1 June 1943

Light cruiser HMS Penelope, along with destroyers Paladin and Petard, bombarded the Pantelleria on 1 June 1943. The bombardment of the Mediterranean island was a precursor to landings by the British 1st Infantry Division. The Arethusa-class cruiser, which acquired the name HMS Pepperpot as she was so heavily punctured by bomb and shell fragments, was hit once but suffered little damage. Penelope’s involvement was part of a wider operation (‘Corkscrew’ to take the Italian island, which lay around 60 miles south-west of Sicily and was an essential milestone in the plan to invade the larger island (Operation Husky). From mid-May warships, bombers and f ighter-bombers pounded Pantelleria with a view to taking the island and preventing Axis forces using it as an air base to support operations over Sicily. The pummelling took out radar installations and damaged or destroyed nearly half the gun batteries , but hopes that bombardment alone would do the trick proved unrealistic – or so the Allies thought. Accordingly, the planned amphibious invasion went ahead on 11 June, but as the first British commandos went ashore they found that the 12,000-strong Italian garrison had been given permission by Rome to surrender that very morning, and the landings were thus unopposed. The nearby islands of Lampedusa and Linosa followed suit in the next few days, and the way was clear for Operation Husky to proceed the following month. Penelope, a product of Harland and Wolff in Belfast and commissioned in November 1936, continued to play an active role in the area, bombarding targets in Sicily during Husky. Later that year she also provided gunfire support for landings on mainland Italy, and also served out of Haifa and Gibraltar, the latter in a (successful) hunt for German blockade runners. On 15 February 1944 she left Naples to return to the Anzio area, but was struck by a torpedoes, 15 minutes apart, from German submarine U-410. Almost 420 men went down with their ship, with just over 200 sailors being rescued.

2 June 1981

Light aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal was launched by the Queen Mother on 2 June 1981. The ship was the third and last of the Invincible-class through deck cruisers to be ordered, a description that was a result of an original concept as escort cruisers to work with the ultimately-cancelled new class of large aircraft carrier. By the time the ship was launched at Swan Hunter on the Tyne the class was being formally referred to as aircraft carriers. Ark Royal was originally earmarked as HMS Indomitable (following the naming pattern of her older sisters Invincible and Illustrious) but was eventually renamed after the fourth Ark Royal, as that popular ship’s withdrawal had left its mark on public opinion. At an initial 22,000 tons she was slightly larger than her sisters, and often assumed the role of Fleet Flagship while in commission. She saw service in the Bosnian War in 1993 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and took part in the somewhat unusual evacuation of tourists stranded in Europe by the eruption of an Icelandic volcano in 2010, which grounded flights around the continent for periods of up to eight days at a time. Following a final overseas visit to Hamburg in November 2010 the ship returned to Portsmouth, and she was formally decommissioned on 11 March 2011, some five years earlier than originally planned because of cuts to the defence budget. Plans to reuse her as a museum ship, a hospital ship, a static helipad on the Thames or even a hotel, casino or sunken artificial reef all came to nothing, and she was towed from Portsmouth on 20 May 2013 bound for a Turkish scrapyard.

