On 17 October 1919 Dragon was hit by three shells fired from a shore battery while taking part in operations against German forces attacking Riga, suffering nine killed and five wounded.

[4] During 1924, she was attached to the Special Service Squadron with HMS Hood, Repulse, Delhi, Danae (which would later replace Dragon in the Polish Navy) and Dauntless for a variety of tasks around the world.

Dragon was stationed in Zanzibar, Ceylon, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, and Jamaica, and took part in visits to the United States, Dutch Antilles, and Australia.

On 30 May 1933 the well-known playwright, composer, director, actor and singer Noël Coward, who had arrived at the Imperial fortress colony of Bermuda (the base of the America and West Indies Station) on 28 May on SS Roma, found his way on board HMS Dragon.

In 1934, she was involved in a collision with a ship in the harbour of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which resulted in an Admiralty action against her captain at the time, Frederic Wake-Walker.

That finding of liability was upheld on appeal by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, at that time the court of last resort for the British Empire and Commonwealth.

During World War II, the ship was initially attached to the 7th Cruiser Squadron of the Northern Patrol, operating in the Shetland area.

Following commencement of hostilities with Japan in December, she served with the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command forces, escorting convoys to Singapore, with Dragon the last ship to leave that city before it surrendered.

After the fall of Java, she joined HMS Caledon and the Dutch cruiser HNLMS Jacob van Heemskerck, and operated from Ceylon.

Since the rump crew could not operate the ship independently, she had to be attached to various convoys and it took almost half a year before she finally reached Liverpool via Cape Town, Chatham and Durban.

Finally on 2 June she was attached to a flotilla composed of HMS Ramillies, Warspite, Mauritius, Frobisher, Arethusa, Danae and 24 smaller vessels and headed for Normandy.

The ship saw action at the Normandy landings as part of Operation Neptune, shelling German shore batteries at Colleville-sur-Orne and at Trouville (Sword Beach) from a distance of four kilometres.

However, on 8 June a communication systems failure prevented the ship from further bombardment and it was not until late at night that she again opened fire against the German 21st Panzer Division near Varaville.

On 7 July 1944 Dragon returned to the area off Caen, where she was to take part in the final artillery preparations for capturing the city after a month-long siege.

At 5:40 am the following day, while waiting for the order to open fire at 49°22′N 0°21′W / 49.367°N 0.350°W / 49.367; -0.350, the Dragon was hit by a German Neger manned torpedo, originally thought to be piloted by Walther Gerhold, and 26 men were lost.

Bekker's 1955 book "K-Men: The Story of the German Frogmen and Midget Submarines" (William Kember; London, 1955; with a preface by Hellmuth Heye, formerly Admiral of the K-Force) instead stated the Neger which attacked Dragon was piloted by Midshipman Potthast.

Allied fighter bomber activity made it difficult to travel during daylight hours and the flotilla leader, Lieutenant Johann-Otto Krieg, was seriously wounded in one attack.

Later flown to an English hospital, Potthast was interrogated by military intelligence and although confronted with maps and details of K-flotilla deployments he refused to confirm or deny anything.

The ship started to sink on her port side and the angle of list reached 9°, but the situation was stabilized by the captain, who ordered all the turrets to train their barrels to starboard.

This article includes data released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported UK: England & Wales Licence, by the National Maritime Museum, as part of the Warship Histories project.