8 August 1944

Battleship HMS Valiant was damaged when a floating dock collapsed in Trincomalee on 8 August 1944. The fully-laden33,800-ton warship was about to undergo routine maintenance in Ceylon, but having entered the dock an incorrect ballast pumping sequence was carried out, which overstressed both ends of the dock and caused it to break its back. As it sank, one section reared up and struck the battleship’s stern, badly damaging her two inner propellers and shafts and her rudder. The ship, which was still in steam, was driven away from the dock to avoid further damage, but it was found she could not steer a straight course and was restricted to eight knots. A plan was devised to take her through the Suez Canal to Alexandria, in Egypt, on her two remaining propellers so that temporary repairs could be completed, but as she wove her way north she grounded near the entrance to the canal. Her two damaged propellers and shafts, and the A-brackets supporting them, were cut away , and she was turned around to complete the tricky passage back to the UK by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Because of the age of the ship – she was launched in November 1914 by Fairfields of Govan , and took part in the Battle of Jutland as well as several major actions in World War 2 – and her general condition it was decided that a full repair would be inappropriate, so after she arrived back in the UK she was decommissioned in July 1945 and used for stoker mechanics training at Devonport until she was sold for scrap early in 1948 and towed to a breakers yard at Cairnryan in Scotland in August the same year.

9 August 1914

Light cruiser HMS Birmingham rammed and sank U-15 on 9 August 1914 – the first U-boat to be sunk in an act of war. Birmingham was a Town-class light cruiser of 5,500 tons, launched by Armstrong Whitworth onto the Tyne in May 1913, and only joined the Fleet in the months before World War 1. On 9 August 1914 submarine U-15, on her first war patrol, lay helpless on the surface of the North Sea off Fair Isle, her engines failed. The only thing in her favour was that she was shrouded in thick fog – but that was not enough to shield her from the view of lookouts on board Birmingham. Sailors in the British warship could hear hammering from inside the 640-ton submarine as frantic attempts to repair her were carried out; when their gunfire missed its target and the submarine began to submerge, Birmingham leapt forward and rammed the diving U-15, cutting her in two and sinking her with all 25 hands – the first U-boat loss to an enemy warship. Birmingham went on to see action at the Battles of Heligoland and Dogger Bank in 1915, and Jutland the following summer, and had an active life after Armistice, acting as flagship for the 6th Light Cruiser Squadron and serving on overseas stations until she was sold in 1931 and broken up at Thomas Ward in March of that year.

10 August 1942

Armed naval trawler HMT Islay sank Italian submarine Scire off Haifa, in Mandatory Palestine (now Israel), on 10 August 1942, putting an end to a series of human torpedo attacks on British harbours. Islay was a 554 ton Isles class ship, built by Smiths Dock Co of South Bank in Middlesbrough and launched on 10 April 1941. She rescued 19 survivors from the sinking of SS Zealand, torpedoed by U-97 off Haifa on 28 June 1942, though the steamer went down with14 crew men and military gunners. On 10 August she spotted Scire, which was heading for Haifa with 11 commandos on board, intending to launch a human torpedo attack on shipping in the harbour – the submarine had already carried out such attacks at Gibraltar and Alexandria. The encounter was not purely by chance – Ultra signals had been read, providing intelligence, and RAF aircraft and coastal batteries were also involved. The submarine was initially seen by a Royal Navy Walrus seaplane, but it was Islay, with gunfire and depth charges, that engaged the submarine and sank it with 60 men on board; the remains of 42 of them were recovered in 1984. Islay was sold as a commercial vessel to a French company in October 1946, and the ship disappeared without trace off the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean on 15 March 1950.

11 August 1705

HMS Plymouth foundered in a gale in the English Channel on 11 August 1705, with more than 350 sailors drowning in the sinking. The ship was originally built by James Taylor at Wapping, and launched on Boxing Day in 1653 as a 52-gun ship, and saw plenty of action in home waters, the North Sea and in the Mediterranean, including the Four Days Battle of 1666, the Battle of Texel in 1673 and the Battle of Barfleur in 1692. She was partially broken up for rebuilding in 1703, and completed as a larger 60-gun vessel at Henry Johnson’s yard at Blackwall in March 1705 – which may have had an impact on her stability, as she was lost with all 365 of her ship’s company when she foundered in a storm in the Channel on 11 August that same year.

