Night Encounter

As destroyers went, she was unmistakably a veteran. Her two funnels were circular in section, with no suspicion of streamlining about them. Her five guns were short and fat and their shields looked oddly skimped beside those of the newer ships as if she had outgrown them and needed new ones. The torpedoes in her two triple sets of tubes were museum curiosities compared with those in the quadruple mountings of her younger and larger consorts. Masts and gun director alike were innocent of anything as new-fangled as radar, but the broad black top of the foremost funnel and the absence of any number painted on the bow proclaimed that her Commanding Officer wore four stripes and was in charge of a whole flotilla. The teak board on her after screen bore the name “Stuart” in brass letters.

The twenty-three-year-old flotilla leader was not the only des­troyer of her vintage in the Eastern Mediterranean. Four others of like seniority belonged to her flotilla. They were easy to pick out by their long, thin foremost funnels and their short, fat after ones. In spite of their age, all five of them had U-boats to their credit and all belonged to the Royal Australian Navy. The remainder of her flock consisted of Royal Navy destroyers of a much later date.

The demands of war have a way of breaking up destroyer flotillas so that their ships are seldom if ever all in company. On a day late in March 1941, the leader was the only representative of the old gang in Alexandria harbour. The tempo of the war was still comparatively sedate. The Bartolomeo Colleone had been sunk. The high-speed chase towards Calabria was in the annals and the skies were not yet darkened by German wings. Hostile aircraft encountered by Admiral Cunningham’s ships could be dealt with by fighters from the carriers. Compared with what was very soon to come, those were halcyon days.

On that March afternoon, among the customary trickle of signals which filtered through to the leader was one which caused her Duty Staff Officer to leave the sunlight of the upper deck and knock at Captain Waller’s cabin door. “Raise steam with all dispatch, sir,” he reported. The signal was addressed to the whole fleet and could mean only one thing. The Italians were out.

While daylight lasted there were no signs of activity. After dark the destroyers slipped first and crept towards the harbour entrance. The heavy ships at their buoys were huge silhouettes and to those on the leader’s crowded bridge the winking of blue-shaded torches and the clank and thud of heavy chain cable on their forecastles told their tale of preparations for departure. Once past the boom gate at the harbour entrance, the destroyers assumed an orderly line ahead in the narrow searched channel which stretched twenty-two miles into the Mediterranean. Their speed was leisurely, for they were waiting for the big ships to follow them out.

One by one the awaited black shapes materialised out of the darkness. “Speed twenty knots, sir,” said the Chief Yeoman of Signals’ voice. The Navigator’s order down the voice-pipe was answered by a melodious chime from the engine-room reply gong. Soon the ancient bridge began to shudder and rattle as the rising engine revolutions urged the ship to her allotted station on the screen ahead of the battle fleet. Built for thirty-six knots, she had long left behind the days when she could even approach such a speed. At anything over twenty knots her whole hull protested.

The night passed without incident. Dawn brought action stations and all eyes on the leader’s bridge searched the horizon intently. It was true that the battleships had radar, but you never knew: and anyway it was the proper habit for a ship to ensure that daylight brought no surprises from a more alert enemy. Specks detached themselves from the bulk of the carrier and gained height steadily: the dawn air search had begun. Their mission was fruitful, for it did not seem long before other specks broke off from the carrier and rose more ponderously than the earlier ones. “There go the torpedomen,” said the Captain. Through binoculars the weapons themselves could be made out slung under the fuselages of the slow moving bi-planes. Lively speculation on what they would achieve broke out all over the destroyer. 

“All quarters stand to.” The boatswain’s mate proclaimed the answer to the whole ship’s company. Over the upper deck and down below spread the confirmatory news that the enemy battleship had been slowed down by the aircrafts’ torpedoes. Surely reprisals would come from the air now? But none materialised. By the afternoon the hurrying fleet had closed the distance from its quarry so much that an encounter in daylight began to look possible. “Hoist the Wallaby Jack,” said the Captain, without taking the binoculars from his eyes. The Chief Yeoman spoke sharply down the voice-pipe to the flag deck, “Masthead, Commonwealth Blue: starboard topsail, white ensign.” The starred blue ensign of Australia rose in a bunch to the foremast-head and was broken out by a jerk of the halliards. The largest white ensign appeared at the yard-arm and at the same time every other ship in company blossomed with battle ensigns.

