Abstract
This volume is an account of the life and career of one of the several hundred British and Empire destroyers which bore the brunt of surface and anti-submarine warfare in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Arctic during the Second World War, in this case HMS Havock. A unit of the H-class destroyers authorised in 1934, Havock was laid down in May 1935, launched in July 1936 and completed in January 1937. The ship never knew a moment’s peace, being assigned first to the Royal Navy’s thankless patrol duties off Spain during the Civil War followed by service off Palestine in 1939. Wartime operations began in earnest with the First Battle of Narvik in April 1940 during which she was slightly damaged. Although involved in efforts to counter the naval side of the German invasion of the Netherlands the following month, Havock was spared the miseries of the withdrawal from the Continent and instead ordered back to the Mediterranean from which she never returned. Here she participated in the battles of Cape Spada and Matapan in July 1940 and March 1941 respectively, in the Malta convoys, at Second Sirte in March 1942, and finally on the Tobruk run. It was during the latter effort that she was lost by grounding on 6 April, resulting in the internment of numbers of her crew in Vichy Algeria and ending a tumultuous career over the course of which she earned no less than 11 battle honours.
This tale is told by what might charitably be called a collection but is best described as a ragbag of citations from memoirs, letters, official documents and news clippings, supported by appendices of material cited in extenso. Much as those interested in HMS Havock will find plenty of value in this volume, any hoping for a nourishing ship biography will come away disappointed. Entertaining though the story is, the disjointed arrangement of the material, scant grasp of the wider conjuncture and a staggering parade of misspellings and grammatical solecisms make for a fairly rum product. In fact, Destroyer at War is simply another iteration in a genre shaped at the hands of non-naval writers since the 1970s which has come to interpret unit history as essentially war career punctuated by action, a sort of factual counterpart to the arid technical studies which now dominate the other extreme of commercial naval writing. Although the sources plainly exist, the authors make little effort to reconstruct the community of the ship or the tenor of her life between alarums and excursions and so grasp the essence of the vessel and her company as shared by no other. To that extent Destroyer at War accurately reflects the limited purview of the authors who contrive to give the impression of the ship as a shell even when amply supplied with eyewitness material from sailors and veterans. Nor should the fact that this has become the prevalent approach to the genre deceive us into thinking it to be the only or the necessary treatment. The last naval veterans of the Second World War are now crossing the bar but their historians could scarcely have a broader or more accessible array of textual, visual and oral material both published and unpublished to draw on in bridging the gap between the experience of the past and the enduring fascination of a community of men fated to sail their ship through fire and water. Might such an emphasis on humanised experience over rehearsal of fact not help to arrest the present inexorable decline in readership of naval history?