HMS Danae (D44)

HMS Danae was the lead ship of the Danae-class light cruisers, also called the D class, and one of the fastest cruisers of her time. Armstrong Whitworth laid her down at the Walker shipyard on the Tyne on 1 December 1916 and launched her on 26 January 1918. Two Brown-Curtis steam turbines of 40,000 horsepower and six boilers drove her two propellers to 29 knots, and her tanks held 1,060 tons of oil. She patrolled the North Sea in the last months of the First World War, supported the Whites in the Baltic during the Russian Civil War, and in 1923 joined the Special Service Squadron on its cruise around the world with the battlecruisers Hood and Repulse. She served on the America and West Indies Station, escorted evacuation convoys from Shanghai in 1935, operated in the South Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Dutch East Indies in the Second World War, and gave gunfire support off Sword Beach in the Normandy landings. In 1944 she was lent to the Polish Navy as ORP Conrad, returned in 1946, sold in 1948 and broken up at Barrow-in-Furness.