3 June 1805

Stone frigate HMS Diamond Rock was surrendered to the French in the face of overwhelming odds on 3 June 1805 – though not without a fight. The rock is a basalt island that juts 175m high out of the sea close to the main port on the southern coast of Martinique in the Caribbean. Its strategic position on the sea lane between Martinique and Saint Lucia meant that British warships blockading the area in the early 19th Century took a closer look, particularly the schooner Ma Sophie, which had been captured in December 1803 by HMS Centaur. The former privateer was set to work patrolling the strait between Diamond Rock and Martinique, and Ma Sophie’s commander Lt William Donnett frequently visited the uninhabited island to gather a green plant that helped prevent scurvy amongst his crew. Between December 1803 and February 1804, when conditions were calm, the Royal Navy crew managed to transfer two 18pdr cannon ashore and haul them to the top of the rock, where rudimentary fortifications and a garrison were built With around 120 British sailors manning the island, it was formally commissioned as HMS Diamond Rock as a sloop-of-war on 7 February, and further strengthened with a 24pdr cannon in a cave half-way up, two more at the base of the rock and a 24pdr carronade covering the only landing site. At some time during this process Ma Sophie was destroyed in an explosion, killing all but one of her crew. HMS Diamond Rock proved an austere (but stable) unit – ratings slept in caves, officers in tents, livestock was kept top supplement the spinach like greens that grew naturally and supplies were hauled up from supply boats by a system of pulleys. A rudimentary hospital was created in a cave near sea level, and passing Royal Navy ships were obliged to show due respect to the island as they would to a more conventional warship. At one point a disgruntled Martinique slave revealed to the British that the French were planning to build a gun battery on the coast to attack the rock, so a small British landing party went ashore, walked to the local plantation house and seized the only French engineer on Martinique, as well as a party of soldiers, and whisked them away to captivity. With Diamond Rock commanding the entrance to Fort-de-France, the main port on Martinique, French shipping was forced to give the rock a wide berth, making them vulnerable to other blockading British warships. This continued for a year and a half, with French attempts to take the rock failing – until mid-May 1805, when a 16-strong combined Franco-Spanish war fleet under Admiral Villeneuve (the fleet that would later form the core of the enemy fleet at Trafalgar) began a blockade of Diamond Rock. Having cut British supply lines, the French actually landed on the rock on 31 May, though they were trapped in sea-level caves for a period until the British garrison, short of water and ammunition and under fierce bombardment from French 74-gun warships, surrendered to a far-superior force on 3 June. The 110-strong British garrison lost two men killed and one was wounded, the French are thought to have had between 50-60 dead and wounded, and lost three gunboats. British prisoners were repatriated a few days later, and a subsequent court-martial exonerated the defenders of Diamond Rock for the loss of their ‘ship’ and praised them for their plucky defence. Diamond Rock was recaptured by the British in February 1809 as part of the ongoing Napoleonic Wars, but was handed back to France in 1815 as part of a deal that saw Martinique returned to French control.

4 June 1943

HMS Truculent sank brand-new submarine U-308 in the Norwegian Sea off the Faeroes on 4 June 1943. The T-class boat was launched by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow on 12 September 1942, and went on to sink nine enemy vessels before peace was declared. Initially based at Lerwick, Truculent set out for her first war patrol off Northern Norway on15 February 1943, and continued to prowl cold northern waters on patrols until she sank her first victim, U-308. The U-boat, launched at Lubeck just weeks after Truculent first hit the water, was at 860 tons little more than half the displacement of the British boat. She set out on her first war patrol from Kiel on 31 May, three days before Truculent left Shetland on her fourth patrol. Their paths crossed far to the north of the Faeroes in the early afternoon of 4 June, when Truculent spotted U-308 three or four miles distant. Truculent dived and attacked with six torpedoes, two of which ripped into the U-boat, causing her to rapidly sink with all 44 men on board. Truculent’s next two patrols were far out into the Atlantic and in the Bay of Biscay; the seventh proved significant when she towed midget submarine X6 to the Altenfjord in September 1943 and the little vessel went on to cause German battleship Tirpitz serious damage. Two months later Truculent was on her way to Trincomalee via Gibraltar, Beirut, Port Said, Aden and Colombo, starting her eighth war patrol on 8 February 1944. Three more patrols followed, all in the northern Indian Ocean, and she sank eight enemy ships, the majority Japanese, including an Army transport and merchantman ‘hell ship’ Harugiku Maru, which unknown to the submariners was carrying more than 700 Allied prisoners of war, of which nearly 200 died in the sinking. Truculent survived the war and continued in service, but on 12 January 1950, following post-refit trials, the submarine was struck by Swedish tanker Divina in the Thames Estuary, the collision being caused by confusion over the lights borne by the Swedish vessel. Truculent quickly sank, and it is though most of her crew survived the accident but were swept away and died in the freezing river. A total of 64 men died, including some dockyard workers; 15 men were picked up by Divina and a further five by a Dutch ship. The submarine’s loss led to the development of a formal Port of London control system, and the introduction of a highly-visible white steaming light on the bows of British submarines, known as the ‘Truculent light’.

