8 June 1944

Frigate HMS Lawford was sunk by German aircraft off Juno Beach shortly after D-Day. Lawford was an American-built 1,160-ton Captain-class frigate, launched at Boston, Massachusetts, in August 1943 and commissioned into the Royal Navy in November under the Lend-Lease scheme. She was converted to a headquarters ship for the Normandy Landings in June 1944, which involved removing her aft 3in gun, extending her superstructure to provide more accommodation and providing a much more powerful radio and aerial fit. She oversaw the activities of Assault Group J1 at Juno Beach on 6 June, but her brief career came to an end just two days later in the Bay of the Seine when she was hit by either a bomb or possibly a rudimentary guided missile, the Henschel Hs 293, in the early hours of the morning. She sank quickly in more than 20 metres of water, and 37 members of her ship’s company died in the attack.

9 June 1931

Submarine HMS Poseidon was lost in a collision with SS Yuta off Wei Hai Wei in Northern China on 9 June 1931 – the first time DSEA (Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus) was used operationally. Poseidon was built by Vickers Shipbuilding at Barrow and launched on 22 August 1929 as part of the Parthian class. After commissioning she was assigned to the 4th Submarine Flotilla, based in the Far East and operating in and around the Yellow Sea. Shortly after midday on 9 June 1931 Poseidon was exercising on the surface with HMS Marazion, a minesweeper converted to submarine tender, around 20 miles off Wai-Hei-Wei, a pocket of territory with a port leased from China. Despite good conditions and as series of manoeuvres in an attempt to avoid each other, Poseidon collided with the Chinese merchantman SS Yuta and sank within two minutes, although more than 30 of her crew of around 50 who were in the centre section of the boat managed to scramble up the fin and jump clear before she went down. She settled on the sea bed, some 40 metres down, and a number of Royal Navy vessels nearby steamed in to join the rescue operation, including aircraft carrier HMS Hermes and cruiser HMS Berwick. Poseidon had been fitted with DSEA equipment – a closed-circuit oxygen breathing system introduced to the Royal Navy two years earlier – and eight men managed to escape from the forward section of the boat, although two failed to surface and a third man died shortly after ascending. A further 18 men died trapped in the sunken submarine, which was secretly salvaged by the Chinese more than 40 years later.

10 June 1941

Patrol vessel HMS Pintail was sunk by a mine off the Humber Estuary on 10 June 1941. The Kingfisher-class vessel, based at Harwich, was escorting a coastal convoy which had arrived off the Humber Estuary when one of the merchant ships, SS Royal Scot, set off an acoustic mine and sank. Pintail hurried over to rescue survivors but also detonated a mine and quickly disappeared below the waves, taking her Commanding Officer and 54 of his ship’s company with her. Despite the violence of the explosion, more than 20 sailors survived, and were picked up by two destroyers, one British and one Norwegian. Pintail had been built on the Clyde by William Denny and Bros at Dumbarton, and commissioned shortly after the war began. The convoy she was escorting in June 1941, FN44, had sailed from Southend, on the Thames Estuary, bound for Methil on the Firth of Forth, and was one of the 1,660 such convoys that ran from the first days of the war through to VE Day.

