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.

Four and a half years between keel and commissioning is remarkable and needs explaining. She was laid down in June 1918, five months before the Armistice, into a destroyer programme running at maximum output; she was launched in November 1919, into a country that had just discovered it had far more warships than it could pay for. Work on her stopped. She was towed round to Pembroke Dock to be finished at whatever pace the Treasury would allow, and she was not commissioned until January 1923. In between came the Washington Naval Treaty and the Geddes economy cuts, which between them took the Royal Navy from the largest fleet the world had ever seen to something the country could afford. She is one of the ships that fell into that gap and was finished anyway.

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.

What a Rescue Destroyer Did

Rescue ship for the Home Fleet's aircraft carriers is a real and specific job, and it deserves better than a passing clause, because it is one of the more nerve-racking things a destroyer is asked to do.

The plane guard, as it is still called, steams astern of the carrier throughout flying operations, a few hundred yards back and slightly off the wake. Her entire purpose is that if an aircraft goes into the sea on take-off or on landing, and in the 1930s a great many of them did, somebody is already there. A carrier cannot stop; she is committed to her course and cannot turn without wrecking the whole cycle of aircraft in the air behind her. The plane guard can, and does, and has a boat turned out and a scrambling net over the side before she gets there.

It is unglamorous, requires precise station-keeping for hours at a time, and is entirely about somebody else's survival. Naval aviation in the 1930s was still an experimental business with a startling accident rate, and the men who flew off those decks were kept flying in no small part by the fact that a destroyer was always sitting behind them.

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 the Allied landings at Bjerkvik, part of the brief and ultimately unsuccessful Allied campaign to hold Norway.

Bjerkvik, and What Was Actually Landed There

The landings she supported in Norway were among the very few things in that campaign that worked, and they were not British.

By May 1940 the Allies had been trying for a month to take Narvik and were getting nowhere, because the town could not be attacked frontally and the German mountain troops held the ground around it. The answer was to land at Bjerkvik, at the head of the fjord, and come at Narvik from behind. On 13 May the 1st Battalion of the 13th Demi-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion went ashore there in landing craft, with French light tanks put on the beach behind them, into opposition, in the small hours of an Arctic May when it is never properly dark.

It was the first opposed Allied amphibious assault of the war and the first in which tanks were landed from purpose-built craft, which makes it a rehearsal, four years early, for a great deal of what came later. It worked. The Legion took Bjerkvik and Narvik fell to a second landing two weeks afterwards, at which point the campaign was abandoned anyway because France was collapsing and every soldier in Norway was needed at home.

What made it possible was the gunfire. The cruisers and battleships lay in the fjord and shelled the beach and the ground behind it before the boats went in; Wren was one of the destroyers screening them and adding her own guns. The naval side of that campaign, from a battleship's deck, is in HMS Resolution (09).

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, 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.

The Twenty-Seventh of July 1940

Her loss makes far more sense with the rest of that day around it. 27 July 1940 was the worst single day the Royal Navy had in home waters that summer, and it changed British naval policy overnight.

The context is the Kanalkampf, the six weeks of German air attacks on Channel and East Coast shipping that opened the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe had discovered that British coastal convoys and the destroyers escorting them were an easy target: within range of French airfields, unprotected by radar-directed fighters that were husbanded for the defence of the airfields themselves, and unable to shoot back effectively because pre-war British destroyers had almost no high-angle armament. Two other ships in this fleet were caught in the same weeks and their accounts fill in what a dive bomber attack on a destroyer was actually like: HMS Boreas (H77) and HMS Delight (H38).

On the morning of the 27th, Wren and HMS Montrose of the 18th Destroyer Flotilla were about twenty miles east of Aldeburgh, covering six minesweeping trawlers, when the Stukas found them. Wren was not hit directly; she was straddled by near misses that opened her below the waterline, and she went down fast. Thirty-seven of her men were killed. The trawlers she had been protecting picked up the rest, which is worth sitting with for a moment: the ship whose job it was to shield them sank, and they stopped, in the middle of an air attack, to get her people out of the water.

Montrose had her bow blown off in the same action and stayed afloat, and was towed stern-first into Harwich. And at Dover that same day, HMS Codrington, the flotilla leader that had done more Dunkirk trips than almost any other ship, was lying in dock when a bomb went off alongside her, broke her back and sank her.

Three destroyers in one day, in home waters, to aircraft. That evening the Admiralty ordered the remaining destroyers out of Dover and gave up the port as a forward base, which is an extraordinary thing to have had to do twenty-one miles from the French coast in the summer of 1940. It was an admission that a destroyer could not survive within reach of German dive bombers in daylight without fighter cover, and that the Royal Navy had built the wrong ships for the war it had got.

She was seventeen years old, had been at war for eleven months, and had spent almost all of that time keeping other people alive: aircrew off the carriers, soldiers at Bjerkvik, trawlermen off Aldeburgh. The name went back into the fleet in 1943, in a Black Swan class sloop that went to Captain Walker's 2nd Escort Group and shared in the destruction of several U-boats, which is a fair way to be remembered.