HMS Opportune (G80)
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| History | |
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 United Kingdom
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| Name: | HMS Opportune |
| Ordered: | 3 September 1939 |
| Laid down: | 28 March 1940 |
| Launched: | 21 February 1942 |
| Commissioned: | 14 August 1942 |
| Motto: |
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| Honours and awards: |
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| Fate: | Scrapped on 25 November 1955 |
| Badge: | On a Field Blue, an hour glass Gold. |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | O-class destroyer |
| Displacement: | 1,540 tons |
| Length: | 345 ft (105 m) |
| Speed: | 36.75 knots (68.06 km/h) |
| Complement: | 175 |
| Armament: |
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HMS Opportune was an O-class destroyer of the Royal Navy. She was ordered from John I. Thornycroft & Company, Woolston on 3 September 1939 for the 1st Emergency Flotilla. She was commissioned on 14 August 1942. She was the second Royal Navy ship borne Opportune.
She served throughout the Second World War, mainly as an escort ship for convoys, and remained with the Royal Navy until the mid-1950s.
Enemy action affected Opportune before she was even completed, as German bombing in 1940 severely damaged the shipyard and enemy action delayed the delivery of components. It was for these reasons that her completion was delayed until 1942.
When she was eventually launched, she was with the 17th Destroyer Flotilla with the Home Fleet. During trials, she assisted in escorting convoy PW-202 to Bristol.
Her fist real duty was escorting the Arctic convoy PQ-18 to the Russian port at Murmansk. On 20 September, she was required to assist the destroyer Somali which had been torpedoed by the German U-boat U-703. Although the stricken ship was already being assisted by Ashanti, and although destroyers Eskimo, Intrepid and the naval trawler Lord Middleton were also on hand to assist the ship, the gales and rough seas proved too much for her and she sank on 24 September. Opportune helped transport some of Somali's survivors to Scapa Flow.
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