HMS Fearless was an F-class destroyer built for the Royal Navy during the 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 time in Spanish waters, enforcing the arms blockade imposed by Britain and France on both sides of the conflict. Several months after the start of the war in September 1939, Fearless helped to sink one submarine and sank another one in 1940 during the Norwegian Campaign. She was sent to Gibraltar in mid-1940 and formed part of Force H where she participated in the attack on the Vichy French ships at Mers-el-Kébir and the bombardment of Genoa. Fearless helped to sink one final submarine in 1941 and escorted many Malta convoys in the Mediterranean before she was torpedoed by an Italian bomber and had to be scuttled on 23 July 1941.

The attack on Mers-el-Kébir on 3 July 1940, during the Second World War, was a British naval attack on neutral French Navy ships at the naval base at Mers El Kébir, near Oran, on the coast of French Algeria. The attack was the main part of Operation Catapult, a British plan to neutralise or destroy neutral French ships to prevent them from falling into German hands after the Allied defeat in the Battle of France. The British bombardment of the base killed 1,297 French servicemen, sank a battleship and damaged five other ships, for a British loss of five aircraft shot down and two crewmen killed. The attack by air and sea was conducted by the Royal Navy, after France had signed armistices with Germany and Italy, coming into effect on 25 June.