Service
Hardy was laid down by Cammell Laird and Company at Birkenhead on 30 May 1935, launched on 7 April 1936 and commissioned on 11 December 1936. Excluding government-furnished equipment like the armament, the ship cost £278,482. The ship was assigned to the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla of the Mediterranean Fleet upon commissioning. Hardy patrolled Spanish waters from 1937 through 1939 during the Spanish Civil War enforcing the policies of the Non-Intervention Committee. After the destroyer HMS Hunter struck a mine off Almeria on 13 May 1937, Hardy stood by in case Hunter needed further assistance. Hardy was berthed in Palma, Majorca on 23 May 1937 when that port was bombed by the Spanish Republican Air Force, but was not damaged. After the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, she began a refit in Devonport Dockyard between 2 June and 29 July. The ship was in Malta when World War II began in September.
In October Hardy was transferred to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to hunt for German commerce raiders in the South Atlantic with Force K. The ship and her half-sisters, HMS Hostile, HMS Hereward, and HMS Hasty, rendezvoused with the battlecruiser HMS Renown, the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, and the light cruiser HMS Neptune on 17 December. They refuelled in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, before proceeding to the estuary of the River Plate in case the damaged German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee attempted to escape from Montevideo, Uruguay, where she had taken refuge after losing the Battle of the River Plate. She was given a brief overhaul at Devonport between 25 January and 12 February 1940 and was transferred to Greenock, Scotland for convoy escort duties after it was completed. The ship rejoined the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet in Scapa Flow on 9 March and became its flagship.
On 6 April Hardy and the rest of the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla escorted the four destroyer minelayers of the 20th Destroyer Flotilla as they sailed to implement Operation Wilfred, an operation to lay mines in the Vestfjord to prevent the shipment of Swedish iron ore from Narvik to Germany. The mines were laid on the early morning of 8 April, before the Germans began their invasion, and the destroyers joined the battlecruiser HMS Renown and her escorts.
The Admiralty ordered Captain Warburton-Lee to attack German shipping in Narvik, Norway on 9 April. The following morning Hardy led four of her half-sisters down Ofotfjord in a surprise dawn attack on Narvik harbour during a blinding snowstorm. A torpedo from Hardy blew off the stern of the German flagship, Z21 Wilhelm Heidkamp, and killed the German flotilla commander, Commodore Friedrich Bonte. Heidkamp sank the next day. Another hit a merchant ship in the stern. A second salvo of four torpedoes was fired at two other German destroyers, but missed and badly damaged the ore docks. After regrouping, Captain Warburton-Lee led another attack on the harbour later that morning, but inflicted little additional damage due to poor visibility.
As the British destroyers completed their second attack, they were engaged by three more German destroyers. The British destroyers attempted to withdraw to the west, but were pursued by the German ships. Two additional German destroyers crossed the T of the British ships and quickly knocked out Hardy's forward guns. More hits to the ship's bridge and superstructure set her on fire, mortally wounded Captain Warburton-Lee and killed or wounded all of the other officers on the bridge except Paymaster Lieutenant G.H. Stanning, the Captain's Secretary. Although badly wounded himself he took command and ordered her run aground at Vidrek after several more hits disabled her boilers. The First Lieutenant, who had not been present on the bridge, assumed command and ordered the ship abandoned. Some of the crew delayed doing so until the last torpedo was fruitlessly fired at a German ship and No. 4 gun fired until it was out of ammunition.
Captain Warburton-Lee was brought ashore but died after an hour from his head wounds. 139 other men managed to get ashore, although 26 were seriously wounded. Captain Warburton-Lee was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. Hardy was lifted off the beach at high tide and drifted to the head of Skjomen fjord where she capsized in shallow waters. The wreck was still visible as late as 1963.
Read more about this topic: HMS Hardy (1936)
Famous quotes containing the word service:
“We could not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent, indifference of Nature to these men’s necessities, while elsewhere she was equally serving others. Like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is unchangeableness. Thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of his Lowell, put to pilgrim’s shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop-shell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.”
—Peregrine, Sir Worsthorne (b. 1923)