8 July 1854

In late June 1854 boats from paddle frigate HMS Firebrand and paddle sloop HMS Vesuvius destroyed part of the Russian defences at the mouth of the Sulina branch of the Danube near the town of Sulina, on the Black Sea in what is now Romania. This small action, part of the wider Crimean War, itself sparked a series of consequences, including the death of a popular young Naval officer. The two wooden warships, each mounting six guns, had bombarded coastal defences and attacked Sulina with virtually no opposition, and it was assumed that the Russians – including mounted Cossack troops – had abandoned the area, despite the fact it was strategically important in controlling military and trade movements on the Danube. On 8 July Capt Hyde Parker, of HMS Firebrand, was rowed upstream in his gig to inspect the damage and investigate rumours that some Russian had returned to man an earthwork battery. Parker’s gig was followed by a second boat from his frigate and a third from Vesuvius, carrying the paddle sloop’s Commanding Officer Cdr Richard Powell. Although they believed no enemy was present, the boats were fired on from the remains of the damaged stockade. Parker, the 30-year-old son of Vice Admiral Hyde Parker, ordered the boats to withdraw, but then landed a shore party to attack the stockade. Parker led the charge, but in doing so was shot through the heart and died at the scene. Cdr Powell took command of the assault party and swiftly drove off the Russian defenders. Nine days later, on 17 July, boats from Vesuvius and the five-gun paddle gunship HMS Spitfire returned to the spot where Capt Parker died, and completely destroyed what remained of the Russian stockades. The boats then continued upstream to Sulina, which they burned, leaving only the church and a lighthouse standing. Sulina was a key location, as it was a major trans-shipment point for the vast quantity of grain that came down the Danube and was then transported out to larger ships in deeper water. HMS Firebrand, which had been ordered in 1842 as HMS Belzebub but was renamed before being launched in that year, served in the Royal Navy until she was sold in 1864; HMS Vesuvius was sold for scrapping the year after, and HMS Spitfire, which by the time of Crimea had been converted to a survey vessel, was used as a tug from 1862 and broken up in 1888.

9 July 1902

HMS A1 was launched on 9 July 1902 – the first British designed submarine, the first Royal Navy submarine to suffer fatalities, and the first submarine to be sunk twice. The lead ship of the A class, A1 displaced 210 tons when submerged – twice that of the Holland class that preceded her by a year – but her later sisters were even larger and more sophisticated. She was not a particularly lucky vessel. Before she even left the Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness there was a hydrogen explosion on board, and while she was being towed to Portsmouth to start her service career seawater entered her batteries, flooding the boat with chlorine and forcing the crew to evacuate. On 18 March 1904 she was carrying out dummy attacks on cruiser HMS Juno in the Solent when she was struck by mail steamer SS Berwick Castle. Although the sea was only 12 metres deep the crew of 11 could not escape as she flooded and all were lost. She was raised a month later, repaired and put back into service, but following an explosion in her petrol engine six years later she was converted for use in anti-submarine warfare research. A1 was lost in 1911 when she was running unmanned underwater on automatic pilot; an extensive search failed to find her, but fishermen in Bracklesham Bay discovered her almost 80 years later – it would appear that she had sunk slowly, and with that reserve of buoyancy she had been pushed several miles away from the search area by strong currents.

10 July 1866

Wooden screw sloop HMS Amazon sank off Start Point in Devon on 10 July 1866 after colliding with a civilian steam packet in flat calm, clear weather. The 1,080 ton vessel had both a simple 300hp steam engine and barque-rigged sail plan, and was launched at Pembroke Dockyard in May 1865. She was equipped with a ram bow and four muzzle-loading guns – two 7in and two 64pdrs. There is not much to say of her Naval career which was as brief as could be. According to a contemporary report in The Times, she was on her maiden voyage and bound for the Nova Scotia when the collision occurred. Around 0100 on 10 July 1866 on a clear, calm night in the Channel 20 miles off the Devon coast it is thought the officer in charge at the time, Sub Lieutenant Alfred Loveridge, ordered the helm to be put to starboard instead of port, with the result that Amazon ploughed into the 420-ton Irish steamer SS Osprey, bound for Antwerp out of Liverpool, which had a crew of 20, and carried seven passengers, as well as the Master’s wife and three children, plus a little boy who was a family friend. Amazon’s ram proved effective – the merchant ship was sliced in two and rapidly sank, taking ten people with her, those being several passengers, the Master’s children and a female steward. The warship stopped and lowered her boats to pick up survivors (most of Osprey’s crew had clambered from the stricken steamer directly onto the warship while the two remained locked together), but the collision had seriously damaged her ram and she started to flood through her bows; little over two hours later she too sank in thickening fog, though her ship’s company and the survivors of the Osprey were able to clamber into her boats and with the help of three fishing boats all made it safely ashore near Torquay that afternoon. The collision raised questions in Parliament, with MPs asking how most of the crew of Osprey escaped with their lives while passengers went down with the steamer – and also how a modern warship designed to ram armoured vessels should sink herself when ramming a civilian steamer. Sub Lt Loveridge was dismissed the service following a court martial on board HMS Victory which found him guilty of “ grave error of judgment”, but “on account of the high character given him for zeal in the service, they recommend him to the favourable consideration of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.”

