HMS Whitley
 The Whitley after being converted into an escort boat
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The first HMS Whitley of the Royal Navy in 1916 under the name of Whitby as a destroyer of the V- and W-class commissioned and was the end of the First World War finished. The destroyer was first used in the Baltic Sea during the Russian Civil War. In 1921 the ship was assigned to the reserve in Rosyth .
The destroyer, which had been in reserve for years, was converted into an escort boat with strong anti-aircraft armament in 1938 and was the first boat of the so-called WAIR conversions of V and W class destroyers to come back into service. During the Second World War, the Whitley was lost off the Belgian coast in May 1940.
History of the ship
In December 1916 the shipyard William Doxford & Sons in Sunderland received the order for two ships of the W class , which should be completed as Walpole and Whitby .
The shipyard had already delivered six torpedo boat destroyers to the Royal Navy after 1895. From December 1914, the shipyard received orders to build destroyers as part of the war building program and by the end of 1916 had completed ten M-class destroyers . Four R-Class ships were still under construction, plus two construction contracts for destroyers of the very similar V-Class with Vega and Velox .
Instead of getting the name Whitby after the small port town in North Yorkshire , the shipyard named the new building with the building number 520 Whitley after a seaside resort (today: Whitley Bay) north of the mouth of the Tynes (probably because of a typing or reading error) . This name was left when it was launched on April 13, 1918, so that the destroyer was the first unit in the Navy to be named Whitley . The destroyer, which was completed in October 1918, was the fourth ship of the V- and W-class that the shipyard delivered. The last war structures at Doxford were three smaller S-class destroyers , of which the Shikari, the shipyard's last warship, was not completed until 1924 by Chatham Dockyard .
First missions
The Whitley was assigned to the "13th Destroyer Flotilla" at the Grand Fleet in December 1918, which at that time had a light cruiser , two flotilla leaders and 28 destroyers, 21 of which were of the V and W classes. When this flotilla was dissolved and distributed in March 1919, the destroyer came with the flotilla leader Valkyrie and the destroyers Vendetta , Verdun , Viceroy , Wakeful and Woolston to the "3rd Destroyer Flotilla". In 1919/20 he is said to have belonged to the British units in the Baltic Sea that protected the newly founded Baltic States and fought the Red Fleet . On her return to Great Britain, the ship of the “4. Flotilla ”and transferred to the reserve in 1921. She was one of the units of the "9th Destroyer Flotilla" in Rosyth with a reduced crew. The assignment to the "7th Destroyer Flotilla" in 1927 led to the relocation to Plymouth . In the early 1930s, the destroyer came to the reserve units in the Nore . The ship was not actively used between 1921 and 1938.
Conversion to escort boat
The destroyer was then converted into a fast escort boat of the WAIR type in the Chatham Dockyard in the second half of the year.
The Whitley was the first ship that received this conversion, in which almost all superstructures of the affected boats were removed and replaced with new superstructures. The armament was also completely removed and replaced by two 4-inch twin anti-aircraft guns with an associated fire control system on the foredeck and on the rear deckhouse. As light anti-aircraft weapons, the boats received two quadruple Vickers machine guns side by side on an elevated position behind the funnels and in front of the rear deckhouse. In addition there was a depth charge armament that was strong for the time.
List of WAIR conversions
| HMS | Launch | in service | BauWerft | modification | to | Final fate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Whitley (L23) | 04/13/1918 | 10/11/1918 | Doxford | Chatham | 11/15/1938 | Sunk on 19 May 1940 off Nieuwpoort |
| Valorous (L00) | May 8, 1917 | 08/21/1917 | Denny | Chatham | 1.06.1939 | Scrapped in 1947 |
| Wallace (L64) | 10/26/1918 | 09/14/1919 | Thornycroft | Devonport | 06/14/1939 | Decommissioned March 20, 1945 |
| Woolston (L49) | 01/27/1918 | 06/28/1918 | Thornycroft | Chatham | 10/9/1939 | August 1945 out of service |
| Vivien (L33) | 02/16/1917 | 05/28/1918 | Yarrow | Chatham | 10/25/1939 | May 1945 out of service |
| Vega (L41) | 09/01/1917 | 12/12/1917 | Doxford | Chatham | 11/27/1939 | August 1945 out of service |
| Vimiera (L29) | 06/22/1917 | 09/19/1917 | Swan Hunter | January 8, 1940 | Sunk January 9, 1942 after being hit by a mine | |
| Westminster (L40) | 06/22/1917 | 09/19/1917 | Scotts | Devonport | January 8, 1940 | August 1945 out of service |
| Wolsey (L02) | March 16, 1918 | 05/14/1918 | Thornycroft | Malta | 01/21/1940? | August 1945 out of service |
