Tribal-class Destroyer

By the mid-1930s the Royal Navy had a problem of size. Japan had built the Fubuki class, France the enormous contre-torpilleurs, Italy the Navigatori — destroyers far heavier and better armed than the small, torpedo-focused boats Britain had been building in flotillas since the First World War. A standard British destroyer meeting one of them would be outgunned.

The Tribal was the answer, and it was blunt: put eight 4.7-inch guns in four twin mounts on a hull of about 1,850 tons — roughly double the gun armament of a normal destroyer — and accept the consequences. The consequence was torpedoes: the class carried a single quadruple mount where its contemporaries had two, because there was no room and no weight left. It was a gunfighting destroyer in a navy whose destroyers had always been torpedo boats.

The class announced itself with a boarding action. In February 1940 the German tanker Altmark, which had supplied the Graf Spee and taken aboard the crews of the merchant ships she sank, was working her way home down the Norwegian coast inside neutral waters with 303 British prisoners in her holds.

On the night of 16 February, Captain Philip Vian took HMS Cossack into Jøssingfjord, went alongside, and put a boarding party onto the tanker. The shout that came down into the darkened holds — “The Navy’s here!” — became one of the most quoted lines of the British war. All 303 were freed. It was also a deliberate violation of Norwegian neutrality, and it hardened German intentions towards Norway at exactly the wrong moment.

Two months later the Tribals were in the Norwegian fjords for real. Cossack ran aground under fire during the Second Battle of Narvik on 13 April 1940, one of several Tribals damaged in the confined water where destroyers fought at ranges of a few hundred metres.

From there the class went wherever the Royal Navy was hardest pressed. On the last night of the Bismarck chase, 26–27 May 1941, Vian’s destroyers — Cossack, Sikh, Zulu, Maori and the Polish Piorun — attacked the crippled German ship repeatedly through a heavy sea, keeping contact and denying her crew any rest until the battleships arrived at dawn. It was the classic destroyer task: not to kill, but to hold on to something far bigger than yourself until someone stronger comes.

The Mediterranean took the heaviest toll. In September 1942 two Tribals, Sikh and Zulu, were committed to Operation Agreement — a raid on Tobruk intended to destroy the port’s fuel installations and shipping behind Rommel’s front, landing Royal Marines from destroyers under the guns of a defended harbour.

It failed completely. Sikh was disabled by shore batteries on 14 September and sunk; Zulu, trying to tow her clear, was caught by aircraft on the way out and sunk the same day. Two of the Royal Navy’s best destroyers were lost in a single morning, together with the anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Coventry, and the port installations the raid had been mounted to destroy were left intact.

The arithmetic is brutal. Of the sixteen Tribals built for the Royal Navy, twelve were lost — only four survived the war. Cossack herself was torpedoed by U-563 on 23 October 1941 and sank four days later. No other British destroyer class of the war was consumed at that rate.

Part of it was where they were sent, and part of it was the design. Heavy gun armament high in a small hull left them wet, and the weight that went into guns did not go into anything that would help them survive a torpedo or a bomb. They were built to win a gun action against another destroyer, and the war they got was mostly aircraft, submarines and mines.

The class outlasted the Royal Navy’s own ships through the Commonwealth. Canada and Australia both built Tribals, and their ships had markedly happier careers — the Canadian boats fought in the Channel and the Bay of Biscay in 1944 and went on to Korea.

The Australian Tribals — Arunta, Warramunga and later Bataan — fought their war in the Pacific, from the New Guinea coast to the Philippines, and several British Tribals ended the war with the British Pacific Fleet in 1945. The class fought in every theatre the Royal Navy and its dominions did.

On 9 June 1944, three days after the Normandy landings, the 10th Destroyer Flotilla — Tartar, Ashanti, Eskimo and the Canadian Haida and Huron, all Tribals — intercepted German destroyers sent to attack the invasion supply route and sank two of them off Ushant. HMCS Haida, which sank more enemy tonnage than any other Canadian warship, survives today as a museum ship at Hamilton, Ontario — the last Tribal afloat anywhere, and the reason the class can still be walked through rather than only read about.

The Tribal is a clear case of a warship built for the wrong opponent. The specification answered a question — how do we beat the big foreign destroyers in a gun duel? — that the war barely asked. Those duels happened, at Narvik and in the Channel, but the destroyer’s real war in 1939–45 was escorting convoys against submarines and aircraft, and for that the class was expensive, cramped and no better than cheaper ships.

What it did have was presence. Twenty-seven of them, in the places where the Royal Navy could not afford to be outgunned, doing the work that got destroyers sunk — and a boarding party in a Norwegian fjord that gave the Royal Navy its best line of the war.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• Alan Raven & John Roberts, War Built Destroyers: O to Z Classes (Arms & Armour Press).
• Angus Konstam, British Destroyers 1939–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).