HMS Durban (D99): Singapore's Last Days, a German Raider's Bluff, and a Breakwater off Sword Beach

A Cruiser of 1917

HMS Durban was one of the Danae Class, the D Class light cruisers, ordered in the last years of the Great War as an improvement on the C Class, with a sixth 6 inch gun and triple torpedo tubes. She was ordered from Scotts at Greenock in July 1917 and laid down in January 1918, but the war ended before she was launched on 29 May 1919, and she was completed at Devonport in 1921, the second ship of the name.

Between the wars she served on the China Station, in the West Indies, where Prince George, later Duke of Kent, was among her officers, and in the Mediterranean, before going into reserve in 1936.

The Indian Ocean

When war came she was escorting convoys between Freetown and the Cape, and in October 1939 she was sent east to the China Station. Through 1940 she was with the British Malaya Force, keeping watch on the German merchant ships sheltering in the ports of the Dutch East Indies, ready to catch any that tried to break out.

In September 1940 she joined a hunting group with the Australian cruiser Canberra, her sister Capetown and an armed merchant cruiser to search for the raider Atlantis, which was finally run down by Devonshire the following year.

In February 1941 she escorted one of the great troop convoys of the war, Queen Mary, Aquitania, Mauretania and Nieuw Amsterdam, carrying Australian soldiers from Fremantle, and took Queen Mary on to Singapore. In November she relieved the cruiser Sydney as escort of the torpedoed troopship Zealandia; it was one of the last duties Sydney performed before she was lost with all hands fighting the raider Kormoran.

Singapore

When Japan attacked in December 1941 Durban was at Singapore, under Captain Peter Cazalet, who had taken command that October and would see her through the next eleven months.

On 19 December she escorted a troopship carrying the survivors of Prince of Wales and Repulse to Colombo, and in January 1942 she helped escort the first of the reinforcement convoys for Singapore, with Exeter, the Dutch cruiser De Ruyter and destroyers including Encounter.

On 10 February, with Singapore about to fall, she went in with the destroyer Jupiter to take off men of the Royal Air Force, and on 12 February she sailed escorting a group of small coastal steamers crammed with evacuees. North of the Sunda Strait Japanese bombers attacked, and she was hit forward, losing one of her 6 inch guns, but she saw her charges through to Batavia. Singapore surrendered three days later.

A Raider's Bluff

She was sent to Fremantle and then on towards America for repairs, and on 13 March 1942, off Cape Town, she sighted a merchant ship and challenged her. The ship replied that she was the British steamer Leverbank.

She was in fact the Doggerbank, a captured British ship, the Speybank, now serving as a German auxiliary minelayer, and she was laying mines off the Cape at that very moment. Her disguise was good enough, and Durban let her go.

The Doggerbank's luck ran out the following year, when she was sunk in error by a U-boat in the Atlantic.

New York and the Persian Gulf

From April 1942 Durban was repaired at the United States Navy Yard in New York, and that summer she came home to Britain to be fitted with British radar. The photograph at the top of this page was taken in the Solent on 8 October 1942, as she sailed again in her bold camouflage.

She escorted a troop convoy round the Cape to Durban, the South African port whose name she bore, served in the Indian Ocean through 1943, escorting convoys to Aden and in the Persian Gulf, and in October was withdrawn from service and sent home. In December 1943 she was reduced to care and maintenance at Portsmouth.

Gooseberry Five

The planners of the Normandy invasion needed sheltered water off the beaches for the landing craft and small ships, and part of the answer was to sink a line of old ships off the coast as breakwaters, which were given the code name Gooseberry. Durban was chosen to be part of Gooseberry No. 5, off Ouistreham at the eastern end of Sword Beach.

She was refitted at Portsmouth in the spring of 1944, with her guns kept and twenty four Oerlikons added so that she could defend herself and the craft she sheltered, and in May she sailed for Oban, where the blockships were gathering.

On 2 June she sailed for the Channel under her own steam with the other blockships, and after the 24 hour postponement of the invasion she reached the beachhead on 6 June.

On 9 June 1944 she was scuttled in her place in the line off Ouistreham, alongside the old French battleship Courbet, the Dutch cruiser Sumatra and a string of merchant ships, and became the headquarters ship of the senior naval officer of the blockships, still flying her ensign. On 3 August 1944 her hulk was hit by a German torpedo in one of the attacks on the anchorage.

Her wreck still lies off Ouistreham. The other prints of her class are in the Danae Class cruisers collection.