16 July 1940

Destroyer HMS Imogen sank after colliding with HMS Glasgow in thick fog off Duncansby Head on 16 July 1940 – but despite her loss so early in the war, she still managed to make a name for herself. The 1,920-ton I-class destroyer was launched at the Hawthorn Leslie yard at Hebburn on Tyneside on 30 December 1936, and was involved in the Spanish Civil War, joining the blockade out of Gibraltar to deny arms to both sides. On the outbreak of World War 2 she moved from the Mediterranean Fleet to the Home Fleet and took part in the Norwegian campaign, with no little success – the destroyer played her part in sinking two submarines (U-42 on 13 October 1939 and U-63 on 25 February 1940) as well as rescuing shipwrecked mariners from two merchantmen and the battleship HMS Barham. On the night of 16 July 1940 Imogen, en route to Scapa Flow, was five miles off Duncansby Head, the most north easterly point of Scotland, when she ran into a powerful cruiser-led Royal Navy task group which had been sent out to find German shipping in the North Sea. With intelligence reports suggesting there was nothing to hunt down, the group reversed course and headed back to Scapa Flow. During the course of their passage back home, Imogen collided with light cruiser HMS Glasgow in thick fog. Badly damaged, the destroyer caught fire and sank unseen some time afterwards; 18 men died in the incident or shortly afterwards, while Glasgow rescued 135 sailors.

17 July 1943

Battleship HMS Warspite bombarded the city of Catania in Sicily. The veteran warship had been active in the Mediterranean with Force H in the preceding days, providing protection for convoys and hunting enemy units – the Italian submarine Nereide was sunk by screening destroyers on 13 July, though three days later the aircraft carrier HMS Indomitable was struck by an air-launched torpedo and forced to limp back to Malta, escorted by battleships Warspite (known as ‘the Grand Old Lady’) and Valiant and a clutch of destroyers. The following day, 17 July, Warspite and Valiant were due to bombard the Sicilian coast, but in moving from the overcrowded Grand Harbour to Marsaxlokk Bay Valiant fouled anti-submarine defences and became trapped, so Warspite continued alone. The 33,800-ton battleship, completed during World War 1 and which served at Jutland, sailed from Malta at 1300 and picked up a seven-destroyer escort off Grand Harbour before heading north at a speed of over 23 knots – which was compromised when her steering suddenly jammed and she began steaming in a tight circle (a problem which had plagued her since Jutland in 1916). Having fixed the problem, Warspite made her firing position just 12 minutes late at 1842 and began raining heavy shells down on her military targets, while her escorts fired at coastal batteries. During the 20-minute bombardment the battleship was attacked by three Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters, though no damage was done. By the time the assault, in support of the 8th Army, was over, Warspite had fired almost 60 15in shells. During the passage back to Malta the ship again came under air attack on several occasions, but no damage was sustained, and she was safely back in Marsaxlokk Bay by 0700 on 18 July. On her return she received a signal from Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Fleet, which said: “Operation well carried out. There is no question when the old lady lifts her skirts she can run.” Warspite, which won 14 Battle Honours in World War 2 to list alongside Jutland – the most honours won by any single ship – served across the globe during the war, including the Far East, and came through some heavy punishment, be that bombs, mines, missiles and shells. She also achieved one of the longest-range gunnery hits ever achieved by a moving ship on a moving target when she landed a damaging blow on Italian battleship Giulio Cesare from around 15 miles away during the Battle of Calabria on 9 July 1940. Worn out by war, the battleship was earmarked for scrapping in July1946 and on 19 April 1947 she was towed from Portsmouth, bound for Faslane, but a severe storm drove her ashore near St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and several salvage attempts failed to shift her. She was scrapped in situover the following eight years.

