HMS Javelin (F61): The Destroyer That Lost Her Bow and Stern and Lived

Built on the Clyde

HMS Javelin was ordered on 25 March 1937 and built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down on 11 October 1937, launched on 21 December 1938 and commissioned on 10 June 1939, a J-class destroyer displacing 1,760 tons and armed with three twin 4.7-inch guns alongside two quintuple mounts of 21-inch torpedo tubes, a notably powerful armament for a ship of her size.

Her early career gave little hint of the drama to come: she collided with her sister ship HMS Jersey on 22 September 1939, and then with a merchant vessel the following month, the kind of unglamorous mishaps that were an occupational hazard of destroyer work in crowded, blacked-out wartime waters.

Norway and Dunkirk

HMS Javelin escorted convoys to Norway during the campaign there in the spring of 1940, and on 21 April that year rescued 30 survivors from the merchant ship Cedarbank after she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-26, landing them safely at Aalesund.

The following month she took part in Operation Dynamo, the evacuation from Dunkirk, helping rescue survivors from the sinking SS Abukir amid the chaos of the beaches, exactly the kind of unglamorous rescue work that defined so much of the destroyer force's contribution to that operation.

The Night the Bow and Stern Came Off

HMS Javelin's war took its most dramatic turn on the night of 29 November 1940, when the 5th Destroyer Flotilla, commanded by Lord Louis Mountbatten, engaged three German destroyers off Plymouth. Under the command of A. F.

Pugsley, HMS Javelin was struck by enemy fire and, worse, by torpedoes, in an action that tore away both her bow and her stern in a single engagement, an almost unimaginable degree of damage for any ship to sustain and survive.

Of her original length of 353 feet, only some 155 feet remained afloat, and 45 of her crew were killed in the attack, a heavy loss suffered in the space of a particularly brutal few minutes at sea.

That HMS Javelin survived at all, let alone that she was subsequently towed home and rebuilt, stands as a remarkable testament to the basic toughness of a well-built destroyer hull, though it would take nearly a year of repair work before she was fit to fight again.

Back in the Fight

HMS Javelin returned to active service and went on to take part in Operation Ironclad, the invasion of Madagascar, in May 1942, and Operation Vigorous, one of the hard-fought convoy operations to resupply besieged Malta, in June 1942.

In January 1943, she and HMS Kelvin together destroyed a group of Italian naval vessels, a satisfying return to offensive action for a ship that had so nearly been lost off Plymouth little more than two years earlier.

A Difficult End and a Quiet Scrapping

HMS Javelin's service was not without further trouble: in 1945 she was affected by a mutiny incident involving her wartime-only, Hostilities Only ratings, a reminder that the strains of years of hard service could tell on a crew just as surely as they told on a hull.

She was eventually sold for scrap on 11 June 1949 and broken up at Troon in Scotland, closing out the career of a destroyer whose survival of a single catastrophic night off Plymouth remains, on its own, one of the more remarkable stories to come out of the Royal Navy's J-class destroyers.

Her ship's bell survives today at the Royal Canadian Legion in Burin, Newfoundland, a small, faraway memorial to a ship that came closer to being cut in two than almost any other Royal Navy vessel to survive the war.