HMS Express: Shipwreck Map, Location & Facts

Name	HMS Express	Wikidata label
Ship type	destroyer	Wikidata P31 instance of
Cause of loss	War action	Keyword match in English Wikipedia lead sentence
Nationality / flag	United Kingdom	Wikidata P8047 country of registry
Operator	Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy	Wikidata P137 operator
Conflict	World War II	Wikidata P607 conflict
Nearest coast	Canada	Natural Earth (public domain)
Position	49.6540, -124.9483	Wikidata P625 coordinate location (CC0)

About the wreck

HMS Express was an E-class minelaying destroyer built for the Royal Navy in the early 1930s. Although assigned to the Home Fleet upon completion, the ship was attached to the Mediterranean Fleet in 1935–36 during the Abyssinia Crisis. During the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, she spent considerable time in Spanish waters, enforcing the arms blockade imposed by Britain and France on both sides of the conflict.

Express spent most of the first year of World War II laying minefields in British, Dutch and German waters. She participated in the evacuation of Allied soldiers from Dunkirk in May–June 1940, but resumed minelaying afterwards. The ship was one of five British destroyers that inadvertently entered a German minefield off the Dutch coast a few months later, leading to the sinking of two destroyers and Express having her bow blown off, incapacitating her for over a year of repairs. Two months after returning to duty, Express escorted the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse (Force Z) to Singapore in late 1941, in an unsuccessful attempt to deter Japanese aggression against British possessions in the Far East.

Location

Recorded position: 49.6540, -124.9483 (Wikidata P625 coordinate location (CC0); may be approximate)
Nearest coast: Canada

Wreck positions on this site are for interest only and are not for navigation. Many wrecks are war graves or legally protected: never disturb human remains or remove artefacts, and check local law before diving.

OpenStreetMap

Text adapted from the Wikipedia article HMS Express (H61) (revision 1375233127), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; condensed by selecting paragraphs and trimming at sentence boundaries; citations and formatting removed. No text added. This excerpt is available under the same licence.