HMS Stevenstone: Survivor of a Disastrous Night Off Brittany

A Hunt Class Destroyer Built for Escort Work

HMS Stevenstone was a Hunt class destroyer, part of a class of smaller, more economical escort destroyers built in large numbers to protect convoys and coastal shipping from air and submarine attack, a class named, in keeping with wider Royal Navy tradition for the type, after English fox hunts rather than battles or admirals.

It was a modest naming convention for ships that would nonetheless find themselves in some particularly dangerous corners of the war at sea.

She was built by J.S. White and Co of Cowes, launched on 23 November 1942 and commissioned the following March, and served under four wartime commanding officers in turn: Lieutenant Peter Barthrop North Lewis, Temporary Acting Lieutenant Commander Henry McLean Duff-Still, Lieutenant Edward Gerard Napier Mansfield and finally Acting Lieutenant Commander Charles Alexander Headon Owen, who was in command when the war in Europe ended.

Her early months were spent on anti-submarine exercises out of Scapa Flow and on escort duty for some of the Navy's biggest capital ships, including the battleships HMS Malaya, HMS King George V, HMS Revenge and HMS Queen Elizabeth, a solid if unremarkable apprenticeship before the night that would define her war.

A Costly Night Action Off Brittany

In October 1943, HMS Stevenstone took part in Operation Tunnel, a night action off the Île de Sept-Îles on the Brittany coast that turned into one of the more costly small-ship engagements of the war for the Royal Navy.

The force, seven ships in all, had been sent to intercept the German blockade runner Munsterland as she tried to slip past Cherbourg; instead, in the small hours of 23 October, they ran into a strong German escort of torpedo boats guarding her, a case of the hunters becoming the hunted.

The cruiser HMS Charybdis was hit by torpedoes from the German torpedo boat T23 and went down with the loss of well over 400 of her ship's company, only 107 men surviving, while the destroyer HMS Limbourne had her bow blown off by a separate torpedo and was so badly crippled that she had to be finished off by her own side, torpedoed by HMS Talybont in the early hours of the following morning with around 40 of her own crew already lost.

It stands, rather remarkably, as the last time in the whole of the Second World War that a Royal Navy surface force was defeated outright by German surface ships, a sobering distinction for an action most people have never heard of.

HMS Stevenstone came through the action, a survival that was as much good fortune as anything else given how badly the engagement went for the squadron as a whole.

What the Hunts Did After the Torpedoes

Surviving is not quite all she did, and the hours afterwards are worth recording. The action itself lasted about seven minutes. Charybdis was hit twice within two minutes of being sighted, before a single British gun had fired, and the German boats then withdrew because their commander feared a second British group behind him that did not exist. That left a burning cruiser going down in the dark, a destroyer with her bow blown off, five surviving ships, no flagship and no admiral: command devolved on Lieutenant Commander R P Hill in the destroyer Grenville, the senior officer left afloat.

What the force then did, through the rest of that night and into the following morning, was pick men out of the sea. A hundred and seven of Charybdis's company came out of the water alive, out of a ship's company of over five hundred. An attempt to take Limbourne in tow failed, so she was finished off with torpedoes from Talybont and gunfire from Rocket, and about a hundred of her people were taken off first; forty-two were not. Stevenstone spent that morning doing the same work as everybody else, which in October, in the Channel, in the dark, with oil on the water, is slow and cold and largely a matter of luck. The rest of the story, including the German commander's own account of the action and the extraordinary funeral the occupied islanders of Guernsey gave the dead who washed ashore, is in HMS Charybdis (88).

Why Tunnel kept going wrong is the useful question. It was not one operation but a standing arrangement, a series of night sweeps into the Channel and the Bay of Biscay repeated through 1943 and 1944, and repetition was exactly the problem: the same waters, the same approach, a scratch force of ships that had not worked together, in a single line with the cruiser leading, and no worked-out plan for who was to fire when. The Germans, operating from ports a few miles away with shore radar watching the whole area, had every advantage that arrangement could give them. HMS Brissenden and HMS Wensleydale (L86), who was in the line that night, both turn up in the same series of sweeps.

Supporting the D-Day Landings

HMS Stevenstone went on to serve in Force J during the Normandy landings of June 1944, escorting convoy J9, ten landing ships infantry among them, across the Channel overnight on 5 and 6 June before providing naval gunfire support to troops going ashore at Beny-sur-Mer on Juno Beach, one of the two beaches assigned to Canadian forces on D-Day, a role that placed her directly in support of the invasion at its most critical opening hours. She then spent the following days on further patrol and fire support duties in the Bay of the Seine as the beachhead was secured.

It was unglamorous but essential work, laying down covering fire so that the landing troops could get ashore and push inland.

A Kill Off Nieuport and a Fatal Mine Off Ostend

On 31 October 1944, as Allied forces pushed along the Belgian and Dutch coast, HMS Stevenstone sank a German E-boat off Nieuport, one more small but genuine success in a war that was by then visibly drawing towards its close. Her own war, however, effectively ended just a month later.

On 30 November 1944, HMS Stevenstone struck a mine off Ostend, an incident well corroborated across multiple independent sources, resulting in the deaths of fourteen of her crew and injuries to a further eighteen, a sobering loss so close to the war's end. Repairs kept her out of the war entirely, running from that December through to the following June, so she returned to service only after the fighting in Europe was already over.

Why the Belgian Coast Was Lethal in November 1944

The mine that ended her war was not a stray. By the autumn of 1944 the Allied armies in north-west Europe had a supply problem that was becoming strategic: they had captured Antwerp, the greatest port in northern Europe, almost intact at the beginning of September, and they could not use a berth of it, because the Germans still held both banks of the sixty miles of the Scheldt estuary that connect it to the sea. The whole of October and the first days of November went on clearing them, ending with the assault on Walcheren, and only then could the minesweepers start.

What they found was one of the densest concentrations of mines anywhere in the war: German ground mines and moored mines laid over four years, Allied mines laid against German coastal traffic, and fresh mines dropped nightly by aircraft into the very channels being cleared. It took a hundred minesweepers most of November to open the approaches, and the first convoy did not reach Antwerp until the 28th. Stevenstone struck her mine off Ostend two days later, on 30 November 1944, in water that had been swept and was being re-mined faster than it could be cleared. Fourteen of her people were killed. She was under repair for the next six months and the war in Europe finished without her.

Of two further claims sometimes associated with her wartime record, one now holds up rather better than the other. A collision with the frigate HMS Brissenden is corroborated by an English language specialist source, which dates it to May 1946 rather than March and confirms it was serious enough to see her placed straight into reserve, so this one can be stated with reasonable confidence even if the exact month remains slightly uncertain. A supposed role rescuing survivors from HMS Trollope on D-Day, however, appears nowhere else, including in detailed English language accounts of her own D-Day movements, and is best treated as unverified rather than repeated as settled fact.

Her collision with Brissenden effectively ended her front line career, and she never recommissioned for further active service. HMS Stevenstone was eventually sold for scrap, arriving at the breakers in Dunston on 2 September 1959, well over sixteen years after she had first commissioned into a war that, for one grim night off Brittany, she had been lucky merely to survive.