The sinking of HMS Exmouth

Before dawn on 21 January 1940 the German submarine U-22, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Karl-Heinrich Jenisch, torpedoed the British destroyer HMS Exmouth in the waters of the Moray Firth, off the coast of Caithness in the north of Scotland. The ship, which was escorting the merchant vessel Cyprian Prince to the fleet base at Scapa Flow, sank within a few minutes. There were no survivors. A few hours later the same U-boat sank the Danish steamer Tekla in the same waters, and in the evening the British collier Ferryhill went down off Blyth on a mine it had laid a month earlier. The day before, on 20 January, another German submarine, U-44, sank the Greek ship Ekatontarchos Dracoulis in the Atlantic west of Portugal after a night-long chase.

It is often stated that 135 men were lost with the Exmouth. That figure is too low. The nominal roll of the dead compiled from British naval records (naval-history.net) lists 190 names, from the commanding officer, Captain Richard S. Benson, to the youngest seamen, and the same number of names appears on the memorial plaque in Wick. Some studies give 189 dead; the difference probably depends on whether a person who was on board outside the ship’s complement is counted. What is certain is that the ship went down with all hands.

A flotilla leader

The Exmouth was a flotilla leader – a ship somewhat larger than an ordinary destroyer, carrying the flotilla commander – built as part of the series of E- and F-class destroyers. She was laid down at the naval dockyard in Portsmouth in March 1933, launched on 30 January 1934 and commissioned in November of the same year. She displaced about 1,500 tons standard and, unlike the ordinary ships of the class, carried five 120 mm (4.7-inch) guns rather than four. She led the 5th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet; during the Abyssinian crisis, when Italy attacked Ethiopia, she served in the Mediterranean in 1935–1936, and during the Spanish Civil War she patrolled Spanish waters as part of the enforcement of the non-intervention policy.

The outbreak of war found her leading the 12th Destroyer Flotilla. In the first months of the war she escorted shipping and hunted submarines, first in the Western Approaches to the British Isles and then in Scottish waters. The Royal Navy, which since September had been introducing the convoy system, had far too few destroyers, and every one of them was needed at the same time to screen the heavy ships of the Home Fleet, to escort merchant shipping and to hunt U-boats. That is why in January 1940 a flotilla leader could sail as the sole escort of a single supply ship. Merchant ships supplied the base at Scapa Flow, which was still being strengthened after the sinking of the Royal Oak in October 1939.

The night of 21 January

During the night of 20/21 January the Exmouth was escorting the Cyprian Prince, a British motor vessel sailing along the east coast of Scotland from Aberdeen to Scapa Flow. According to British naval records the destroyer was also to search for a U-boat reported at the entrance to the Moray Firth. The submarine was indeed there. U-22, a small Type IIB (PL) coastal boat with a crew of twenty-odd men, had laid mines off Blyth on the coast of Northumberland a few weeks earlier, and on 15 January 1940 had left Kiel on another patrol to hunt shipping off the Scottish coast.

According to U-22’s war diary, kept in German time, at 5.35 a.m. – 4.35 a.m. British time – Jenisch fired a G7e electric torpedo at the destroyer. It struck the Exmouth on the starboard side forward, some 21 nautical miles south-east of Noss Head, near the town of Wick. According to British accounts the explosion may have set off a magazine. The ship sank within a few minutes at most, in darkness and icy water. Three minutes after the first shot Jenisch fired another torpedo at the Cyprian Prince, but missed.

The master of the Cyprian Prince considered stopping his ship and lowering a boat to search for survivors. He decided against it, judging that he would expose his ship to another torpedo, and sailed on alone. In doing so he followed Admiralty instructions, which forbade merchant ships to stop in the vicinity of a submarine to rescue men from sunken vessels. Such rules stemmed from the experience of the First World War, when U-boats had sunk ships that stopped to pick up survivors. Since no one survived, the Admiralty learned of the destroyer’s loss only from the report of the Cyprian Prince and from the absence of any word from the Exmouth.

Most of the crew remained inside the hull. In the following days the sea washed a dozen or more bodies ashore on the coast of Caithness: six near Wick and nine some miles further on. Fifteen sailors were buried with military honours in a common grave in the cemetery at Wick, in the presence of representatives of the navy, army, air force and town authorities; the service was conducted by clergy of three denominations. Some studies speak of eighteen bodies recovered. The other sailors, Captain Benson among them, have no graves. Their names are commemorated on the naval memorial in Portsmouth, and in St Fergus’s Church in Wick hang a White Ensign and a plaque bearing the names of all 190 dead.

