Queen Elizabeth class, built during the First World War. She was commissioned in 1915, and a year later fought at the Battle of Jutland as flagship of the 5th Battle Squadron. She carried eight 15-inch (381 mm) guns and displaced some 33,000 tons. She was modernised between the wars, but unlike her sisters Warspite, Valiant and Queen Elizabeth she never underwent the thorough reconstruction that would have strengthened her deck armour and underwater protection.

The outbreak of war found the battleship in the Mediterranean. In December 1939 she joined the Home Fleet, and at the end of that month she was torpedoed by U-30 under Fritz-Julius Lemp; repairs took six months. In September 1940 she bombarded Dakar during the failed expedition against French West Africa, and she then joined Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet at Alexandria. In March 1941 she fought at the Battle of Cape Matapan, where, together with Warspite and Valiant, she destroyed Italian heavy cruisers at point-blank range in a night action. On 27 May, during the fighting for Crete, she was hit by a German bomb; repairs at Durban lasted until the summer. In August she returned to Alexandria as flagship of the 1st Battle Squadron under Vice-Admiral Henry Pridham-Wippell, Cunningham’s second-in-command.

U-boats in the Mediterranean

In the autumn of 1941 a new danger was added to those the Mediterranean Fleet already knew – the Italian fleet, Italian and German aircraft, and mines. At the end of August Hitler, against the advice of the commander of the U-boat arm, Karl Dönitz, decided to send German U-boats into the Mediterranean to help the Italians cut British supply lines and to support Rommel’s forces. From the end of September a first group of six boats passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, followed by more in November. One of them was U-331, which made the passage at the turn of September and October and reached the base at Salamis in Greece. On 13 November another U-boat, U-81, sank the aircraft carrier Ark Royal off Gibraltar.

On 12 November U-331 left Salamis for a patrol off the Egyptian coast. On 17 November she landed seven men of the Brandenburg special unit on the coast of Egypt to blow up the coastal railway supplying the Eighth Army; the mission failed. Tiesenhausen then remained in the waters between Alexandria and Sollum.

A sortie against the convoys

By then the British offensive in Libya, Operation Crusader, was already under way, and Rommel had thrown his panzer divisions towards the Egyptian frontier. The outcome depended on how much fuel and ammunition he could receive by sea. Since the destruction of the Duisburg convoy on the night of 8–9 November, the Italians had been sending ships singly and in small groups, often to Benghazi. The British, who were reading Italian signals, knew of many of these sailings. In late November the cruisers from Alexandria and Force K from Malta put to sea at the same time to intercept ships bound for Cyrenaica. On 24 November Force K sank two German merchantmen west of Crete, Maritza and Procida, which were carrying aviation fuel among other cargo.

On the afternoon of 24 November the 1st Battle Squadron also sailed from Alexandria: Queen Elizabeth, with Cunningham aboard, Barham and Valiant, screened by eight destroyers. Its task was to cover the cruisers should the Italian fleet come out. On the morning of 25 November U-331’s hydrophones picked up the distant noise of large ships’ propellers, and Tiesenhausen set off to meet them.

Four minutes

In the afternoon the two forces were steaming on opposite courses. At about 4.18 p.m., according to British records, the sonar (ASDIC) operator on the destroyer Jervis detected an echo a few hundred metres away, but judged it too large for a submarine and disregarded it. U-331 passed beneath the destroyer screen, let the leading Queen Elizabeth go by and, at about 4.25 p.m., fired four torpedoes from her bow tubes at Barham, second in the line, from a range of about 375 metres. After firing, the submarine lost her trim and her conning tower broke the surface just ahead of Valiant’s bow. The battleship opened fire on her with anti-aircraft guns, but U-331 at once plunged in an uncontrolled dive to a depth that, according to German accounts, exceeded 250 metres, far beyond her safe limit, and survived. The destroyers did not attack her.

Barham had no time to take evasive action. Three torpedoes struck her port side amidships, so close together that they threw up a single huge column of water. The ship quickly heeled over to port. Those sailors who managed to reach the deck jumped into the sea or slid down the hull. After about four minutes, when the battleship was already lying on her side, there was a tremendous explosion. According to the board of inquiry, fire reached the 4-inch (102 mm) magazines, which in turn set off the main magazines. When the smoke cleared, Barham was gone.

The destroyers Hotspur and the Australian Nizam picked up about 450 survivors, among them Pridham-Wippell. The battleship’s commanding officer, Captain Geoffrey Cooke, went down with his ship. According to British figures 862 officers and men were killed, including two who died of their wounds after being rescued; other tallies give slightly different numbers. From the deck of Valiant the whole scene was filmed by the Pathé cameraman John Turner.

The secret

The Admiralty and the government decided to conceal the loss. Tiesenhausen did not know what he had sunk: he reported only a torpedo hit on a Queen Elizabeth-class battleship, and on 3 December he returned to Salamis. The British did not want the enemy to learn that the Mediterranean Fleet was a battleship short, nor did they want the news to damage morale during the fighting in Libya. After a few weeks the families of the dead received notifications asking them not to discuss the circumstances of their relatives’ deaths with anyone outside their immediate family. Only on 27 January 1942, after further reports on German radio, did the Admiralty announce the sinking of Barham, explaining that certain necessary redeployments of forces had first to be carried out. Tiesenhausen was then awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Turner’s footage, held back by the censors, was shown to the public only years later.

A strange story is linked to the concealment of the loss. The spiritualist medium Helen Duncan claimed, even before the official announcement, that the spirit of a sailor from Barham had appeared to her at a séance. This brought her to the attention of the authorities, and in 1944 she was convicted under the old Witchcraft Act of 1735 – one of the last people in Britain to be so.

Place in the war

Barham was the only British battleship sunk at sea by a submarine during the Second World War. Her loss opened the darkest weeks of the Mediterranean Fleet. On 14 December U-557 sank the cruiser Galatea off Alexandria; on 19 December Force K ran into a minefield off Tripoli and lost the cruiser Neptune and the destroyer Kandahar; and on the night of 18–19 December Italian frogmen riding human torpedoes penetrated Alexandria harbour and mined Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, which settled on the bottom of the basin and were out of action for many months. At the same time Japan struck in the Far East, and on 10 December Japanese aircraft sank the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse off Malaya. At the beginning of 1942 Cunningham did not have a single serviceable battleship in the Mediterranean.

The sinking of Barham also showed how quickly German submarines had changed the war in the Mediterranean. In less than two weeks they had sunk an aircraft carrier and a battleship, and in December a cruiser as well. For the Royal Navy it was a lesson that old battleships from the First World War, even when screened by destroyers, were defenceless against a well-handled submarine, and that their days as the main strength of navies were drawing to a close.