HMS Cygnet (H83): The Destroyer That Rescued 860 Souls From the Arandora Star

Constructed at Barrow

HMS Cygnet was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, ordered on 15 July 1930, laid down on 1 December that year, launched on 29 September 1931, and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 9 April 1932, a C-class destroyer displacing 1,375 long tons standard, capable of 36 knots and carrying a complement of 145 officers and men.

HMS Cygnet served with the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet, deploying to the Red Sea during the Abyssinian Crisis from September 1935 to April 1936, and conducting Bay of Biscay patrols during the summer of 1936 amid the opening stages of the Spanish Civil War.

Sold to Canada

HMS Cygnet was sold to Canada on 20 October 1936, alongside her sister ship HMS Crescent, for a combined £400,000, and was renamed HMCS St. Laurent, formally handed over on 1 February 1937 and commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy on 17 February that year.

She was initially based at Halifax, Nova Scotia, arriving in May 1937, before transferring to Esquimalt, British Columbia, in 1938, joining a small but rapidly growing Canadian destroyer force.

Rescuing the Arandora Star

The former HMS Cygnet was ordered to Halifax on 31 August 1939 as war broke out, arriving on 18 September and escorting local convoys, including the convoy carrying half of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division to Britain on 10 December that year. Ordered to Plymouth on 24 May 1940, she took part in the evacuation of French soldiers from Le Havre that June and engaged a German artillery battery in the process.

On 2 July 1940, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Harry DeWolf, she rescued around 860 survivors from the torpedoed liner SS Arandora Star, an enormous rescue effort and one of the more remarkable single humanitarian achievements of her entire wartime career (accounts differ slightly on the exact final count, understandable given the chaos of hauling hundreds of oil-soaked survivors aboard from scattered lifeboats and rafts). A Sunderland flying boat, alerted by the stricken liner's distress call, had guided St Laurent to the scene, where her crew worked her scramble nets for hours while the ship herself sat exposed in waters known to be patrolled by the same U-boat that had just struck. DeWolf was Mentioned in Despatches for his handling of the rescue.

What the Arandora Star was carrying is the part of this that ought not to be skated over. She had sailed from Liverpool the day before, unescorted and unmarked, with 1,213 internees aboard: 717 Italians, 473 Germans and 86 prisoners of war. The Italians were not soldiers. They were men who had lived in Britain for years and in many cases for decades, running cafes and ice-cream shops and restaurants in Glasgow, Cardiff, London and the south Wales valleys, rounded up in the panic that followed Mussolini's declaration of war on 10 June 1940, when Churchill said collar the lot. Almost none of them had been before a tribunal. The Security Service had simply drawn up lists from Italian Fascist party membership records, and made little distinction between men who had joined out of conviction and men who had joined because the local consulate expected it.

She was hit at three minutes to seven in the morning by a single torpedo from U-47, the boat that had got into Scapa Flow and sunk the Royal Oak nine months earlier, commanded by the same man, Gunther Prien. She went down in about half an hour. More than eight hundred people died, among them 470 of the Italians and 143 of the Germans; whole families in Glasgow and Bardi and the valleys lost several men at once. There was an inquiry, chaired by Lord Snell, which reported that autumn. It was not published in full for many years. The memorials, at St David's Cathedral in Cardiff and in a cloister garden beside St Andrew's Cathedral in Glasgow, were not unveiled until 2 July 2010, the seventieth anniversary.

The boat that did it did not outlive her victims by very long. U-47 sank thirty ships of something over a hundred and sixty thousand tons in ten war patrols, and Prien was the best known submarine commander in Germany, a national figure with a nickname and a published memoir. On the morning of 7 March 1941, eight months after the Arandora Star, U-47 sent a signal from the North Atlantic somewhere near the Rockall Bank. Nothing was ever heard from her again.

For decades the Royal Navy credited the destroyer HMS Wolverine with sinking her, and it is still the version in a great many books. Careful reassessment of the German and British records has since made it fairly clear that Wolverine was in fact attacking a different boat, UA under Eckermann, which got away damaged. Nobody knows what happened to U-47. The two likeliest explanations are one of her own torpedoes circling back, which German torpedoes of that vintage were quite capable of doing, or a straightforward mechanical failure at depth. The announcement of Prien's death was held back for weeks. He remains one of the more conspicuous unsolved losses of the war, and the ship he is best remembered for sinking, the battleship Royal Oak, is still lying in Scapa Flow with more than eight hundred men in her.

