HMS Churchill (I45): The Destroyer That Hosted Its Own Namesake, and Died as a Soviet Ship

Born American, Transferred to Britain

HMS Churchill began life as USS Herndon, built by Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, launched on 31 May 1919 and commissioned into the United States Navy on 14 September 1920 at Norfolk, Virginia, a Clemson-class destroyer armed with four 4-inch guns, three 3-inch guns and twelve 21-inch torpedo tubes. After service on reserve duty along the American east coast and Prohibition-era Coast Guard rum-running patrols in the early 1930s, and Caribbean neutrality patrol duties in 1940, she was transferred to the Royal Navy in September that year under the Destroyers for Bases Agreement, one of fifty ageing American destroyers exchanged for British base rights in the Western Hemisphere, and renamed HMS Churchill.

Hunting the Bismarck

HMS Churchill took part in the search for the German battleship Bismarck after she had sunk the battlecruiser HMS Hood in May 1941, one of the most intensive and consequential naval hunts of the entire war, joining the substantial force of British warships determined to avenge Hood's loss and prevent Bismarck from reaching safe harbour.

A Visit From Her Own Namesake

In August 1941, HMS Churchill was visited by Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself, on his way home from the Atlantic Conference with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the meeting that produced the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration of principles that would shape the post-war world. It is a genuinely delightful piece of naval trivia that a destroyer named after Britain's wartime Prime Minister was, quite literally, visited by the man himself during one of the most consequential diplomatic meetings of the entire war.

Years of Convoy Escort

HMS Churchill served as leader of the first Town-class flotilla in transatlantic convoy escort and patrol duty off the Western Approaches, before joining Escort Group B-7 of the Mid-Ocean Escort Force for convoys HX186 and ON94, and later Escort Group C-4 for convoys SC112, ON158, HX224, ON177 and HX235 during the harsh winter of 1942 to 1943. Along the way she was modified for dedicated anti-submarine escort work, with some of her original guns and torpedo tubes removed to make way for additional depth charge capacity and anti-submarine equipment, exactly the kind of practical adaptation that kept ageing ex-American destroyers genuinely useful years into a war they had never been designed to fight.

A Soviet Ship, Lost in the Kara Sea

HMS Churchill was transferred to the Soviet Navy on 16 July 1944, renamed Deyatelny, meaning 'Active'. She was lost the following year while escorting a convoy along the treacherous route from the Kola Inlet to the White Sea, sunk in the Kara Sea some 40 nautical miles east of Cape Terebirski, with 117 of her 124 crew killed, either torpedoed by the German submarine U-956 or destroyed by an accidental explosion of her own depth charges while attacking the submarine, the exact cause never definitively established. The seven survivors reported a massive explosion at the ship's stern before being rescued by the Soviet destroyer Derzky, a devastating final chapter for a ship that had already served two navies, hosted a Prime Minister, and hunted one of the most famous warships of the entire war, before being lost in the frozen waters of the Arctic under a flag entirely different from either of the two she had originally served under.