Philip George Dunbar

Portsmouth Memorial Panel 85 Column 3

HMS Quorn

HMS Quorn was a Hunt-class destroyer of the Royal Navy, built in 1940 and sunk off the Normandy coast on 3 August 1944. The class were named after British fox and stag hunts, in this case, the Quorn Hunt, which was originally based in Quorn Leicestershire.

Quorn was built by J. Samuel White and Co. at Cowes, Isle of Wight. A Type 1 Hunt-class destroyer. She was launched on 27 March 1940 and completed on 21 September 1940 with the pennant number L66. She was adopted by the civil community of Rushden, Northamptonshire, as part of Warship Week in 1942.

Quorn twice survived being mined before, in June 1944, being deployed as an escort for convoys of personnel during Operation Neptune, the naval part of Operation Overlord, the Normandy Landings.

On 3 August, she was hit and sunk by a human torpedo piloted by Oberfernschreibmeister Herbert Berrer of the Kriegsmarine during an attack on the British assault area by a force of E-boats, Linse explosive motorboats, human torpedoes and low flying aircraft. Those that survived the initial attack spent up to eight hours in the water before being rescued, and many of these died. One hundred and thirty of her crew were lost including Philip George Dunbar from Trowell, Nottinghamshire. (Wikipedia)

This is an eye witness account by Norman Ackroyd (a survivor) of the events of the night of 3rd August 1944: " The ship had been part of the beach head defence force for some nights before, on the night of August 3rd we sailed as normal just before dusk and went to all night action stations (I was part of No 3 guns crew on the quarterdeck) again as normal, this time however we were acompanied by an American radar ship and we were informed over the tannoy that at dawn we were going in close to Le Havre in order to bombard the e-boat pens. The American ship was to control the shelling. Just before midnight however there was a massive explosion amidships and I understand we had been hit in the boiler rooms, the ship broke in two, and sank in a few minutes. I personaly was blown overboard by the blast and found myself in the water fully dressed. A large number of my shipmates must have gone down with the ship but there were quite a lot of us in the water. The American ship left the scene at full speed which caused a lot of resentment at the time but it was explained to us later that if she had stayed she would possibly have sustained the same fate as the Quorn. A lot of those with me in the water did not last the night but quietly slipped away, I was in the water for eight and a half hours before we were picked up by an armed trawler looking for us, by that time we were only a small band. We were informed after that the ship had been sunk by a German human torpedo on which the pilot sat on a type of torpedo which had an explosive torpedo slung underneath and that the German pilot had been picked up by another of our destroyers of the defence force. We were also told that we had run into a number of these torpedoes which were being carried into the beach head by the tide but as a result of the Quorn being sunk the alarm had been raised and the other torpedoes had been dealt with." (uboat.net)

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