HMS Scorpion (G72): The Destroyer That Torpedoed the Scharnhorst and Bombarded Sword Beach

A Name Inherited From a Lost Gunboat

HMS Scorpion was originally to be named Sentinel, but was renamed Scorpion following the loss of a Dragonfly-class river gunboat that had carried the name, sunk in February 1942, a small but poignant reminder of how ship names were passed on within the Royal Navy even in the midst of a war that was claiming vessels at an alarming rate. She commissioned as an S-class destroyer on 11 May 1943.

The gunboat deserves better than a subordinate clause. HM River Gunboat Scorpion was a Dragonfly-class boat, one of the shallow-draught ships the Royal Navy kept for river work in the Far East, and on 13 February 1942 she was caught in the open by Japanese destroyers off Sumatra while the evacuation of Singapore was collapsing around her. She had no business fighting destroyers and she fought them anyway. The Admiralty's response was to take a name away from a destroyer building at Birkenhead so that Scorpion stayed on the Navy List, which is a small formal gesture and the only one available.

Getting her finished took a while. She was ordered on 9 January 1941 with the 5th Emergency Flotilla, the same order that produced HMS Savage (G20), and laid down at Cammell Laird that June. Then she sat. The launch slipped past a year and did not happen until 26 August 1942, held up by design problems and by armament and fire-control equipment that would not arrive, and she was not completed until 11 May 1943. Two years and four months from order to commissioning, for a destroyer, in the middle of a war, is a long time, and it is the sort of delay that never appears in a battle narrative and decided a great deal about which ships were where in 1942.

Screening the Arctic Convoys

Scorpion joined the 23rd Destroyer Flotilla and took on extensive convoy escort duty on the brutal Arctic route to the Soviet Union, covering convoys JW 54B, RA 54A, JW 55A and RA 55A, exactly the kind of gruelling, dangerous work that defined service on this most punishing of wartime routes.

Torpedoing the Scharnhorst

Scorpion's defining moment came at the Battle of the North Cape on 26 December 1943, screening the battleship HMS Duke of York during the climactic engagement with the German battleship Scharnhorst.

Together with the Norwegian destroyer Stord, Scorpion launched sixteen torpedoes, scoring one confirmed hit that contributed directly to the Scharnhorst's eventual sinking, one of the most significant surface actions of the naval war and a decisive moment in neutralising the German threat to the Arctic convoy route.

Opening Fire on Sword Beach

Barely six months later, Scorpion crossed the English Channel on 5 June 1944 and took up position off Ouistreham to bombard targets in support of Allied landing forces in the Queen Sector of Sword Beach on D-Day, directly supporting the invasion of Normandy before going on to patrol against the threat of German E-boats in the crowded, dangerous waters off the beachhead.

Her Sister Died on That Beach

There is something that belongs in this section and is missing from it, and it happened within sight of her. HMS Shark was another S-class destroyer, launched in June 1943, and she was handed over to the exiled Royal Norwegian Navy and commissioned as HNoMS Svenner. At first light on 6 June 1944, while the bombardment force was forming up off Sword, two German torpedo boats of the 5th Flotilla came out of Le Havre through the smoke, got inside the screen and fired. Svenner took two torpedoes amidships, broke in half and went down in minutes. Thirty-two Norwegians and one British sailor were killed and 185 of her 219 people were pulled out of the water.

She was the only Allied warship sunk by German naval action on the morning of D-Day, and Scorpion was a few thousand yards away off Ouistreham, firing at the same beach. The two of them had been built to the same drawings. Svenner's anchor was recovered and now stands as a memorial at Hermanville-sur-Mer, on the shore she was covering. The attack that killed her, from the point of view of the ships that went after the torpedo boats, is described in HMS Brissenden, and HMS Holmes (K581) was in the same crowded water.

Back to the Arctic, Then Carrying Norwegian Troops

After her D-Day duties, Scorpion resumed Arctic convoy escort work that September, supporting operations alongside escort carriers, and in November 1944 carried Norwegian troops, a fitting task for a ship whose most celebrated action had helped remove one of the last major German surface threats to Norwegian and Arctic waters.

A New Flag and a New Name

Scorpion was sold to the Dutch Navy in October 1945 and renamed Kortenaer, going on to be converted into a fast frigate in 1957 before finally being broken up in 1963, a long and useful second career for a ship whose Royal Navy service alone had already secured her a notably significant place in naval history.

The name the Dutch gave her closes a circle that nobody planned. Kortenaer had been a destroyer of the Royal Netherlands Navy, and she was sunk by Japanese warships in the Java Sea on 28 February 1942. So this hull began as Sentinel, was renamed for a British gunboat the Japanese destroyed off Sumatra on 13 February 1942, and ended her career carrying the name of a Dutch destroyer the Japanese destroyed a fortnight later and eight hundred miles away. Two navies, one fortnight, the same enemy, and one ship carrying both memorials for the rest of her working life. She served the Dutch as a destroyer until 1957, was rebuilt as a fast frigate, and lasted into the 1960s: a longer second career than her Royal Navy one, under a name that meant as much to her new owners as Scorpion had to her old ones.

A Destroyer at Two of the War's Turning Points

HMS Scorpion's war carried her through two of the Second World War's most consequential naval moments within the space of six months, helping sink one of Germany's most feared battleships at the Battle of the North Cape and then directly supporting the invasion that would open the final chapter of the war in Europe, a remarkable run for a single destroyer.