Which is the context for what St Laurent did that morning. A Sunderland found the survivors and led her in; she stopped in open water known to be worked by the boat that had just fired, put her scramble nets over the side and spent hours hauling oil-covered men aboard a destroyer with a designed complement of 145. She took off around eight hundred and sixty of them. There is no version of the arithmetic in which that ship was not dangerously overloaded by the end of it, and no version of the day in which stopping was the safe thing to do.

She went on to help damage U-52 on 4 August, and rescued survivors from the torpedoed HMS Forfar on 2 December that same year.

Forfar deserves rather more than that clause, because it was the same job again five months later against a worse opponent. She was an armed merchant cruiser, which is to say a passenger liner with guns bolted to her decks and no armour anywhere, working the Northern Patrol and on her way to meet a convoy about five hundred miles west of Ireland. At a quarter to six on the morning of 2 December 1940 a torpedo hit her. Another came at 6.39, another at 6.43, another at 6.50 and another at 6.57, and she sank after the fifth. Her captain and something in the order of a hundred and seventy of her people went with her. St Laurent, the destroyer Viscount and a cargo steamer picked up what was left and landed them at Oban.

The submarine was U-99, and her commander was Otto Kretschmer, who finished the war as the highest-scoring U-boat captain Germany produced. So within five months, a single Canadian destroyer, a ship the Royal Navy had sold off in 1936 for want of anything better to do with her, pulled survivors out of the Atlantic from ships sunk by Prien and by Kretschmer, the two most celebrated submarine commanders of the entire war, and did it both times by stopping dead in open ocean in the middle of the night. That is the Battle of the Atlantic in 1940 written out in one ship's log.

Sinking Two U-Boats

Following a refit between March and July 1941, the former HMS Cygnet joined the 14th Escort Group, operating with the Newfoundland and Mid-Ocean Escort Forces through the height of the Battle of the Atlantic and receiving Type 271 radar in December 1942.

On 27 December 1942, she was credited with sinking U-356 north of the Azores, and on 10 March 1944, while escorting convoy SC.154, she took part in sinking the Type IXC-40 boat U-845, working alongside HMS Forester and the Canadian frigates HMCS Owen Sound and HMCS Swansea; forty-five of U-845's fifty-six crew survived, a particularly strong combat record against the U-boat threat.

Screening the D-Day Invasion

The former HMS Cygnet transferred to the 11th Escort Group in May 1944, and on D-Day itself, 6 June 1944, was stationed alongside the Canadian destroyers Chaudière, Gatineau, Kootenay and Ottawa at the entrance to the English Channel, guarding against U-boat attacks on the vast invasion convoys supporting the Normandy landings.

She went on to conduct further anti-submarine operations in the Bay of Biscay, survived an attack by a German glide bomb on 8 August 1944, which missed, and on 13 August, working alongside HMCS Ottawa, rescued survivors from U-270, which had itself just been sunk by depth charges from a Sunderland flying boat.

Following a refit at Shelburne, Nova Scotia, between November 1944 and 20 March 1945, and after Germany's surrender on 6 May 1945, the former HMS Cygnet was employed as a troop transport before finally paying off on 10 October 1945.

She was sold for scrap and broken up in 1947, closing out a career that had carried her from Home Fleet destroyer duty through the Abyssinian Crisis, a mass rescue at sea, two confirmed U-boat kills, and a direct role guarding the invasion of Normandy.

DeWolf is worth following. He had been born at Bedford in Nova Scotia in 1903 and joined as a cadet at fifteen; St Laurent was his first command of note. In 1943 he was given the Tribal-class destroyer HMCS Haida and took her into the Channel actions of 1944, where his crew named him Hard-over Harry for the way he handled her, and Haida came out of the war the most successful ship in the Royal Canadian Navy and is preserved at Hamilton today as the last Tribal-class destroyer anywhere in the world. DeWolf became Chief of the Naval Staff in 1956 and retired in 1960. He died in Ottawa in 2000, and the Royal Canadian Navy's newest class of ships is named after him, the first time in more than a century that it has named a class of warships after a person.