Wakeful was a W-class destroyer, ordered under the 1916-1917 War Emergency Programme, built on the Clyde, and commissioned in late 1917. She joined the Grand Fleet in time to be present at the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet in November 1918, but never fired her guns in anger in that war. Between the wars she went into reserve, the standard fate of small destroyers in a country trying to save money. In August 1939, with another war coming, she was reactivated and sent to the Royal Review of the Reserve Fleet in Weymouth Bay. When war broke out she joined the 17th Destroyer Flotilla on convoy escort duty under Western Approaches Command. She was twenty-two years old. Her boilers were tired. Her crew were good.

On 26 May 1940 the Admiralty selected Wakeful, along with thirty-eight other destroyers and hundreds of smaller craft, to support Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of British and French forces from Dunkirk. The town was burning. The mole was under air attack. The beaches were a chaos of waiting men in khaki. On 27 May Wakeful went in, embarked 631 troops, and started back to Dover. On the way home she was attacked from the air. A near miss caused minor damage below the waterline; she made port, repaired what she could, and turned around. On 28 May she came back to Bray-Dunes, east of Dunkirk itself, and took on 640 more. The Royal Navy had decided to send soldiers below deck rather than crowd the upper works, partly to keep weight low, partly to give them protection from strafing. It would prove a terrible decision.

Wakeful left the Belgian coast in the small hours of 29 May, taking the northern route home. The Germans had set picket lines of E-boats along the most likely return tracks. S-30, a 30-metre torpedo boat under Oberleutnant Wilhelm Zimmermann, was waiting off the Kwinte Buoy when Wakeful's silhouette passed her at 00:45. Two torpedoes went into the water. One hit the forward boiler room dead amidships. Wakeful's back broke. The ship cracked in two between her two funnels, the halves dipping their broken ends into the sea like a folded letter. They sank in seconds. The men below had no chance. The compartments were already crowded; the deck above flooded almost instantly; the bulkheads that should have given them time were torn open by the blast. Almost all of the 640 soldiers below deck and most of the crew were already drowning before they knew the ship had been hit.

Twenty-five of Wakeful's crew survived, men who had been on the upper deck or in compartments aft. Of the 640 soldiers below, four came out alive. Their names are remembered. Sapper Michael Frazer of the Royal Engineers. Mr Stanley Patrick of the Royal Army Service Corps. Mr H.F.R. Ruddell of the Royal Army Service Corps. Mr James 'Jim' Kane of the Royal Tank Regiment. Four men who had survived the German push across France, survived the retreat to the coast, survived the wait on the beach, survived the embarkation, and then somehow survived the fifteen seconds in which the ship around them disintegrated. Other Royal Navy vessels closed in to pick up survivors. One of them, HMS Grafton, stopped to lower boats. Grafton was then torpedoed in turn by the U-boat U-62 and sunk with further loss of life. The night off the Belgian coast became one of the worst the Royal Navy ever endured in coastal waters.

Wakeful lies today at a depth of twenty-four metres in busy water along the approaches to Zeebrugge, at 51 degrees 22 minutes north, 2 degrees 43 minutes east. Permission from the Belgian Nautical Authority is required to dive on her. She is a designated War Grave under British law. In 2003 some of her superstructure and her funnel had to be cut away because they were rising too high above the seabed and threatened to snag fishing gear or, more seriously, the keels of shipping using the modern lanes. Her crest and a section of her foot plate were lifted at that time and are now held at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. The rest of her remains where she fell. Around six hundred Allied soldiers and most of her crew rest in her hull, somewhere between the cars and container ships that pass overhead every hour of every day. They were going home.