| Verdun (L93) | 08/21/1917 | November 3, 1917 | Hawthorn Leslie | Catham | 3.1940 | August 1945 out of service |
| Wryneck (L04) | 05/13/1918 | 11/11/1918 | Palmers | Gibraltar | 3.1940 | Sunk on April 27, 1941 off Crete |
| Valentine (L69) | March 24, 1917 | 06/27/1917 | Cammell Laird | Devonport | March 28, 1940 | Sunk in the Scheldt on May 15, 1940 |
| Winchester (L55) | February 1, 1918 | 04/29/1918 | JS White | Portsmouth | April 9, 1940 | Out of service in February 1945 |
| Wolfhound (I56) | 03/14/1918 | 04/27/1918 | Fairfield | Chatham | 4.1940 | August 1945 out of service |
| Vanity (L38) | May 3, 1918 | 06/21/1918 | Beardmore | 6.1940 | May 1945 out of service | |
| Viceroy (L21) | 11/17/1917 | 01/14/1918 | Thornycroft | 01/10/1941 | August 1945 out of service |
War missions
When the Second World War broke out , the Whitley was assigned to the "Rosyth Escort Force", which also used the other two finished WAIR conversions ( Wallace and Valourous ). In addition, by the end of 1939, there were other escort boats of this type with the Vivien and Vega . The main task of the association was to secure escorts along the British east coast. The convoys ran south from Methil on the Firth of Forth as FS convoys to Southend at the Thames estuary and back as FN convoys. While securing Convoy FN 12 from the Thames to Scotland, the Whitley had to repel a German air attack for the first time on January 12, 1940. The ship remained in service on the British east coast until May under the "Rosyth Escort Force", which meanwhile had further WAIR conversions.
After the start of the German offensive to the west in May 1940, the Whitley was subordinated to the "Dover Command", whose main task was to support the British Expeditionary Corps (BEF) on the European mainland. With five further WAIR conversions, the Whitley was subordinated to the Force FA of the French Navy , which supported the Allied troops in northern France and Belgium. Whitley , who arrived in Dover on May 12, moved via Dunkirk off the Dutch coast, where she supported the evacuation efforts of the Royal Navy and defended it against attacks by the German air force with other units of the "Force FA" and French units . The Force FA units then supported the reception of refugees from the German attackers from Vlissingen , where the Winchester was badly damaged but was able to return to England on its own. Valentine , who met on the 15th, was not lucky. The severely damaged ship was able to run aground near Terneuzen in order to facilitate the rescue of the crew. The Whitley took over the rest of the crew, including 21 wounded and made the run-up ship unusable, on which 31 men had fallen. The association then withdrew from the Scheldt estuary . With the Valentine , the first WAIR conversion, which had only been completed less than a month earlier, was lost.
The end of the Whitley
The Whitley was then used off the Belgian coast to pick up retreating Allied troops via local ports or to bombard German troops. On May 19, 1940, she was attacked two nautical miles off Nieuwpoort by Ju-88 dive bombers of Kampfgeschwader 30 . Three close hits in shallow water left the destroyer leaking and both engine rooms overflowed, killing four of the crew. To prevent the ship from sinking, it was set aground between Nieuwpoort and Ostend . The nearby Vimiera took over the crew and ran with them back to Dover. Later the flotilla leader Keith appeared at the wreck with the commander of the destroyers sent from Rosyth to the canal on board, who decided that a rescue of the Whitley was not possible, although a tug was already on the way from Dover. In order not to let the ship fall into the hands of the Germans, the Keith destroyed the accidental destroyer with her artillery, which was located at 51 ° 9 ′ 4 ″ N , 2 ° 39 ′ 34 ″ E sank.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Service History HMS WHITLEY (L 23)
- ↑ Vessels built by 'WILLIAM DOXFORD' at pallion N
- ↑ 13th Destroyer Flotilla
- ^ A b Rohwer: Sea War. 15-19 May 1940, the Netherlands.
- ^ Service History HMS Vimiera (L29).
- ↑ Bertke, Kindell, Smith: WORLD WAR II SEA WAR: FRANCE FALLS, BRITAIN STANDS ALONE. P. 149
literature
- Donald A. Bertke, Don Kindell, Gordon Smith: WORLD WAR II SEA WAR: France falls, Britain stands alone. Bertke Publications, Dayton (OH, 2011), ISBN 978-1-937-47000-5 .
- Alexander Bredt (Ed.): WEYERS Taschenbuch der Kriegsflotten 1941/1942. Lehmanns Verlag, Munich / Berlin 1941.
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the naval war 1939-1945. Manfred Pawlak VerlagsGmbH, Herrsching 1968, ISBN 3-88199-0097 .
- MJ Whitley: Destroyers of World War 2. Cassell Publishing, 1988, ISBN 1-85409-521-8 .
Web links
- HMS Whitley (L23) - V&W-class Destroyer (Eng.) Retrieved
- HMS Whitley (L23 ) accessed October 7, 2016
- VandW ship list accessed October 7, 2016