At midnight on September 7, 1940, the Royal Navy's D-class destroyer Diana was escorting a merchant ship from Britain to Canada, and most of the crew was sleeping late at night, when suddenly a loud Diana was hit and sank quickly, and 142 people sank into the sea with the battleship, all of which was actually done by her own people.
Built in 1931 by the Palmers Shipbuilding and Steel Company in Hepburn-sur-Tyne and commissioned into service with the Royal Navy fleet in 1932, diana has a displacement of 1,375 tons, a length of 100 meters and can sail at full speed of up to 31 knots. It was staffed by 180 naval officers and men and was fitted with four 4.7-inch guns, a three-inch gun, a pair of two-pounder guns, machine guns, torpedoes and depth charges. After 6 September 1940, it was remodeled and renamed Margaery at Albert Dock in London. Its mission was to escort 5 merchant ships to their destination, Canada.
The next night, the merchant ship formation encountered a storm 400 miles west of Ireland, severely affecting visibility. The destroyer opened the way in front of the merchant ships, but the storm caused extremely low visibility, and the crew of the destroyer could not see the merchant ship he was escorting, and the crew of the merchant ship also did not notice the destroyer.
In this case, once the enemy attack was obviously unable to effectively rescue, the destroyer slowed down, trying to maintain a visible distance from the merchant ship, and the disaster occurred.
At 1:25 a.m., the merchant ship lookout discovered that the destroyer was only that the destroyer was very close to the merchant ship, and what was even more fatal was that the destroyer changed course and began to turn to starboard, crossing the bow of the merchant ship, in order to avoid collision The merchant ship immediately stopped moving forward and reversed extremely quickly, but it was too late. Although the destroyer is indestructible on the sea, it is not the opponent of the merchant ship at all, and the destroyer is knocked in half in an instant.
Within a minute the destroyer capsized and sank. The front half of the ship and the bridge did not have time to escape from the room, and they were flooded into the room by the sea and buried in the sea with the hull. A total of 180 crew members, who lived only in the rear part of the hull, were rescued by other ships because the ship did not sink quickly and had no time to escape. Fortunately, the location of the incident was located very close to the British mainland Fairy Harbor, and the rescue was very rapid, so that the crew could escape after the disaster.
Because everyone inside the bridge sank into the sea, it became an unsolved mystery as to why the destroyer turned to the left, whether it was a ship failure or human error, no one could know.
