23 September 1941

The award of a posthumous George Cross for Henry Herbert Reed, DEMS gunner in SS Cormount, was published in a supplement to the London Gazette on 23 September 1941. A 29-year-old Army Bombardier, Reed was a gunner on board Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship (DEMS) SS Cormount, part of a convoy steaming south from Blyth in the North Sea, when the formation was attacked by German aircraft on the night of 20-21 June 1941. The 2,800-ton collier fought back in a hail of bullets, cannon shells and bombs, but Reed was hit and badly wounded, but when the Master asked him how he was he said he would carry on firing. The ship’s Chief Officer was also badly injured, so Reed carried the wounded man down two ladders from the bridge to a sheltered spot near a lifeboat, placed him on the deck and died shortly afterwards. When his shipmates attended Reed it was found that his stomach had been ripped wide open by machine gun bullets, but his brave action, in extreme pain, had saved the life of the Chief Officer. He was buried in Sunderland, the town where he was born, and his mother received her son’s George Cross from the King at a ceremony in Buckingham Palace in March the following year. SS Cormount was damaged by a mine in the North Sea in November 1943, and sank under tow.

24 September 1922

Destroyer HMS Speedy was lost in a collision with a tug in the Sea of Marmara on 24 September 1922. The 1,075 ton Thornycroft-built S-class warship was commissioned on 14 August 1918, so served for the last three months of World War 1 with the 12 Destroyer Flotilla, part of the Grand Fleet, though she saw no significant action and was placed in reserve after the Armistice Speedy was recommissioned I February 1919 and joined the Mediterranean Fleet which was tasked with protecting British interests in the Black Sea during the Russian Civil War. She went on to support Greek forces in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22, but it was during the Chanak Crisis of September 1922 that she met her end. The Crisis was a period of tension between the UK and France on one hand, and Turkey on the other, when popular opinion in the UK was against another war, and allied nations (including Canada and France) refused to entertain an ultimatum or any other measures other than a negotiated settlement. On 24 September Speedy collided with a Turkish tug near the Gulf of Gemlik in the Sea of Marmara, causing the destroyer to sink with the loss of ten of her ship’s company.

25 September 1925

The giant submarine HMS X1 was completed on 23 September 1925. Displacing 2,780 tons and mounting four 5.2in guns in two twin turrets, she was the largest submarine in the world at the time, and the largest in the Royal Navy until HMS Dreadnought commissioned on 17 April 1963. Designed to carry out the role of a cruiser, and adopting principles discovered from German U-boat development, the experimental X1 was in the minds of naval architects since 1915 but the technology was against them until long after the Armistice. The 1922 Washington Naval Treaty banned the use of submarines against merchant shipping, which was one of X1’s proposed main roles – that of commerce raider – so the boat was shrouded in secrecy during her build at Chatham. Her gun system was somewhat cumbersome – the ammunition hoists on board could not keep up with the rate of fire, it required almost 60 men to operate the guns, and the submarine needed a special ballast tank system to compensate for the weight of ammunition expended. The machinery and magazines for the guns also meant that the boat’s torpedo room was somewhat cramped, and X1 could only carry one reload for each of her six torpedo tubes. Despite her speed (almost 20 knots on the surface) and her impressive handling underwater and good rate of dive and ascent, her career was far from successful. After her first voyage, to Gibraltar in 1926, it was discovered that her main engine drive wheels were damaged requiring urgent repairs. A full-power run in the Mediterranean in January 1926 broke her starboard camshaft driveshaft, requiring a new set of gears to be fitted in Malta; no sooner was that sorted in Malta than her port camshaft driveshaft also broke, in April the same year. Her engines continued to cause trouble throughout her career, and life on board was not pleasant, with reports of cramped accommodation spaces, high humidity and poor ventilation. She was placed in reserve in the early 1930s and scrapped at Pembroke in December 1936.

