HMS Ivanhoe (D16): Bombed at Dunkirk, Lost in the Texel Disaster

Built on the Clyde

HMS Ivanhoe was ordered on 30 October 1935 under the 1935 Naval Programme and built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun, laid down on 12 February 1936 and launched on 11 February 1937, completed that August at a cost of £259,371 excluding items supplied by the Admiralty.

She was the second Royal Navy warship to carry the name, an I-class destroyer that joined the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean on commissioning, taking part in training exercises with French forces and enforcing the international non-intervention policy during the Spanish Civil War through 1939.

Sinking a U-boat

HMS Ivanhoe transferred to Western Approaches Command following the outbreak of war in September 1939, and helped sink the German submarine U-45 on 14 October that year, working alongside her sister ships in exactly the kind of coordinated anti-submarine effort that would become increasingly essential as the Battle of the Atlantic intensified.

She was subsequently converted to a minelayer, and carried out operations off the German, Dutch and Norwegian coasts through the spring of 1940.

Bombed at Dunkirk

HMS Ivanhoe took part in the Dunkirk evacuation in May and June 1940, and was attacked off Dunkirk harbour by German aircraft during the operation. The bomb that struck her killed 26 men, including five soldiers she was carrying, and wounded many others, a heavy toll inflicted in the midst of the desperate effort to bring troops home from the beaches.

She underwent repairs before resuming her minelaying duties.

The Texel Disaster

HMS Ivanhoe was lost on 31 August 1940, while laying mines north of the Dutch island of Texel, an operation that went catastrophically wrong when her own force ran into an unswept minefield, an episode that became known as the Texel Disaster and cost the Royal Navy several ships and men in a single, grim night.

HMS Ivanhoe herself struck a mine, and though she initially appeared to be recovering, she eventually lost all power and had to be abandoned.

She was finally scuttled by a torpedo fired by the destroyer HMS Kelvin, sinking on 1 September 1940, closing out the career of a destroyer whose final mission, laying the very kind of weapon that ultimately destroyed her, stands as a sobering reminder of just how dangerous minelaying operations remained even for the ships carrying out the laying rather than merely sweeping up afterward.