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, also known as Scott-class, destroyer leaders, ordered in April 1917 and laid down by Cammell Laird, the yard responsible for most of her class, on 27 March 1918. 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 was one of only two of her class to miss that war entirely and still be around, and fighting, for the next one.

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 notably 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.

Her eighth and final run, on the night of 2 to 3 June, went in to lift the last of the British Expeditionary Force and rescue the French rearguard; her officers had a celebration planned ashore for the following evening when the recall order arrived instead, and reportedly sailed for Dunkirk still in their mess dress, monkey jackets and bow ties included, rather than waste time changing.

Barges, Boulogne and a U-boat Kill

Dunkirk was not the end of Malcolm's involvement with the French coast that year. On 10 September 1940, with the invasion threat to Britain at its height, she joined HM Ships Wild Swan and Veteran in attacking German invasion barges gathering at Ostend, and within the week the same ships were back off the coast bombarding Boulogne, part of a running effort to disrupt the invasion fleet Hitler never in the end launched.

The barge work deserves more than a footnote, because it was a campaign rather than a raid. Through September 1940 the invasion ports, Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne, Ostend, Cherbourg, were being worked over almost nightly by destroyers and motor torpedo boats out of the Nore, Portsmouth and Plymouth, with the 2nd Cruiser Squadron joining in on the night of the 8th and 9th, and by heavy ships as well: the bombardment of Cherbourg under Operation Medium is described in the article on HMS Revenge (06).

It worked. By 21 September British air and naval attacks had sunk sixty-seven craft in the invasion ports and damaged a hundred and seventy-three more, and British naval intelligence reckoned the Germans had lost something over an eighth of both their transports and their barges. Bomber Command claimed afterwards that the barge attacks were what finally convinced the German command the Channel could not be crossed, which is the sort of claim an air force makes about its own work, but the barges were unquestionably going down.

What is worth holding on to is what those barges actually were: river craft, towed and unpowered for the most part, meant to carry an army across twenty miles of the roughest short sea in Europe. Malcolm and her two consorts going into Ostend on 10 September were shooting at something that would have had to survive that crossing with the Royal Navy loose in the middle of it. Whether Sea Lion was ever a serious proposition is still argued about. Nobody argued about it at the time.

By the end of 1940 Malcolm had settled into the unglamorous but vital work of the Western Approaches Escort Force, eventually shepherding 29 Atlantic convoys and three bound for Gibraltar, ten of which came under attack. The most significant of these came on 29 June 1941, when she combined with HM Ships Violet, Scimitar, Arabis and Speedwell to sink U-651 while escorting convoy HX 133, a small measure of revenge for the two merchant ships, Brockley Hill and Grayburn, the U-boat had already sunk from that same convoy.

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 from the Vichy French troops defending the port, who opened fire within minutes of Malcolm and her fellow destroyer HMS Broke approaching the harbour entrance at four o'clock in the morning. Malcolm tried to break through the boom but was struck and severely damaged by a shell fired from the shore, an attack that killed ten of her crew, wounded many more, and knocked out three of her four boilers, cutting her speed to a crawl of four knots and forcing her to withdraw, badly battered and listing, to wait it out beyond the harbour mouth.

Broke fared rather better, forcing her way through the same boom on her third attempt and landing her troops on the Quai de Fécamp under fire, a stark reminder of how much of naval warfare comes down to luck as much as planning when two old leaders attempting the identical manoeuvre meet such starkly different fates.

Broke's luck did not last the morning. She got in, landed her troops and was then driven out again by fire she could not answer, and she did not survive the operation: badly holed, she was taken in tow by the destroyer HMS Zetland and sank two days later, on 10 November 1942. The full account of Operation Terminal, the three attempts at the boom and what it cost, is in the article on HMS Broke. So of the two old leaders sent to force the harbour, the one that failed to get in survived the war and the one that succeeded did not survive the week.

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 truly costly attempt to force her way into an enemy harbour.