HMS Crescent (H48): Cut in Half by Her Own Escort While Rescuing Refugees

The Build: Barrow

HMS Crescent was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, her keel laid on 1 December 1930, launched on 29 September 1931, and completed on 15 April 1932, a C-class destroyer commissioned on 21 April that year into the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet.

During the Abyssinian Crisis, HMS Crescent deployed to the Indian Ocean and Red Sea from September 1935 through to April 1936, part of the wider Royal Navy build-up in response to Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, a crisis that stopped short of open war between Britain and Italy but kept a substantial portion of the fleet on edge throughout.

Sold to Canada

HMS Crescent was sold to Canada on 20 October 1936 alongside her sister ship HMS Cygnet, the pair costing £400,000 combined, and was renamed HMCS Fraser upon her transfer, commissioning into the Royal Canadian Navy at Chatham on 17 February 1937 before sailing on to Esquimalt, arriving there on 3 May that year, joining a small but growing Canadian destroyer force that would prove absolutely vital once war broke out just over two years later.

Vital is not an overstatement, and the numbers behind it are worth having. When war was declared in September 1939 the Royal Canadian Navy consisted of six ocean-going destroyers, five minesweepers, two training ships and about three and a half thousand people, regulars and reserves together. Crescent and Cygnet were two of the six. By 1945 the same navy had some three hundred and sixty ships and a hundred thousand people in it, and was the third largest navy on the Allied side by number of warships, most of it built in Canadian yards by a country that had barely built a warship before. The two destroyers Britain sold to Canada for £400,000 in 1936 were, in a very literal sense, a third of the seed corn.

What became of the other five is a fair measure of what that navy was asked to do with what it had. The six ocean-going destroyers Canada owned in September 1939 were Fraser, St Laurent, Restigouche, Saguenay, Skeena and Ottawa, every one of them a second-hand British hull built in the early 1930s. Fraser was cut in half in June 1940. Ottawa was torpedoed by U-91 while escorting convoy ON 127 on 14 September 1942, was hit again inside half an hour and broke in two. Saguenay was rammed by a Panamanian freighter off Cape Race that November; the impact set off her own depth charges and blew her stern away, and she spent the rest of the war as a training ship. Skeena dragged her anchor off Reykjavik on the night of 24 October 1944 and was wrecked on Videy Island in fifty-foot seas, fifteen of her people dying with her.

So of the six: one cut in half by a friendly cruiser, one torpedoed and broken in two, one crippled by a merchant ship's bow and her own depth charges, one wrecked in a gale in Iceland, and only Restigouche and St Laurent coming through intact to be scrapped afterwards. St Laurent is the one that gets remembered, because on 2 July 1940, a week after Fraser went down, she came up on the wreckage of the torpedoed liner Arandora Star four and a half hours after the ship had gone and took eight hundred and fifty-seven people out of the Atlantic; her account of that day is in HMS Cygnet (H83). Six worn-out ships, and around them a navy grew from three and a half thousand people to a hundred thousand in five years.

A Tragic Collision During Operation Aerial

The former HMS Crescent, by then HMCS Fraser, met her end on 25 June 1940 in remarkably tragic circumstances, not through enemy action but through collision with a friendly ship. She had been screening ahead of the cruiser HMS Calcutta, together with HMCS Restigouche, making for Bordeaux at the tail end of Operation Aerial, the evacuation that continued after Dunkirk as France's collapse accelerated, when Calcutta's captain ordered the ships into line astern on a moonless, visibility-poor night.

Operation Aerial has been almost entirely swallowed by Dunkirk in the public memory, and it was bigger. Between 15 and 25 June 1940, with the German army moving south faster than anybody could plan around, the Royal Navy and a fleet of requisitioned merchant ships took 191,870 people out of Cherbourg, St Malo, Brest, St Nazaire, La Pallice, Bordeaux and Bayonne: British, Polish and Czech soldiers, aircrew, civilians and refugees. Added to Dunkirk and the earlier lifts, more than half a million people were brought out of France in six weeks.

