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.

The name she was born with deserves a paragraph of its own. William Lewis Herndon was a United States Navy officer who led an expedition down the length of the Amazon in 1851 and 1852 and wrote it up in a report that was read all over the country. In September 1857 he was commanding the mail steamer Central America, homeward bound from Panama with a fortune in Californian gold in her hold, when a hurricane caught her off Cape Hatteras and she began to founder. Herndon got a hundred and fifty-two women and children away in the boats. Then he went below, put on his full dress uniform, came back up, and stood by the wheelhouse with his hat in his hand and his head bowed while she went down under him. It is still the worst loss of life in an American commercial shipwreck, and the Naval Academy at Annapolis has a monument to him. The ship that carried his name went down in an Arctic gale eighty-eight years later with a hundred and seventeen of her hundred and twenty-four men aboard. He would have recognised the arithmetic.

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, renamed HMS Churchill and commissioned under her first wartime captain, Commander Gerald Roger Cousins.

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.

For the hunt itself, and what it was avenging, see the article on HMS Hood. Churchill was a twenty-two-year-old flush-decker with a designed speed she could no longer make and a hull that had already been laid up twice; whatever she was going to contribute to catching a modern battleship, it was going to be measured in the number of squares of ocean somebody had to look at. That is what most of the hunt actually consisted of.

A Visit From Her Own Namesake

In August 1941, on his way home from the Atlantic Conference with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the meeting that produced the Atlantic Charter, Winston Churchill stopped in Iceland and addressed the crews of the British and American ships anchored there, HMS Churchill among them; he recorded the moment himself in his memoir The Grand Alliance, naming the destroyers Hecla and Churchill specifically.

It is a properly delightful piece of naval trivia, made rather better by the fact that the ship was never actually named after him in the first place. The Admiralty's official line was that Churchill honoured towns of that name shared by Britain and the United States, part of the wider naming convention applied to all fifty ex-American Town-class destroyers; the Prime Minister himself, asked about it, preferred to joke that if the ship was named after anyone, it was his own ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, whose family surname it was. Nobody, least of all Churchill, seems to have found the official explanation remotely convincing.

There is a reason the Admiralty needed a naming policy in the first place, and it is a good deal funnier than the official explanation. The fifty destroyers came across carrying the names of American naval officers, and a fair number of those officers had built their reputations fighting the Royal Navy in the War of 1812. Asking a British ship's company to answer to them was more than the Admiralty was prepared to countenance. Renaming the lot after towns whose names turned up on both sides of the Atlantic solved the difficulty without anybody having to say what the difficulty was, and gave the class its name into the bargain. Churchill was the first of the fifty to be renamed, which is either a coincidence or the least convincing coincidence 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.

That escort work was more than routine steaming. In June 1942 she rescued three survivors from the American merchantman Franklin K. Lane and 47 more from the Belgian ship Bruxelles after both were torpedoed by U-502, counter-attacking the submarine with depth charges of her own, and that August she picked up a further 50 survivors from the torpedoed Delmundo, sunk by U-600.

It is worth saying where all that happened, because the received idea about the Town-class destroyers is that they spent the war in the North Atlantic, and for much of 1942 Churchill did not. Franklin K. Lane, Bruxelles and Delmundo were all lost in the Caribbean, where the U-boats had spent the year working almost unopposed against the tanker traffic out of Venezuela and the refineries on Aruba and Curaçao. She was on the TAW convoys, Trinidad to Aruba to Key West, and she landed the Delmundo survivors at Guantanamo Bay. It was a great deal warmer than the Western Approaches and, for a stretch of 1942, every bit as dangerous.

She went on to escort the Operation Torch landings in North Africa that November, and in early 1943, under a rapid succession of wartime commanding officers, survived two separate attacks by the German Navy's Falke wolfpack, a piece of good fortune three of her fellow escorts in the group did not share.

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 particularly useful years into a war they had never been designed to fight.