26 September 1942

HMS Veteran was sunk by U-404 with all hands plus 80 Merchant Navy survivors from Convoy RB1 on 26 September 1942. The modified W-class destroyer, displacing 1,550 tons, was ordered during the Great War, but launched at the John Brown yard in Clydebank on 16 August 1919. She saw service with the Atlantic and Mediterranean Fleets, and also on the China Station, where she played a part in the Nanking Incident in March 1927, when foreign warships bombarded Nanking to protect their citizens as soldiers of the Nationalist Revolutionary Army of the Kuomintang rioted and looted foreign-owned businesses. Veteran was in reserve when World War 2 started, and as with similar elderly destroyers she was put on escort duties and modified accordingly, with guns replacing torpedo tubes and space made for depth charges. She escorted convoys for the Norwegian campaign in 1940 and moved on to North Sea convoys and patrols, during which she suffered some damage when she struck a mine. In September 1940 she switched to Atlantic convoy duties, based out of Londonderry, sharing the credit for sinking U-207 a year later. Early in 1942 she underwent conversion in London to Short Range Escort, and spent the summer of 1942 off the east coast of North America on convoy defence. On 16 September 1942 she sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, with Special Convoy RB1, reportedly standing for ‘Rivers to Britain’ and comprising a number of Great Lakes river steamers that were transferred to Britain under the Lease Lend arrangement. The formation, which also called in at New York, was spotted by U-380 a week later, and the Blitz wolfpack of U-boats was called in, with two other packs also alerted – a total of 17 U-boats. The German submarines began their attacks on 24 September, and the following day sank two steamers (SS Boston and SS New York). The convoy was ordered to scatter, but on 26 September the ships were ordered to reform the convoy, and Veteran set about gathering some of the merchantmen back into the fold. In doing so she found survivors of the SS New York, but while rescuing them she was struck by two torpedoes fired by U-404 and exploded, sinking with all 161 hands and taking a number of rescued merchant sailors with her. U-404 enjoyed moderate success on her seven war patrols, sinking 14 merchant ships totalling more than 70,000 tons, and was sunk with all hands on 28 July 1943 by depth charges from three Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers, two American and one British – all three aircraft lost one of their four engines through accurate fire from the submarine before it was destroyed.

27 September 1778

HM Ships Experiment and Unicorn engaged the American Raleigh in Penobscot Bay, Maine, and took her the next day after she had been run ashore. Raleigh, a 32-gun frigate of the Continental Navy built at Maine in 1775-6, spent her early years harassing British ships and convoys in the Atlantic, and on 25 September 1778 sailed from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with a brig and sloop in convoy. Just six hours in to their passage lookouts spotted two sails on the horizon, which turned out to be 50-gun fourth rate HMS Experiment and 20 gun sixth rate post ship Unicorn. Raleigh ordered the merchant ships back to port and drew off the British ships, which gave chase through the rest of the day and overnight. Late in the afternoon of 27 September Raleigh was finally overhauled and forced to fight, with a fierce seven-hour action taking place. Around midnight the British pair pulled back and Raleigh was taken into the islands of Penobscot Bay, south of Maine. Before the ship could escape the British resumed the battle, and Raleigh was driven aground on Matinicus Island, where her crew took to the boats and made it to shore. A party returned to the ship to salvage anything useful, but the British continued to fire on the stricken ship, forcing her crew to abandon her. Unicorn had been badly damaged, but the British managed to refloat Raleigh the following day and she was taken into service with the Royal Navy, taking part in the American Revolutionary War on the ‘other’ side. She was sold in Portsmouth in July 1783. Some of her American crew were captured after the action, but most escaped and made it back to Boston. Experiment remained active on the American coast, but on 23 September 1779 she was captured by the French 50-gun Sagittaire and put into service with the French navy, playing an active role in French activities in the Atlantic, the Caribbean and North America. In 1794 she was cut down to a frigate, and continued to be a thorn in the side of British mariners on the west coast of Africa until late 1797, when she was converted to a horse transport. She was finally hulked in Rochefort in the summer of 1802. Unicorn suffered a similar fate – in September 1780 she was sailing off Tortuga, near Haiti, when she saw a sail on the horizon. On approaching it she realised it was a full French fleet, and she fled, pursued by two ships of the line and a frigate. The frigate caught her after an hour, and the two were locked in battle for an hour until one of the other ships, the 74-gun Andromaque, also entered the fray. With her rigging in tatters and four guns down, Unicorn surrendered, and entered service with the French as Licorne. Her stint under the tricolour was brief, as she was recaptured in the Caribbean in April 1781 by 28-gun frigate HMS Resource, and she returned to the Royal Navy under the name Unicorn Prize. After a refit in Portsmouth she served in the Channel and Irish Sea until 1783. The following year she recommissioned and returned to the Caribbean for a final two-year spell before sailing back to England and being broken up at Deptford in August 1787.

