HMS Wild Swan (D62)
HMS Wild Swan was an Admiralty modified W-class destroyer built for the Royal Navy. She was one of four destroyers ordered in 1918 from Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson, Wallsend-on-Tyne under the 14th Order for Destroyers of the Emergency War Program of 1917–18. She was the second Royal Navy ship to carry the name, after the sloop in 1876. Like her sisters, she was completed too late to see action in the First World War. Construction and design Wild Swan was one of seven Modified W-class destroyers that were completed after World War I, out of an original order for 38 ships issued in April 1918. She was built by Swan Hunter at Wallsend on Tyne, being laid down in July 1918, launched on 17 May 1919 and completed on 14 November 1919. Wild Swan was long overall and between perpendiculars, with a beam of and a draught of between and depending on load. Displacement was standard and deep load. Three oil-fed Yarrow boilers raising steam at fed Brown-Curtis geared steam turbines which developed , driving two screws for a maximum designed speed of . The ship carried of oil giving a range of at . She shipped four 4.7 in (120 mm) BL guns on four single center-line mounts. These were disposed as two forward and two aft in super imposed firing positions. Anti-aircraft armament consisted of two 2-pounder "pom-pom" autocannon. Six 21-inch torpedo tubes were fitted in two triple mounts on the center-line. She had a crew of 134 officers and other ranks. Pre-war service On commissioning, the ship joined the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla, Atlantic Fleet, based at Port Edgar on the Firth of Forth and from March to July 1920, operated in the Baltic. She remained with the 3rd Flotilla when the Royal Navy's Destroyer Flotillas were reorganised from large flotillas of 16 destroyers and a leader to smaller units of eight ships and a leader in 1921. The 3rd Destroyer Flotilla, including Wild Swan, transferred from the Atlantic Fleet to the Mediterranean Fleet in September 1922 as a result of the Chanak Crisis, a war scare between Britain and Turkey towards the end of the Greco-Turkish War. The 3rd Flotilla assisted in the evacuation of Greeks from Turkish territory after the end of the year, escorting transports carrying Greek troops. On 24–25 December 1923, she took part in the unsuccessful hunt for the French airship Dixmunde, searching the Gulf of Gabès, although Dixmunde had in fact been destroyed in an explosion off Sicily on 21 December. Wild Swan had her boilers retubed at Sheerness dockyard in June–July 1926. As a result of the outbreak of the Chinese Civil War the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla was despatched from the Mediterranean to China in order to protect British interests, arriving at Hong Kong on 15 October 1926. Wild Swan was based at Jiujiang on the Yangtze river from January to June 1927, and on 26 March Wild Swan and the river gunboat intercepted the British steamer Kiangwo which had