HMS Kelvin (F37): The Destroyer That Carried Churchill to Normandy

The Build: Govan

HMS Kelvin was laid down on 5 October 1937 and built by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan on the Clyde, launched on 19 January 1939 and commissioned on 27 November that year, a K-class destroyer armed with three twin 4.7-inch guns and two quintuple mounts of 21-inch torpedo tubes, a powerful fit for a ship of her size that would see her through some of the most eventful years of the naval war.

She is one of very few Royal Navy warships named after a scientist rather than an admiral or a battle, and the choice was well earned. William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, is remembered now for the absolute temperature scale that carries his name, but a great deal of his working life was spent on problems the Navy cared about a good deal more. He solved the engineering of the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable. And in 1876 he patented the compass that bears his name, which addressed the single worst navigational problem of the age: as ships changed from wood to iron, the hull itself became a magnet and pulled the compass needle off north by amounts that varied with the ship's heading, her latitude and even how recently she had been struck by lightning. Thomson's answer was a binnacle carrying corrector magnets and two soft iron spheres, which could be adjusted to cancel the ship's own field, paired with a much lighter card carrying small needles that did not swing wildly in a seaway. It became standard throughout the Royal Navy, and the two iron balls on either side of a ship's binnacle, which every sailor of the next century took for granted, are his. He went on in his seventies to design the sounding machine the Navy used for the next sixty years.

Scuttling a Sister Ship

HMS Kelvin's war began with a grim duty, and a chaotic one. On the night of 31 August 1940, she was part of a combined force of eight destroyers laying mines off the Dutch island of Texel when, diverted to intercept a suspected German naval movement, the flotilla ran into an unmarked minefield of its own. HMS Express hit first, losing most of her bow and suffering ninety casualties among her crew of 175. HMS Esk went to her aid and struck a mine of her own, breaking in two and sinking within minutes with 127 men lost. HMS Ivanhoe then went alongside Express to take off her wounded, only to hit a mine herself, a further 53 men killed in the blast.

Ivanhoe could not be saved, and that afternoon it fell to HMS Kelvin to finish the job with a torpedo of her own, an unhappy but necessary task, and the kind of decision that fell to a destroyer's crew rather more often than any of them would have liked during the confused, dangerous early years of the war. The Texel Disaster, as it became known, cost the Royal Navy around 300 men in a single night, a sobering reminder that mines laid in a hurry could just as easily catch the layer as the enemy.

Her part in that night deserves a word of its own, because being the ship that finishes off a friend is a particular kind of duty. The flotilla had jettisoned its own mines to go and intercept a reported invasion force that did not exist, run into a German field nobody had charted, and lost two ships and about three hundred men in a couple of hours; the full account is in the article on HMS Esk (H15), and Ivanhoe's own story is in the article on HMS Ivanhoe (D16). What was left to Kelvin was a burning, powerless destroyer that could not be towed home and could not be left where she was, with her own dead still aboard her, in a minefield, in daylight, within reach of German aircraft. Somebody has to fire that torpedo, and somebody has to give the order. It was done twice in the Royal Navy that summer within three days at Dunkirk and again here, and the men who did it did not talk about it much afterwards.

That October, HMS Kelvin escorted the battleship HMS Revenge during the bombardment of Cherbourg, one of her first major operational tasks of the war.

The Spartivento action is worth a note because of what it did to the man who fought it. On 27 November 1940 Somerville, escorting a convoy through the western Mediterranean with a scratch force, met a superior Italian squadron, drove it off in a short and inconclusive engagement, and then broke off the pursuit to stay with his convoy rather than chase the Italians towards their own airfields. The convoy got through untouched. The Admiralty, at a distance of two thousand miles, convened a board of enquiry into whether he had been insufficiently aggressive, which enraged the entire Mediterranean Fleet and did lasting damage to relations between Somerville and the Admiralty; the board exonerated him completely. It is a useful illustration of a permanent tension in naval command: the object of escorting a convoy is to get the convoy through, and the object of a fleet action is to sink the enemy, and the two are not always the same thing. Somerville was right, and being right about it very nearly cost him his job.

The Mediterranean War

HMS Kelvin spent much of the following three years in the Mediterranean under Admiral James Somerville, taking part in a remarkably relentless run of operations: the Action off Cape Spartivento in November 1940, the bombardment of Benghazi and operations off Crete in May 1941, the Second Battle of Sirte in March 1942 as part of the 1st Division alongside HMS Jervis, Kipling and Kingston while escorting the vital Malta convoy MW10, the sinking of the Italian torpedo boat Lupo off Kerkennah Bank in Tunisia in December 1942 in company with HMS Janus, Javelin and Jervis, and further attacks on Italian supply ships and a convoy in January 1943.

It was a punishing schedule that reflected just how central destroyers like HMS Kelvin had become to the constant, grinding contest for control of the Mediterranean's sea lanes.