11 July 1941

Destroyer HMS Defender was fatally damaged by a bomb as she returned to Alexandria on 11 July 1941, sinking several hours later. Defender was a 1,920 ton D-class destroyer, built by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow in the early 1930s, and spend much of her pre war service on the China Station and in the Red Sea. The first part of her war saw Defender serving in the Mediterranean and on West Africa convoy escort duties, and she picked up a clutch of Battle Honours – Calabria and Spartivento (1940), and Matapan, Malta Convoys, Greece, Crete and Libya (1941). In June 1941 she began shuttling from Alexandria to Tobruk, in Libya, carrying essential supplies, and it was on one of these missions that she met her end. Returning from Tobruk just before dawn on 11 July 1941 in company with the Australian destroyer HMAS Vendetta, Defender was spotted by a lone Junker Ju88 bomber on a reconnaissance mission. The aircraft attacked the ships, and one bomb fell very close to Defender, exploding under her hull just in front of her engine room. The shockwave broke the destroyer’s back and flooded her engine room, so most of her ship’s company transferred to Vendetta, which took Defender and a skeleton crew in tow. However, the stricken warship began to break up under the strain, so the final members of her crew were recovered and Defender was scuttled by Vendetta using torpedoes and gunfire. There were no casualties in the sinking.

12 July 1943

Motor Torpedo Boat MTB 81 sank a German submarine in the Messina Strait on 12 July 1943. The boat was built at the Vosper yard in Portchester, at the top of Portsmouth Harbour, in 1943, one of the Vosper 70ft type of MTB displacing just under 50 tons that created legends in home waters and beyond as they dashed into combat at speeds over 40 knots. MTB 81 was for much of her war part of the 24th MTB Flotilla which operated in the eastern Mediterranean, with an emphasis on special operations in the latter part of the conflict. However, on 12 July MTB 81 was operating in Italian waters, and fired torpedoes at U-561 in the Strait of Messina. The submarine sank, with 42 of her crew of 47 going down with her. Her loss occurred almost exactly a year after she narrowly escaped destruction by an Allies aircraft – on the evening of 15 July 1942, off Port Said in Egypt, a British Liberator bomber was fired on by the submarine, and hits were noted on the aircraft, which flew over the boat without dropping any bombs. The U-boat dived, resurfacing around an hour later at 2315, at which point she came under attack by what they assumed was the same bomber. This time the U-boat’s flak was more accurate, bringing down the aircraft and killing all seven of its crew.