5 June 1916

Armoured cruiser HMS Hampshire was sunk by a mine off Orkney on 5 June 1916 while on passage to Russia with a top-level military delegation on board. The 11,000-ton cruiser, launched on the Tyne by Armstrong Whitworth on 24 September 1903, spent some time in reserve and the Mediterranean before joining the China Station at Wei Hai Wei, from where she hunted German commerce raiders on the outbreak of hostilities. At the end of 1914 she was assigned to the Grand Fleet, and was part of the 2nd Cruiser Squadron at the Battle of Jutland, though she played a very minor role in the action. Just days later, she was given the task of carrying the British Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, to Arkhangelsk in Russia on a diplomatic mission. She sailed from Scapa Flow into the teeth of a gale on the afternoon of 5 June 1916, and as her two escort destroyers struggled in the heavy seas it was decided to send them back to harbour as it was very unlikely German submarines would be active in such conditions. Shortly before 2000 that evening, around two miles west of Orkney, Hampshire struck a mine laid a week before by U-75, blowing a hole in her hull forward of her bridge. As she began to sink boats were lowered, but in the gale-force winds most of them were smashed against the cruiser’s hull. A total of 737 men were lost with the ship, including Kitchener and his entire staff; a dozen sailors managed to struggle ashore on Carley floats. Rumours swirled that the cruiser was carrying a significant amount of gold, perhaps as a loan to the Russian government, but there has never been official confirmation. The sinking, and the loss of Kitchener was a blow to British morale, following so close on the heels of the inconclusive clash of the great naval fleets at Jutland.

6 June 1779

Post-ship HMS Daphne captured the American privateer Oliver Cromwell on 6 June 1779 during the American Revolutionary War. The 430-ton Sphinx class sixth rate, which initially carried 20 guns, was launched at Woolwich in 1776, one of a class of ten such vessels built in the Royal Dockyards, and was serving on the East Coast of North America when she spotted privateer Oliver Cromwell on 6 June 1779. Oliver Cromwell, a 300-ton, 20-gun corvette, was the largest ship in the Connecticut State Navy, and had captured two British ships the previous year. On 6 June she was off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, when Daphne, along with HMS Delaware (a frigate captured from the Americans two years before) and the privateer Union, showed up. The battle raged for several hours until Oliver Cromwell was forced to strike her colours. The ship was fitted out locally as the Restoration immediately following the battle, then formally bought by the Royal Navy later the same year and renamed HMS Loyalist. Her Royal Navy career was not lengthy; after taking some prizes, she was captured by the French in August 1781 on the Chesapeake River, and she entered French service as Loyaliste, though by the end of the year she had been presented to the Americans, bringing her career full circle. HMS Daphne, which was in French hands between January 1795 and December 1797, was sold in May 1802.

7 June 1915

Flt Sub Lt Reginald Warneford won the Victoria Cross for destroying a Zeppelin near Ghent on 7 June 1915 – the first VC to be won by the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). Warneford was born in Darjeeling, India, on 15 October 1891, where his father was a railway engineer. He was brought to England while still very young and attended school in Stratford-upon-Avon, but then returned to India with his family. After school he joined the British India Steam Navigation Company, and was in Canada, awaiting passage back to India, when war broke out. Warneford sailed to Britain instead and signed up, first for the Army, then to the RNAS to train as a pilot. He completed his training in February 1915 (his instructors noting both his high level of skill and his tendency to over -confidence) and after a brief spell with 2 Wing in Kent he joined 1 Wing on the coast of Belgium, his first operational unit, on 7 May 1915. The following month saw him prove his mettle in ground attacks as well as aerial combat, so much so that he was given a free hand and his own aircraft on a roving commission. On 17 May he encountered Zeppelin L-39 as it set out to raid Britain, but his machine-gun attack did not stop the airship, which climbed out of range. He was more successful on 7 June, when he was on patrol in his French Morane-Saulnier Type L monoplane. Warneford spotted Zeppelin L-37 near the Belgian coast and attacked, managing to evade its defensive gunfire before flying above it and dropping six 20lb Hale bombs, one of which set the airship on fire. The German craft crashed onto a convent school near Ghent, killing eight of its crew, as well as two nuns in the school. Warneford’s aircraft was flipped over by the blast from the Zeppelin, stalling the engine and forcing the Naval pilot to glide down behind enemy lines. He spent more than half an hour tinkering with the engine before he got it restarted, and took off just as German troops turned up to see what was going on (he reportedly told the Germans to “give my regards to the Kaiser!”) His exploits won him the Victoria Cross, but he did not live long enough to receive the medal in person. Ten days after downing the Zeppelin, and on the day he received the Legion d’honneur from French Army Commander in-Chief General Joffre, Warneford took a test flight in an aircraft he was tasked with delivering to the RNAS at Veurne. An American journalist flew as Warneford’s passenger, but shortly after take-off the wings collapsed and the aircraft disintegrated, throwing both men from their seats. The journalist died instantly, and Warneford succumbed to his serious injuries on the way to hospital. He was buried at Brompton Cemetery in London, with thousands attending the funeral procession of one of the first military aviation heroes.