HMS Codrington (D65): The King's Destroyer, a Dutch Princess and Five Thousand Men From Dunkirk

The Leader

HMS Codrington was built as the leader of the A Class destroyers, the first full flotilla of destroyers built for the Royal Navy after the Great War. She was ordered from Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend on 6 March 1928, laid down on 20 June 1929 and launched on 8 August 1929.

She was the first ship of the Navy to bear the name, chosen for the centenary of the Battle of Navarino in 1827, at which Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, who had commanded the Orion at Trafalgar, led the British, French and Russian fleets that destroyed the Turkish and Egyptian fleet. Her badge was a red lion on a silver field, and her motto, Vultus in hostem, means "Facing the enemy".

As a leader she was larger than the eight ships she led, at 2,012 tons, with a fifth 4.7 inch gun between her funnels and a bigger bridge to make room for the captain of the flotilla and his staff. She had two quadruple torpedo tube mountings, and her turbines of 34,000 shaft horsepower gave her 37.74 knots on her trials.

The photograph at the top of this page shows her at speed on 4 June 1930, the day she was completed.

She served with the Mediterranean Fleet for most of the 1930s at the head of the flotilla. On 12 June 1934, during exercises off Malta, she collided with one of her own ships, Acasta.

She took her turn on the patrols off Spain during the Civil War, and later served with the Home Fleet and spent time in reserve at Devonport, before a refit in 1938. She was recommissioned in August 1939, under Captain David Simson, as leader of the 19th Destroyer Flotilla in the Nore Command.

The VIP Destroyer

From 4 September 1939 she was at Dover, escorting the convoys that carried the British Expeditionary Force to France. After a spell at Harwich in November, when destroyers were gathered there against a feared German attack on the Low Countries, she came back to Dover, and because she was fast, handy and on the short sea route, she became the destroyer that carried the great and the good across the Channel.

On 4 December she took King George VI from Dover to Boulogne to visit his army, and brought him back on the 10th. On 22 December she escorted the minelayer Princess Victoria with Esk, Express and Brazen while she laid mines in the Dover Barrage.

On 4 January 1940 she carried Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, to France, and on 5 February she took the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, with Churchill and the service chiefs, across to Boulogne on their way to the Supreme War Council in Paris.

By then she had a new role. The flotilla leader Grenville had been mined in the North Sea on 19 January, and Codrington was named to take her place as the ship of Captain George Creasy, Captain (D) of the 1st Destroyer Flotilla at Harwich, who had lost his own ship.

Creasy would end his career as an Admiral of the Fleet. After a refit at Chatham she joined the flotilla on 6 March, and Keith took over her place at Dover.

Norway

In April 1940 she went north with the Home Fleet. On 7 April she sailed in the screen of the battleships covering the planned mining of Norwegian waters, an operation overtaken the next day by the German invasion, and on the 9th she was under air attack with the fleet before going in to Sullom Voe to refuel.

On 14 April she screened Valiant and the repair ship Vindictive with Acasta and Ardent as they brought the first troop convoy, NP 1, into Vaagsfjord, near Narvik. On 28 April she carried Admiral of the Fleet the Earl of Cork and Orrery and the French General Béthouart on a reconnaissance of the fjords around Narvik before the Allied assault on the town, bombarding German gun positions as she went.

IJmuiden

On 10 May 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands and Belgium, and Codrington was ordered south. She covered the 530 miles from Scapa Flow to Dover in twenty three hours, refuelled, and was sent across to the Dutch coast.

On the evening of 12 May, in Operation J, she went into IJmuiden and took aboard the heir to the Dutch throne, Princess Juliana, with her husband Prince Bernhard and their two small daughters, Beatrix, who was two, and Irene, who was nine months old, and with Venetia and Vivacious as escort brought them safely across to Harwich. The next day Queen Wilhelmina herself crossed in Hereward.

Beatrix and Irene's younger sister Margriet was born in Canada, where the princesses spent the rest of the war; Beatrix later reigned as Queen of the Netherlands for thirty three years.

Dunkirk

From 15 May she was at Harwich, and on 27 May she sailed with Grenade, Jaguar and Javelin to patrol against German surface craft before being sent to Dover for the evacuation of Dunkirk. Captain George Stevens-Guille had taken command of her a fortnight before.

Over the next six days she made six round trips between Dunkirk and Dover, bringing home 866 men on 28 May, 766 on the 29th, 799 on the 30th, 909 on the 31st, 746 on 1 June and 878 on 2 June, close to five thousand men in all. Among those she is said to have brought home was the future Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

On her first trip she and the destroyers in company picked up thirty three survivors of the Abukir, a small steamer sunk by a German motor torpedo boat while bringing troops out of Ostend. Despite the constant air attacks, she was one of the few destroyers to come through the evacuation without serious damage.

A fortnight later she was senior naval officer afloat for Operation Cycle, the evacuation of British and French troops from Le Havre and the coast near St Valery, in which some eleven thousand soldiers and civilians were taken off, and she went on supporting the evacuations from the French ports and patrolling the Channel through June.

Dover, 27 July 1940

By July the Germans were attacking the Channel convoys and the port of Dover from the air, the opening of the Battle of Britain. On 27 July Codrington was lying alongside the depot ship Sandhurst in the submarine basin at Dover, with her boilers shut down for cleaning, when German bombers attacked the harbour.

A bomb fell close alongside and broke her back, and she sank at her moorings. By extraordinary good fortune only three men were wounded. Her loss was kept secret, and not officially announced until 18 May 1945, after the war in Europe was over; her wreck was still to be seen in the harbour in 1947. She had been afloat for less than eleven years.

Her battle honours are Norway 1940 and Dunkirk 1940. Her sister Achates and the other A Class ships are in the A Class destroyers collection.