HMS Bulldog (H91)
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HMS Bulldog (H91) was a destroyer of the B-Class , the British in April 1931 in the service of the Royal Navy came. During the Second World War , the destroyer was awarded the Battle Honors “Atlantic 1941–45” and “Artic 1942–44”. On May 9, 1941, a boarding party of the destroyer succeeded in recovering valuable secret material and in particular the first complete Enigma cipher machine ( type M3 ) from the German submarine U 110 , which the destroyer had forced to surface with other units . In April 1942, the Beagle and other destroyers in the North Sea successfully defended the QP 11 convoy against attacks by superior German destroyers.
On May 9, 1945, the German troops surrendered on board the Bulldog in the Channel Islands . In December 1945 the destroyer was sold for demolition, which began in Rosyth in January 1946.
History of the ship
The destroyer was ordered as one of two from Swan Hunter in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear on March 22, 1929 and was part of the Royal Navy's second class of destroyers built after the end of World War I. The keel of the new building with construction number 1411 was laid on August 10, 1929, two days after the previous A-class flotilla leader Codrington was launched . The Bulldog was launched on December 6, 1930 as the last B-class ship. The destroyer entered service on April 7, 1931.
The destroyer was the seventh ship of the Royal Navy, which was named after the English dog breed Bulldog . Before that, the Royal Navy at the John Brown & Co. -built destroyer HMS Bulldog of Beagle class had from 1910 to 1920 in the service.
Mission history
The destroyer Bulldog and its sister ships were first assigned to the "4th Destroyer Flotilla" in the Mediterranean Fleet . The Bulldog provided humanitarian aid to the victims of the Ierissos earthquake in 1932 and was one of the first British units to monitor the southern Spanish coast after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War . Since the British Mediterranean fleet mostly received the latest destroyers, the 4th Flotilla was relocated to the Home Fleet in 1936 and replaced by the "2nd Destroyer Flotilla" in the Mediterranean, which had just been converted to the latest H-class destroyers. As a unit of the 4th Flotilla, the Bulldog was used several times off Spain in the so-called neutrality patrols between January 1937 and March 1938 .
After the old 4th Flotilla was disbanded in early 1939, the Bulldog came to the "Gibraltar Local Flotilla" before serving as a backup destroyer for the aircraft carrier Glorious from March 1939 . In the “plane guard” service, the destroyer was supposed to rescue the crews of aircraft that crashed during take-off or landing, especially during flight maneuvers on the carrier. The Bulldog was still in this service when the Second World War broke out in September 1939. It was the only B-class destroyer that was not at home at the time.
War missions
In October 1939, the Glorious and Bulldog with the battleship Malaya and the destroyer Daring were used as a hunting group against German ships from Socotra and Aden in the Indian Ocean . In January 1940 the Glorious moved with her companion to Malta for overhauls . In March 1940, the Bulldog took on similar tasks for the carrier Ark Royal . In response to the news of the German attack on Norway ( company Weserübungen ), the British porters moved from the Mediterranean to the Home Fleet on April 9. The Bulldog marched together with the Ark Royal from Gibraltar to the English Channel .
After necessary repairs in Devonport , the Bulldog was first used in the Home Fleet on May 9th with the cruiser Birmingham and thirteen other destroyers in the Skagerrak against German mine layers . The British association was discovered by German speedboats and the mine layers stopped their mission in time. One of the speedboats torpedoed the destroyer Kelly under Lord Louis Mountbatten . The Bulldog dragged the badly damaged Kelly to Hebburn for repairs at their shipyard. In doing this, she herself suffered damage to the stern, which Swan Hunter repaired within a week.
The destroyer was not ready for action during the evacuation of Dunkirk ( Operation Dynamo ) due to damage to the screws that occurred shortly afterwards . Ready for use again on June 5, 1940, the destroyer, now subordinate to the "1st Destroyer Flotilla", was to be used for the subsequent evacuations of British army units and citizens from other French ports ( Operation Cycle ). However, the Bulldog received three bomb hits off Le Havre on June 10th . The destroyer was seriously damaged and was temporarily unable to maneuver. The crew managed an emergency repair of the steering gear and the march back to Portsmouth . During the repairs in the local naval shipyard, the destroyer was again slightly damaged in a German air raid and was not ready for action again until the beginning of September. On the 13th, he then shelled Cherbourg, now used by the Germans as a base, with the sister ship Beagle and the destroyers Highlander and Harvester .
In October the Beagle then moved to the Clyde in order to be used in the following months to secure convoys in the North Atlantic .
From the beginning of January to mid-February 1941, the destroyer was overhauled at Cammell Laird in Birkenhead and optimized for use in convoy security. The 120 mm stern gun and the rear torpedo tube set were dismantled. For this purpose, the inventory of depth charges was increased to 70 and two additional launchers were installed. In addition, a 76 mm L / 40 (12 pdr) flak in front of the rear deckhouse and two individual 20 mm Oerlikon cannons to the side of the bridge house were also on board to increase the air defense capabilities . The destroyer was then assigned to the "3rd Escort Group" as the lead ship, which was used in transatlantic convoys between the Clyde and Iceland. In addition to the Bulldog , the Escort Group also had the destroyer Amazon and several ex-American four-chimneys of the Town class .
