HMS Vanity (D28): From the Russian Civil War to the English Channel

Constructed at Dalmuir

HMS Vanity was built by William Beardmore and Company at Dalmuir, laid down on 28 July 1917, launched on 3 May 1918 and commissioned on 21 June 1918, an Admiralty V-class destroyer that arrived just in time to see service in the final months of the First World War.

The Admiralty heralds enjoyed themselves with this one. A ship called Vanity was given a badge of a peacock's feather in gold, blue and green on a black field, which is as close to a joke as naval heraldry gets. Rather later, in December 1941, the town of Scunthorpe adopted her after a Warship Week savings campaign, which is a very late adoption for a ship that had already been in commission for twenty-three years and had fought in one war and started another.

Intervention in the Russian Civil War

In the aftermath of the war, Vanity took part in the Baltic campaigns of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, a lesser-remembered but truly dangerous chapter of British naval history in which Royal Navy warships found themselves fighting Bolshevik forces in the confined and mine-strewn waters of the Baltic.

The War Nobody Declared

Lesser-remembered is putting it mildly. Between the end of 1918 and the end of 1919 the Royal Navy fought a campaign in the Baltic that was never declared, is barely taught, and cost it well over a hundred dead and seventeen ships. Britain had gone in to keep the newly independent Estonia and Latvia from being reabsorbed by the Bolsheviks, and found itself in a shallow, freezing, extensively mined sea, opposed by a Russian fleet based at Kronstadt and by German Freikorps units on land who were nominally on the same side and frequently were not.

It was fought by light forces, and it produced some of the most audacious operations in the Navy's history: coastal motor boats taken over the shoals into Kronstadt harbour at night to torpedo the Bolshevik fleet at its moorings, two Victoria Crosses won in one raid, and a running war of mines and patrols in the Gulf of Finland. It also produced casualties nobody at home wanted to hear about, in a country exhausted by four years of war and being told there was another one going on. Vanity was one of the destroyers doing the patrolling, and men of her generation of ships came home from it to a Britain that had already moved on.

Two Decades in Reserve

Vanity remained in active service through the 1920s before being decommissioned and placed in reserve during the 1930s, part of the substantial pool of older destroyers kept in mothballs as Britain's naval strength was gradually rebuilt in the years before the Second World War.

What a WAIR Conversion Was

Converted into an anti-aircraft escort covers a specific and rather clever piece of make-do. By 1939 the Royal Navy had a large number of First World War V and W-class destroyers, worn out as fleet destroyers but structurally sound, and an urgent shortage of anything that could protect the East Coast coal convoys from air attack. The answer was the WAIR conversion.

The 4.7-inch guns came out, because a low-angle destroyer gun is useless against aircraft. In went twin four-inch high-angle mountings with a proper anti-aircraft director, along with radar and close-range weapons as they became available. What emerged was not a destroyer any more; it was a small, fast, elderly escort whose entire purpose was to put a curtain of fire between a line of colliers and a formation of Ju 87s. HMS Vimiera went through the same programme.

Recommissioned as an Anti-Aircraft Escort

Recommissioned in August 1939 as war loomed, Vanity was converted into an anti-aircraft escort between October 1939 and June 1940, going on to perform convoy escort and patrol duties in the North Sea and taking part in the Gothenburg break-out operations in 1942, before finishing the war on convoy escort and patrol duty in the English Channel from February 1945 through to Germany's surrender.

The Ships That Ran From Gothenburg

The Swedish operations she escorted for are worth explaining, because they are among the strangest of the war. When Norway fell in 1940 a number of Norwegian merchant ships were caught in Gothenburg, a neutral Swedish port, with German forces holding both shores of the Skagerrak between them and the open sea. Norway's government in exile wanted them; Britain needed the tonnage badly; and Sweden, understandably, wanted no part of it.

The break-outs were run by the Special Operations Executive. In Operation Rubble, in January 1941, five ships slipped out and all five got through, bringing with them a large cargo of Swedish steel and ball bearings, with cruisers and destroyers of the Home Fleet waiting in the North Sea to meet them. Operation Performance, on the night of 31 March and 1 April 1942, tried the same thing with ten ships and went badly wrong: two arrived, the rest were sunk, scuttled, bombed or mined, and the affair produced a furious diplomatic row with Stockholm and considerable bitterness from the Norwegians.

Which of the two Vanity met is not entirely clear from her own record, which files the entry under January and names the later operation. What is not in doubt is the shape of the job: a twenty-four-year-old destroyer waiting in the North Sea in winter for unarmed merchant ships that might or might not appear out of the dark.

The Unsung Part

The best summary of what she actually did was written by the Admiralty historian who compiled her record, and it deserves quoting rather than paraphrasing. She was, he wrote, one of many First World War-built destroyers that were unsung ships whose routine work in defence of coastal convoys received little publicity, and she was frequently in action against E-boats during her many months of North Sea and Channel duties. Service in that class of destroyer, he added, was especially unpleasant, and the performance of the ships' companies under the abominable living conditions was quite outstanding.

Abominable is not a word Admiralty historians throw about. A V-class destroyer was designed in 1916 for short North Sea sorties, with no refrigeration worth the name, minimal heating, and messdecks forward where the motion is worst; she was then asked to spend six years going up and down the East Coast in all weathers with a crew a third larger than she was built for. It is a fair guess that nobody who served in her forgot it.

Scrapped at Grangemouth

Decommissioned in mid-1945 after more than a quarter century of intermittent service across two world wars and a foreign intervention in between, HMS Vanity was sold for scrapping at Grangemouth in Scotland on 4 March 1947.