Loss
On 29 June, Waterhen and HMS Defender were making the run to Tobruk when they were attacked off Sollum by Axis aircraft. The 12 German and 7 Italian Ju-87 dive bombers heavily damaged the Australian destroyer (although the only casualty was a wound from a flying can of bully beef). Defender took Waterhen in tow, but at 13:50 on 30 June 1941, the destroyer rolled over and sank. She was the first ship of the Royal Australian Navy to be lost by enemy action in World War II.
The ship earned three battle honours for her wartime service: "Libya 1941", "Greece 1941", and "Crete 1941".
Read more about this topic: HMAS Waterhen (D22)
Famous quotes containing the word loss:
“Faster, faster with no loss of ritual
Stiff minions without banners, a steady guard ...”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)
“The universal social pressure upon women to be all alike, and do all the same things, and to be content with identical restrictions, has resulted not only in terrible suffering in the lives of exceptional women, but also in the loss of unmeasured feminine values in special gifts. The Drama of the Woman of Genius has too often been a tragedy of misshapen and perverted power.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)