USS Hopewell, a 1090-ton Lamberton class destroyer, was built at Newport News, Virginia, under the World War I emergency shipbuilding program. She was commissioned in mid-March 1919, about five months after the conflict's end, and in May helped support the trans-Atlantic flight of the seaplane NC-4. Thereafter Hopewell operated in the western Atlantic and Caribbean areas, with her duties including training Naval reservists during 1920 and 1921. Generally inactive after October 1921, she was formally decommissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in July 1922 and remained laid up there for nearly eighteen years.
The great European war that began in September 1939 caused a strengthening of U.S. defense efforts, and Hopewell was returned to commissioned service in mid-June 1940. She spent the summer of that year on neutrality patrols off New England. In September the destroyer was sent to Halifax, Nova Scotia, decommissioned and transferred to Great Britain as part of the "Destroyers for Bases" agreement. Renamed HMS Bath, she served in the Royal Navy until April 1941, when she became part of the Royal Norwegian Navy. As KNM Bath she began operation as part of the "Liverpool Escort Force" early in June, but had a very brief subsequent career, being sunk by a German submarine on 19 August 1941, while escorting a convoy bound for Gibraltar.
This page features the only views we have concerning USS Hopewell (Destroyer # 181, later DD-181).
If you want higher resolution reproductions than the digital images presented here, see: "How to Obtain Photographic Reproductions." |
Click on the small photograph to prompt a larger view of the same image.
If you want higher resolution reproductions than the digital images presented here, see: "How to Obtain Photographic Reproductions." |
Page made 26 June 2004