28 September 1956

Inshore minesweepers HM Ships Broadley, Bisham and Edlingham, held in reserve in Hasler Creek off HMS Hornet in Portsmouth Harbour, were destroyed by a fire that started in Broadley on 28 September 1956. The three ships, one Ley- class and two Ham class, were relatively young. Edlingham was built in 1953, Bisham and Broadley in 1954, and all were held in operational reserve at the coastal forces base HMS Hornet in Gosport. The Ley class displaced 167 tons and were of composite construction, designed to act as inshore minehunters, with divers locating and destroying individual mines in rivers, estuaries and harbours – a new concept in dealing with the danger of such devices. Ham class ships shared the same hull as the Ley class, but were more traditional in their use of sweeps to deal with mines. They were also far more numerous – almost 100 were completed for various navies, mainly the Royal Navy, compared to ten Ley-class ships. Fire was discovered to have broken out on board Broadley on 28 September, spreading quickly to the two ships berthed alongside, so the three mine countermeasures vessels were towed into the centre of the harbour to prevent the blaze spreading even further. They were subsequently put into dock in Portsmouth with a view to repairing them, but all three were deemed beyond repair and were scrapped – Bisham and Edlingham in 1957, Broadley in 1959.

29 September 1918

Destroyers HM Ships Ouse and Star sank UB-115 off Northumberland on 29 September 1918. Ouse was a 635-ton River-class destroyer built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead and launched on 7 January 1905. Before World War 1 she was almost exclusively based on the East Coast at Harwich and the Nore. On the eve of war she moved to the Tyne with the 9th Destroyer Flotilla, carrying out patrols along the coast of North-East England, moving to the Humber Patrol in 1915. On 3 May 1917 Ouse and destroyer HMS Bat mistakenly attacked submarine HMS C10 of Blyth, killing one sailor and wounding a second, but the submarine survived. Ouse depth-charged and sank UC-70 off the Yorkshire coast on 28 August 1918 – the submarine had been damaged in an attack by an RAF Blackburn Kangaroo reconnaissance aircraft, but was finished off by Ouse with the loss of all 31 men on board. She repeated that success on 29 September in a joint enterprise with HMS Star. Star was a somewhat elderly Palmer three-funnel 30-knotter, launched in August 1897 on the Tyne and displacing 450 tons. Star spent much of her life along the South Coast of England, starting as an instructional ship then joining the Channel Fleet, though she did venture as far as Gibraltar in 1905. Star moved to Chatham at the outbreak of war to undertake anti-submarine and counter-mining patrols, a task she continued when she moved to the Humber in November 1916. On 29 September 1918 the former RNAS airship R29, escorting a convoy, noticed an oil slick in the sea to the north east of Blyth and homed in Ouse, Star and two armed trawlers to the spot. The two destroyers carried out a depth-charge attack which destroyed UB-115, killing all 39 men on board. The 640-ton U-boat, which had only been commissioned in May 1918, was on her second patrol, having sunk just one 340-ton ship, and is thought to have been the last U-boat to leave Zeebrugge on a war patrol in the conflict. Having survived the war, both Ouse and Star were deemed surplus to requirements and sold for scrap in 1919.

30 September 1944

HMS Terrible, the only British carrier built in a Royal Dockyard, was launched at Devonport on 30 September 1944. The 19,550-ton vessel never actually served as Terrible. One of six supposedly ‘disposable’ Majestic class light Fleet carriers, Terrible was not completed until after the war, and in 1947 was sold to Australia as HMAS Sydney. Acting as flagship early in her career, she saw service during the Korean War before being switched to training duties from 1955 after the arrival of her upgraded sister ship HMAS Melbourne. She went into reserve in 1958, but was reactivated in 1962 after undergoing modification to undertake the role of fast troop transport. She made 25 trips to Vietnam between 1965 and 1972 (earning the nickname the ‘Vung Tau Ferry’). The Australian government decided in July 1973 to decommission the ship and she was paid off in November the same year. Plans to preserve the carrier as a floating museum, convention centre or even a car park came to nothing, and on 23 December 1975 she was towed from Sydney to South Korea, where she was scrapped. She was not replaced.