12 August 1844

Boats from the corvette HMS Dido destroyed Seriff Muller’s settlement in the Sengei Undop in Borneo on 12 August 1844 – part of wider operations against pirates in South East Asia and the local chiefs who supported them. Dido was an 18-gun corvette/sloop, launched at Pembroke in 1836, which saw 20 years of service far and wide for the Royal Navy, from the Mediterranean to Australasia. In 1842, under the command of Capt the Hon. Henry Keppel, Dido sailed from England for China, based around Hong Kong and Singapore, often countering pirates. In the summer of 1843 Dido and her boats were involved in targeted raids on pirates in Borneo – operations which Keppel was instrumental in setting up and executing. One by one, pirate strongholds along rivers and in estuaries were attacked and destroyed, and promises of support given to local people if they would refuse to shelter pirates. After several months off Canton, and a passage from Singapore to Calcutta, Dido returned to the piracy issue in the summer of 1844. With Dido anchored at the mouth of the River Morotaba, on 29 July an 80-strong party of sailors from the warship, plus several boats, went upstream with the merchant steamer Phlegethon. As and when tides allowed, the party destroyed forts and strongholds, often with very little resistance as the pirates disappeared into the surrounding jungle. Although there were very few casualties on either side, the British raiders managed to weaken the power of the pirates – on 7 August, for example, accommodation for up to 5,000 pirates and their families was burned, four forts and several hundred boats destroyed, 15 iron cannon spiked and thrown into the river along with large quantities of guns and ammunition, and 60 brass cannon seized. On 14 August Seriff Muller’s settlement was found after gruelling expeditions through thick jungle; the settlement was undefended so it was plundered and burned, while local intelligence suggested Seriff Muller and his supporters had decamped to a spot around 25 miles further up the Undop River – this position was attacked on 14 August, and further operations continued until the last week of August. HMS Dido returned to Spithead on 27 January 1845, when Keppel learned that his wife, whom he had not seen for four years, was at Droxford, a dozen miles to the north of Portsmouth. With Dido ordered to make for Sheerness to pay off, Capt Keppel changed clothes with his Master, Robert Allen, who impersonated Keppel as he took the ship around the coast of Sussex and Kent. Keppel met with his wife, and together they drove (in a yellow post-chaise, no less) to Sheerness, where Keppel confessed his subterfuge to the local Captain Superintendent, who turned a blind eye to the three-day charade. Dido continued to serve until 1860, seeing service in New Zealand, the Middle East, China and South America, where she ran aground in April 1852. She also went aground in Tahiti three months later, requiring repairs back in England. From 1860 she was used as a coal hulk at Sheerness, and was sold in 1903.

13 August 1915

Former ocean liner HMT Royal Edward was sunk by submarine UB-14 in the Aegean Sea on 13 August 1915, resulting in large loss of life. The ship began life in 1907 in Govan as the 11,120-ton Royal Mail Steamer Cairo, designed for mail services between Marseille and Alexandria, but the venture was not a success and in 1910 Cairo and her sister, Heliopolis, were sold to the Canadian Northern Steamship Co, with Cairo being renamed Royal Edward. The liner carried out a year-round service across the North Atlantic from Avonmouth to Halifax or Montreal until the outbreak of World War 1, when she and her sister (no named Royal George) were taken up as troopships. After a spell of bringing Canadian troops to Europe, Royal Edward embarked almost 1,400 men, mainly 29th Infantry Division, for Gallipoli on 28 July 1915. She arrived at Alexandria on 10 August, a day after her sister had arrived from Devonport. She then continued unescorted towards the island of Lemnos, but on the morning of 13 August she was spotted by UB-14 off the island of Nisiros in the Dodecanese group. The German submarine fired two torpedoes from a mile distant, striking Royal Edward on the stern and causing the troopship to sink within six minutes. The British hospital ship Soudan, which had passed Royal Edward shortly before, turned and rescued more than 400 men, while two French destroyers and some trawlers picked up a further 221. The number of casualties in the sinking is open to much debate – figures range from 132 to more than 1,860, but an Admiralty casualty list published in The Times in September that year puts the figure at 864.

