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 was one of four escorts, alongside HMS Inglefield, HMS Impulsive and HMS Intrepid, screening the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous when the carrier was torpedoed and sunk by U-29 on 17 September, going down in just seventeen minutes off the south-west Irish coast. Ivanhoe joined the hunt for U-29 afterwards, dropping depth charges alongside HMS Kempenfelt and HMS Echo through the night, but the submarine escaped regardless, a frustrating first taste of just how hard U-boats could be to actually catch.

What she was doing when Courageous was lost is worth explaining, because the operation itself was a mistake and it was abandoned immediately afterwards. In the first fortnight of the war the Admiralty tried using its fleet carriers as anti-submarine hunting groups, sending them out into the Western Approaches with a destroyer screen to find U-boats with their aircraft. It sounded reasonable and it was extremely dangerous: a carrier steaming into wind to fly off aircraft is a large, predictable, slow-turning target, and two of her four escorting destroyers had been detached to chase a contact when U-29 found Courageous on the evening of 17 September 1939. Two torpedoes hit her and she went over and sank in about seventeen minutes, taking 519 men and her captain with her. She was the first British warship lost in the war. The Admiralty stopped carrier anti-submarine patrols within days and did not try the idea again until 1943, by which time the carriers were small, expendable escort carriers permanently attached to convoys rather than fleet units wandering the ocean on their own.

Less than a month later, on 14 October, she had rather more luck, helping sink the German submarine U-45 alongside HMS Inglefield, HMS Intrepid and HMS Icarus, working together 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.

On 29 May 1940, amid the chaos of the Dunkirk evacuation itself, she was given a considerably grimmer job. The destroyer HMS Grafton, torpedoed by U-62 while rescuing survivors of the already-sunk HMS Wakeful, had suffered heavy casualties and was left drifting and beyond saving. Under the command of Commander Philip Hadow, Ivanhoe torpedoed and sank Grafton herself, a mercy killing intended to stop the wreck becoming a hazard to other shipping once darkness fell.

It is worth pausing on what Commander Hadow was actually ordered to do, because it is one of the harder things the Navy asks of anybody. Grafton had been torpedoed while stopped, picking survivors out of the water from another destroyer that had already been sunk; her bridge had been wrecked and her captain killed. What was left was a drifting hull, still afloat, still with British dead aboard her, in a crowded stretch of water in the dark with hundreds of small craft coming and going. Ivanhoe put a torpedo into her because a wreck like that in the Dunkirk approaches would kill somebody else before morning. Her own account is in the article on HMS Grafton (H89). Three months later Ivanhoe was the ship drifting and burning, and it was HMS Kelvin who had to do it to her.

Bombed at Dunkirk

Two days later, on 1 June 1940, HMS Ivanhoe was attacked by German aircraft as she left Dunkirk harbour, strafed and bombed in the same desperate hours that had already cost Grafton's crew so dear. The bomb that struck her killed 26 men, including her own Able Seaman Hubert Dutson and five soldiers she was carrying, and wounded many others; only one of her boiler rooms remained working afterwards, just enough power to limp home to the naval dockyard at Sheerness.

The first of June was the worst day the Royal Navy had at Dunkirk, and her damage was part of a pattern. The weather cleared, the Luftwaffe came over in strength, and by nightfall four destroyers and twenty-seven other vessels had been sunk: Keith, Basilisk and Havant lost to air attack off the beaches, the minesweeper Skipjack hit five times and capsized with several hundred troops aboard, and Ivanhoe and others damaged badly enough to be out of it. Havant's own end is described in the article on HMS Havant (H32). The Admiralty response was immediate and unsentimental: the modern destroyers were pulled out of the operation altogether, because Britain was going to need them for what everybody assumed was coming next, and the remaining evacuation was restricted to the hours of darkness. That decision, taken with the army still on the beaches, is one of the least comfortable of the whole campaign, and it was almost certainly right.

She underwent repairs before resuming her minelaying duties.

The Texel Disaster

HMS Ivanhoe was lost on the night of 31 August into 1 September 1940, one of five destroyers of the 20th Destroyer Flotilla, alongside HMS Express, Esk, Icarus and Intrepid, that sailed from Immingham to lay mines off the Dutch coast north-west of Texel, reinforced by HMS Kelvin, Jupiter and Vortigern of the 5th Flotilla. Air reconnaissance spotted a German naval force apparently heading for Britain while the minelaying was still under way, and the flotilla was ordered to turn and intercept it, a change of plan that sent the ships straight into a newly laid, uncharted German minefield.

HMS Express was badly damaged first, losing most of her bow and suffering ninety casualties among her 175 men, including her own wounded captain. The flotilla commander's ship, HMS Esk, went to help and struck a mine herself, sinking almost immediately with the loss of all but one man aboard. HMS Ivanhoe then closed in to take off Express's wounded and hit a mine in turn, an explosion that killed a further 53 of her own crew and injured most of the rest; men like Leading Stoker Edward Brown and Able Seaman Ronald Marshall, among those lost, are commemorated on the Chatham Naval Memorial to this day. Though she initially appeared to be recovering, HMS Ivanhoe eventually lost all power and had to be abandoned, one of roughly 300 men killed across the whole disaster, with around 100 more injured or taken prisoner after drifting ashore in the Netherlands.

The order that killed them makes no sense without the summer they were living through. By the last day of August 1940 the invasion of Britain was expected daily; the Germans were assembling barges in the Channel ports, the Battle of Britain was at its height, and the Admiralty had destroyers at short notice all down the east coast with orders to attack any invasion convoy the moment one appeared. On the night of 31 August a reconnaissance report of German warships moving west from Terschelling was, in that atmosphere, exactly what everybody had been waiting for. The flotilla did the obvious thing: dumped its own mines over the side, because a destroyer carrying sixty of them is no use in a fight and rather worse than no use if she is hit, and turned to intercept. There was no invasion convoy. What there was, in the water they turned into, was a German field laid shortly before, which nobody knew about. Three hundred men died because an aircraft saw something in the dark in the week everybody expected the invasion.

The Chatham Naval Memorial where her dead are named is worth knowing about in its own right. After the First World War the Admiralty had to find some way of commemorating the very large number of sailors who had no grave, because the sea does not return people, and the answer was an identical memorial at each of the three manning ports, Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth, so that a man was remembered where he had been borne on the books. They were designed by Sir Robert Lorimer, and Chatham's was unveiled by the Prince of Wales in April 1924; an extension by Sir Edward Maufe was added after the second war and unveiled by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1952. Chatham alone carries 8,517 names from the First World War and 10,098 from the Second. Ivanhoe's dead are on it because Chatham was her home port, and they are there rather than in a cemetery because there was nothing to bury.

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.

The whole flotilla is a fair illustration of what the destroyer war actually cost. The I class numbered nine ships; six of them were sunk and a seventh was written off. Of the five destroyers that sailed from Immingham that night, two were sunk within an hour of each other and a third had her bow blown off, and the flotilla commander went down with his ship along with all but one of her company; the fuller account of that night is in the article on HMS Esk (H15), and one of the two that came through it, only to be sunk by aircraft in a Greek harbour three years later, is in the article on HMS Intrepid (D10). Ivanhoe was three years old. She had escorted the first British warship lost in the war, killed a U-boat, laid mines off three enemy coastlines, torpedoed one of her own to keep a channel clear, been bombed on the worst day at Dunkirk, and then been mined and scuttled on a false alarm. That is a great deal of war for thirty-six months.