Shortly after 9am on April 8th 1940, the British destroyer HMS Glowworm rammed the
18,000 ton German Heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper. It was the climax of a running battle that developed
after a single British destroyer inadvertently stumbled into the middle of a full scale German
invasion of Norway. This is the story of a fight to the end against overwhelming odds,
and a tale of gallantry that was only recognised in the most extraordinary of circumstances.
Three days before fighting a German cruiser single handed, HMS Glowworm was at anchor . The G class
destroyer, skippered by Lieutenant Commander Gerard Broadmead Roope had been assigned to
the 1st Destroyer Flotilla, part of the Royal Navy’s home fleet, in February 1940. At the
start of April, she was earmarked to be part of an operation to lay mines in the territorial
waters of neutral Norway to try and disrupt the flow of Swedish iron ore shipments to Germany.
Glowworm became part of the escort for the minelaying Force WV along with the
battlecruiser HMS Renown and a host of other destroyers. The British force departed Scapa
Flow on April 5th and set out into a north sea in the grip of an intense early spring storm.
After battling against the waves throughout the night, on the morning of April 6th a
particularly large swell pitched Glowworm over in a bad roll, throwing one of the
crew overboard. Lieutenant Commander Roope quickly sought and received permission from
Vice Admiral William Whitworth aboard Renown to search for him,
and so Glowworm detached from the rest of the British fleet and turned back,
sweeping over its previous course in hope of find a man shaped needle in an aquatic haystack.
After a period of time it became obvious that they were not going to find the missing sailor , but by
this stage Renown and the others had disappeared . Unable to ask Renown where she was directly due to
strict Radio silence, Lieutenant Commander Roope had no choice but to take his ship west again,
in a bid to ask Scapa Flow for further orders . Glowworm was now very much alone.
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Eventually HMS Glowworm was able to make contact with Scapa Flow and get
an approximate position report for Renown and Force WV. But the British Admiralty was about
to have a much bigger problem than an errant destroyer, as at the southern end of the North
Sea the German Kreigsmarine was stirring, for an operation rather more ambitious than laying
a few mines. On the evening of April 6th, virtually the entire German fleet left port,
embarking on an audacious plan to seize the entirety of Denmark and Norway in one
swoop. Escorting the largest flotilla of transports heading for Norway were
the capital ships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, as well as the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper.
The German flotilla sailed into the same stormy weather as the British had been dealing
with, and it badly affected particularly the German destroyers. Over the next 24 hours a number
of men were lost overboard as the ships fought their way north through the heavy swells. Unlike
the British ships though, the Germans were banned from deviating course to try and pick
up the unfortunate sailors – the timings for the invasion of Norway were too tight
and the naval forces arrayed against them too strong for that kind of rescue to be attempted.
By 4.45am on April 8th, as the sky began to lighten, the German fleet was about
100 miles off Trondheim- or at least, the capital ships were. The destroyers
had become scattered and delayed during a night of storms and were all over the
place somewhere to the south. Visibility was poor, with early morning fog and high seas.
HMS Glowworm meanwhile was still trying to make her way to a rendezvous with
Vice Admiral Whitworth’s squadron but was struggling. The ships Gyrocompass
had broken during the night, so navigation was difficult,
but at 5.30 Lieutenant Commander Roope reported to Whitworth that Glowworm was on her way.
A couple of hours of steady progress followed, until the destroyer’s lookouts spotted the
shape of another destroyer looming out of the mist shortly before 9am.
When challenged the vessel identified itself as ‘swedish destroyer Goteborg’. This seemed
distinctly unlikely to Lieutenant Commander Roope, so he raised steam, ran Glowworm’s
battle ensign up and opened fire. As you might be able to guess, the destroyer was not Swedish,
but was in fact the german destroyer Hans Ludemann , trying to rejoin the German fleet.
Ludemann had no interest in firing back and turned to the north west to escape, deliberately leading
Glowworm away from Vice Admiral Lutjen’s fleet before vanishing into the mist.
Shortly after Ludemann disappeared, the Bernd von Arnim appeared behind it, and this time there
was an exchange of fire, as Arnim tried to follow Ludemann to the north west. Travelling at 35 knots
the german destroyer was battered by the waves, losing two men overboard and suffering damage to
her bridge. Glowworm coped better, and began to reel in Lieutenant Commander Curt Rechel’s ship.
Arnim tried to use a smokescreen to cover its withdrawal , but still
could not shake the persistent destroyer. In desperation, Bernd von Arnim altered
course to the north east , hoping that the larger ships could be their salvation.
Luckily for Lieutenant Commander Rechel, at about the same time, 9.30am, Vice Admiral Lutjens was
dispatching the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper to the south to bring the situation under control.
Admiral Hipper was a heavy cruiser of more than 18,000 tons, with eight 8inch
guns. To say she outgunned Glowworm would be understating it. Led by Captain Hellmuth Heye,
Hipper was laden with troops from the 138th mountain regiment bound for Trondheim. She steamed
south towards the reported action, cutting through the waves with less trouble than the destroyers.
