HMS Havant (H32): Built for Brazil, Lost at Dunkirk

Built for a Foreign Navy

HMS Havant began life under a rather different flag: she was ordered by Brazil as the Javary on 8 December 1937 from J. Samuel White at Cowes, laid down on 30 March 1938 and launched on 17 July 1939.

With war clouds gathering over Europe, Britain purchased the still-incomplete destroyer on 5 September 1939, just two days after declaring war on Germany, renaming her HMS Havant and commissioning her on 19 December that year, a notably useful piece of last-minute fleet expansion at exactly the moment Britain needed every available hull it could get.

She was not the only one, and the wider story is a good deal odder than a single purchase. Brazil had ordered six modified H-class destroyers from British yards in early 1938, spread between Vickers Armstrong at Barrow, J. Samuel White at Cowes and Thornycroft at Woolston, and had named them after Brazilian rivers: Jurua, Javary, Jutahy, Juruena, Jaguaribe and Japura. When war came Britain took the lot. All six were requisitioned on the stocks or fitting out, given English names beginning with H to match the class they were derived from, and pushed into service between December 1939 and June 1940 as the Havant class: Havant, Handy, Havelock, Hearty, Highlander and Hurricane. Two of them had to be renamed almost at once, Handy becoming Harvester and Hearty becoming Hesperus, because the Admiralty realised it now had too many ships whose names sounded like HMS Hardy over a radio. One of them went on to become one of the most successful U-boat killers of the war, as described in the article on HMS Hesperus (H57). Britain effectively took delivery of another country's destroyer flotilla, and Brazil, which was neutral at the time and would not declare war until 1942, had to do without.

Norway and the Faroes

Under the command of Lieutenant Commander Anthony Frank Burnell-Nugent, DSC, who would remain her only Royal Navy captain for her entire commission, HMS Havant spent her first months on convoy escort duty in the Western Approaches, shepherding trade convoys such as HX 28 in from Halifax alongside a battleship and a trio of Canadian destroyers.

She joined the 9th Destroyer Flotilla before transferring to the Home Fleet in April 1940 as the Norwegian Campaign got underway, providing escort for convoys sailing to Narvik and transporting Royal Marines to occupy the Faroe Islands and Iceland, pre-emptive moves designed to deny those strategically valuable North Atlantic outposts to Germany following its invasion of Denmark and Norway.

Those two occupations deserve to be called what they were, because the usual language for them is diplomatic and the events were not. Denmark fell on 9 April 1940, and Denmark owned the Faroes and had responsibility for Iceland's foreign affairs. Three days later British forces landed in the Faroes, and Churchill told the Commons that the islands were a strategic point of high importance and that their people had shown every disposition to receive us with warm regard. On 10 May Royal Marines went ashore at Reykjavik in the early hours and spent the morning cutting the telegraph, securing the airfield and the port and arresting German nationals. Nobody fired a shot in either place. The Icelandic government issued a formal protest stating that its neutrality had been flagrantly violated and its independence infringed, and it was entirely right. Britain did it because the alternative was Germany doing it first, and because a German base in Iceland would have made the North Atlantic convoy routes untenable. Havant spent that spring carrying the marines who took two neutral countries.

Rescuing Thousands at Dunkirk

HMS Havant took part in Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk, from 29 May 1940, making four separate runs across the Channel and rescuing more than 2,300 men from the beaches and harbour, a remarkable individual contribution to one of the largest and most desperate evacuations in British military history.

Four runs and 2,300 men is worth converting into a picture. Havant was a destroyer of about 1,300 tons with a designed complement of 145, roughly 320 feet long, with a hull built for speed and a very fine bow. Putting five or six hundred exhausted soldiers into a ship like that means men standing shoulder to shoulder on the upper deck, filling the mess decks, sitting in the passageways and packed into every compartment that is not machinery, with the ship's stability calculations rewritten by their weight and their tendency to move all at once. Nobody could fight the ship in that condition; the guns could not be worked properly and damage control was close to impossible. And she did it four times in three days, across a minefield, under air attack, into a burning port. The reason the destroyers mattered so much at Dunkirk is that they were fast enough to make the round trip twice a day, and the reason the losses among them were so heavy is exactly the same.

