HMS Danae (D44): The Cruiser That Became Poland’s ORP Conrad

Built on the Tyne

HMS Danae was built by Armstrong Whitworth at Walker-on-Tyne, laid down on 1 December 1916 and launched on 26 January 1918, a Danae-class light cruiser displacing 4,276 tons standard, capable of 29 knots, and carrying six 6-inch guns alongside anti-aircraft armament and a substantial torpedo battery.

Attached to the 5th Light Cruiser Squadron at Harwich, HMS Danae joined the force in June 1918, one of the first of her class to see any wartime service before the Armistice arrived a few months later. The drama of that August belonged not to any ship's guns but to a single Sopwith Camel, launched from a lighter towed behind the Harwich Force destroyer HMS Redoubt on 11 August, whose pilot climbed to nineteen thousand feet, an altitude no ship's anti-aircraft gun could touch, to bring down the German Zeppelin L53, the last airship destroyed in the entire war. Danae's own squadron was very much part of that wider operation, even if the credit for that particular kill belonged elsewhere.

That operation deserves telling properly, because it is one of the more inspired pieces of improvisation the Royal Navy ever managed. Zeppelin commanders working the North Sea knew perfectly well that they were safe: the nearest British fighter base was Harwich, and no aeroplane in existence had the range to reach them and get home. So the Navy stopped trying to fly out to them and towed a fighter instead. A Sopwith Camel was lashed to a flat lighter, the lighter was towed behind a destroyer at speed until there was enough wind over the deck, and the pilot took off from about thirty feet of planking in the middle of the sea. On 11 August 1918 Lieutenant Stuart Culley did exactly that off HMS Redoubt, climbed for the best part of an hour to nineteen thousand feet, and set L53 on fire with two Lewis guns. She was the last Zeppelin destroyed in the war. Culley ditched alongside the fleet and was fished out, and his Camel is in the Imperial War Museum in London to this day.

Interwar Wanderings

HMS Danae took part in Baltic Sea operations supporting White forces during the Russian Civil War in October and November 1919, before joining the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet in February 1920.

Those two months are worth pinning down, because they were the end of the whole affair rather than the middle of it. The Royal Navy had been in the eastern Baltic since late 1918, propping up four newly independent countries against a Bolshevik army marching west, and the campaign is set out at length in the article on HMS Curlew (D42). What was happening in October and November 1919 specifically was the last White offensive. General Yudenich's North Western Army advanced on Petrograd that October, got close enough to see the city, and was then thrown back; by the end of November it had disintegrated altogether and its remnants had crossed into Estonia to be interned.

Danae was one of the cruisers covering the seaward flank of that while it happened. It makes an odd start to a peacetime career: her first substantial operation after the Armistice consisted of supporting an offensive that failed, in a war her country had never declared, against a government it did not recognise, in a sea the Royal Navy left the following year and did not return to in strength for seventy years. She was less than two years old.

Between 1923 and 1924, she took part in the Special Service Squadron's celebrated world cruise, departing Devonport on 27 November 1923 and visiting Africa, the Asia-Pacific region and the Americas before returning home via South America, including a call at Napier, New Zealand, alongside HMS Dragon and the Australian cruiser HMAS Adelaide, a remarkably extensive showing of the flag that would have taken her crew to more corners of the globe than most sailors of any era ever saw.

The Empire Cruise was a great deal more than a long trip, and it is worth setting out at its proper size. The Special Service Squadron was built round the battlecruisers HMS Hood and Repulse, with the whole of the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron in company: HMS Delhi, Danae, Dauntless and Dragon, under Rear-Admiral Brand. Seven ships left Devonport on 27 November 1923 and did not get home until 28 September 1924: ten months, better than thirty-eight thousand miles, and more than forty ports of call.