11 June 1930

Three Rainbow-class submarines were launched in one day by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow on 11 June 1930, two of which failed to survive the war. Rainbow-class submarines were successors to Parthian-class boats, and at 2.060 tons were designed for long-range patrols, particularly on foreign stations. HMS Regulus spent much of her operational life in the Far East with the 4th Submarine Flotilla based in Hong Kong, but moved to the Mediterranean and the 1st Squadron Flotilla in 1940 and was sunk by a mine in the Straits of Otranto in late November of early December 1940 with her entire crew of 55 – she was marked down as overdue on 6 December when she failed to return to base on that day. HMS Regent’s career closely followed that of Regulus. She too was sent to the China Station, and like sister boat Rover she was on patrol when war broke out in September 1939. She completed three war patrols from Singapore and visited Hong Kong before sailing with her sisters to the Mediterranean via Colombo and Aden. She began her fourth war patrol, out of Alexandria in Egypt, in August 1940, notching up a number of successes in attacks on Italian shipping in the eastern Med over a further 10 patrols, the last of which was from Gibraltar. In early 1942 she sailed to England, then crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia in the United States for a refit – a journey fraught with difficulties. She lost depth control on two occasions, and also suffered engine problems which required a five-day visit to the Azores. The day after she resumed her passage she narrowly escaping an attack by submarine HMS Clyde, which was unaware her compatriot was passing through the area. After her refit and a spell off the east coast of America on trials and defect rectification she returned to the Mediterranean. She managed two further patrols, during the second of which she was lost with all 63 of her crew off the coast of Italy, probably having struck a mine on or close to 19 April. The first indication that she had sunk came on 1 May when the body of a British sailor, in DSEA apparatus, was washed ashore near Brindisi. Three further bodies were washed ashore in the following month. The final boat of the Rainbow class launched on 11 June 1930 was HMS Rover, which again started her career in the Far East, first at Hong Kong, then at Singapore, from where she sailed for patrol on 31 August 1939 which became her first war patrol just days later. She conducted three further patrols, and extensive exercises, in the area before a refit in Singapore and passage to Aden then the Mediterranean at Alexandria. Rover completed six further patrols before being ordered to Souda Bay in Crete where heavy cruiser HMS York, damaged in the Battle of Crete in April 1941, was being patched up. Rover provided electrical power for the ship’s systems, particularly her anti-aircraft guns, but the submarine suffered bomb damage (a smashed battery and holed hull) and had to be towed away, first to Alexandria where she was patched up, then Port Said and Aden, and ultimately to Singapore for a permanent repair (which had to be completed in Bombay when the Japanese advance threatened the British territory). She then operated out of Trincomalee, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), mainly escorting convoys, and did not get the opportunity to carry out further attacks on enemy shipping. She was sold to South African scrapyard Joubert of Durban after the war, and scrapped on 30 July 1946.

12 June 1924

An official dinner was held on board flagship HMS Hood in Honolulu on 12 June 1924, the evening before the Special Service Squadron (SSS) departed Hawaii for Canada. The SSS, a powerful flotilla of warships led by battlecruisers HM Ships Hood and Repulse, had sailed from Devonport in November 1923 on the Empire Cruise, a circumnavigation that was designed to both support nations of the British Empire and demonstrate to the rest of the world the power of the Royal Navy. Ports were visited in Africa (including Sierra Leone, Cape Town and Mombasa), Asia (including Singapore), Australia (including Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane), New Zealand (Dunedin and Auckland), the United States and Canada, with the visit to Honolulu scheduled as a refuelling stop after the long Pacific crossing. It was also, after 190 days of steaming, the first port which the Squadron visited that was not part of the British Empire – and a bit of a shock to the system for British sailors, as the United States was a dry country at the time and SSS commanders declared an alcohol ban out of respect to their hosts (though Prohibition was not quite as restrictive as it seemed – Royal Navy personnel soon found that most Americans could lay their hands on supplies of alcohol if required, of varying quality…). The Squadron’s first evening in Pearl Harbor, 6 June, featured a formal dance which drew some 3,000 people, and a full programme of parades, social gatherings, sports contests and entertainment followed, ending with the dinner on board Hood. The British squadron sailed the following morning, escorted out of harbour by American seaplanes, and spent the following week at sea, using the time to exercise both day and night, until they reached British Columbia. The SSS subsequently headed south to the Panama Canal via San Francisco (the light cruisers continued to South America, with visits including Valparaiso, Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro), re-entering the Atlantic and visiting the east coast of Canada before returning to Britain in September 1924.