13 July 1943

German submarine U-607 sunk by an RAF Short Sunderland in the Bay of Biscay on 13 July 1943 – and the handful of survivors were eventually picked up by Black Swan-class sloop HMS Wren. The U-boat was built by Blohm & Voss at Hamburg and launched on 11 December 1941. Displacing 860 tons submerged, and with a crew of up to 60, the Type VIIC boat had a long range – almost 10,000 miles at 10 knots – and could operate as deep as 230 metres, making her a dangerous opponent. U-607 completed three patrols under her first commanding officer, the first from Kristiansand in Norway then two from St Nazaire in France. During her second patrol the submarine took part in an attack on Convoy SC 104 from Canada to Liverpool, and took a beating when HMS Viscount dropped 14 depth charges on her – the boat plummeted to 180 metres before the crew regained control, and the incident resulted in an open slanging match between her commanding officer and engineering officer, which resulted in the court martial and removal of the latter, who was sentenced to a year in confinement. The submarine took six weeks to repair. Her fourth patrol – the first under her new captain – was also a tense affair for her crew, with two air attacks and a depth-charge run by a Royal Navy corvette, all of which she evaded. On 10 July 1943 she sailed from St Nazaire with a crew of 51 to lay mines off Kingston, Jamaica, in company with three other U-boats, though one was forced to return to base with mechanical issues. In the morning of 13 July U-607 surfaced at the western edge of the Bay of Biscay, and was spotted by a Short Sunderland flying boat of 228 Sqn RAF and a Handley Page Halifax bomber of 58 Sqn RAF. The Sunderland pressed home a low-level attack, dropping seven depth charges from a height of 50ft, narrowly missing the U-boat’s fin. The depth charges cut the submarine in two, with the bow rising vertically before sinking and the stern capsizing before slipping below the surface. Around two dozen sailors were seen to escape, seven of whom managed to clamber into a dinghy dropped by the Sunderland – these were the only men to survive the sinking. The Royal Navy;s Second Support Group swept past some time later but could not divert from their task to pick up the men, so it was left to sloop HMS Wren to approach in the early hours of 14 July. At first the Germans refused to state the identity of their submarine, but when Wren threatened to leave them adrift they changed their mind and revealed they were from U-607.

14 July 1909

Submarine HMS C11 sunk following a collision with merchantman SS Eddystone off the Norfolk coast on 14 July 1909. One of a class of 38 short-range coastal submarines built in the first decade of the 20th Century, C11 was launched at Vickers of Barrow on 27 March 1907 and commissioned in September the same year. On in the evening of 14 July 1909 the 320-ton boat was on a southbound passage in the North Sea with eight of her sister boats, 11 torpedo boats and the depot ship HMS Bonaventure. It was a calm but foggy night, with all the warships correctly lit. Approaching from the south was the 3,900-ton freighter SS Eddystone, carrying a cargo of wheat and unaware of the formation coming in the opposite direction. The merchantman attempted to steer through the flotilla, causing them to swerve out of line, and in doing so she ran down C11, the first submarine in the column, slicing her fin clean away from the hull and causing her to rapidly sink in around 22 metres of water off the town of Cromer. Three of her crew of 16 survived – commanding officer Lt Charles Brodie, First Lieutenant Lt Geoffrey Watkins and a junior rating, AB W Stripes, who were on watch and therefore on or in the vicinity of the bridge; all were thrown into the sea or scrambled off the hull before she sank. An immediate attempt to raise the boat resulted in her being lifted more than 50ft from the sea bed slung between two lighters, but on moving the wreck struck an underwater obstruction and became stuck. Cruiser HMS Vindictive was then placed on station above the wreck in the hope of salvaging C11 or some of her equipment, but over the course of six weeks virtually nothing could be done, and the warship left after a full formal funeral service. Diving on the wreck proved difficult in strong currents, and after C11’s periscope and some other deck f ittings were retrieved she was left to the shifting sands, and it is thought the wreck was fully buried on the sea bed by early September. Lt Brodie went on to have a successful career, achieving the rank of rear admiral.

15 July 1916

Submarine HMS H3 was sunk by a mine in the Gulf of Cattaro in the Adriatic on 15 July 1916, barely a year after she was commissioned. H3 was one of an unusual group of submarines, as H1 to H10 were built by Canadian Vickers in Montreal during the war, with the first four vessels making the transatlantic crossing in June 1915 from St John’s Newfoundland to Gibraltar accompanied by armed merchant cruiser HMS Calgarian, arriving on 3 July. The boats were built overseas as there was not sufficient capacity in British shipyards at the time. A second group of ten H-class submarines was built in the United States at the same time as Group 1, but with the Americans being neutral at that time the finished boats were impounded and only released when America entered the war in 1917. The 440-ton H-class submarines, based on the American Electric Boat Co’s Holland 602 Type design, were generally popular with their crews, and were designed to be small enough to operate in coastal waters, either laying mines or attacking coastal shipping. H3 is thought to have struck a mine in the Adriatic on 15 July 1916 and went down with all 22 hands. One of those lost in the sinking was South African Sub Lt William Tatham, who was appointed First Lieutenant of H3 at the age of just 19, making him the youngest Jimmy the One in the Royal Navy at the time. His brother was killed while serving with South African infantry just three days later.