The Exmouth is sometimes described as the first British surface warship of the Second World War to be lost with all hands. She was the second flotilla leader lost in three days: on 19 January HMS Grenville, returning from contraband control off the Dutch coast, sank on a mine laid by German destroyers off the Thames estuary, with the loss of more than seventy of her crew.

The Tekla and the Ferryhill

After the attack U-22 remained in these waters. At 7.11 a.m. German time, some 40 nautical miles north-west of Kinnaird Head, Jenisch torpedoed without warning the Danish steamer Tekla, 1,469 GRT, sailing alone with a cargo of coal and coke from Burntisland in Scotland to Aarhus. The ship was neutral. The torpedo hit her forward of the bridge; the explosion killed four men, and the ship capsized and sank within three minutes. The lifeboat into which some of the crew had climbed was crushed by the falling mast; five men drowned. The rest saved themselves on rafts. Four were picked up by the British destroyer HMS Sikh, and all the survivors were landed at Bergen by the Norwegian ship Iris. Of the crew of eighteen, nine seamen were lost; the body of one of them was washed ashore near Wick, where he was buried beside the sailors of the Exmouth.

That same evening, at 9.30 p.m., the small British collier Ferryhill, sailing unescorted from Blyth to Aberdeen with 1,200 tons of coal, struck a mine laid by U-22 on 20 December 1939 and sank a mile and a half north of St Mary’s lighthouse off Blyth. The master and ten members of the crew were killed; two seamen were picked up by a trawler. The toll of a single day for a single small U-boat was thus three vessels sunk and more than two hundred dead.

The chase of the Ekatontarchos Dracoulis

The day before, on 20 January, at the other end of the German submarines’ area of operations, the Greek ship Ekatontarchos Dracoulis was lost. She was a steamer of 5,329 GRT, built in 1918 at a British yard in Stockton-on-Tees as one of the standard ships mass-produced during the First World War. She changed owners and names many times until in 1932 she was bought by the heirs of the Athenian shipowner George A. Dracoulis; her home port was Ithaca. In January 1940 she was sailing alone from Rosario in Argentina to ports on the Tyne with a cargo of 7,511 tons of wheat and general cargo.

She was sighted by U-44, a new ocean-going Type IXA submarine, which had been commissioned in November 1939 and in January set out on its first war patrol under Kapitänleutnant Ludwig Mathes. According to the U-boat’s war diary the chase began on 19 January at 8.05 p.m. German time. At 12.21 a.m. Mathes fired a G7e torpedo, but it exploded prematurely before reaching its target; unreliable torpedo pistols were the bane of the U-boats in those months. The submarine closed the ship again and at 4.15 a.m. hit her with a torpedo from the stern tube, at about 40°20′ N, more than a hundred kilometres off the west coast of Portugal. Mathes watched the crew abandon ship. He decided not to fire a second time, because the lifeboats were still too close to the ship’s side, and left, judging that the ship was sinking anyway. Six members of the crew were killed.

Some lists state that U-44 hunted the Greek ship for six hours. According to the entries in the boat’s war diary, on which the uboat.net account is based, more than eight hours passed between first contact and the hit, and almost four from the first, failed shot. The figure of six dead is correct.

The Ekatontarchos Dracoulis was U-44’s fifth victim in six days. On 15 January, in the western approaches to the English Channel, south-west of the island of Ouessant (PL), Mathes sank the Norwegian ship Fagerheim (fifteen men were killed) and the Dutch Arendskerk, which he stopped with warning shots and, having established that she was carrying contraband, ordered her crew to abandon before torpedoing her. On 16 January U-44 torpedoed without warning the Greek steamer Panachrandos, which sank in three minutes with her entire crew of more than thirty. On 18 January, near Cape Finisterre, she stopped the Danish refrigerated ship Canadian Reefer, carrying oranges from Haifa to Glasgow, and sank her after the crew had taken to the boats. After the Ekatontarchos Dracoulis she went on to sink two French ships from convoy 56-KS on 24 and 25 January and the Greek Flora on 28 January. Eight ships sunk, totalling almost 31,000 GRT – three of them Greek and three belonging to other neutral states – made this one of the most successful U-boat patrols of the first winter of the war.