The purpose was politics rather than seamanship. Britain had come out of the First World War effectively broke, the Washington Treaty had just put a hard cap on the size of the fleet, and the Dominions were being asked to carry more of the cost of defending the sea lanes the whole Empire ran on. So the Admiralty took the most impressive warship in the world and sent her round to be looked at, with a proper squadron behind her so it did not look like a stunt. In its own terms it worked: something over a million people went aboard the squadron during the cruise, about three-quarters of them into Hood alone, which for 1924 is an extraordinary number of human beings to walk up a gangway. Danae's job was to be one of the four cruisers that turned two famous ships into a fleet, which is, more or less, what light cruisers have always been for.

She went on to serve Mediterranean escort duties with the 1st Cruiser Squadron between 1927 and 1929, before modernisation and assignment to the America and West Indies Station's 8th Cruiser Squadron from 1930.

From the Indian Ocean to Normandy

HMS Danae mobilised with the 9th Cruiser Squadron in July 1939, serving in the South Atlantic and then the Indian Ocean, before joining the Malaya Force in March 1940, patrolling the Dutch East Indies and Singapore.

In January 1941, she joined the China Force, escorting convoys through the Yellow Sea and to Ceylon, before arriving at Batavia in February that year and then being withdrawn to Cape Town for a lengthy refurbishment.

HMS Danae returned to active service in July 1943 after an eleven-month shipyard overhaul, and returned to Great Britain in March 1944, joining the 1st Cruiser Squadron.

Between June and August 1944, she provided direct fire support during the D-Day landings, conducting ground support missions off Sword Beach during the Normandy invasion before relocating to the Port-en-Bessin and Ouistreham area that July, direct participation in one of the pivotal operations of the entire war.

Becoming ORP Conrad

In October 1944, following the loss of her sister ship ORP Dragon, HMS Danae was leased to the Polish Navy, refurbished at Southampton and Chatham until 23 January 1945, and renamed ORP Conrad, after the novelist Joseph Conrad, a choice made specifically to avoid the political controversy that retaining the original Danae name might have stirred given the complicated wartime politics surrounding Poland's exiled government and armed forces.

What happened to Dragon is worth knowing, because it is the reason any of this happened. She was Danae's sister, lent to the Polish Navy in 1943, and she was lying off the Normandy beaches on the night of 7 July 1944 when a German Neger got at her. A Neger was a torpedo with a second torpedo slung underneath it and a man sitting in a perspex bubble on top, steering; the one that found Dragon was flown, if that is the word, by a nineteen-year-old called Karl-Heinz Potthast. The explosion went into her ammunition space and killed thirty-seven of her people. She was too badly damaged to be worth repairing, and on 20 July she was towed off Courseulles-sur-Mer and sunk deliberately as part of a breakwater, where the hulk of her sheltered the ships unloading behind it. Danae was handed over to the Polish Navy in her place three months later.

The choice of name was also rather better than merely avoiding a row. Joseph Conrad had been born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Berdychiv, in a Poland that did not at that point exist on any map, had gone to sea at sixteen, spent sixteen years in the British merchant service, earned his master's certificate and taken British nationality, and then written some of the best novels in the English language about ships. A cruiser built on the Tyne, crewed by Poles, flying the Polish ensign under British operational command, named after a Pole who became a British master mariner and an English novelist, is about as neat a piece of naming as the war produced.

Moved to Scapa Flow in February 1945, she was attached to the 10th Cruiser Squadron that April before being withdrawn for turbine repairs, and between May and December 1945 transported Polish Red Cross supplies to Norway and Denmark, truly valuable humanitarian work in the war's immediate aftermath. In January 1946, she returned to Rosyth for training duties alongside other Polish vessels.

Back to the Royal Navy, and Finally the Breakers

The ship was decommissioned from Home Fleet service as ORP Conrad on 8 March 1946, and formally returned to the Royal Navy on 28 September that year, reverting to her original name of HMS Danae. She moved to Falmouth for Care and Maintenance before being sold to Thos. W. Ward on 22 January 1948, and was scrapped at the Vickers Armstrong shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness from 27 March 1948 onwards, closing out an extraordinary three-decade career that had carried her from the Harwich Force's final wartime months in 1918 to supporting the liberation of France in 1944 and serving, however briefly, under a different flag entirely as part of Poland's wartime navy in exile.