HMS Eridge (L68)
.jpg) The Eridge at Sea, July 1941
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HMS Eridge (L68) was the first destroyer escort from type II of Hunt class , who in World War II on 28 February 1941, the British Royal Navy was delivered.
In August 1942 the ship was badly damaged in the Mediterranean. After being brought into Alexandria, the Eridge was only used as a barge and was sold for demolition in 1946.
History of the ship
The ship was one of the first re-orders for Hunt-class destroyers in escort as part of the first war building program in September 1939 immediately after the start of World War II. The re-order came at a time when not a single one of the 20 ships ordered in peace had been launched. The boats of this order were later all completed according to the deviating Type II of the Hunt class, after the experience with the first ships of the peace order in their trials from the end of 1939 showed that the hulls of the ships were miscalculated and for the desired armament with three 102 -mm twin guns required a larger hull width.
The keel of the destroyer with the ship identification "L68" was laid on November 21, 1939 at Swan Hunter in Wallsend , England , where the ship was launched on August 20, 1940 and put into service on February 28, 1941. The shipyard became the main supplier of Hunt class ships with 16 ships delivered from June 1940 to November 1942. After the shipyard delivered four Type I ships, the Eridge was the yard's first completed Type II boat and class.
During the Second World War , the destroyer was mainly used as an escort for convoys and received four battle honors for its missions in the Mediterranean .
Calls
The ship's crew training was completed at Home Fleet in Scapa Flow . There were also fuse links on the north-western access roads to the British Isles. In June 1941 the destroyer escort was transferred to the 13th Destroyer Flotilla in Gibraltar.
After deployments in convoys in the Atlantic and supply convoy trains to Malta , the Eridge moved from August 4 to September 29, 1941 from Gibraltar around Africa to Suez. The ship was also used in the 5th Destroyer Flotilla in Alexandria.
On March 20, 1942, the 5th Destroyer Flotilla with the Eridge and six other Hunt destroyers carried out a submarine hunting operation from Alexandria to Tobruk in preparation for a supply convoy to Malta, on which the HMS Heythrop was sunk by the German submarine U 652 . The Eridge took the sister ship Heythrop , which had been hit by a torpedo at the stern , about 40 miles northeast of Bardia in tow and tried to tow it to Tobruk . In the early afternoon, the damaged vessel capsized after being towed for five hours. The Eridge could take over the crew of the sister ship with boats up to 15 men .
At the same time, the second naval battle took place in the Gulf of Syrte for the supply convoy MW 10 to Malta. Since the convoy's security units concentrated on defending against Italian surface forces, the remaining six Hunts of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla took over the security of the convoy with the utility HMS Breconshire (9776 GRT, including 5,000 t of fuel), which had evaded south with the flak cruiser Carlisle Clan Campbell (7255 BRT), the Pampas (5415 BRT) and the Norwegian Talabot (6798 BRT), which was massively attacked by air forces of the Axis powers. The Clan Campbell sank about 20 miles from Malta after a bomb hit and the Eridge was able to save 112 men from the sinking ship in the stormy seas and despite the air raids. The Breconshire had to be beached badly damaged and the Pampas and Talabot made it into the port of La Valletta but were sunk from the air the day after arriving in Malta. The Talabot that was hit was sunk by its commander to prevent the ship from exploding in the harbor and to enable part of the cargo to be recovered. Of the total cargo of 25,900 ts, only 5000 ts could be brought ashore. Of the security ships, the Southwold sank shortly before Malta after a mine hit on a British lock while attempting to support the Breconshire and the Avon Vale suffered damage from close hits from the air. Carlisle , Eridge and three destroyers of the flotilla ( Beaufort , Dulverton , Hurworth ) left Malta on March 25th and reached Alexandria again on the 27th.
On May 29, 1942, the HMS Eridge, together with the destroyers HMS Hero and HMS Hurworth , succeeded in sinking the German submarine U 568 off Tobruk after a 15-hour chase .
On July 11th, the Eridge fired at the Dulverton and Hurworth Mersa Matruh .
The ship was attacked by an Italian speedboat on August 29, 1942 at position 31 ° 7 ' N , 28 ° 26' E when it was shelling positions of the Axis powers near El Daba in Egypt . The hit of a 45-cm torpedo made the Eridge a wreck. Although she could be towed to Alexandria by the accompanying HMS Aldenham , the repair was not worthwhile and she was used during the rest of the war as a houseboat and spare parts donor for other Hunt destroyers. In October 1946 the Eridge in Alexandria was sold for scrapping.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Loss of the HMS Heythrop (L85)
- ↑ Summary of Captain Toft's own story
- ↑ Loss of Southwold (L10)
- ↑ Damage to the Avon Vale (L06)
- ^ Rohwer: Chronicle of the naval war. P. 229.
- ^ Rohwer, p. 246
literature
- Clay Blair: Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942. Random House Publishing Group, 2010, ISBN 0-307-87437-0 .
- JJ Colledge, Ben Warlow: Ships of the Royal Navy: the complete record of all fighting ships of the Royal Navy. (Rev. ed.) Chatham. London 1969/2006, ISBN 978-1-86176-281-8 . OCLC 67375475.
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the naval war 1939-1945. Manfred Pawlak Verlag, Herrsching 1968, ISBN 3-88199-009-7 .