13 June 1943

Destroyer HMS Nubian received the surrender of the island of Linosa, west of Malta, on13 June 1943. Nubian was a powerful 2,600-ton Tribal-class vessel, launched at Woolston by Thornycroft just before Christmas 1937, and she saw action in several key moments of World War 2, including the Norwegian Campaign in May 1940, Matapan (March 1941), and Crete (May 1941), during which she was struck by a bomb which blew part of her stern away, killing seven of her ship’s company. Though her rudder was destroyed, her propellers were undamaged and she managed to steam back to Alexandria at speeds up to 22 knots, accompanied by destroyer HMS Jackal, but had to move on to Bombay in August for full repairs, which were completed at the end of October 1942. Back with the 14th Destroyer Flotilla in November 1942 she was quickly back in action. On 11 June 1943 she was present at the formal surrender of the Italian island of Pantellaria, the following day another island, Lampedusa, followed suit, and the hat-trick was completed on 13 June when she arrived at Linosa with cruiser HMS Newfoundland and destroyer HMS Troubridge, and found the small Italian garrison ready to surrender. Nubian landed a shore party which formally accepted the surrender, then destroyed anti-aircraft guns and took almost 170 Italians prisoner. The ship made it four in a row on 14 June, accepting the surrender of the tiny (ten acre) rocky island of Lampione. Nubian then took part in the Tunisian Campaign and supported the landings at Sicily and Salerno before steaming back to Tyneside for a refit at the end of the year. On completion the destroyer was assigned to Arctic Convoys and attacks on German warships in Norwegian waters. Early in 1945 Nubian set off to join the East Indies Fleet, and saw action in the closing stages of the war in the Indian Ocean and South-East Asia. The destroyer survived the war and, after being used for ship target trials, was scrapped at Briton Ferry in 1949.

14 June 1943

Frigate HMS Jed and sloop HMS Pelican sank U-334 in the North Atlantic on 14 June 1943. The River-class frigate had only been in service for seven months when U-334 was destroyed, but by that time she had already either sunk or helped sink two other submarines, U-438 in the Western Approaches (sloop HMS Pelican actually sent the boat to the bottom) and U-954, which was sunk in the North Atlantic by Jed and sloop HMS Sennen. U-334 was spotted by escorts of Convoy ONS (Outbound North Slow) 10 to the south-west of Iceland as the slow-moving formation made its way from Liverpool to Canada. The German submarine was on her fourth patrol, having left Bergen on 5 June and sailed between Iceland and the Faeroes to take up her position, but before she could find any targets she was depth charged by Jed and Pelican, killing all 47 men on board. Jed continued to play an active role against U-boats, either escorting Atlantic and Mediterranean convoys or undertaking anti-submarine patrols.

15 June 1885

Battleship HMS Benbow, the first ship to carry Elswick’s 110-ton 16.25in breech-loading (BL) guns, was launched at Thames Ironworks on 15 June 1885. The ship was far from a success, and barely registers even a footnote in the annals of the Royal Navy, apart from the fact she mounted two of the largest calibre guns, only exceeded by HMS Furious (two 18in monsters) and a number of specialised monitors. The Admiral-class battleship, which displaced 10,600 tons, should have been fitted with 13.5in guns, but they were in short supply at the time of her building, so instead of going for the 12in version (readily available but seen as inferior for a ship of her class, even though they were powerful enough to sink a ship) designers chose the Elswick ‘superheavy’ option, manufactured by Armstrong Mitchell and Co in Newcastle, and already supplied to the Italian Navy. Benbow had two such guns – only a dozen were ever built – in single turrets fore and aft, firing shells that weighed 820kg. There were good reasons why only 12 such guns were built. As breech loaders, the rate of firing was slow (anywhere between three to five minutes per round), there was the distinct possibility that the muzzles would develop a droop, and the violence of the action of firing the gun meant the lining of the rifled barrel was only good for 75 rounds, after which a costly, lengthy and difficult replacement process would be needed. As it turned out, none of the 12 Elswick 110-tonners were ever fired in anger, and Benbow herself proved only slightly more useful. Commissioned in June 1888, she served with the Mediterranean Fleet until the autumn of 1891, then spent most of the next two years in reserve, briefly recommissioning for manoeuvres. She spent ten years, until April 1904, as Greenock guardship, then languished in reserve until she was sold for breaking in 1909.