HMS Wren (D88): Lost to Stukas Off the Suffolk Coast

Scotstoun-Built

HMS Wren was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun, her keel laid in June 1918, launched on 11 November 1919 and towed to Pembroke Dock for completion, finally commissioning into the Royal Navy on 23 January 1923, the third ship to carry a name first used by the Royal Navy in 1653.

Rescue Ship for the Home Fleet

Wren joined the 4th Destroyer Flotilla of the Atlantic Fleet, serving mainly in home waters through the interwar years, and in 1938 was assigned as rescue ship for the Home Fleet's aircraft carriers, a role that put her survival skills to good use long before the war she would not live to see the end of.

Gunfire Support at Bjerkvik

In September 1939, Wren transferred to the 16th Destroyer Flotilla for convoy defence in the English Channel, before serving on convoy escort and anti-submarine patrol duties with various flotillas.

Following the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, she transferred to Scapa Flow and provided gunfire support to British landings at Bjerkvik, part of the brief and ultimately unsuccessful Allied campaign to hold Norway.

Sunk Off Aldeburgh

On 27 July 1940, off Aldeburgh in Suffolk, Wren came under heavy and sustained attack while providing anti-aircraft cover for minesweeping operations alongside HMS Montrose, when fifteen Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers struck.

Damaged by several near misses that holed her below the waterline, she sank quickly, and thirty-seven of her crew were killed; her survivors were picked up by the minesweepers she had been protecting, a devastating loss this account records with the full gravity it deserves, one of the earliest and heaviest blows suffered by the Royal Navy's East Coast forces in the opening months of the aerial war over Britain's home waters.