HMAS Vampires (D68)
|
|
|---|---|
.jpg) The HMAS vampires |
|
| Overview | |
| Type | destroyer |
| Shipyard | |
| Keel laying | October 10, 1916 |
| Launch | May 21, 1917 as HMS Wallace |
| Commissioning | September 22, 1917 |
| Whereabouts | Sunk by Japanese aircraft on April 9, 1942 off Ceylon |
| Technical specifications | |
| displacement | |
| length |
95.1 m (309 ft) overall, |
| width |
8.9 m (29.75 ft) |
| Draft |
up to 4.9 m (13.66 ft) |
| crew |
110 men |
| drive |
3 White-Forster boilers , |
| speed |
34 kn |
| Range |
3,500 nm at 15 kn |
| Armament |
4 × 4 "102 mm Mk.V gun |
| Fuel supply |
367 ts of heating oil |
| Sister boats | |
| similar |
23 boats of the Admiralty V-class |
The HMAS Vampire (D68 / I68) was a flotilla of Admiralty V class , who during the First World War in the Royal Navy as HMS Vampire and after the sale in 1933 of Australia in the Second World War in the Royal Australian Navy as HMAS Vampire was on duty . On December 10, 1941, she and other escort destroyers rescued many survivors of the battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse, sunk by Japanese planes .
On April 9, 1942, she was sunk by Japanese aircraft off Ceylon together with the old carrier Hermes .
HMS Vampires
The destroyer was on 10 October 1916 near the shipyard J. Samuel White and Company in Cowes on the Isle of Wight laid down on and ran on 21 May 1917 as Wallace launched. In July 1917 the name was changed to Vampire and on September 22, 1917 the boat was put into active service with the British Royal Navy. As an experiment, triple torpedo tube sets were installed on the Vampire so that, in contrast to her sister ships, she had six instead of four torpedo tubes. After it had been used in the North Sea until the end of the First World War , it was used in the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean in the post-war period and in the early 1920s . Most recently she was in Malta as a reserve destroyer .
HMAS vampires
On October 11, 1933, the Vampire was combined with the destroyers Vendetta , Voyager , Waterhen of the Admiralty V- and W-Class and the somewhat more modern flotilla commander Stuart in Portsmouth to form the Australian Destroyer Flotilla and handed over to the Royal Australian Navy , to the previous six Australian destroyers to replace that have been scrapped for reasons of age. Arrived in Australia, the destroyer was decommissioned in January 1934 and assigned to the reserve fleet, in which it was first in reserve in Sydney and then from 1936 as a depot ship in the HMAS Cerberus naval base ( Flinders Naval Depot ). On May 11, 1938, the Vampire was reactivated for active duty.
Mediterranean Sea
After World War II broke out in Europe, Vampire and Voyager ran from Fremantle to Singapore in October 1939 , where they met Stuart , Vendetta and Waterhen and, after a short stay, moved to the Mediterranean Sea. On January 2, 1940, the ships in Malta formed the 19th destroyer flotilla of the British Mediterranean fleet. The Australian units participated in several exercises. Since the Mediterranean was not yet a theater of war at the time, the Australian destroyers had a relatively uneventful period of service while they participated in naval exercises and escort missions. In the period from March 5 to April 4, 1940, the Vampire was subjected to a general overhaul in Malta.
In June 1940, when Italy entered the war and France surrendered , the strategic situation in the Mediterranean changed significantly to the detriment of the Allies. From then on there were numerous fighting between the British and the Italians in the Mediterranean. On July 9, 1940 , the vampires took part in the sea battle at Punta Stilo , where they were assigned to the escort of the aircraft carrier Eagle . Since the carrier successfully remained at a distance from the battlefield during the battle between the two fleets, the vampires were not directly involved in the battle, but helped repel several Italian air raids on the Eagle .
In the following days, the Vampire was part of the escort for convoy MA5, although she was able to avoid all bombs during numerous Italian air raids, but received numerous damage from close hits and fragments. It was also a fragment of a bomb that killed gunner JH Endicott on July 12, 1940, the first man killed in the Australian Navy in World War II. Apart from participating in two smaller naval advances, the destroyer spent most of July and August 1940 in the shipyard in Alexandria , where the damage suffered was repaired and the ship was overhauled . In the following months, the ship was used in the entire eastern Mediterranean for numerous escort tasks (including Operations Hats , Excess and Demon ) and was involved in several shelling of Italian positions on the North African coast. At times it served Captain Hector Waller , the commander of the 10th destroyer flotilla, as the flagship. During the siege of Tobruk in May 1941 , the vampires carried out two supply missions during which fresh troops were brought into the fortress and the wounded were brought out. After its return from the second mission, however, the destroyer was in a particularly poor condition as a result of the numerous stresses and strains of the past few months as well as the high-speed supply mission. Particularly strong vibrations, which occurred at speeds above 16 knots, made further use of the destroyer in the Mediterranean impossible. The ship desperately needed a major overhaul lasting several weeks before it could be used again on the front lines. However, since the capacities of the British shipyards in the Mediterranean and India were at full capacity and the repair of modern ships had higher priority than the overhaul of an old destroyer, there was nothing left but to send the vampires to Singapore, which they reached on June 20, 1941.
