This week in the War, 17–23 February 1941: British monitor HMS Terror is fatally damaged off the coast of Libya

Monitors were the Royal Navy’s ugly ducklings. Slow, ungainly, and strange to behold. The calibre of their armament matched that of a battleship—i.e. 15 inch guns—but they possessed only two such guns, mounted in a single turret. A casual observer might imagine that someone had forgotten to build the rest of the ship.

The monitor HMS Terror was built by Harland & Wolff, and launched in 1916. Her role was to lie off an unfriendly coast and to bombard hostile forces entrenched on shore. During World War I, she took part in the Fourth Battle of Ypres.

In World War II, she was stationed in the Mediterranean and bombarded enemy-held fortifications as part of the O’Connor-Wavell campaign against Italian forces in Libya.

This week in the war, on 22 February 1941, HMS Terror was sailing east from Benghazi when she was attacked by German Junkers 88s based in Sicily. She was badly damaged and, despite an attempt to tow her to safety, she sank a day or so later off Derna, between Benghazi and Tobruk.