HMS Vimiera: The Destroyer That Lifted 2,400 Men Off the Quay at Boulogne

Built for the 1917-18 Programme

HMS Vimiera was a V-class destroyer built under the Royal Navy's 1917-18 construction programme, fitted with Brown-Curtis steam turbines and Yarrow water-tube boilers and armed with a mix of guns and torpedo tubes typical of her class, entering service in the final phase of the First World War.

The name comes from Vimeiro, a village north of Lisbon where on 21 August 1808 Sir Arthur Wellesley fought his first battle of the Peninsular War and beat Junot. It was also the occasion of one of the more remarkable episodes in British military history: two more senior generals arrived, superseded Wellesley within hours of the victory, declined to pursue, and then signed the Convention of Cintra, under which the defeated French army was shipped home to France in British ships with its loot. All three generals were recalled and put before a board of inquiry. Wellesley was cleared. The other two never held a field command again, and the man who won the battle went on to become the Duke of Wellington.

Carrying Soviet Diplomats to Reval

In the uncertain years following the war, Vimiera undertook the unusual duty of carrying the Soviet trade delegates Leonid Krasin and Viktor Nogin back to the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic via a trip to Reval, part of the tentative Anglo-Soviet trade negotiations that marked one of the earliest diplomatic contacts between Britain and the new Bolshevik state.

Two Bolsheviks and a Destroyer

Carrying Leonid Krasin and Viktor Nogin to Reval is one of the odder entries in any British warship's log, and the men are worth naming properly. Krasin was an engineer, a former Bolshevik fundraiser who had organised bank robberies to finance the party before the revolution, and by 1920 he was Lenin's Commissar for Foreign Trade and the most presentable face the Soviet government had. He came to London in May 1920 as head of the first Soviet trade delegation, and Lloyd George received him.

The context is what makes it strange. Britain had spent the previous two years fighting the Bolsheviks: British troops had been at Archangel and Murmansk and British warships were still operating against them in the Baltic. The negotiations Krasin came for produced the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement of March 1921, which was the first formal recognition by any Western power that the Soviet government existed and was going to continue existing. Reval, now Tallinn, was the neutral back door through which almost all traffic between Soviet Russia and the West passed in those years, because it was the only route that neither side had to acknowledge.

So a British destroyer that had been built to fight the Germans, in a navy that had been shooting at Bolsheviks in the Gulf of Finland the previous summer, carried two Soviet commissars to Estonia as part of the process of making peace with them. The Baltic campaign that preceded it is described in HMS Vanity (D28).

Converted for a New War

Ahead of the Second World War, Vimiera was converted into a WAIR-configuration escort destroyer with enhanced anti-aircraft and anti-submarine fittings, joining the Nore Command in January 1940 before transferring to Dover Command that April as the situation in France deteriorated rapidly.

Rescue Work in the Channel Ports

Vimiera played an active part in the evacuations from the Channel ports, rescuing survivors from HMS Whitley and evacuating personnel from multiple locations along the French coast, sustaining substantial damage during the fighting around Boulogne and Calais and entering repairs on 25 May 1940, right at the height of the crisis.

Boulogne, 23 and 24 May 1940

Evacuating personnel from multiple locations along the French coast covers the single most impressive thing this ship ever did, and it is worth the detail.

On 21 May 1940 Vimiera escorted the 20th Guards Brigade across the Channel and into Boulogne, to hold the port against the German armoured divisions racing for the coast. Thirty-six hours later she was ordered back to take them out again, because the position had collapsed that fast.

She went alongside in Boulogne at half past seven on the evening of 23 May, in a harbour under artillery and air attack, with German troops fighting in the town, and left at twenty-five past eight with about a thousand men aboard. Then she went back. At twenty to two on the morning of the 24th she came in again, in the dark, and took off something in the region of fourteen hundred more, mostly Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps labourers and stragglers of the BEF. She was the last ship in and the last ship out.

The arithmetic is worth doing. A V-class destroyer had a ship's company of about a hundred and thirty and was three hundred feet long. On the second trip she took aboard roughly eleven times her own crew, standing shoulder to shoulder on every deck and in every compartment, in a hull with no stability margin for that kind of load, and took them across the Channel. Something like four thousand three hundred and sixty men were lifted out of Boulogne altogether, and about two thousand four hundred of them came out in this one ship.

It was not a clean ending. A second destroyer, HMS Wessex, did not arrive, and between two and three hundred Welsh Guardsmen were left on the quay, some of them having been told the evacuation was over. They tried to break out to the north-east. Very few made it.

Vimiera was damaged in the fighting off Calais immediately afterwards and went into dockyard hands on 25 May. Operation Dynamo, the Dunkirk evacuation proper, began the following day and ran until 4 June, and she was under repair for all of it. What she had already done at Boulogne was, by any reasonable measure, harder.

Lost With Heavy Loss of Life

On 9 January 1942, under the command of Lieutenant-Commander Angus Alexander Mackenzie, HMS Vimiera struck a mine in the Thames Estuary off East Spile Buoy near the Isle of Sheppey and sank with the loss of around ninety-six of her crew.

It was a stark reminder that even Britain's own coastal waters remained dangerous throughout the war, claiming a destroyer that had already proven her worth in some of the conflict's darkest early days.

The Most Mined Water in the World

Struck a mine in the Thames Estuary understates a campaign. From the first weeks of the war the Germans laid mines into the estuary and the East Coast channels, by aircraft, by destroyer and by submarine, night after night, for years. They used magnetic mines, then acoustic ones, then combinations designed to defeat whatever countermeasure had last been introduced, and they laid them faster than the sweepers could clear them.

The Thames Estuary was the single most heavily mined stretch of water on earth, because everything going into and out of London had to cross it and the Germans knew exactly where the swept channels were. Ships were being lost in it in 1945. HMS Vimiera hit one off the East Spile buoy near the Isle of Sheppey on 9 January 1942, in home water, within sight of England, and ninety-six of her people died there. She had been afloat for twenty-four years and had brought the better part of two and a half thousand men off a burning quay in France, and she was killed by a weapon dropped out of an aeroplane into the mouth of her own river.