South East Asia
The overhaul of the vampires took more than four months, the destroyer was not ready for action again until November 26, 1941. During this time, a large part of the crew was transferred to other ships and replaced by new recruits. In the meantime the political situation in Asia had deteriorated rapidly and an attack by Japan on the British colonies and the Dutch East Indies was feared. On December 2, the Force Z arrived in Singapore with the battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse as reinforcement for the British armed forces . The vampires were supposed to escort the Repulse to Darwin for a visit , but after only a day at sea, the ships were ordered back to Singapore. On December 8, 1941, the war with Japan in Asia began with the Japanese invasion of the Malay Peninsula , the invasion of the Philippines and the attack on Pearl Harbor (there on December 7th due to the intervening date line ).
On the evening of December 8th, the Force Z left Singapore with the Prince of Wales , Repulse and the destroyers Electra , Express , Tenedos and Vampire to attack the Japanese troop transports that were landing troops in northern Malaysia. The operation turned into a disaster for the British when the unit could not find the Japanese transporters and were attacked by Japanese Betty bombers on the morning of December 10th . A total of seven Japanese attack waves scored numerous torpedo hits on Prince of Wales and Repulse , the two sank. see => sinking of the HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse . The three accompanying destroyers (the Tenedos had previously returned to Singapore due to lack of fuel) were ignored by the bombers and together were able to save 2089 of a total of 2921 crew members of the two capital ships and bring them back to Singapore.
In the following weeks the Vampire was used as an escort for numerous convoys between Singapore and Batavia . On January 26, she tried together with the destroyer Thanet to attack two Japanese transporters off the mouth of the Sungai Endau about 80 nautical miles north of Singapore (see battle at Endau ). However, they failed because of the Japanese escort, consisting of the light cruiser Sendai and six destroyers. The two Allied destroyers attacked the Japanese units unsuccessfully with their torpedoes and tried to evade the Japanese pursuers at top speed to the south. However, the Thanet was badly damaged by a hit, fell back and was sunk. After an unsuccessful attempt to protect the Thanet by laying a smoke screen, the vampire managed to escape to Singapore.
The destroyer left Singapore for the last time on January 28 and protected two convoys during their passage through the Sunda Strait in the following days . On February 5, she left the theater of war in Malaya / Dutch East Indies for good and went to Colombo in a convoy consisting of two merchant ships . There she was assigned to the East India Station of the Royal Navy on February 11 and thus part of the British East India Fleet. There she spent the rest of February and March as an escort for the old aircraft carrier Hermes .
In March 1942 the advancing Japanese had conquered Burma and the Royal Navy lost control of the Bay of Bengal . At the end of March, the British High Command received information that suggested an imminent attack by the enemy fleet on Ceylon . Admiral Sir James Somerville then gathered the units at his disposal south of Ceylon and waited there for the arrival of the Japanese, in the hope of being able to involve their carrier forces, which were superior during the day, in a night battle. The fleet cruised for three days until April 2 without the Japanese showing up. Due to a lack of fuel, the fleet then canceled the operation and ran to the Addu Atoll in the Maldives to refuel . Before that, however, Admiral Somerville released the Hermes along with the vampires to Trincomalee , where the porter was supposed to equip himself for the planned invasion of Madagascar . But then the Japanese fleet carried out its attack in the Indian Ocean later than expected. When the Japanese porter associations approached Ceylon on April 8, Hermes and Vampires left the port of Trincomalee that night and escaped the attack that took place the following day by fleeing south. After the attack, the two ships set course back to Trincomalee, but were spotted by Japanese scouts. At around 10:35 a.m. on the morning of April 9, the carrier and destroyer were attacked by 85 dive bombers. The Hermes received numerous hits and sank within twenty minutes, whereupon the remaining attackers pounced on the vampires . The destroyer broke in two after a direct hit and sank within ten minutes to the position 7 ° 35 ′ 0 ″ N , 82 ° 5 ′ 0 ″ E , the commander and eight crew members died or were fatally wounded. The rest of the crew was picked up by local boats and the hospital ship Vita . Some were also able to swim to the nearby coast.