Second Sirte deserves rather more than a clause in a list, because it is one of the finest defensive actions the Royal Navy has ever fought and it ended in complete failure. On 22 March 1942 Rear Admiral Philip Vian was escorting four merchant ships to Malta with four light cruisers and fourteen destroyers when Admiral Iachino appeared with the battleship Littorio, two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and ten destroyers. Vian had nothing that could hurt a battleship. What he did instead was divide his force into six divisions, send the convoy away to the south, and use one division to lay a smoke screen while the rest attacked out of it, appearing, firing torpedoes and vanishing again, in a rising gale, for two and a half hours, until Iachino concluded that he could not get at the convoy without accepting torpedo damage he could not afford and turned away. Kelvin was in the 1st Division with Jervis, Kipling and Kingston. It was a textbook piece of tactics, universally admired, and it achieved nothing at all: the delay meant the convoy reached Malta in daylight instead of before dawn, and German aircraft sank all four merchant ships and one of the escorts over the following two days. Fifteen thousand tons of cargo left Alexandria and about five thousand tons of it was landed.

Bombarding Sword Beach and Carrying Churchill

HMS Kelvin returned to Britain for a refit at Chatham and recommissioned in March 1944, in good time to take part in one of the defining operations of the entire war.

Assigned to Task Force D for Operation Neptune, the naval component of the D-Day landings, she was tasked at dawn on 6 June 1944 to bombard German positions around Sword Beach, providing exactly the kind of close naval gunfire support that helped suppress enemy defences as Allied troops fought their way ashore.

Churchill had wanted to watch the invasion itself from a cruiser on 6 June, and was only talked out of it when King George VI pointed out that if the Prime Minister insisted on going, the King would rather feel obliged to come too. Six days later, on 12 June 1944, HMS Kelvin got her consolation prize instead, carrying Churchill, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke and Admiral Sir Philip Vian across the Channel so the Prime Minister could visit the Normandy front, lunch with General Montgomery just three miles from the fighting, Monty mentioning, when asked, that his own headquarters had been shelled the night before, and sit in on a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff.

The argument about Churchill going on D-Day is one of the better constitutional stories of the war. He had told Eisenhower he intended to watch the landings from a cruiser and had, in effect, dared anybody to stop him; Eisenhower objected and was ignored, the Chiefs of Staff objected and were ignored, and the matter was only settled when George VI wrote to say that if the Prime Minister was going then the King saw no reason why he should not go too, which was plainly impossible and both men knew it. Churchill gave way with poor grace. The King himself crossed on 16 June, four days after Churchill's trip in Kelvin; Churchill went again in July and in September. He was sixty-nine, he had been Prime Minister for four years, and he had spent a good deal of the previous eighteen months in aircraft over hostile territory. The idea that a man of that age and that office should be within range of German artillery seemed obvious to nobody except himself.

The trip produced one of the best-loved anecdotes of Churchill's entire war. On the way home, well within range of the German shore batteries, he turned to Vian and asked, "Since we are so near, why shouldn't we have a plug at them ourselves before we go home?" Vian agreed, and moments later every gun HMS Kelvin had opened up on the silent coastline before beating a hasty retreat back through the safety of the assembled cruiser and battleship lines. Churchill later wrote that it was the only time in his life he had been aboard a warship when she fired her guns in anger, a rather remarkable claim for a man who had spent decades as First Lord of the Admiralty and a wartime Prime Minister besides.

It is worth noticing who was standing next to him when he asked to have a plug at them. Philip Vian was already one of the most famous fighting officers in the Royal Navy: it was Vian who took HMS Cossack into a Norwegian fjord in February 1940 and boarded the German supply ship Altmark to release three hundred British merchant seamen imprisoned in her hold, calling down to them the four words that made the newspapers for a fortnight, the Navy's here. He had fought Second Sirte, commanded the Eastern Task Force off Normandy, and would end the war commanding the British Pacific Fleet's carriers off Okinawa. So when the Prime Minister suggested opening fire on the French coast for the fun of it, the admiral he suggested it to was precisely the wrong man to say no. Every gun in the ship fired, nothing whatever fired back, and Kelvin withdrew through the lines of cruisers and battleships at speed.

A Rare Survivor

HMS Kelvin remained in the Channel for further operations before returning to the Mediterranean, particularly the Aegean, until November 1944, continuing to support the liberation of the Dodecanese islands.

She survived the war entirely intact, a particularly notable achievement given how many of her fellow J, K and N-class destroyers were lost in action. She arrived at Troon in Scotland for scrapping on 29 March 1949, with breaking up beginning the very next day; she was beached on 26 July and demolition was complete by 23 August 1949, closing out the career of a destroyer whose service ranged from a grim mercy scuttling to carrying the Prime Minister himself across the Channel, and giving him the only shots "fired in anger" of his own long naval career into the bargain.

Surviving intact is genuinely remarkable for a ship of her class and the arithmetic makes the point. Twenty-four J, K and N-class destroyers were built for the Royal Navy, and more than half of them were sunk, most in the Mediterranean and a good many within a few months of each other in 1941 and 1942; the design bought its firepower at the cost of being lightly built, as described in the article on HMS Javelin (F61). Kelvin was at Texel, off Cherbourg, at Spartivento, off Crete, at Second Sirte, in the Kerkennah actions, off Sword Beach and in the Aegean, which is about as much of the war as one destroyer could reasonably attend, and she came through all of it. She was scrapped at Troon in 1949 at the age of nine, which is the usual reward: a wartime destroyer that survives is worn out, obsolete and expensive, and the peacetime navy has no use for her. The ones that were sunk are remembered. The ones that came home were cut up.