Lieutenant-Commander Gerard Broadmead Roope (13 March 1905 – 8 April 1940) was a British Royal Navy officer and a posthumous recipient of the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award for gallantry. Unusually, he was recommended for the VC by an enemy combatant, one of only three VC recipients to achieve this (alongside Thomas Frank Durrant and Lloyd Trigg).
Biography[]
Roope was born at Taunton, Somerset, in 1905. He was educated at the Royal Naval College and appointed a midshipman on the HMS Revenge in 1923. He later served on two other ships as a lieutenant, before eventually being given command of the G-class destroyer HMS Glowworm on 22 July 1938.
On 8 April 1940, the Glowworm engaged two German destroyers in the Norwegian Sea. The destroyers retreated, and Roope decided to give chase. The Glowworm was lead to the German capital ship Admiral Hipper, at which point Roope alerted the Home Fleet before engaging. Every torpedo fired by the Glowworm missed and the ship was soon on fire from end to end and too badly damaged to fire most of its guns. Roope refused to give up and gave the order to ram the Admiral Hipper. The ramming attack tore off 130ft of armour plating and half the torpedo tubes from the Admiral Hipper before the Glowworm fired one final salvo, capsized and sank. 31 of the 149 crew survived and were recovered by the Admiral Hipper, but Roope was not among them; he drowned while assisting other survivors in reaching the ship.
Upon discovering Roope's identity from the surviving crew, Captain Hellmuth Heye of the Admiral Hipper wrote to British authorities via the Red Cross to recommend him for the Victoria Cross. The recommendation was approved and Roope was posthumously awarded the VC on 12 February 1946.