12 NAVY NEWS, MARCH 2011 653 The boar war(ship)


NOW if you’re named after Britain’s most famous fi shing port, it’s quite obvious what your ship’s mascot would be.


suitably ‘boarish’ name for said beast. Correct again. Jimmy. Obviously,


Greece ........................1941 Crete ...........................1941 Libya ...........................1941 Arabian Gulf ...............2003


Class: Sandown-class mine countermeasures vessel Pennant number: M108 Builder: Vosper Thornycroft, Woolston Launched: August 10, 1998 Commissioned: September 25, 1999


roam around the decks of HMS Grimsby: (a) it’s a tad dangerous for the crew; (b) it’s a tad hot in the Gulf. Jimmy is safely back in the UK – where in the not-too-distant future the minehunter’s ship’s company will be able to visit him in the flesh (apologies for the very laboured segue...). The Sandown-class warship is coming to the end of her extended spell in Bahrain (she’s been in the small island kingdom since early 2009) and will return to her more traditional home on the Clyde later this year. Before that 6,000-mile journey


Displacement: 450 tons Length: 172ft (52.5m) Beam: 34ft (10.5m) Draught: 7½ft (2.3m) Speed: 13kt Complement: 34-40 Propulsion: 2 x Paxman Valenta diesels generating 1,523hp; Voith-Schneider propulsion; 2 x Schottel bow thrusters Range: 2,500 nautical miles at 12kt Sensors: Type 2093 mine search and classification sonar


Armament: 1 x 30mm; 1 x Minigun; Seafox mine disposal system


Jimmy doesn’t


That’s right, a boar. And you’d obviously pick a


interested in the work of Coalition naval forces in the Gulf, and undertaken a few more exercises. Grimsby is no stranger to these


waters; the current ship earned her sole battle honour as part of the sustained mine clearance effort during the 2003 campaign in Iraq when Saddam Hussein’s regime peppered the waters of the northern Gulf with mines. All three of HMS Grimsby’s other battle honours were earned by her predecessor, a sloop built at Devonport in 1933-34. After service on the China


Station initially, the ship was recalled to the UK when war broke out in 1939. Grimsby was subsequently


there’s quite a lot of work to do as part of the RN’s sizeable mine warfare presence in the Gulf (two Hunts, two Sandowns). Grimsby’s longstanding presence east of Suez is thanks to a good deal of maintenance in the punishing Gulf environment and the rotation of the entire ship’s company every six or seven months.


M108 are Crew 5 from 1st Mine Countermeasures Squadron, who took over Grimsby from their comrades in Crew 1 in December.


exercises,


in Dubai, enjoyed a spot of maintenance alongside at Mina Salman port in Bahrain, hosted senior Canadian politicians


Since then the ship’s conducted enjoyed New Year


The latest ‘occupants’ of


dispatched to the Mediterranean and saw extensive action in the spring of 1941 when war engulfed the Balkan Peninsula. The sloop was called upon to


escort convoys from Alexandria to Greece... and within weeks was heading in the opposite direction evacuating British troops from first Greece then Crete as German troops overran the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. Her luck ran out on May 25 1941 off the besieged North African port of Tobruk. Grimsby was ferrying troops and supplies for the garrison when she was sunk by the Luftwaffe just 25 miles from her destination. As for the ship’s mascot, that all stems from the ship’s badge – based on the coat of arms of the East Coast port. Some 400 years ago the mayor and his townsfolk enjoyed the right to hunt wild boar in woods just outside Grimsby.


HEROES OF THE ROYAL NAVY No.83 – Lt Sir Marshall Warmington


IT’S a shame there was no colour film to capture the impressive sight of Norwegian oil tanks burning fiercely in the


village of Stamsund. But this photograph (No. N396 from the archives of the Imperial War Museum) is visible proof of the success of Britain’s first major commando raid, Operation Claymore, a ‘tip and run’ strike at the Lofoten Islands in Norway. Arching into the Norwegian Sea to the west of Narvik, the island chain was among the most remote outposts of the Nazi empire. It was here that British warships had sought shelter to lick their wounds after the two battles of Narvik in the spring of 1940.


