The sinking of HMS Jervis Bay

Towards evening on 5 November 1940, in the middle of the North Atlantic, the German heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer caught convoy HX 84, bound from Canada to Britain. The sole escort of its thirty-odd ships was the armed merchant cruiser HMS Jervis Bay, a former passenger liner armed with a handful of guns dating from the end of the nineteenth century. Her commanding officer, Captain Edward Fegen, ordered the merchantmen to scatter behind a smokescreen and turned his own ship straight towards the enemy. After some twenty minutes of an unequal fight Jervis Bay was a blazing wreck, and she soon sank; around 190 men were killed, Fegen among them. Yet the time her crew bought allowed most of the convoy to get away. That evening Admiral Scheer sank five ships of HX 84 and damaged several more, but over thirty reached port.

The loss of Jervis Bay is said to have “become a media event”. The description is apt: the fight between an armed merchant cruiser and a “pocket battleship” became, in Britain and across the Commonwealth, one of the best-known stories of the early years of the war at sea, and Fegen was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. The figures given by the sources differ in detail.

The raider puts to sea

In the autumn of 1940 the Kriegsmarine command decided to send heavy ships out into the Atlantic once more. Since the scuttling of the Admiral Graf Spee in December 1939 German surface warships had scarcely appeared on the ocean; the war against shipping had been waged by U-boats and by a few armed merchantmen – raiders disguised as ordinary freighters. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder wanted to supplement the operations of Karl Dönitz’s U-boats with strikes by warships, which could destroy any convoy not covered by battleships and at the same time tie down a large part of the Home Fleet. Since 17 August the total blockade of the British Isles proclaimed by Berlin had been in force, and the British, as the attacks on convoys SC 7 and HX 79 had shown, still had too few escort vessels.

Admiral Scheer was the second of the three ships of the Deutschland class, built in the early 1930s as “armoured ships” within the limits of the Treaty of Versailles and known abroad as “pocket battleships”. She carried six 280 mm guns in two triple turrets, eight 150 mm guns, torpedo tubes and Arado Ar 196 seaplanes, and her diesel engines gave her an enormous range. She was faster than any ship that could defeat her and stronger than any ship that could catch her – except for the few British battlecruisers. She had spent the winter of 1939/1940 in the dockyard, where she was rebuilt and reclassified as a heavy cruiser. Since the autumn of 1939 she had been commanded by Kapitän zur See Theodor Krancke, who in the spring of 1940 had served on the staff that planned the invasion of Norway.

On 23 October 1940 the ship left Gotenhafen, as the Germans called occupied Gdynia, and moved to Brunsbüttel. On 27 October she put to sea, called briefly at Stavanger in occupied Norway, and on the night of 31 October to 1 November, in a gale and poor visibility, passed unseen through the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. The British did not know that a German heavy ship was loose in the Atlantic. Krancke had orders to attack convoys on the route from North America, and the German radio intelligence service, the B-Dienst, supplied him with the details of convoy HX 84.

Convoy HX 84 and its escort

The HX convoys, named after Halifax in Nova Scotia, had been sailing to Britain since September 1939, when the first HX convoy left port. HX 84 left Halifax on 28 October 1940 and was joined at sea by a group of ships from Bermuda. According to the tables of the British convoy historian Arnold Hague it numbered 38 ships, though some sources, including the British record of naval losses, give 37 – the difference depends on whether ships that joined or left along the way are counted. They carried oil, aviation fuel, steel, timber, grain and food. Among them were British freighters and tankers, as well as Norwegian, Swedish, Belgian and Greek ships and two Polish ones, Morska Wola and Puck. The largest was the New Zealand Shipping Company liner Rangitiki, with passengers aboard, women and children among them.

The Canadian destroyers Columbia and St. Francis escorted the convoy out of coastal waters, but on the open ocean, as with convoy HX 72 in September, it was covered by a single armed merchant cruiser. The anti-submarine escort was to take over only in the approaches to the British Isles. Armed merchant cruisers were meant to defend convoys against surface raiders, but in practice they could at most deter an armed merchantman. Against a warship with heavy guns they were helpless, as Rawalpindi had discovered a year earlier.

Jervis Bay was a passenger-cargo ship built in 1922 by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness for the Australian government shipping line and named after a bay on the coast of New South Wales. She measured almost 14,000 GRT and made about 15 knots. For years she had carried emigrants from England to Australia. In August 1939 the Admiralty requisitioned her and armed her with seven 152 mm (6-inch) guns made at the end of the nineteenth century and two old 76 mm anti-aircraft guns. Only four guns could fire on either broadside, and their range was far shorter than that of Admiral Scheer’s heavy guns. The ship had no armour and no modern fire-control equipment. From May 1940 she escorted convoys from Bermuda and Halifax. Her crew of 254 consisted mostly of naval reservists and merchant seamen; she was manned from the naval base at Chatham, and many of her sailors came from Caithness in the far north of Scotland. Fegen, a regular officer with almost forty years’ service, had commanded her since the end of February 1940.

