HMS Malcolm (D19): Eight Runs to Dunkirk, Then Straight Into a Harbour Boom

Built Too Late for the War She Was Built For

HMS Malcolm was one of eight Admiralty-type destroyer leaders, ordered in April 1917 and built by Cammell Laird, the yard responsible for most of her class. By the time she was launched, on 29 May 1919, the First World War she had been designed and built to fight was already over, a fate shared by a great many warships ordered in the war's final desperate years. She served with the 5th Destroyer Flotilla through the 1920s before entering reserve, and by September 1939 had returned to active duty as leader of the 16th Destroyer Flotilla based at Portsmouth, conducting anti-submarine patrols as an altogether different war began.

Eight Runs Into Dunkirk

HMS Malcolm transferred to Dover Command in May 1940, and from 26 May to 4 June took part in the evacuation of Dunkirk, making eight separate runs between the beleaguered French port and England, a genuinely relentless schedule carried out under near-constant threat from German aircraft and shore artillery. Her commanding officer, Captain Sir Thomas Halsey, was specifically recognised for good services in the withdrawal of the Allied armies from the beaches, a fitting tribute to a ship whose repeated crossings helped bring so many thousands of soldiers safely home.

Shelled Trying to Force Algiers Harbour

HMS Malcolm's most costly action came during the North African landings of November 1942, when she took part in Operation Terminal, an attempt to seize the port of Algiers directly by sailing straight into the harbour. The operation ran into unexpectedly determined resistance: HMS Malcolm tried to break through the harbour boom but was struck and severely damaged by a shell fired from the shore, an attack that killed ten of her crew and disabled three of her four boilers, forcing her to withdraw badly battered from an operation that had asked her to sail directly into the teeth of shore-based defences rather than engage at a safer distance.

Repaired and Back to Escort Duty

HMS Malcolm was repaired and returned to convoy escort duties in the South Atlantic and Mediterranean, continuing that steady, essential work through to the middle of 1945. She arrived at Plymouth on 14 June that year, and by the end of July had arrived in tow at the Barrow breakers' yard, closing out the career of a destroyer whose life had begun too late for the war she was built to fight, but who went on to earn her place in naval history regardless, first through eight determined runs into Dunkirk, and later through a genuinely costly attempt to force her way into an enemy harbour.