Qualla: HMS Exmouth (H02)

HMS Exmouth (H02): Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It was the worst kind of weather. A southerly gale, sleet, the North Sea piled high and breaking on itself, a January darkness that would not lift. Just before five in the morning on 21 January 1940 a U-22 captain named Karl-Heinrich Jenisch put two torpedoes into a Royal Navy destroyer escorting a small merchant ship through the Moray Firth. The destroyer was HMS Exmouth, an E-class flotilla leader six years off the Portsmouth slipway. She broke up and went down in the storm. All 190 men aboard her - officers, ratings, the captain himself - were lost. The merchant ship she had been protecting reached port. The bodies began washing ashore over the days that followed.

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HMS Exmouth (H02): A Flotilla Leader Built for Other Wars

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Exmouth had not been designed for what killed her. She was a destroyer flotilla leader - larger than a standard destroyer, with extra accommodation for a flotilla commander and his staff, ordered under the 1931 Naval Programme and laid down at Portsmouth Dockyard on 15 March 1933...

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HMS Exmouth (H02): Abyssinia, Spain, and the Years Before

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Exmouth's career through the 1930s tracked the slow gathering of the European storm. From August 1935 to March 1936 the Admiralty attached her flotilla to the Mediterranean Fleet because of the Abyssinia Crisis - Italy's invasion of Ethiopia threatening to draw the Royal Navy in....

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HMS Exmouth (H02): Convoy Duty in the Western Approaches

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When war began in September 1939 Exmouth was with the Home Fleet. In December the Admiralty transferred her to the Western Approaches Command - the great choke-point west of Ireland where the Atlantic convoys arrived - to escort merchant traffic and run anti-submarine patrols. In...

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HMS Exmouth (H02): 21 January 1940

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

U-22, a Type IIB coastal submarine commanded by Karl-Heinrich Jenisch, had been hunting in the Moray Firth for several days. At approximately 04:50 on 21 January she fired her torpedoes. Exmouth was hit twice in heavy seas. She broke apart and sank rapidly somewhere off the north...

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HMS Exmouth (H02): The Wreck Found, the Names Kept

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The wreck of HMS Exmouth was not located for sixty-one years. In July 2001 an independent diving expedition found her in the Moray Firth and Historic Scotland verified the identification. She lies in deep water, broken but recognisable. Under the Protection of Military Remains Ac...

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