Mopan

On 5 November the weather improved and Krancke was able to launch a seaplane. Around noon the airman reported a convoy steaming east roughly 90 nautical miles from the ship, and saw no escort with it. Krancke had to decide whether to strike before nightfall or wait until dawn. He chose to attack that same day, reckoning that he would reach the convoy at about half past three in the afternoon.

On the way, however, at around 2.30 p.m., the Germans came upon a lone ship. This was the British Mopan, bound from Jamaica to Liverpool, which had overtaken the convoy that morning: her master had declined the offer to join HX 84 and was sailing independently, faster than the convoy. Admiral Scheer stopped her with warning shots and a signal not to use her wireless. Mopan’s master did not send a raider warning, which might have alerted the convoy, although, according to accounts, his radio officer urged him to. The crew went across to the German ship in their boats and were taken prisoner, while Mopan proved hard to sink and went down only after 4 p.m. The convoy received no warning, but the Germans had lost almost two hours of daylight – and it was a short November day.

Jervis Bay’s fight

Towards evening, at about 5 p.m. according to most British accounts, ships on the convoy’s port wing sighted the masts of a warship on the horizon. Jervis Bay was steaming in the centre of the front rank, between the columns of merchantmen. Fegen instructed the convoy commodore, the retired naval officer H. B. Maltby in the Cornish City, that once the stranger was confirmed as hostile the ships were to turn away and scatter; he himself left the formation and steered to meet the newcomer. He also sent a raider report, which was picked up by British stations. The merchantmen lit smoke floats and began to flee, while Jervis Bay, already on fire after the first hits, held on towards the German ship to draw its fire upon herself.

Admiral Scheer opened fire from well over ten kilometres, beyond the range of the British guns. According to most descriptions the very first salvoes hit Jervis Bay, wrecking her wireless and steering gear and starting fires. Fegen, his arm shattered by a splinter, continued to command until he was killed when another hit destroyed the bridge. Jervis Bay’s guns kept firing for as long as they could, although their shells fell short. After some 22 minutes the ship was a burning, crippled wreck with a heavy list, and Krancke left her to go after the merchantmen. Jervis Bay stayed afloat longer than expected – reportedly helped by the empty barrels with which her holds had been packed to increase buoyancy – and sank after dark. The Victoria Cross citation states that the ship drew the German’s fire “for nearly an hour”; the fighting itself is estimated to have lasted about twenty minutes.

Of her crew of 254, around 190 were killed – 187, 189 or 190, depending on the source – among them Fegen and most of the officers. The survivors were picked up during the night by the Swedish ship Stureholm from the convoy. Her master, Sven Olander, turned back in the darkness to the scene of the action, risking an encounter with the raider, and rescued 68 men, three of whom later died of their wounds. Thus 65 of Jervis Bay’s sailors survived.

The chase in the dark

By the time Krancke set off after the convoy, the merchantmen were scattering in all directions and darkness was falling. Admiral Scheer found them one by one, lit them up with star shell and searchlights and opened fire. She sank five ships of the convoy: the British Maidan, which went down with all 91 of her crew; Trewellard (16 killed); Kenbane Head (23 killed), whose crew managed to fire a few rounds from her stern gun; Beaverford (77 killed, no survivors), which the Germans finished off with a torpedo to save ammunition; and Fresno City (1 killed). According to German tables the ships sunk totalled 33,600 GRT, and more than two hundred seamen died aboard them. The tanker San Demetrio and the freighter Andalusian were damaged. Rangitiki, the largest ship in the convoy, escaped despite being straddled by a salvo, and her radio officer sent an attack signal that was received and relayed on the other side of the ocean.

Some British accounts, wartime ones included, perpetuated the story that Beaverford, armed with two guns, duelled with Admiral Scheer for four or five hours, buying time for the rest of the convoy. It is borne out neither by the memoirs of Krancke – who paid tribute to the courage of Jervis Bay’s crew and of a small burning freighter that kept firing to the end (this was Kenbane Head) – nor by the recorded times of the individual sinkings. Beaverford was lost about an hour before Fresno City, and there was no time for a fight lasting several hours. The story nonetheless shows how quickly a legend grew up around HX 84.

Late in the evening Krancke broke off the search and made off to the south, knowing that the raider reports had put the whole British fleet on alert. Thirty-three ships of the scattered convoy escaped and continued independently. Not all of them survived the rest of the voyage: the Swedish Vingaland, sailing alone after the convoy dispersed, was sunk by German aircraft on 8 November.

San Demetrio

The most famous episode of the night of 5 November was the fate of the tanker San Demetrio. Built in 1938 for the Eagle Oil and Shipping Company, she was carrying some 11,000 tons of aviation fuel from Aruba. Hit by several shells, her deck ablaze, she seemed about to explode, so her master ordered her abandoned. Two boats carrying the master and part of the crew were picked up by another ship and taken to Newfoundland. In the third, sixteen men, among them the second officer Arthur Hawkins and the chief engineer Charles Pollard, drifted in a cold gale. After a day and a night they sighted a burning ship – their own tanker.