18 July 1944

German submarine U-672 was crippled by depth charges from frigate HMS Balfour off the Channel Islands on 18 July 1944, but her crew survived. U-672 was a relatively modern craft, having been commissioned on 6 April 1943, but was a failure as a weapon of war, registering no victims at all during her four patrols. The submarine went into active service on 1 October 1943 with 6 Flotille based at St Nazaire in France, although she left for her first war patrol on 13 November 1943 from Kiel, finishing in the French Atlantic port on 15 January 1944, 64 days later. Her second patrol, starting on 24 February, was even longer, at 79 days, during which she suffered two air attacks. U-672 also took part in eight wolfpack attacks between December 1943 and March 1944, all of which drew a blank. She set out from St Nazaire on her final patrol on 6 July 1944, and spent the next 13 days prowling around the Bay of Biscay and South West Approaches in a fruitless search for targets. On 13 July she escaped damage when an Allied aircraft dropped four depth charges on her in the Channel, but five days later her luck ran out. Spotted midway between Fowey and Cherbourg by Captain class frigate HMS Balfour on the afternoon of 18 July, the submarine was subjected to a depth-charge attack caused serious damage. Although U-672 managed to slip away from Balfour, she was forced to surface in the early hours of the following day. Unable to save her, her crew successfully scuttled the 860-ton submarine and all 52 took to lifeboats, being picked up later that day and seeing out the war as prisoners.

19 July 1918

Seven British aircraft destroyed two German airships and an air balloon on 19 July 1918 in the first air attack in history to be launched from an aircraft carrier. The so-called Tondern Raid was a joint Royal Navy and RAF operation, launched from aircraft carrier HMS Furious, a converted battlecruiser which had small flight decks fitted in front of and behind her superstructure. The operation was suggested by an RAF Staff Officer Lt Col Robert Clark-Hall and one of his pilots, Sqn Cdr Richard Bell-Davies VC, both of whom had been Naval aviators before the RN Air Service and Royal Flying Corps were merged. On 1 April 1918. Using markers to simulate the layout of airship sheds at Tondern in Denmark, seven pilots underwent intensive training at an airfield in Turnhouse, Scotland, in June, and the pilots and their Sopwith Camel aircraft sailed with Furious and an escorting force on 27 June. However, when the flotilla reached its flying off point the wind was deemed too strong at Force 6 and the operation – code named F6 – was called off. A second attempt (F7) was planned, and the ships sailed around midday on 17 July. Early on 18 July the aircraft were ready to launch, but a sudden and violent thunderstorm prevented them leaving. Instead, the flotilla loitered out of sight off the Danish coast for 24 hours, and around 1035, with the weather threatening to close in again, the seven Camels got airborne. Little over an hour later the first wave of three aircraft attacked the largest shed at Tondern, which housed two airships – L54, which had undertaken 16 missions, 14 of them scouting and two bombing raids, and L60, with 11 scouting flights and one bombing raid to its name. Both airships were destroyed by fire, though the planned explosion, which would have wrecked the shed, did not occur. The second wave of three (one Camel was forced to abandon the mission with mechanical trouble) hit the second shed and destroyed a balloon inside. Four men were injured on the ground, but the attacking force suffered one pilot dead (Lt Yeulett, whose Camel is though to have run out of fuel over the North Sea, and whose body was later recovered from the sea) and several aircraft losses – two more ditched at sea while three landed in Denmark with no hope of making it back to the ships. The flotilla waited at their designated rendezvous until it was certain that the aircraft would have run out of fuel, then made their way back to the UK. As a result, Tondern was abandoned as an operational airship station and only used for emergencies. Two of the pilots involved were awarded the Distinguished Service Order, while a third was awarded a Bar to his DSO.

20 July 1918

German submarine UB-124 was a novice in terms of warfare by the summer of 1918, so when faced by overwhelming odds there could only have been one result. The 630-ton Type UB III boat had only been commissioned on 22 April 1918, managed one (incomplete) war patrol and had one victim to her name – the 32,300-ton troopship SS Justicia, which was running out of Belfast unladen and had been badly damaged by UB-64 on 19 July 1918. UB-124 spotted Justicia under tow to the north of Londonderry on the following morning and hit her with two torpedoes, killing a number of engine room crew and causing the ship to finally roll over and sink. Unfortunately for UB 124, that was the last act in her brief naval career. The boat suffered a critical equipment failure in the engine room which caused her to sink to the sea bed 90 metres deep. After around seven hours her crew attempted to bring her up, but in doing so water in the bilge got into her electric motors and shorted them. Destroyers HMS Marne, Milbrook and Pigeon, accompanied by a host of patrol craft, had remained in the area and attacked the submarine with gunfire as it came to the surface. Unable to dive again, the boat was abandoned and scuttled, with two German sailors dying in the attack.