14 August 1943

River gunboats Aphis, Cockchafer and Flores bombarded the coastal road at Taormina in Sicily, while HM Ships Dido, Panther and Sirius bombarded Scaletta in Italy. Taking Aphis an example, the 635 ton Insect-class gunboat was built during World War 1 and saw action on the Danube, operating out of Bucharest, and in the immediate post-war period she joined the Yangtse Flotilla in China to support British trade and wider interests. In World War 2 she served almost exclusively in the Mediterranean, where her shallow draught (just over one metre) and impressive armament – two 6in guns and two 12pdrs as well s six .303 machine guns – made her and her sisters (including Cockchafer) very useful for coastal bombardment work in support of Army operations, as seen in the Italian campaigns. When Malta became available, Aphis switched to the island from Alexandria, putting her much closer to the assaults on Italian islands and ultimately the mainland. She took part in the landings in Pantelleria in June 1943, and also bombarded important infrastructure in Sicily in July and August, including coastal roads as on 14 August when she, Cockchafer and the much larger (1,820-ton) Dutch gunboat HNLMS Flores pounded the road near Taormina – although the Insect-class ships were spared from the action during the actual landings of Operation Husky (9 July to 17 August 1943) as they were vulnerable to air attack. On the same day that the Taormina road was under attack, another force was bombarding the ancient fortified town of Scalea, to the south-east of Naples on the mainland of Italy. Anti-aircraft cruisers HMS Sirius and Dido and P-class destroyers HMS Panther and HMS Penn took part in various naval gunfire serials during August under the collective name Operation Annoyance, softening up targets in Calabria and Campania as far north as Naples and intercepting Axis convoys. The bombardment of shore facilities prepared the way for the Allied landings in mainland Italy in September 1843, with the main landings taking place around Salerno and Taranto.

15 August 1915

Armed fishing smack HMS Inverlyon sank submarine UB-4 off the cost of East Anglia on 15 August 1915. In February of that year the Germans had determined to sink any vessels within the so-called war zone, which was essentially all waters around the UK, and commercial fishing vessels were seen as legitimate targets. Thus, in mid-June, German submarine UB-2 had sunk six fishing smacks in two days in the North Sea – smacks are a traditional type of British fishing vessel, powered by the wind and often displaying distinctive red sails. With such vessels being targeted, some smacks were taken up by the Admiralty as Q-ships – decoy vessels that would appear innocuous and would lure unsuspecting submarines to close in, at which point they displayed the White Ensign and opened fire with concealed guns. Inverlyon was put into military service on 2 August 1915, and within two weeks had scored a notable success. Under the command of Royal Naval Gunner Ernest Jehan, supported by three other Naval gunners and the smack’s civilian crew (who were temporarily inducted into the Royal Naval reserve), Inverlyon was operating in amongst a group of similar vessels at Smith’s Knoll Buoy to the east of Great Yarmouth on 15 August 1915. UB-4, a 140-ton coastal submarine which had sunk four vessels in 14 patrols, was hunting more victims, having sunk the 60-ton smack Bona Fide the evening before. It was gone 8pm when UB-4 approached the smacks and began to shout orders in German. The boat closed to within 30 metres of Inverlyon before Jehan revealed their true colours and ordered his colleagues to open fire with the modest 3pdr gun, hitting the fin and bridge and sending her commanding officer into the water. Drifting out of control, the submarine floated astern of Inverlyon and back into the gunner’s arc of fire, upon which six more shots were fired, two into the fin, two into the hull at point-blank range, and two that missed. A hail of small-arms fire was also aimed at the stricken boat. The submarine tipped slowly up until almost vertical, and slipped beneath the surface, but in doing so she fouled Inverlyon’s nets (which had been deployed to help with the subterfuge) and anchored the fishing smack in place. With no radio, an account of the incident was passed to another smack, and then Inverlyon released carrier pigeons the following morning asking what they should do. Any attempt to salvage the submarine was rejected, so the nets were cut and UB-4, along with her crew of 15, finally sank to the sea bed. The encounter earned Gunner Jehan a Distinguished Service Cross, and the smack’s civilian skipper, a man named Philips, was praised by the Admiralty for risking his own safety in attempting to save the life of a drowning German sailor, though he failed to reach the doomed man before he was dragged down with his submarine. Inverlyon came close to sinking a second submarine in early September, but could not add to her tally, and the following year she returned to commercial fishing. Ironically, having returned to civilian life, Inverlyon was sunk by a submarine on 1 February 1917 when U-55 shelled her off the north coast of Cornwall, although there were no reported casualties.