On the morning of 7 November they climbed back aboard, put out the fires, got the engines going and, without charts, navigational instruments or wireless, brought the ship across the ocean, steering by the sun. One of them, John Boyle, died of his injuries. After several days they reached the coast of Ireland, and on 16 November San Demetrio entered the mouth of the Clyde with her cargo almost intact. Because the crew had saved the ship without outside help, the Admiralty Court later awarded them salvage money. The story of the San Demetrio became the subject of a booklet published in 1942 by the government publisher and of the 1943 film San Demetrio London, one of the few pictures of those years devoted to merchant seamen.

Convoys held back

The news that a German heavy ship was at large in the North Atlantic caused an alarm at the Admiralty like that of a year earlier, after the sinking of Rawalpindi. The heavy ships of the Home Fleet put to sea to cut off the raider’s routes back to Germany and to the French ports, while cruisers searched the area of the attack. Convoy sailings from Canada were also halted. Convoy HX 85, which had left Halifax on 1 November, was diverted to Sydney on Cape Breton Island, and the following convoys were held in their assembly ports. They sailed only after a fortnight or so, with a joint rendezvous at sea set for 22 November. In the meantime, no ships were sailing to Britain with the cargoes the country was waiting for. A single warship, though she sank only a few ships, thus disrupted shipping on Britain’s most important supply route for almost two weeks.

Krancke did not, however, return to the North Atlantic convoy route. As planned, he headed south, beyond the reach of the British search, and for the following months operated in the central and South Atlantic, replenishing from supply ships and meeting German auxiliary raiders.

A media event

The first news of the attack was incomplete and worrying: the signals from Jervis Bay and Rangitiki spoke only of a raider attacking a convoy, and the scattered ships kept wireless silence, so at first no one knew how many had survived. When it turned out that most had escaped, and the accounts of Jervis Bay’s survivors began to reach port, Fegen’s fight became, in the British press and on the radio, a symbol of the navy’s self-sacrifice in defence of the shipping on which the island’s life depended. It was the kind of story Britain needed in the autumn of 1940: in weeks of night raids on its cities and heavy losses in the Atlantic, it showed that the Royal Navy did not give way even when it had no chance of winning.

On 22 November The London Gazette announced Fegen’s posthumous Victoria Cross. The citation honoured him “for valour in challenging hopeless odds and giving his life to save the many ships it was his duty to protect”. The story of HX 84 lived on long after the war: the Australian poet and naval officer Michael Thwaites wrote a ballad about Jervis Bay in 1941, memorials to the ship and her captain were erected in Bermuda, Canada and Britain, and the first anniversary of the action was marked by the unveiling of a memorial in Hamilton, from where the ship had sailed on her last voyage.

The fates of Jervis Bay and Rawalpindi were similar, but their significance differed. Rawalpindi was lost without being able to shield anyone. Jervis Bay, by her destruction, bought time that saved over thirty ships and hundreds of seamen. Had Admiral Scheer caught the convoy in broad daylight and unopposed, its losses might have been many times greater.

Place in the war

Admiral Scheer’s cruise proved to be the most successful raid by a German heavy warship of the war. In December Krancke captured the British refrigerated ship Duquesa, laden with food, in the central Atlantic; in January 1941 he took the Norwegian tanker Sandefjord and other ships; and in February he ventured into the Indian Ocean as far as the Seychelles. Hunted by British cruisers and aircraft carriers, he returned to the Atlantic, passed through the Denmark Strait again at the end of March and on 1 April 1941 put into Kiel. In 155 days he had covered some 46,000 nautical miles, sunk or captured 17 merchant ships totalling more than 113,000 GRT, and sunk Jervis Bay. Krancke received the Knight’s Cross and was promoted to Konteradmiral.

For the British, HX 84 was a warning that a single armed merchant cruiser could not defend a convoy against a warship. From then on, whenever forces allowed, the Admiralty assigned old battleships to the Halifax convoys. As early as February 1941 the presence of the battleship Ramillies with convoy HX 106 persuaded the commander of the German squadron with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau to abandon an attack. The growth of naval air power and radar, the reading of German signals, and above all the destruction of the German network of supply ships after the sinking of Bismarck in May 1941 soon brought the era of great surface raids in the Atlantic to an end. The convoys’ real enemy remained the U-boats.

Yet the memory of Jervis Bay survived in the history of the Battle of the Atlantic as an example of an escort’s duty, which Fegen understood as the commander of the British station in Bermuda put it a year later: to protect the convoy at any cost. The ship herself, an ordinary passenger liner with guns half a century old, also showed with what modest means Britain defended its supply lines in 1940.