HMS Grenade (H86): Lost in Dunkirk Harbour

Built on the Clyde

HMS Grenade was laid down by Alexander Stephen and Sons in Glasgow on 3 October 1934, launched on 12 November 1935 and completed on 28 March 1936, a G-class destroyer displacing 1,350 tons and armed with four 4.7-inch guns, eight half-inch machine guns and eight 21-inch torpedo tubes, a well-balanced fleet destroyer for her era.

From the Mediterranean to Norway

Grenade transferred from the Mediterranean Fleet to Plymouth in October 1939 as war clouds gathered closer to home, and went on to take part in the early stages of the Norwegian campaign, escorting the tanker British Lady to the Lofoten Islands in April 1940 to help set up a forward refuelling base before spending the rest of the month screening the battleship HMS Warspite and the carrier HMS Ark Royal in Norwegian waters.

She then took part in the evacuation of Namsos, and on 3 May 1940 found herself at the centre of a genuinely harrowing chain of disasters. The French destroyer Bison had her forward magazine detonated by a Stuka's bomb, and when HMS Afridi moved in to pull Bison's survivors from the water, she too was sunk by a follow-up air attack, killing dozens of the men she had only just rescued. Grenade, working alongside HMS Imperial and HMS Griffin, helped fish what remained of both crews out of the freezing water, an effort that cost her four of her own men wounded and left twenty of those she had rescued dead from their injuries before she reached Scapa Flow on 5 May, a taste of the desperate evacuation work that would soon define her final days.

The Afridi part of that day has an article of its own, and it is worth reading alongside this one, because she was sunk while doing exactly what Grenade was doing and had herself sunk the ship whose survivors she stopped for: HMS Afridi (F07). Norway in the spring of 1940 taught the Royal Navy a lesson it had not really absorbed: that a stopped ship under an unopposed air force is not a rescuer, she is a target, and that the price of picking men out of the water is very often the ship doing the picking. Four weeks later, off the Kwinte Buoy, HMS Grafton learned it again.

Under Commander Boyle

Grenade was commanded throughout her wartime service, from 26 July 1938 until her loss, by Commander Richard Courtenay Boyle, RN, the only commanding officer she ever had.

He got off her, and what he did afterwards is worth following, because it turns the whole story round. Boyle was given the Distinguished Service Cross on 5 July 1940, five weeks after his ship burned and blew up underneath him. In October 1942 he was given another destroyer, HMS Havelock, and it was in her, over three days in the first week of January 1943 in the water off the Canary Islands, that he pulled something in the order of a hundred and twenty-three people out of the sea from three separate torpedoed ships: forty-three from the tanker Oltenia II, thirty-eight from the Norwegian tanker Minister Wedel, and the rest from a third. He went on to the frigate Hadleigh Castle in 1944 and finished the war a captain.

There is a thread running through all of that which is worth naming. Grenade had helped fish the survivors of Bison and Afridi out of the Norwegian Sea in May 1940. She picked thirty-three people out of the water after the Abukir was torpedoed on 28 May. The next day she was destroyed at Dunkirk. Two and a half years later the same officer, in a different ship, spent the better part of a week doing nothing but hauling other crews aboard in the Atlantic. Rescue is the whole shape of Richard Boyle's war, and most of it came after his own ship had been taken away from him.

Sunk During Operation Dynamo

Grenade spent the first days of Operation Dynamo screening the evacuation from further out in the Channel, and on 28 May pulled 33 survivors from the water after the coastal steamer SS Abukir, packed with troops and civilians evacuated from Ostend, was torpedoed by the German E-boat S.34, one of five Royal Navy destroyers that turned out that night to search for survivors. It was only on the night of 28 to 29 May that Grenade herself was finally sent into Dunkirk harbour, and on 29 May 1940, while helping evacuate Allied troops from Dunkirk during Operation Dynamo, she came under attack from German Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers in the harbour itself.

To understand what happened next you have to know what she was tied up to. The East Mole at Dunkirk was not a jetty. It was a breakwater, a line of latticed concrete piles carrying a narrow wooden walkway about a mile long, put there to break the sea coming into the harbour, with no bollards, no cranes and no depth alongside that anyone had ever measured for a warship. On the evening of 27 May, out of options, Captain Bill Tennant had a ferry try berthing against it to see whether it would take the strain. It did. From that moment the Mole became the single most important structure in the British war effort: of the 338,226 men brought out of Dunkirk, 239,555 walked down that wooden plankway and stepped across onto a ship. Everything else, the beaches, the little ships, the queues in the water, accounted for the rest.