Nearly 12 months on, two survivors of that battle – HM Ships Eskimo and Bedouin – were at the heart of a force of half a dozen warships and transporters carrying Army commandos and Norwegian volunteers determined to strike a blow at the Hun.


Enemy shipping was sunk, Huns captured and fish oil factories destroyed – and with them tanks containing some 800,000 gallons of oil and glycerine which would have been used by the German armaments industry. To many of the fledgling commandos, however, the Lofoten Raid was a bit of a disappointment – Jerry didn’t put up much of a fight, to the chagrin of the attackers (the sole British casualty was an officer who accidently shot himself with his revolver). But in the late winter of 1941, the Lofoten raiders enjoyed their brief moment in the spotlight. One junior officer dashed


off a telegram from Stamsund, ‘A Hitler, Berlin’: “You said in your last speech German troops would meet the British wherever


into one of the Norwegian fishing boats clustered around the destroyer (in the brief skirmish with the Germans earlier in the day, Somali had dropped a depth charge which had achieved little except bring scores of dead fish to the surface) and sailed across to the Krebs.


What the Somali’s guns had


not wrecked, the trawler’s few surviving crew – now cowering on deck, one of them waving a white flag – had.


But the Germans had not photographic


they landed. Where are your troops?” Lord Lovat (as in lovat green and the legendary commando leader on D-Day) took a bus to a nearby Luftwaffe seaplane base and captured the staff; its miffed commander vowed to report Lovat’s ‘unmilitary’ behaviour to Hitler.


were the edifying sights of oil tanks blazing, German troops


For the newsreels there


and sailors being captured, Norwegian collaborators (Quislings) being rounded up, and more than 300 locals being rescued from Nazi enslavement. All in all, a jolly good show. What the Pathé cameras did not show their audience was the real triumph of the Lofoten Raid: the seizing of rotor wheels and code books of an Enigma machine in pretty much the last action of this ‘tip and run’ raid.


In the opening minutes of the landing the destroyer HMS Somali had encountered the German armed trawler Krebs which had the temerity to offer (brief) resistance before the destroyer’s guns knocked out half the crew and sent the vessel drifting towards rocks, where she grounded.


and was drifting.


With the raid completed and the task force about to withdraw, Krebs had refloated


Rather than sink the trawler, the grandly-titled Sir Marshall George Clitheroe Warmington, 3rd Baronet and, more importantly in this instance, Lieutenant RN and signals officer aboard Somali, suggested boarding her. Warmington – a dozen years in the Navy, half of them in the world of signals and intelligence – and two shipmates climbed


destroyed everything. Stepping over the bodies of the skipper and two crew in the wheelhouse, Marshall Warmington made for the captain’s cabin, where he found a locked drawer. The junior officer drew his pistol and fired. The bullet shattered the lock... then bounced around the room narrowly missing him. Inside the drawer, Warmington found a couple of discs – rotor wheels for the Germans’ Enigma encoding machine. At the same time his comrades gathered up bundles of papers and documents, then returned to Somali; the destroyer’s captain was keen to leave, fearing the Luftwaffe would attack Two days later the Lofoten raiding force was back in Scapa Flow. Within a week, Warmington’s discs and the papers his party had seized were at Bletchley Park, home of the codebreakers.


The documents in particular


proved vital – among them the settings for the cipher machine, allowing the cryptographers to read all German radio traffic for February 1941.


Another piece of the tortuous Enigma jigsaw had slotted into place. ■ THIS photograph – and 9,999,999 others from a century of war and peace – can be viewed or purchased at www. iwmcollections.org.uk, by emailing photos@IWM.org.uk, or by phoning 0207 416 5333.


Facts and figures


Battle Honours


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