HMS Dunkirk (D09): A Destroyer Named for the Miracle of 1940

A Name From 1940

HMS Dunkirk was one of the Battle Class destroyers, named after battles fought by British forces, and her name recalled the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk in May and June 1940, when more than 330,000 men were brought home under the bombs.

Some forty British destroyers took part, and six were sunk; the stories of some of them, among them Havant, are told on these pages, and so is that of Greyhound, which brought home some 1,350 men before she was bombed and towed out of the harbour.

Dunkirk belonged to the second, enlarged group of the Battle Class, ordered in 1943, slightly bigger than the first ships, with an extra gun and improved anti-aircraft fire control. She was built by Alexander Stephen and Sons at Linthouse on the Clyde, launched in August 1945, a week after Japan's surrender, and commissioned on 27 November 1946.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken three days before, as she lay at a buoy in the Clyde with her pennant number painted large on her hull.

The Home Fleet and the Reserve

She joined the 4th Destroyer Flotilla in the Home Fleet, and in 1950 she was placed in reserve, as were many of her sisters in the 1950s, when the Navy had more ships than men to crew them. She was later recommissioned, and in 1958, while she was serving in the Mediterranean, she was lightly damaged in a collision with her sister Jutland during exercises off Malta.

Amsterdam and South America

In October 1959 she went with a British squadron on a visit to the Netherlands, and the photograph above shows her arriving at Amsterdam on 10 October, her ship's company fallen in along the forecastle and a Dutch tug at her bow.

In 1961 she crossed the Atlantic with the cruiser Lion and the frigate Leopard for a tour of South America, showing the flag in the ports of the continent where Britain still had large trading interests. Leopard's article tells of her journey more than a thousand miles up the Amazon.

On her return Dunkirk went to the Mediterranean, and served there until 1963, in the same years that her sister Saintes was making her last commission.

The End

She came home in 1963 and was placed in reserve, and she was broken up at Faslane in 1965, nineteen years after she was commissioned. Both of her photographs on this page, from her first days in 1946 to her visit to Amsterdam in 1959, are sold as prints, and her sisters are in the Battle Class destroyers collection.