HMS Haldon (L19): The British Destroyer That Carried De Gaulle Home to France

Constructed at Govan, Lent to Free France

HMS Haldon was ordered on 28 July 1940 and built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, laid down on 16 January 1941 and launched on 27 April 1942, a Type III Hunt-class escort destroyer.

Rather than entering Royal Navy service under her own name, she was completed and offered to the Free French Naval Forces in December 1942, renamed La Combattante, 'the fighter' or 'the combatant', a fitting name for a ship about to have a notably eventful war under a foreign flag while still built, part-crewed by Royal Navy specialists, and ultimately owned by Britain. She was, in fact, the only one of three Type III Hunt-class destroyers earmarked for transfer that actually reached French hands, the other two staying under the White Ensign for want of enough trained French officers to man them.

That last detail is the whole story of the Free French Navy in one line. When France fell in June 1940 the Marine Nationale was the fourth largest fleet in the world, and almost none of it came over: most ships and most crews stayed loyal to Vichy, and what remained of any goodwill was destroyed at Mers-el-Kebir on 3 July, when the Royal Navy opened fire on a French squadron in harbour and killed nearly 1,300 French sailors. De Gaulle's Forces Navales Francaises Libres began with a few thousand men, and the constraint on them was never ships, which Britain had, but trained people, whom nobody had. Handing over three destroyers and getting one crewed was about the rate of exchange. That is why La Combattante mattered out of all proportion to her tonnage: she was, for long stretches, the most capable ship the Free French had at sea, and everything she did was done in front of an audience.

The ship underneath the French name was a very ordinary product of the British emergency programme, and a slightly compromised one. The Hunts had been designed in a hurry and the first of them turned out to be dangerously unstable, a story set out in the article on HMS Eglinton (L87). By the Type III the design had been corrected and then repurposed: a twin 4-inch mounting was given up for torpedo tubes, which turned an escort into a ship that could go hunting German coastal convoys at night, exactly as described in the article on HMS Goathland (L27). La Combattante spent 1944 doing precisely what the Type III was drawn for, and she did it better than almost anybody.

Hunting E-boats in the Channel

Weeks before D-Day, HMS Haldon, as La Combattante, was already earning her keep hunting German E-boats in the Channel. On the night of 25 to 26 April 1944, she and the frigate HMS Rowley caught a group of German fast attack craft off the Isle of Wight, and La Combattante's gunners scored a direct hit on S-147, sinking her with the loss of thirteen of her crew. La Combattante herself pulled one survivor from the water that night, while the rest of S-147's crew, including her commanding officer, were picked up the following morning by a British aircraft that had spotted their lifeboat.

A fortnight later, on the night of 12 to 13 May 1944, La Combattante caught a second group of E-boats off the Isle of Wight and sank S-141 by gunfire, fishing six survivors, including her captain, from the sea. Twenty of the German crew died, among them Leutnant zur See Klaus Dönitz, elder son of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the Kriegsmarine's own commander-in-chief, whose younger son Peter had already been killed aboard a U-boat the year before, a personal loss inflicted twice over on Germany's top admiral by a war he was fighting to win.

There is a detail to the younger Donitz's death that makes it worse still. Klaus Donitz was born on 13 May 1920, which means he died on his twenty-fourth birthday. He was not supposed to be there at all: after his brother Peter went down in U-954 in May 1943, he had been taken off front-line duty and sent to train as a naval doctor, on the reasonable principle that one family should not lose two sons to the same service. He talked the crew of S-141 into letting him come along on the raid as a birthday outing. Six men were pulled out of the water and he was not among them. His father learned of it in the middle of running the German navy, which by then was losing the war he had done more than anyone to start at sea.

Not every action that spring went to plan. On the night of 27 to 28 May 1944, in the confusion of a blacked-out Channel, La Combattante mistook two British motor torpedo boats, MTB 732 and MTB 739, for the enemy and opened fire, sinking MTB 732. Fifteen of her crew were pulled from the water, six of them seriously wounded, a sobering reminder of how easily friend could be mistaken for foe in a night action, even for as practised a ship's company as La Combattante's.

Shelling the Beaches on D-Day

HMS Haldon, as La Combattante, played a direct and significant role in the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944, commanded by Commander André Patou.

She provided close fire support off Courseulles-sur-Mer, holding station just 3,000 metres from the beach in a mere four metres of water as she shelled German shore batteries defending the Juno Beach landing area, a particularly dangerous position for a warship to hold, deliberately exposing herself in shallow, mined waters to give the landing troops the covering fire they needed.

