HMS Sabre (H18): The Destroyer That Brought Home 5,765 Men From Dunkirk

Launched Too Late for One War, Just in Time for Another

HMS Sabre was an Admiralty S-class destroyer built by Alex Stephens in Scotland and completed by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, launched in September 1918 and commissioned in 1919, just missing the First World War she had been designed to fight.

Her interwar years were a slow slide into obscurity. Reduced to reserve at Portsmouth in 1931, by 1933 she was essentially idle with just a single engineer looking after her, and in 1934 the Admiralty went so far as to offer her own ship's bell for sale to interested naval officers, asking price a modest five pounds. She was nominally struck off and "scrapped" on paper in December 1936, purely to satisfy the tonnage limits of the London Naval Treaty, while in reality remaining laid up in a demilitarised state. It was only in November 1937 that she returned to real duty, recommissioned at Portsmouth as a target ship for torpedo-bombers under Lieutenant-Commander Brian Dean, the very officer who would still be in command when her war truly began.

Rammed at Rosyth

Sabre's war got off to an unpromising start when she was rammed and severely damaged by HMS Jervis Bay at Rosyth in October 1939, an accident that might easily have ended her career before it properly began. Repaired and returned to service, she joined the 22nd Destroyer Flotilla, setting the stage for the role that would define her entire war.

The ship that rammed her deserves a line, because she did not have long. Jervis Bay was a liner taken up as an armed merchant cruiser, and on 5 November 1940, a little over a year after the collision at Rosyth, she was the sole escort of convoy HX 84 in the mid-Atlantic when the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer found it. Her captain, Edward Fegen, turned his 14,000-ton liner with her seven old six-inch guns straight at a warship that outranged and outgunned him in every respect, and made smoke, and kept going until she sank. He was killed with 189 of his people. Thirty-one of the thirty-seven merchant ships in the convoy got away in the dark while the Scheer was busy with him. Fegen was given a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Ten Trips to Dunkirk in Nine Days

In May and June 1940, Sabre took part in the Dunkirk evacuation with a determination that stands out even among the hundreds of vessels, great and small, that took part, working first off the beaches at Malo-les-Bains and later from the harbour mole itself as the operation wore on. She made ten round trips across the Channel over nine days, continuing to run the gauntlet despite being damaged in an air attack along the way.

On a single sortie on 28 May, she embarked roughly 100 men from the beaches, then a further 800 from the mole, and 500 more later that same day, 1,400 troops across three separate trips alone.

By the time the evacuation ended, Sabre had rescued 5,765 soldiers in total, among the highest totals achieved by any individual ship in the entire operation, an extraordinary feat of sustained, dangerous seamanship. Commander Brian Dean was awarded the DSO on 6 June 1940 for his leadership throughout, the same officer who had brought Sabre back into service as a target ship less than three years earlier.

Some perspective on that figure. Something over 338,000 men came out of Dunkirk, and rather more than two-thirds of them were lifted not from the beaches at all but from the East Mole, a mile-long timber walkway on concrete piles that had never been intended to take a ship alongside. The story of how somebody worked out that it would is in the article on HMS Grenade (H86), who was tied up to it when the Stukas found her. Sabre, a destroyer laid down to fight the Kaiser, brought out 5,765 men on her own, which is something like one in every fifty-eight people who got home.

A War of Rescues

Sabre's remarkable talent for saving lives at sea did not end at Dunkirk.

Modified that autumn with additional depth charges and anti-aircraft armament and attached to the 1st and later 21st Escort Groups, she went on to rescue 879 passengers and 273 crew from the stricken liner SS Volendam in the late summer of 1940, all 320 children aboard among them, youngsters being evacuated overseas away from the Blitz.

The Children on the Volendam, and the Ship That Came After

Those children were not simply passengers. They were part of the Children's Overseas Reception Board, a government scheme set up in the summer of 1940 to send British children out of the country altogether, to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, on the assumption that Britain was about to be invaded. It was enormously oversubscribed. Something like 211,000 applications came in and about 2,664 children were actually sent. Volendam was carrying 321 of them, with 31 escorts, 255 other passengers and her crew of 273.

She was torpedoed by U-60 on the night of 30 August 1940, and every single person aboard lived, for a reason that has nothing to do with anybody's courage. Two torpedoes hit her and only one of them went off. The second was found afterwards, still lodged in her bow, unexploded. Sabre and the other escorts took everybody off a ship with a live torpedo in her, and Volendam was subsequently towed in and repaired.

Eighteen days later the same route killed almost everybody. On 17 September 1940 the liner City of Benares, carrying ninety CORB children to Canada, was torpedoed by U-48 six hundred miles out in an Atlantic gale. She went down in half an hour. Of the 406 people aboard, 258 died, and of the ninety children, seventy-seven were killed. The public reaction in Britain was such that Churchill cancelled the whole evacuation scheme within days, and no more children were sent. Sabre's three hundred and twenty children came home and grew up. It is worth setting the two nights side by side, because the difference between them was a defective torpedo pistol.

That December, escorting a convoy off Tory Island in hurricane-force winds, she went to the aid of the Dutch cargo ship Stolwijk, driven onto the rocks off the Donegal coast. A great wave swept Sabre's own decks in the attempt, flattening her bridge and carrying away her upper-deck fittings, and she had to withdraw badly damaged herself. Ten of Stolwijk's crew were lost, but the remaining eighteen were pulled from the wreck by the crew of the Arranmore lifeboat, a separate act of courage that finished the rescue Sabre could no longer complete.

In December 1941 she pulled ten survivors from the torpedoed tanker Cardita, and in March 1942 she escorted the opening stage of the perilous Arctic convoy PQ 13 out through the Northwest Approaches. By then Commander Dean had moved on, handing Sabre over in January 1941 to Lieutenant Peter Gretton, who would go on to become one of the Atlantic convoy war's most celebrated escort commanders.

Gretton is worth following, because Sabre was very nearly the making of him. He was a lieutenant when he took her in January 1941. By the spring of 1943 he was a commander with his own escort group, B7, and at the beginning of May that year he took the escort of convoy ONS 5 into the largest convoy battle of the entire war: some forty U-boats against forty-odd merchant ships in the North Atlantic in filthy weather. Thirteen merchantmen were lost. Six U-boats were sunk and several more damaged, and Donitz pulled his boats out of the North Atlantic three weeks later. It is generally taken as the exact point at which the Battle of the Atlantic turned.

Two ships from that battle are here. HMS Tay (K232) was the frigate Gretton was actually in for part of it, and HMS Snowflake (K211) was one of the corvettes that did the killing. Gretton finished the war as one of the most respected escort commanders in the Navy and retired a Vice-Admiral. He had learned the trade in a twenty-two-year-old destroyer that the Admiralty had tried to sell for scrap and whose bell had once been going for five pounds.

A Quiet Final Chapter

Sabre spent her final years of service on Atlantic and coastal convoy defence duties through 1943 to 1945, unglamorous but essential work that rounded out a war career already defined by acts of genuine heroism. She was placed on the disposal list at the war's end and sold for scrap in November 1945, arriving at the breaker's yard at Grangemouth the following year.

A Destroyer Whose True Legacy Was Lives Saved

HMS Sabre never sank an enemy warship or claimed a headline-grabbing kill, and her most lasting legacy is instead measured in the thousands of men who owed their safe return to Britain to her crew's willingness to keep sailing back into danger, trip after trip, at Dunkirk and beyond. Few ships of her size and age can claim to have saved quite so many lives.