At 9:50, two mast heads could be seen, one on each side of the Hipper. Initially it
was impossible to make out which was friendly and which was hostile. The
destroyer on the starboard side flashed the letter A in morse code three times,
which the cruiser’s bridge took to be an attempt at asking who they were. Moments later,
Hipper’s lookouts reported the destroyer was flying a white ensign. It was glowworm.
Captain Heye quickly ordered his ship to open fire , with the hostile target at a range of
8,400 metres. He also swung Hipper’s bow around to point at Glowworm, to try and mitigate the
risk of a torpedo attack., Hipper soon struck the destroyer, prompting Roope to lay smoke to try
and gain some respite, of which there was little forthcoming . Guided byb an early form of radar,
Hipper continued to straddle its opponent, with the distance between them decreasing all the time.
Glowworm’s crew were doing their best to return fire, but their small 4inch
shells were having little effect on a german cruiser almost ten times their displacement.
After emerging from the smoke Hipper’s secondary armament opened up and pummelled the little ship.
The radio room was hit and destroyed. Shrapnel raked the deck from hits to
the bridge and the forwardmost gun was destroyed. Leading Seaman Fred Smith,
who was inside 2 gun during the battle described the scene later as “hell on earth.”
Despite the punishment she was receiving though, HMS Glowworm pressed her attack on the Admiral
Hipper. At 1010 am and just 800 metres from the enemy, she launched a spread of torpedoes.
Captain Heye had prepared for this with the positioning of his ship, and was able
to manuever to avoid them, with one torpedo passing by a few metres away on the port side .
Having played his strongest card, Lieutenant Commander Roope now darted his ship back into
the smokescreen , but Hipper was having none of it. Not keen to wait for more torpedoes to appear,
Captain Heye resolved to end the battle as quickly as possible, and charged through the smokescreen.
On Glowworm, the situation was desperate. Both of the forward guns were now out of action,
and the upper deck was strewn with injured sailors. A fire burned amidships,
and a shell had gone through the sick bay, causing huge casualties.
Lieutenant Commander Roope may have hoped for a respite with the smoke for protection – but Hipper
then appeared, remorselessly closing the distance. With no time to manuever to fire more torpedoes,
the British officer decided there was only one thing for it. He ordered as much speed
as the ship’s boilers could muster, and drove Glowworm into the side of the German cruiser.
There was a monumental crash as the two ships collided. In Glowworm’s aft magazine,
where stoker Albert Harris was stationed, there was a huge noise and all the lights went out. Very
swiftly afterwards, the ship began to list badly. As she scraped down the side of the german ship,
Glowworm ripped a hundred foot hole in Hipper’s hull. 500 tons of water rushed in and another
sailor, Seaman 2nd class Ritter, was thrown over the side. Glowworm’s bow was then ripped
off in the impact and the ship rapidly began to sink. Roope quickly ordered abandon ship,
and the ships crew scrambled their way over the side into the freezing waters of the north sea.
Initially, Captain Heye thought about moving swiftly away from the scene of the sinking,
assuming that other British ships must be in the area to pick up the survivors, but luckily for the
stricken sailors he reconsidered. Admiral Hipper swung around to position herself downwind of the
survivors, remaining on station for over an hour to pull as many survivors as they could out of
the sea. 30 were saved from the oil-drenched water, including Fred Smith and Albert Harris,
but not Lieutenant Commander Roope, whose strength gave out while trying to hold onto a rope thrown
over the side of Hipper. He, along with 115 other members of Glowworm’s crew perished.
By all accounts, Gerard Broadmead Roope’s leadership of his crew during this action
was exemplary- leading his men from the front against impossible odds to the very last.
Both Albert Harris and Fred Smith, when interviewed by the Imperial War Museum in
the 1990s described him as an extremely brave man. Harris went on to say that Roope was “a
true blue naval man and a destroyer captain. They were death or glory boys, destroyer captains.”
On the fight and eventual ramming, Harris said “we were all for it…whatever he did, we were there.”
Despite this, for a long time there was no acknowledgement of Roope’s gallantry- and indeed
that of the whole crew. After all Glowworm had sunk with no British witnesses who weren’t now in
captivity, so there was little information about the exact circumstances of her demise.
But then something extraordinary happened. Captain Heye, whilst
the war was still going on, wrote to the British admiralty via the swiss red cross,
outlining what he saw as Roope’s gallantry and recommending that he be given an award.
And so, in July 1945, more than five years after his death, Lieutenant Commander Roope was awarded
the Victoria Cross for his “supreme coolness and skill” under fire. It was the first time Britain’s
highest award for gallantry had been awarded based on the recommendation of an enemy combatant,
and was a fitting end to the tale of a little destroyer that went down fighting.