Her log for that morning reads like precision under pressure: opening fire at 6.54am, she needed just four rounds from her 102mm guns to knock out a German battery, going on to neutralise five fortified houses and three blockhouses covering the beach. At 7.39am an 88mm gun opened up from concealment nearby; ordered to cease fire as the first landing craft closed the shore, her commander judged the threat too great to ignore, authorised a further salvo regardless, and found the gun's ammunition stores with it, silencing it for good.

During the operation, La Combattante briefly ran aground, prompting the British destroyer HMS Venus to signal a message that captured the spirit of the day rather well: 'I am happy that a French ship be the first to touch the ground of France.' It was a small, generous gesture between allied crews amid the noise and chaos of the largest amphibious invasion in history.

Bringing de Gaulle Home

HMS Haldon's most historically resonant moment came on 14 June 1944, eight days after the landings, when La Combattante carried General Charles de Gaulle, along with Generals Béthouart and Koenig and Admiral d'Argenlieu, across the Channel to Courseulles-sur-Mer, a properly symbolic voyage that saw the leader of the Free French forces return to his home country aboard a ship built in Britain but flying French colours, a fitting vessel for exactly that kind of homecoming.

Tucked aboard alongside the General's own party was a chest holding 250 million francs in freshly printed banknotes, sent over to head off the American-issued occupation currency then threatening to become the everyday money of a liberated France. Before he stepped ashore, de Gaulle pinned the Croix de Guerre on Commander Patou himself, a fitting send-off for the ship that had just carried him home.

The money in that chest was not a piece of housekeeping, it was the point of the whole voyage. Washington had set up a body called AMGOT, the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories, to administer liberated France in the way it was administering Italy, as enemy territory under military rule, on the reasoning that de Gaulle's authority rested on nothing anybody had voted for. It came with its own currency, francs printed in America. De Gaulle regarded this as an American occupation in waiting, called the notes counterfeit money in public, and set about presenting the Allies with a fait accompli: he came ashore on 14 June, went to Bayeux, was cheered through the streets, and before he left installed Francois Coulet in the sub-prefecture as Commissioner of the Republic, with instructions to the banks to take the American francs in and not issue them again. There was no argument, because there was nobody to argue with; a French administration simply existed, and AMGOT quietly never happened in France. A British-built destroyer with a French crew carried the man and the money that killed it.

In the weeks that followed, La Combattante kept up the pressure along the Norman coast, escorting eight cross-Channel convoys and running a string of patrols through that first summer of liberation. On the night of 25 to 26 August 1944, she caught the German 8th Artillery Ferry Flotilla off Fécamp and sank four of its vessels outright, roughly half the convoy, a properly productive night's work for a single destroyer during the desperate final months of the German occupation of northern France.

Lost to a Mine

HMS Haldon's war, and her life, ended on 23 February 1945, when La Combattante struck a mine near the East Dudgeon buoy in the Humber estuary.

She sank quickly, breaking in two, in an incident whose exact cause was disputed at the time: a German Kriegsmarine bulletin credited the sinking to torpedoes from a midget submarine, while Allied investigators concluded she had run into a minefield, codenamed F6/OMS-101, that German fast attack craft had laid across the same stretch of water only three weeks earlier. Time, and later research, has settled the argument firmly in the Allies' favour.

Of her complement of 185, 117 men were rescued and 68 were lost, including two Royal Navy sailors serving alongside her largely French crew, a heavy final toll for a ship whose war had already carried her from the Normandy beaches to the deck of history itself, ferrying home the man who would go on to lead France for a generation.

La Combattante lay undisturbed for nearly sixty years before French wreck-hunters from GRIEME, the Groupe de Recherche et d'Identification d'Épaves de Manche Est, found her stern section in May 2002. Her bow, which had drifted some way off after the explosion before going down, held out rather longer, only being identified in October 2005 in a joint search with British divers, finally closing the book on exactly where the ship that carried de Gaulle home came to rest.

The two halves of her lie some distance apart, which is itself a piece of evidence. A ship that breaks in two and then has one section drift before sinking has been opened up amidships with great violence, which fits a mine and does not fit the German claim of a midget submarine attack; the wreck did more to settle the argument than the paperwork ever did. She is a war grave for sixty-eight men, most of them French, two of them British, lying in the southern North Sea rather than off the coast they had spent 1944 liberating. There is a memorial to them at Courseulles-sur-Mer, on a road named the Avenue de la Combattante, put up in 2017 and carrying every name; the town where she landed de Gaulle waited seventy-two years to write them down, and then did.