SPIRITED AWAY
The afternoon of November 25, 1941, had been relatively quiet for the 1,350 men aboard the battleship HMS Barham. Along with 12 other ships from the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet, Barham was sailing off the coast of Egypt, providing gun cover for cruisers on the hunt for Axis ships en route to North Africa. The fleet thought they were alone in the area’s waters.
Crewmember Douglas Ralphs went below for a cup of tea. “I had just lifted the cup to my lips when the first ‘tin fish’ hit,” Ralphs recalled. “There was an enormous explosion, followed by a deathly silence, and an acrid smell of super-heated steam and the stench of cordite.”
A German U-boat torpedo had struck the battleship; two more quickly followed. The 643-foot Barham rolled to its port side. Crewmembers on the convoy’s other battleships, the Valiant and the Queen Elizabeth, watched as columns of smoke and water sprang from the ship’s wounds. They could do nothing to help.
Several of the boat’s four-inch magazines were on fire. The blaze spread, moving to the main 15-inch magazines. “There followed a big explosion amidships, from which belched black and brown smoke intermingled with flames,” Valiant’s commanding officer, Captain C. E. Morgan, later recalled. Wreckage peppered the water.
Four minutes, the battleship disappeared from sight. Though 488 men were saved, 862 others would never return home.