Sunk on Her Final Run

HMS Havant's own end came on 1 June 1940. Arriving at her usual berth at 7.30 that morning, she embarked around 500 troops before going alongside the destroyer HMS Ivanhoe, herself disabled by dive bombers earlier that day, and taking off all of Ivanhoe's own troops and wounded besides. German Stuka dive bombers found Havant as she sailed for home and struck with devastating accuracy, two bombs hitting her engine room directly and a third passing clean over her before exploding just beneath her hull.

The attack killed eight of her crew and wounded 25 more out of a ship's company of 145, along with at least 25 of the soldiers she was carrying, a heavy toll inflicted in a matter of moments.

The first of June was the day the Luftwaffe finally got the weather it had been waiting for, and it was the worst day of the whole operation for the Royal Navy. The sky cleared at first light and the bombers came in waves from dawn onwards. Three British destroyers were sunk off the beaches that morning, Keith, Basilisk and Havant, along with a long list of minesweepers, trawlers, tugs and personnel ships; the toll ran to something like thirty vessels in a single day. Some 64,000 men still came out. That evening the Admiralty accepted what the morning had proved, and daylight evacuation was abandoned altogether; everything that came off Dunkirk after 1 June came off in darkness. Havant was hit at the end of the last daylight lift there ever was.

What she was doing when the bombers found her is the part that ought not to be lost in the arithmetic. A ship that goes alongside a disabled one in a bombed anchorage and takes her load aboard is doing the most dangerous thing available: she is stopped, she is deep, and she is now carrying twice what she should. Havant turned for England slow and grossly overloaded, and that is when the Stukas caught her. Ivanhoe survived that day, was patched up and was lost off the Texel three months later, a story told in the article on HMS Ivanhoe (D16). Havant was sunk because she stopped to take other people's wounded aboard, which at Dunkirk was so routine that it barely got written down.

With the ship crippled beyond saving, an attempt to tow her to safety failed, and HMS Havant was finally sunk at 10.15 that morning, her own magazines deliberately flooded and finished off by shellfire from the minesweeper HMS Saltash, under Lieutenant Commander T.R. Fowke, which had come alongside to take off her survivors. She lies still today in around 27 metres of water a few miles off Dunkirk, closing out the career of a destroyer that, in the space of barely six months in British service, had gone from a half-built Brazilian order to one of the many quiet heroes of the Dunkirk evacuation.

She had been a British warship for five and a half months. Ordered by one country, taken by another, commissioned three days before Christmas 1939, and on the bottom off Dunkirk by the first of June, with eight of her own men and at least twenty-five soldiers dead in her. Her only Royal Navy captain, Burnell-Nugent, had commanded her for the whole of it. She lies in about twenty-seven metres of water a few miles off the French coast, and the men still in her are the reason she is a war grave rather than a wreck. Of the six ships Brazil ordered, she was among the first into service and the first to be lost, with much the shortest career of them all. What the Royal Navy paid at Dunkirk, and how much of the army came home because of it, is set out in the article on HMS Grenade (H86).

Burnell-Nugent himself had a war that is difficult to credit. Havant was the first of three ships lost under him inside two years. Later in 1940 he was in HMS Hostile when she was mined in the Mediterranean, and in 1941 he was in HMS Jersey when she was mined again, at Malta. Three destroyers gone beneath him in twenty-four months, and he walked away from all three.

It is worth thinking about what that does to a man, and about what the Royal Navy did with him afterwards, which was to give him another ship. He held the DSC, was born in 1906 and died in 1976, and by any reasonable measure had already used up more luck by the age of thirty-five than most people are issued with.

There is a postscript that closes the circle rather neatly. In November 1949, nine years after the morning off Dunkirk, he had a son. James Burnell-Nugent went into the Royal Navy as his father had, and in November 2005 was promoted admiral and appointed Commander-in-Chief Fleet, which is to say that he ended up in charge of the entire operational Royal Navy. The son of a man who lost three ships in two years finished as the officer responsible for all of them.