21 July 1941

The Hawker Sea Hurricane scored its first success when an aircraft launched from the flight deck of HMS Furious shot down a German flying boat on 21 July 1941. The Royal Navy had gone into World War 2 with a glaring lack of capable fighter aircraft – the Gloster Sea Gladiator biplane was already obsolete on its introduction to the Fleet Air Arm in 1938, with a top speed of little over 250mph, although many of the Navy’s 98 machines, as well as the RAF variants, served in theatres around the globe in World War 2. Royal Navy attempts to procure Spitfires for use at sea proved fruitless, but in 1940 they were able to get their hands on some (somewhat tired) Hawker Hurricanes, which had a top speed of well over 300mph. The first Hurricanes in Naval service were the Mk IA ‘Hurricats’ launched from CAM ships (Catapult Aircraft Merchantmen) – civilian ships with a rocket-propelled launch system but no landing facility; once launched, the aircraft either had to head ashore to land or ditch into the sea. Meanwhile, on 15 January 1941, 880 Naval Air Squadron was formed up to receive the new aircraft. The Mk IB Sea Hurricane appeared soon after, adapted for operation from an aircraft carrier, and the first formation joined HMS Furious in July that year. It was one of 880’s Sea Hurricanes which notched up the first victory against an enemy aircraft when it shot down a Dornier Do 18 f lying boat on 21 July 1941. The Dornier was itself in the Gloster Gladiator category – very much a pre-war aircraft that was being relegated to less critical roles at the time this particular aircraft was loft. More than 440 Hurricane variants served with almost 40 Fleet Air Arm squadrons during the war, and they were prominent in the Battle of the Atlantic, Mediterranean convoys (including Operation Pedestal, the convoy that relieved the pressure on Malta in August 1942) and Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa. By the autumn of 1944 the type was being superseded by Seafires (the maritime version of the Spitfire) and American carrier launched fighters.

22 July 1836

Portsmouth-built brigantine HMS Buzzard intercepted a Portuguese slave ship off the Calabar River in what is now Nigeria, preventing more than 420 slaves from suffering the notorious ‘Middle Passage’ from West Africa to the Caribbean. Buzzard was built in 1834, initially ordered as a ten-gun Cherokee-class brig-sloop but completed as a 230-ton brigantine with reduced armament to serve as anti-slave patrol ships off the African coast. She left Spithead for The Gambia on 30 August 1834 with a crew of 50, and before the year was out she was involved in a brutal 45-minute action with the 300-ton eight-gun Spanish slave brig Formidable, carrying 712 slaves and a crew of 66. After a day-long chase, including much use of sweeps (oars) by the crew of Buzzard, the Spanish ship was forced into action, during which two British sailors are reported to have died, while Formidable lost at least four men, with 11 wounded, including her captain. Two months later, in February 1835, Buzzard caught the slave schooner Iberia, with more than 300 slaves on board. Buzzard continued to apprehend slavers throughout the rest of 1835 and into 1836, affecting more than 1,500 slaves. On 22 July 1836 her target was the slave brigantine Joven Carolina, bound for Havana, Cuba, and hundreds more slaves were freed in the following months, while two of the ships seized – Eagle and Clara – were escorted to New York by Buzzard for adjudication. Having been determined that they were Spanish, not American, Buzzard escorted them back to Bermuda, but both slavers were apparently lost in a severe storm. Slavers were harder to find in the 840s, and in May 1842 Buzzard returned to Britain, paying off at Plymouth on 19 May. She was advertised for sale in October, and apparently sold the following year. Buzzard’s efforts were part of a wider antislavery initiative led by Britain, which outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery all together in 1833. The Royal Navy was at the forefront of the fight against slavery, intercepting slave ships off the African and American coasts, while British diplomats applied pressure to other slaving nations to end the trade. The Middle Passage was the transatlantic crossing by which slaves, tightly packed in the hold of slavers, were taken to the Americas and Caribbean. Many died of disease, starvation or abuse during the passage, which was part of a triangular trade system – the first passage saw ships bring goods from the UK (and other European nations who took part) which could be bartered for slaves. The final, third leg of the triangular system saw the slave ships, having delivered their human cargo, return to Europe with raw materials such as cotton, sugar and tobacco.