HMS Verdun (L93): The Destroyer That Carried the Unknown Warrior Home

Named for a French Sacrifice

HMS Verdun was named as a tribute to the French people and the extraordinary endurance of their armies at Verdun in 1916, one of the longest and costliest battles of the First World War. The Admiralty V-class destroyer was built by Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn on Tyneside, launched on 21 August 1917 and completed that November, joining the Grand Fleet and Harwich Force.

Leading the German Fleet Into Internment

In November 1918, Verdun had the striking distinction of preceding King George V's own vessel through the lines of the interned German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow during Operation ZZ, a particularly symbolic role at the moment the Kaiser's navy was led into captivity.

Operation ZZ, on 21 November 1918, is worth a figure. Something like three hundred and seventy Allied warships put to sea from the Firth of Forth in two enormous parallel lines, six miles apart, and the seventy ships of the German High Seas Fleet steamed up the corridor between them to surrender without a shot. It remains the largest concentration of warships ever assembled anywhere, and it is the only time in history that one battle fleet has surrendered another intact. Verdun went ahead of the royal yacht through the lines. The cruiser at the head of the whole procession, leading the Germans in, has her own account in HMS Cardiff (D58).

Carrying the Unknown Warrior Home

Verdun's single most significant duty came in November 1920, when she was given the solemn honour of transporting the remains of the Unknown Warrior from France to Britain.

On 10 November 1920, she berthed at Boulogne-sur-Mer, where the coffin was carried up the gangplank and piped aboard with an admiral's salute, before six escorting destroyers accompanied her across the Channel to Dover, from where the coffin travelled by train to Westminster Abbey for burial.

How the Unknown Warrior Was Chosen

The most important thing about the Unknown Warrior is that nobody knows who he was, and that this was arranged with great care so that it could never be found out.

On the night of 7 November 1920, four bodies were brought into a chapel at St Pol, near Arras. Each had been exhumed from one of the four great British battlefields, the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and the Ypres Salient; each had been chosen because nothing whatever survived to identify it; and each was covered with a Union flag. Brigadier-General L J Wyatt went in alone, put his hand on one of them, and came out. The other three were taken away and reburied. The men who had brought them in did not know which battlefield the chosen one had come from, and no record was kept.

That is the whole design of the thing. He could be a private or a general, a regular of 1914 or a conscript of 1918, from any part of the United Kingdom or, in principle, anywhere in the Empire. Every family with a son who had gone missing in France could believe, without being contradicted, that it might be theirs. Something over half a million British and Empire dead of that war have no known grave.

The coffin was made of English oak, banded and handled in iron, and set into the lid behind the plate was a crusader's sword from the royal collection, given by the King. It was, by any measure, a medieval object, and it was carrying a man who had almost certainly been killed by industrial artillery.

The Crossing

He spent the night of 9 November in the thirteenth-century castle at Boulogne, watched in turn through the hours of darkness by British and French soldiers. On the morning of the 10th the coffin came down through the town to the quay on a French army wagon drawn by six black horses, through streets lined by French troops and by a great many people who had no obligation to be there, and was piped aboard Verdun with an admiral's salute.

The escort can be named. French warships took her clear of French waters. In British waters six destroyers of the Royal Navy formed up on her: Witherington, Wanderer, Whitshed, Wyvern, Wolverine and Veteran. Dover Castle fired a nineteen-gun salute as she came in, which is the salute due to a field marshal, and is the only time it has ever been fired for a man whose name nobody knew.

From Dover the coffin went by train to Victoria, where it rested overnight in the station, and on the morning of 11 November 1920 it was drawn through London on a gun carriage past the newly unveiled Cenotaph to Westminster Abbey. He was buried in soil brought from the battlefields, and the grave was covered with a slab of Belgian marble. It is the only floor in the Abbey that is never walked on.

Why It Had to Be This Ship

The ship was not picked out of a hat, and the article's opening explains the choice without quite drawing the line. Verdun was named for the ten-month battle of 1916 in which the French army lost something in the region of a hundred and sixty thousand dead holding a fortress town of no great strategic importance, on the principle that it must not fall. It is the battle the French remember as their Somme and their Passchendaele together, and it is the reason the phrase they attach to it, on ne passe pas, is still on the walls there.

A British destroyer carrying that name, sailing from a French port with a British soldier whose identity had been deliberately destroyed, escorted out by French warships and cheered off by French crowds, is about as carefully judged a piece of symbolism as the Admiralty ever managed. France buried her own unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe on the same day.

Bomb Damage and the Loss of Her Captain

Converted to an anti-aircraft escort in 1940 and redesignated with the pennant number L93, Verdun operated as a convoy escort from Rosyth, and in November 1940 suffered bomb damage that killed her captain and eleven of her crew. She went on to support the Arctic convoys in 1942 and spent the rest of the war on coastal escort duties.

The bomb that hit her in November 1940 killed her commanding officer and eleven of her ship's company. It is worth pausing on the ordinariness of it. She was twenty-three years old, converted to an anti-aircraft escort of the type described in HMS Vimiera, and shepherding colliers up and down the East Coast, and twelve men died on her in a routine action of a war that had barely started. Twenty years earlier she had carried one dead soldier home and half the country had come out to watch.

A Bell in Westminster Abbey

After VE Day, HMS Verdun was decommissioned and sold for scrap at Granton, Edinburgh in April 1946, but her ship's bell survives to this day, hanging in Westminster Abbey close to the tomb of the Unknown Warrior she once carried home, a fitting and permanent memorial to her most solemn duty.

The bell is a proper survival and worth knowing about. When she was scrapped in 1946, her ship's bell was preserved and presented to Westminster Abbey, and it hangs on a pillar close to the grave. It is rung on the anniversary of the burial and at services connected with the Warrior, which means that a piece of a First World War destroyer, built on the Tyne in 1917, is still doing its job in the same building as the man it carried, more than a century later.