More than one writer has been stirred by such a sight. The small ensign, which flies at the peak day and night while a warship is at sea and is sullied by funnel fumes, becomes taken for granted. The large battle ensigns, with their brilliant blue and white, made a picture of arresting beauty. Flickering against the cloudless sky, they shouted the ship’s nationality to all whom it might concern and gave clear warning against drawing the wrong conclusion if any one of them were to be shot away.

But the horizon remained clear of the expected smoke or mastheads. Slowly anticlimax supplanted tension. There was no way of passing orders or news round the ship but that which Nelson’s ships had used, ­the time-honoured piping of the boatswain’s mate. It therefore fell to him to dispel the expectation that he himself had raised. Along decks and down hatches went the shrill whistling of his call, followed by the chanted order, “Port watch to defence stations.” Half the armament remained manned while the other watch went below.

At sunset there was still no sign of the enemy. The Gunner’s Yeoman, stocky and bearded, began his rounds of the upper deck. At each quarters—gun and torpedo—he hung a length of smouldering slow-match with its burning end hidden in an empty tobacco tin. Smoking means much to men closed up for long hours at exposed quarters, but the flare of a struck match or petrol lighter is a very real danger at night in wartime. The First Lieutenant carefully checked the darkening of the whole ship and the watch below turned in fully dressed after supper.

A few minutes before ten o’clock, sleep was shattered by the alarm bells. Running feet hammered on steel decks and ladders. The guns seemed to wake up and stretch as they were tested through their full limits of elevation and training. Slowly the torpedo tubes were swung through their full arcs of traverse. “Coxswain at the wheel”, “Torpedo tubes closed up and cleared away”, “All boilers connected”, “All guns closed up, cleared away and lined up”, “Emergency W/T position manned”. One by one the reports of readiness for battle reached the bridge by voice-pipe, telephone or word of mouth. Soon the news for which everyone was waiting was passed round the ship. Darkened ships had been sighted.

What seemed a long pause followed. The night was moonless but thickly starred. Then, without warning, a single silver-blue search­light beam pierced the darkness and every detail of the ship was lit up by an immense mushroom of red flame. The Fiume’s death agony had begun. Brilliant orange flashes now came at short intervals as all three British battleships released their terrible broadsides.

But the destroyers were still on the leash, keeping their appointed stations on the battle fleet. Three ships could be seen burning fiercely before the moment came when the Chief Yeoman read out the text of the long-awaited signal, “Destroyers close and attack.” Wheel orders passed down the voice-pipe and the ship heeled on the turn, heading for the nearest of the blazing ships. By this time the sky was bright with slowly descending star-shells, which threw lurid patches of light onto the surface of the sea. Streams of red, white and green tracers soared up to meet them from the enemy’s anti-aircraft guns in a fruitless attempt to snuff them out.

Until this moment, those above decks in the leader had had a chance to look at the scene as spectators. Now it was each man to his own job and an intense effort to avoid missing orders or reports, for it was not long before the crash of her first salvo shook the ship throughout her whole length. Station-keeping at night had long made every friendly silhouette in company familiar and here was an alien one. But the guns did not continue firing for long as this was a side issue. The real business in hand was the coup de grace for the shattered cruiser, which was the job of the torpedoes. Orders and reports passed between the tubes and the torpedo control officer on the bridge, and the tubes came to rest on the starboard beam. “Take the burning cruiser,” said the Captain, “and don’t use any deflection. I’m turning to fire now.” Again the ship heeled as the wheel went over and righted herself as it was eased when the order “Stand by” went down to the tubes. Almost at the same moment the flames from the target began to be eclipsed by a slow-moving black shadow, whose shape announced its identity. The Captain gave quick orders: “Take the undamaged cruiser; no change of settings.” The ship continued to swing and the sight traversed the second cruiser. The six torpedoes jumped overboard and started on their mission. 