She was struck by two direct hits that set her ablaze, and with fire sweeping through the ship, her crew cast her off from her moorings rather than risk her sinking and blocking the berth. She drifted into the harbour's main channel, where the trawler John Cattling took her under tow to the western side of the port to clear the way, and it was there, that evening, that her magazines finally exploded and she went down, a rapid and violent end for a ship that had been doing everything possible to bring soldiers home from the beaches.

That is why casting a burning destroyer adrift was the right decision and not a desperate one. Grenade was alongside the Mole and on fire, with her magazines certain to go at some point, and a destroyer sunk against those piles would have taken out a length of the only berth in France that mattered. Her people let go the lines and pushed her off into the harbour, where she promptly drifted into the main channel and had to be taken in tow by a trawler and dragged clear to the western side before she blew up. A ship's company fighting a fire aboard their own ship, in a harbour under dive-bomber attack, worked out in a matter of minutes that the structure mattered more than the ship did, and acted accordingly.

They very nearly lost it anyway, and not to the Luftwaffe. In the confusion after the raids of 29 May a report reached England that the harbour was blocked by a sunken ship, and for several hours shipping was routed away from the Mole to the beaches, where loading was five or ten times slower. Ramsay had to send a destroyer, HMS Vanquisher, across in the early hours of the 30th simply to look at it and report back that it was still standing. The Mole worked for another five days. Whether the ship in that report was Grenade, drifting and burning in the channel where everybody could see her, is not recorded, but the timing does not leave a great deal of room for doubt.

The attack killed 14 of her sailors outright, with a further four men later succumbing to their wounds, eighteen dead in a single afternoon, part of the wider and often overlooked cost paid by the Royal Navy in delivering the so-called miracle of Dunkirk.

The scale of that cost bears repeating, because the phrase little ships has a way of crowding it out. Six British destroyers were sunk in the course of the operation and nineteen more damaged, along with a long list of minesweepers, trawlers, drifters, ferries and personnel ships; well over two hundred vessels of all kinds were lost. On 29 May alone the Royal Navy lost Grenade in the harbour, and Wakeful and Grafton off the Belgian coast, the second of those two lost while stopped to pick the first one's people out of the water, as told in the article on HMS Grafton (H89). Grenade had been in commission for four years and two months and had one captain for the whole of it.

The class she belonged to had an even worse 1940 than she did. Nine G-class destroyers were built for the Royal Navy, and by the end of that year three had been sunk and a fourth given away. Gipsy was mined off Harwich in November 1939, six weeks into the war. Grafton was torpedoed off the Kwinte Buoy on the very same day Grenade burned at the Mole. Garland had been lent to the Polish Navy that May. And on 8 April 1940, in the Norwegian Sea, Glowworm did something that has never quite been repeated.

Glowworm, under Lieutenant Commander Gerard Roope, had dropped astern of the fleet in heavy weather looking for a man lost overboard, and ran straight into the German invasion force. She engaged two destroyers, followed them when they pulled away, and came up against the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper, a ship several times her size that could hit her from a range at which she could do nothing whatever in reply. Roope made smoke, was hit repeatedly and set on fire, and then turned in and rammed. The impact tore something like forty metres of armour belt off the cruiser's starboard side and sent her into Trondheim for repairs. Glowworm sank shortly afterwards. Roope was last seen helping his people into lifejackets and was not among those picked up.

What followed has almost no parallel. Hipper's captain, Hellmuth Heye, was sufficiently impressed by what had just been done to him that he wrote to the British authorities recommending Roope for the Victoria Cross. Roope got it, gazetted on 10 July 1945, and the delay is the telling part: it could not be awarded until Glowworm's surviving prisoners came home from Germany and confirmed the account, because until then the only description of the action in British hands had come from the enemy. It is the first Victoria Cross of the Second World War by date of action, and one of a very small handful in the entire history of the decoration awarded partly on the recommendation of the officer who destroyed the ship.