U-30 hits HMS Barham

On the afternoon of 28 December 1939 the German submarine U-30, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp, torpedoed the British battleship HMS Barham in the Atlantic west of the Butt of Lewis, the northernmost point of the Outer Hebrides. One torpedo struck the ship on the port side abreast of her forward main turrets. Four sailors were killed. The battleship managed to reach a shipyard on the Mersey under her own power, but she was out of service for several months. It was the same U-boat and the same commander that on the first day of Britain’s war with Germany had sunk the liner Athenia.

For the Barham it was the second blow in two weeks. On 12 December, on her way home from the Mediterranean, the battleship had rammed one of her escorting destroyers, HMS Duchess, in fog off the coast of Scotland, and the destroyer had sunk with almost all hands.

It is often stated that 137 men died in the Duchess and that after being torpedoed the Barham was out of service for four months. Both figures vary between sources. A named casualty list compiled from British records gives 136 killed and missing from the Duchess, and some studies give 124. According to most sources the Barham’s repairs lasted until April 1940; according to one compilation of U-boat successes the ship did not return to service until 30 June.

Home from the Mediterranean

The Barham, a Queen Elizabeth-class battleship built during the First World War, had fought at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 as flagship of the 5th Battle Squadron. In the 1930s she was thoroughly reconstructed. The outbreak of war found her with the Mediterranean Fleet at Alexandria. As Italy remained neutral for the time being, and heavy ships were in short supply in the waters around the British Isles, the Admiralty transferred her to the Home Fleet. She sailed from Alexandria on 1 December 1939, and from Gibraltar, which she left on 6 December, she was escorted by four D-class destroyers: Duchess, Delight, Duncan and Dainty.

The Duchess was a destroyer launched in 1932 at Jarrow, which had spent several years on the China Station. She had returned to the Mediterranean only in October 1939. In the early hours of 12 December the group was steaming through the North Channel towards the Clyde. The sea was shrouded in thick fog. Near the Mull of Kintyre the battleship ran into the destroyer. The Duchess capsized and sank quickly. Depth charges on the sinking ship, primed for release in case a submarine was encountered, exploded and, according to accounts, killed some of the sailors who had managed to get into the water. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Robert White, died trapped in his cabin when the sliding door jammed. Some twenty-odd men were saved. Among the dead were two Chinese stewards.

It was one of the Royal Navy’s heaviest losses in the first months of the war. Collisions in darkness and fog, with lights darkened and ships zigzagging against submarines, were, however, the price the fleet paid for sailing under wartime conditions. By the very next day British attention was fixed on the Battle of the River Plate.

Lemp after the Athenia

U-30 had returned from her first patrol to Wilhelmshaven on 27 September 1939. Lemp then admitted to Karl Dönitz that it was he who had sunk the Athenia, having taken her for an armed merchant cruiser. The matter was hushed up, all trace of the attack was removed from the boat’s log, and Lemp did not face a court martial and kept his command. The boat spent a long time in port; her second patrol, on 9–14 December, was a short and fruitless cruise off the coast of Norway.

On 23 December U-30 left Wilhelmshaven on her third patrol. She rounded the north of Scotland and entered the waters west of the Hebrides. Besides torpedoes she carried mines, which she was to lay in the approaches to Liverpool. At about 4 a.m. on 28 December, roughly 35 nautical miles north-west of the Butt of Lewis, she sank the armed anti-submarine trawler HMS Barbara Robertson by gunfire. One of her crew of seventeen was killed. Lemp stopped the Swedish ship Hispania and asked her to take on the survivors, but they were picked up only fourteen hours later by the British destroyer Isis, guided to their boat by an aircraft.

The attack on the Barham

That same day heavy ships of the Home Fleet were patrolling these waters. Their task was to cut off German warships that might try to break out into the Atlantic through the passages north of the British Isles, as the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had done in November, when they sank the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi. The Barham, commanded by Captain H. T. C. Walker, was steaming together with the battlecruiser Repulse, escorted by destroyers, among them the Isis and the Nubian.

At about 3.45 p.m., according to British figures some 66 nautical miles west of the Butt of Lewis, Lemp fired four torpedoes at the two big ships. Three missed. The fourth hit the Barham on the port side near the magazines of her forward A and B turrets. The explosion shattered the anti-torpedo bulge there – the outer protective layer of the hull designed to absorb the force of an explosion – and flooded the adjacent compartments. Four men were killed and two wounded. The ship took on a list of about seven degrees. The crew corrected it by pumping oil into the starboard tanks. The battleship at first slowed to 10 knots, but after an hour and a half she could make 16 knots and proceeded to Liverpool under her own steam. At the Cammell Laird yard in Birkenhead the damage was repaired, and the opportunity was taken to fit a launcher for unguided anti-aircraft rockets and new anti-aircraft directors.

The destroyers did not detect U-30. Lemp continued southwards and at the beginning of January 1940 laid mines off the mouth of the Mersey. Ships ran onto them: on 11 January the British ship El Oso sank, on 16 January the Gracia was damaged, and on 17 January the Cairnross sank. That same day U-30 returned to Wilhelmshaven.

A December of heavy ships

The torpedoing of the Barham rounded off a month in which the Royal Navy learned several times over that its heavy ships were not safe even in home waters. On 4 December a mine laid by U-31 damaged the battleship Nelson in Loch Ewe; the flagship of the Home Fleet, she was not expected to return to service until the summer. Admiral Charles Forbes’s Home Fleet had thus lost two heavy ships for many months, while others were scattered in pursuit of German raiders. For the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and the First Sea Lord, Dudley Pound, it was a painful reckoning of the first months of the war. The Germans, for their part, found that their torpedoes, which had often failed in the autumn, could be effective; their confidence in them was, however, to be badly shaken in the Norwegian campaign.

Significance

The Barham returned to service in the spring or summer of 1940. In September 1940 she bombarded Dakar during the unsuccessful Operation Menace, in March 1941 she fought at the Battle of Cape Matapan, and in May 1941 she was damaged by German aircraft during the fighting for Crete. On 25 November 1941, in the Mediterranean north of Sidi Barrani, she was hit by three torpedoes from the German submarine U-331. As she rolled over, her magazines exploded. Eight hundred and sixty-two men were killed. The explosion was filmed by a newsreel cameraman, and the Admiralty concealed the loss of the ship until the end of January 1942. The battlecruiser Repulse, which Lemp had failed to harm on 28 December 1939, was sunk by Japanese aircraft off the coast of Malaya on 10 December 1941, together with the battleship Prince of Wales.

In August 1940 Lemp was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, and in the autumn he took command of a new boat, U-110. He was killed on 9 May 1941, when British warships forced U-110 to the surface and captured an intact Enigma cipher machine and documents from her, which helped the codebreakers at Bletchley Park to break the German naval ciphers. The attack of 28 December 1939 was his greatest success against warships, and the first U-boat hit on a British battleship since the sinking of the Royal Oak in which the torpedo actually exploded. It showed that in the war for the sea lanes around the British Isles German submarines threatened not only merchant ships but also the heavy units of the fleet that were meant to protect them. The loss of the Duchess, for its part, was a reminder that many of the victims of this war at sea were claimed not by enemy action but by fog, darkness and accident.