Down at the tubes the Gunner (T) began to count the minutes before the hoped-for explosion was due. In this interval another silhouette to port brought the director and guns round to that side when a look­out’s report turned all eyes on the bridge to another bearing. A shadow rose up and grew as it approached. Two voices said simultaneously, “Enemy destroyer!” The shifting of the guns to this more urgent threat seemed intolerably slow. As the shadow loomed bigger, the leader turned to present her full broadside and to avoid a collision at a mutual speed of perhaps fifty knots. For a few seconds a man could be seen walking aft along the Italian’s deck, guiding himself with a torch. Then, when she was right abeam, the momentary picture disappeared in a blinding orange flash as the leader’s guns at last spoke. Armour-piercing shell, bursting inside the enemy’s bridge, silhouetted its disintegrating fragments and her stern began to burn fiercely. There was time for only one more broadside as the ships raced past each other, but the destroyer astern finished the work.

The leader continued her search for the cruiser at which she had fired torpedoes. Soon her black shape was discerned, listing and almost stopped, with her turrets trained fore-and-aft; a sitting torpedo target presented to a ship which had already fired her whole outfit! There was nothing left but gunfire, but the enemy’s power of ret­aliation was still an unknown quantity. The Captain, therefore, ordered about the only ruse of which the ship was capable, the firing of coloured tracers into the air after the manner of the enemy when the action had first been joined. The mimicry was perfect, for the tracers and the light guns which fired them were all of enemy origin—the spoils of General Wavell’s victories in the Western Desert.

This false recognition signal was made when it was judged that the enemy could not fail to have seen the ship. Whether she was deceived or not, the leader crept closer and closer unopposed until, at a bare 1500 yards, the five guns again opened fire. Shell bursts appeared on the target’s superstructure, but the dreaded sight of the heavy turrets swinging round to present their muzzles at point-blank range never came. It was as if she were dead or had ceased to care what happened to her. A small glow appeared in her upperworks and spread into a sizeable fire before it became clear that she was still alive. No one in the leader saw the flash of her secondary batteries firing, but their shell splashes began to fall uncomfortably closer until the ship was in the midst of them.

Fresh reports now compelled attention. Binoculars traversing the horizon revealed large and apparently undamaged enemies on three sides. It was time to stop pretending that an old destroyer could sink a modern cruiser with gunfire alone. So the oldest and smallest ship of that night encounter withdrew quietly and set about finding the main body of the fleet.

In a night melee involving a large number of ships it is notor­iously difficult to find out just what has happened. The necessity for reticence on the ether, the lack of radar and her intense preoccupation with the events in her own small circle of visibility had all conspired to keep the ship in ignorance of the balance sheet of the action. By a miracle she had come through unscathed, but at various times burning ships had been in sight pretty well all round the compass and there was no knowing for certain on whose side they all were. At first light there was an anxious count of the number of ships in company, when the astonishing truth became clear—there was actually one more than at nightfall the day before. Not a single friendly ship had been so much as touched and another of the Australian veterans had joined company in the night.

The enemy’s battleship had escaped, but three cruisers and two destroyers had been sent to the bottom. It was an occasion worthy of a name of its own and there was great curiosity as to what it would be. Not many days later we knew. Officers and men crowded into the destroyer’s upper mess deck on a hot Sunday morning for Divine Service, whose rubric contained the Psalm of Praise after Victory or Deliverance from an Enemy: and in the visiting chaplain’s hand was a leaflet headed, “A Form of Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the Great Victory of Matapan”. 

Richard Blakesley Chenevix Trench was born on October 28, 1912, attended Shrewsbury School and joined the Royal Navy as a young Cadet. During the Second World War he saw service on HMS Woolwich, HMS Osprey, HMS Dainty and in February 1941 he was appointed to the destroyer HMAS Stuart as part of the 10th Destroyer Flotilla. He went on to serve on HMS King George V operating with the US Pacific Fleet. He retired from service in the Royal Navy as a Lieutenant Commander in 1955. He had a lifelong interest in naval history and was an expert model ship builder. He died in May 1979. His daughter, Fenella Townsend, found the manuscript of this unpublished article while going through her father’s papers in Toronto.