A Soviet Ship, Lost in the Barents Sea

HMS Churchill was transferred to the Soviet Navy on 16 July 1944, renamed Deyatelny, meaning "Active". The day before the handover, orders reportedly went out to strip every trace of her old name and identity from the ship; a shipyard worker rescued her bridge nameplate and crest at the last moment, saving it from the scrapman's barrow.

The reason a British destroyer ended up under the Soviet flag is a piece of alliance politics that rarely gets told alongside her. When Italy surrendered in 1943, Stalin claimed a share of the Italian fleet, and he had an argument: the Soviet Union was at war with Italy too. Britain and the United States had no intention of breaking up a navy that was now fighting on their side, and no great enthusiasm for Soviet warships in the Mediterranean either. The compromise was to lend Moscow an equivalent tonnage of their own ships instead. North went the elderly battleship HMS Royal Sovereign, which became Arkhangelsk, four submarines, and eight Town-class destroyers, with a ninth that could not be made to work thrown in for spares. Churchill was one of the eight. She had been taken off operations in February 1944 with a lengthening list of defects and laid up on the Tyne, which tells you what sort of gift this was.

The order to scrub her name is better documented than the word "reportedly" suggests. She was lying at the Wallsend Slipway on the Tyne, and by the account of the family of a later manager of the yard, the yard manager of the day, Jim Tocker, was telephoned by the Prime Minister's private secretary and instructed to have the ship searched and anything bearing the name taken off and disposed of as he saw fit. The crest plate on the front of the bridge was noticed at the very last minute and unbolted. Which is to say that an office which had spent four years politely maintaining that the ship was named after a couple of towns went to considerable trouble to make sure no Soviet sailor ever read the name off her bridge.

She was lost the following year, on 16 January 1945, while escorting convoy KB-1 along the treacherous route from the Kola Inlet to the White Sea, sunk in the Barents Sea some 40 nautical miles east of Cape Terebirski, with 117 of her 124 crew killed, either by the German submarine U-956 or by an accidental explosion of her own depth charges while attacking the submarine, the exact cause never definitively established. She was the only one of the Town-class destroyers handed to the Soviet Navy that was ever lost, and, by the usual reckoning, the last of the fifty to be lost anywhere.

The Soviet account of that night is precise right up to the point where it stops making sense. At half past eight in the evening, Moscow time, in a gale, she got a radar contact. She ran in to ram, the boat dived, she went over the spot and put down a pattern of depth charges, and as she came round for a second attack a heavy explosion blew her stern off. She stayed afloat for fifty minutes and only seven men came off her alive. Her commanding officer, Kravchenko, went down with the ship, as the officer whose name she had carried out of Newport News had done eighty-eight years before.

The uncertainty about who did it is genuine and has never been settled. No German attack report exists for that night at all. The only U-boat known to have been anywhere near was U-956, and the war diary for that patrol has not survived, so there is nothing to set against the Soviet version. A mine, an internal explosion, or her own depth charges going up while being prepared for the second run are all still on the table, and the last of those fits the survivors' description of the blast at her stern rather better than a torpedo does. She had form for near misses. On 6 December 1944, off Kildin Island, U-293 fired an acoustic torpedo at her convoy and reported a hit, and Deyatelny logged a detonation in her wake. Six weeks later something at her stern did not miss.

One point of geography, since a good many published accounts get it wrong, including some careful ones: she is often said to have gone down in the Kara Sea. Her recorded position is 69 degrees 04 minutes north, 36 degrees 10 minutes east, which is on the Murman coast a few hours east of the Kola Inlet, in the Barents Sea. The Kara lies on the far side of Novaya Zemlya, several hundred miles further on, and no convoy running from Kola to the White Sea would have gone anywhere near it. The error appears to have come from one source and been copied ever since.

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.

That rescued nameplate still exists. Kept for decades by the shipyard manager who saved it, it eventually passed into private hands in Devon, its crest still bearing a dent from wartime shrapnel, an unlikely survivor of a ship that never officially bore the Prime Minister's name but somehow ended up carrying it into legend anyway.