A January of the neutrals

Both attacks, on the Greek ship off Portugal and on the Danish steamer off Scotland, reflected the policy the German navy had been pursuing since the autumn of 1939: unrestricted submarine warfare introduced by stealth, without any formal declaration. On 30 December 1939 Adolf Hitler agreed that, within the zone closed to Americans, the ships of countries that sold or chartered tonnage to Britain – above all Greek ships – could be torpedoed without warning, and the ships of other neutral states wherever their loss could be attributed to mines. In January 1940 Karl Dönitz’s U-boat command designated successive zones around the British Isles in which U-boats could attack without warning any ship except those of states friendly to Germany.

The consequences can be seen in the figures. According to the uboat.net database, in January 1940 German submarines hit 58 ships and warships with torpedoes, gunfire or mines. More than forty of them sailed under neutral flags: eighteen Norwegian, nine Swedish, six Danish, five Greek, and single Dutch, Finnish and Latvian vessels. Fourteen were British and three French. The neutral merchant fleets, which in defiance of German pressure went on carrying cargoes to Britain, paid a high price for it. For Norway, Sweden and Denmark trade with Britain was an economic necessity, and Greek shipowners, despite their country’s neutrality, sold and chartered many ships to the British. Many of these ships went down in the North Sea, on the routes between Scotland and Norway, where the British were already running convoys to Norway and back.

For the Royal Navy January was just as painful. In three days it lost two flotilla leaders, the Grenville to a mine and the Exmouth to a torpedo. The sinking of the Exmouth confirmed that the small Type II coastal boats that Dönitz was sending into the North Sea were dangerous not only as minelayers. British anti-submarine weapons, in which so much faith had been placed before the war, were failing in practice: a destroyer meant to protect a ship from a U-boat had herself fallen victim to one before she could detect it. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and the First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, had to divide an ever smaller number of destroyers between convoy escort, the screening of the Home Fleet and the increasingly imminent plans for operations off the Norwegian coast.

Significance

Neither of the two U-boats survived the spring of 1940. U-44 set out on its second patrol in March and went missing. According to post-war findings, it sank around 13 March 1940 north of the island of Terschelling in a British minefield laid at the beginning of March across the path of outgoing U-boats by the destroyers Express, Esk, Icarus and Impulsive. The Express and Esk were ships of the same series as the Exmouth. Forty-seven men were lost – the entire crew, together with Kapitänleutnant Mathes. The loss of U-44 had earlier been attributed to the destroyer Fortune, which on 20 March attacked a suspected submarine with depth charges. U-22 left Wilhelmshaven on 20 March 1940, less than three weeks before the German invasion of Norway, and did not return. It sent no message after leaving port and was posted missing on 27 March. It sank with its entire crew of 27, including Kapitänleutnant Jenisch, in the North Sea or the Skagerrak; the cause of its loss, possibly a mine, is unknown.

Karl-Heinrich Jenisch should not be confused with another U-boat commander of the same surname, Hans Jenisch, who in command of U-32 on 28 October 1940 finished off the liner Empress of Britain, already damaged by aircraft – the largest ship sunk by U-boats during the war. Two days later British destroyers sank U-32, and Hans Jenisch was taken prisoner.

The neutral states whose ships were sunk in January 1940 did not remain neutral for long. On 9 April 1940 Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. The Norwegian merchant fleet, one of the largest in the world, for the most part passed into Allied service and played an enormous part in the Battle of the Atlantic. In October 1940 Italy attacked Greece, and the Greek ships that had survived sailed from then on in Allied convoys as ships of a belligerent state.

The wreck of the Exmouth remained undiscovered for more than sixty years. British researchers established its probable position, and in 2001 divers confirmed that a wreck in the Moray Firth was the missing destroyer. In 2002 the site was protected as a war grave under the British Protection of Military Remains Act 1986. The fate of the Exmouth, which vanished with all hands in a few minutes, and the fate of the neutral seamen of the Tekla and the Ekatontarchos Dracoulis showed that in the first winter of the war, while on land in the West the Phoney War still went on, at sea the war was being waged in earnest and spared no one.