HMS Scimitar (H21): From Dunkirk to the Disaster Rehearsal at Slapton Sands

A Quiet First War, a Busy Second

HMS Scimitar was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down in May 1917, launched in February 1918 and commissioned that April under the pennant G41.

She served briefly with the Grand Fleet but saw no combat action before the Armistice, entering reserve at Devonport in 1920 and cycling through further reserve postings at Rosyth and The Nore over the following decade and a half, an unremarkable interwar career that gave little hint of the eventful war still to come.

One of Eleven Left Out of Sixty-Seven

The unremarkable interwar career is the whole point of her, because most of her class did not get one. Sixty-seven S-class destroyers were built from 1917, drawn from the modified R class on the sensible principle that a small destroyer you can build quickly beats a large one you cannot. They had two funnels, a long forecastle and a bridge set oddly far aft, behind the break of the deck, and most of them were finished after the Armistice and had nothing whatever to do.

Then in 1930 the London Naval Treaty put a ceiling on how much destroyer tonnage Britain was allowed to own, and the Admiralty went through the fleet with a pencil. Almost the whole class went to the breakers through the middle and later 1930s. Eleven were still on the list in 1939. Everything Scimitar did in the six years that followed, Dunkirk, the Atlantic, a U-boat, Slapton Sands, she did as one of eleven survivors of sixty-seven, and the only reason she was there to do any of it is that somebody totting up tonnage in Whitehall stopped counting before they got to her. Her sister HMS Sardonyx (H26) was another of the eleven, and the two of them served in the same escort group at Iceland in 1943.

Into the Dunkirk Evacuation

Scimitar spent the early months of the Second World War on English Channel convoy defence, escorting vessels to Brest and undergoing modification for minesweeping duties.

In May 1940 she took part in the Dunkirk evacuation, part of the extraordinary fleet of vessels that pulled hundreds of thousands of trapped soldiers off the beaches, though the operation cost her a collision with HMS Icarus that damaged her propeller, a reminder of just how chaotic and dangerous the crowded waters off Dunkirk had become.

The Icarus collision is worth putting in proportion. Dunkirk was fought in a stretch of water a few miles across, in the dark, without lights, by several hundred ships of every conceivable size, many of them handled by people who had never taken a vessel to sea before that week, while being bombed. Collisions were not the exception. HMS Sabre (H18), another of the eleven surviving S-class ships, made ten crossings and brought home 5,765 men; HMS Malcolm (D19) made eight and would be alongside Scimitar again the following summer, hunting a U-boat.

Repaired and back at sea within weeks, Scimitar and HMS Vanquisher picked up 43 survivors on 8 July 1940 from the British merchantman Humber Arm, torpedoed south-west of Ireland by U-99, the same U-boat whose captain, Otto Kretschmer, would go on to become the highest-scoring submarine ace of the entire war before his own capture the following year.

Helping Sink U-651

Scimitar went on to serve with the 8th, 1st and 21st Escort Groups on Atlantic convoy duty, and on 29 June 1941, under the command of Lieutenant Robert Franks, helped sink the German submarine U-651 south of Iceland alongside the destroyer HMS Malcolm and the corvettes Arabis and Violet, a genuine combat success achieved through exactly the kind of patient, coordinated escort work that gradually turned the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats.

There were five ships in on that kill, not four. Malcolm and Scimitar were the destroyers, Arabis and Violet the corvettes, and the minesweeper HMS Speedwell was there as well; between them they held the contact and depth-charged U-651 to the surface at 59 degrees 52 north, 18 degrees 36 west, in the empty water south of Iceland. What happened next is the unusual part. Every one of her forty-five men came off her alive and went into a prisoner of war camp. A U-boat depth-charged in the middle of the North Atlantic in 1941 normally took her whole crew with her, and the sailors doing the depth-charging knew it perfectly well; a boat that surfaces and gives her people time to get out is the exception that everybody remembers.

The lieutenant commanding Scimitar that day is worth naming in full. Robert Denys Franks finished the war a lieutenant commander with a DSO, a DSC and an OBE, which is a decorated escort career by any measure, and he was doing it in a twenty-three-year-old destroyer that the Admiralty had come within a pencil stroke of scrapping.

Rescuing the Survivors of HMS Warwick

On 20 February 1943, while searching for a submarine, Scimitar found herself performing a very different and more urgent duty, rescuing ninety-three survivors after HMS Warwick was struck by a homing torpedo fired from U-413 and sank nearby, a rapid and demanding rescue operation that undoubtedly saved many lives from a sister ship's sudden loss.

Caught Up in the Slapton Sands Tragedy

Scimitar's war took a darker turn during Exercise Tiger on 26 April 1944, the D-Day landing rehearsal off Slapton Sands that became one of the war's most tragic training accidents when German E-boats attacked the exercise convoy, killing hundreds of American servicemen.

Scimitar's own part in the story was, in the end, one of absence rather than presence. On the evening of 26 April, in a collision unconnected to the exercise itself, she struck a landing ship, tank and had to put back into Plymouth for repairs, leaving Convoy T-4, eight American LSTs bound for Slapton Sands, with only the corvette HMS Azalea standing guard instead of the two escorts it was meant to have. The gap wasn't even noticed for hours; a replacement, HMS Saladin, was not sent until half past one the following morning, and she arrived too late to help. In the small hours of 28 April, nine German E-boats found the poorly escorted convoy and sank LST-507 and LST-531 outright, badly damaging a third, LST-289. Estimates of the dead range from around 750 to nearly 950 American servicemen, a toll kept quiet for decades, and one that a single unlucky collision, days earlier and miles away, had helped make possible.

There was a second failure that night and it was worse than the first. The American landing ships had been issued the wrong radio frequency in their orders, so when the E-boats came in, Convoy T-4 and the ship guarding it were physically alongside one another and unable to talk. HMS Azalea knew what was happening and could not tell them; the LSTs could not tell her. Compounding that, the shore authorities who knew a second escort had never sailed took hours to act on it. Azalea's own account of that night, from the point of view of the ship that was there, is in HMS Azalea (K25).

None of which is Scimitar's fault, and it is worth saying so plainly. A destroyer that has hit a landing ship and is holed goes into dock; that is not negligence, it is Tuesday. What went wrong was everything that was supposed to happen after she reported it, and the men who paid for it were the several hundred American soldiers and sailors already named, whose families were not told at the time what had happened or why.

A Final Role Training New Crews

Withdrawn from operational service in October 1944, Scimitar spent her final months of war on training duties at Plymouth, passing on the hard-won lessons of years of convoy escort and evacuation work to a new generation of naval personnel as the war moved toward its conclusion. She survived to see peace, finally scrapped on 30 June 1947, almost three decades after she first commissioned.

A Destroyer That Touched Some of the War's Defining Moments

HMS Scimitar's career brought her into contact with an unusually wide range of the Second World War's most significant episodes, from the desperate evacuation at Dunkirk to a confirmed U-boat kill, a dramatic rescue at sea, and finally the tragic rehearsal for D-Day itself, a particularly eventful record for a destroyer whose earlier First World War service had passed almost entirely without incident.