On May 9, 1941, during convoy OB 318 , the Bulldog, together with the destroyer Broadway ( Town class) and the corvette Aubretia ( Flower class ), succeeded the German submarine U 110 ( Kapitänleutnant Fritz-Julius Lemp ) had already sunk two freighters to force them to surface after depth charges. Valuable secret material and in particular the first complete Marine Enigma cipher machine (type M3) could be recovered from the submarine before it sank while being towed the following day. The loot key machine and the other documents were of great assistance to the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to the radio key naval decipher .
From late October 1941 to February 1942 the destroyer was overhauled and modernized at Fairfields in Govan . The hull was partially reinforced. Above the bridge, a type 271 radar device replaced the artillery's previous fire control center with optical rangefinders.
After a short time with the Home Fleet, the destroyer served as an escort for the Northern Sea Convoys PQ 14 , through which the Soviet Union was supplied with war material, and the return flight QP 11 . In April 1942, as the lead ship for securing the convoy , the Bulldog defended the convoy returning to Great Britain with other destroyers against attacks by the submarine group " Strauchritter " and the German destroyers Z 7 Hermann Schoemann , Z 24 and Z 25 . The German destroyer group was successfully pushed away from the convoy by the Bulldog , the sister ship Beagle and the destroyer prototype Amazon in an almost three-hour battle, with the two B-class destroyers only suffering minor fragmentation damage while the Amazon was hit and several wounded, including the commander to complain about. However, the following day the German destroyers found the Edinburgh of the local security, which was immobilized after a torpedo hit by U 456, and sank it with further torpedo hits. In addition, they severely damaged their companion destroyers Foresight and Forester . The British cruiser was able to damage the Hermann Schoemann so badly that the German destroyer sank itself so as not to endanger the retreat of the other German units.
After ten weeks of repairs on the Clyde, the Bulldog was ready to go again and performed various tasks with the Home Fleet. In September 1942, the destroyer belonged to an association of two cruisers as well as several destroyers and tankers, which was in Spitsbergen to support and supply the security groups during the journeys of the Allied supply convoy PQ 18 and the return convoy QP 14 . This association also supplied the Norwegian meteorological station on Svalbard. The Germans did not discover the supply association.
After her return, the Bulldog was seconded to secure the escort with troops and supplies for the planned landing of the Allies in North Africa ( Operation Torch ). The destroyer remained in this mission until the end of October and secured convoys on the route from the Kingdom to Gibraltar and back.
Although the destroyer urgently needed another major overhaul, on December 20, 1942, it was assigned to the part of the Northern Sea Corridor JW 51B starting from the British Isles . The Bulldog had to cancel this job, which should at least lead to Iceland, on the second day due to severe weather damage. After the necessary work had been carried out, the ship, together with its sister ship Beagle, was still part of the security of the convoys JW 52 and RA 52 in the North Sea and then from the beginning of February to the end of March 1943 transatlantic convoys in the section between Iceland and the British Isles.
The ship then lay in the yard in Greenock for another month , before moving to Freetown by October 1943 . She did backup jobs between Lagos in Nigeria , Freetown and Gibraltar. In the summer of 1943, all of the B-class destroyers still in existence were temporarily in service with the "Westafrica Command". First the Boreas had moved to Freetown in February 1943, which remained stationed there until June, before moving to the Mediterranean. Before the Bulldog , the Beagle and the Brilliant arrived there in March 1943 and stayed there until October ( Beagle ) and May 1943 ( Brilliant ). The Boadicea arrived in May 1943 as the last ship of the class in Freetown, where she did three months of service.
On November 8, the Bulldog , which had returned to Great Britain, went to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard for another major overhaul , which lasted until May 24, 1944.
During the landing in Normandy in June 1944, the destroyer was initially used as part of the submarine hunt, while it was later assigned to escort convoys. On June 26, 1944, south-west of Ireland, the ship succeeded in sinking the German snorkel submarine U 719 after a long hunt with three Hedgehog salvos. This was followed by another deployment in the Arctic in the winter of 1944/45 with the convoy trains JW 60 and RA 60 and together with the Beagle with JW 62 and RA 62 . After a final repair of the Bulldog, she secured convoys between Plymouth and the ports on the Irish Sea for the rest of the war from the end of January 1945 . On May 8, 1945, the destroyer in Guernsey accepted the surrender of the German troops in the Channel Islands together with the sister ship Beagle .
At the end of the month the destroyer was decommissioned and assigned to the reserve. In December 1945, HMS Bulldog was sold for scrapping .
literature
- MJ Whitley: Destroyers of World War Two. Arms and Armor Press, London 1988, ISBN 0-85368-910-5 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War. 9/10 May 1940, North Sea.
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War. 1. – 11. May 1941, North Atlantic / radio reconnaissance.
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War. April 26 - May 12, 1942, Northern Sea, operations against convoys PQ.15 and QP.11.
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War. 12-18 September 1942, Arctic Ocean, fighting the Allied supply convoy PQ.18; 20.-26. September 1942, Northern Sea.
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War. 1-10 June 1944, North Atlantic.
- ^ Rohwer: Sea War. May 6 - June 7, 1945, Northern / Western Europe.
HMS Keith (Flotilla Leader) †
HMS Basilisk † |
Beagle |
Blanche † |
Boadicea † |
Boreas / Salamis 
|
Brazen † |
Brilliant |
Bulldog