It also produced the worst disaster in British maritime history, and eight days before Fraser was cut in half. On the afternoon of 17 June the liner Lancastria was lying off St Nazaire, loading anything that could get aboard her; nobody counted, and estimates of how many were on her run from six thousand upwards. Four bombs hit her and she went over and down in about twenty minutes. Two thousand four hundred and forty-seven people were saved. The number who died is not known and never will be, but the usual figure is around four thousand, which is more than the Titanic and the Lusitania together. Churchill suppressed the news, on the grounds that the papers had had enough disaster for one day, and the story stayed largely untold for decades. That was the operation Fraser was working when Calcutta hit her.

What followed was a short, tangled sequence of misjudgement on both sides. Fraser's captain, Commander Wallace Creery, sped up to close the gap and took his turn a little too wide, then corrected it; Calcutta's captain read that correction as an attempt to cross his own bow rather than fall in behind him, altered course to starboard himself, and sounded a warning whistle that only made matters worse. By the time Creery ordered engines full astern, the two ships were closing at 34 knots with no time left to avoid each other. Calcutta's bow struck Fraser just abaft her bridge, cutting the destroyer clean in half. The severed bridge section came briefly to rest on Calcutta's own forecastle, and Creery and his bridge team simply stepped off their own ship and onto hers; Calcutta carried the wreckage of Fraser's bridge all the way into Plymouth.

Sixty-six people died in the collision: forty-seven Canadian sailors and nineteen Royal Navy personnel who had been taking passage home to England. A further 166 were rescued, 107 of them by Calcutta's own whaler and the remaining 59 by Restigouche.

Neither captain's career ended on that bridge, which is worth knowing, because the reflex assumption about a collision is that somebody must be finished by it. Wallace Creery had lost his ship in about as public a manner as the thing can be done, in his first year of the war, in front of a British cruiser and a second Canadian destroyer. He went on to hold senior appointments in the Royal Canadian Navy, was appointed CBE at the beginning of 1946, served as Chief of Naval Technical Services and retired a rear-admiral. The Navy's own view, then and since, is that manoeuvring in close company at night without radar is a thing that will occasionally go wrong regardless of who is standing on the compass platform.

The cruiser did not last the year out. On 1 June 1941, off Crete, HMS Calcutta was caught by German dive bombers and sunk, and the collision is told from her side in her own article. So the ship that carried Fraser's bridge into Plymouth on her forecastle was herself on the bottom of the Mediterranean within twelve months of doing it.

The survivors were consolidated aboard another Canadian destroyer, HMCS Margaree, formerly HMS Diana, only for fate to repeat itself with almost unbearable precision. On 22 October 1940, escorting convoy OL8 some 400 miles west of Ireland, Margaree altered course sharply in poor visibility directly into the path of the merchant ship Port Fairy, whose bow sliced through her just aft of her own bridge, an almost exact echo of Fraser's own end. She capsized and sank in under a minute, killing everyone on her bridge and in her forward mess decks, her captain among them; 142 men died, and only 32 were pulled from the water by Port Fairy herself. Eighty-six of those killed aboard Margaree were survivors of Fraser's sinking four months before, men who had already lived through one destroyer breaking in half beneath them, only to die the same way twice. With nobody left alive from Margaree's own bridge, the Board of Inquiry that followed was never able to establish exactly what had gone wrong.

Legacy

HMS Crescent's story, from Home Fleet destroyer through Red Sea deployment during the Abyssinian Crisis to Canadian service and finally a tragic accidental loss while rescuing refugees from France, stands as a sobering reminder that the dangers of naval war extended well beyond enemy torpedoes and bombs.

Collisions between friendly ships, particularly amid the chaos and darkness of evacuation operations like Operation Aerial, claimed ships and lives just as surely as combat did, and HMS Crescent's fate as HMCS Fraser remains one of the more poignant examples of exactly that risk.

It is worth being precise about why. A convoy or a screen at night in 1940 ran without lights and largely without radar, which almost no British ship yet carried, keeping station on the shape of the ship ahead and on the wake she left. Manoeuvres were ordered by signal lamp or by whistle and executed by judgement. Get the judgement wrong by a few degrees at closing speeds of thirty knots and there is no second chance and nothing to warn you, which is precisely what happened to Fraser, and then to Margaree, and to a great many others. The Royal Navy lost more ships to collision in the Second World War than most people would guess, and almost every one of them happened in the dark, in company, doing exactly what the book said.