Express spent most of the first year of World War II laying minefields in British, Dutch and German waters.

Two months after returning to duty, Express escorted the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse (Force Z) to Singapore in late 1941, in an unsuccessful attempt to deter Japanese aggression against British possessions in the Far East.

She escorted the capital ships in an attempt to intercept landings in British Malaya in December and rescued their survivors after they were sunk by Japanese bombers.

Express was then assigned convoy escort duties in and around Singapore and the Dutch East Indies under the control of American-British-Dutch-Australian Command (ABDACOM) as the Japanese advanced.

The ships carried a maximum of 470 long tons (480 t) of fuel oil that gave them a range of 6,350 nautical miles (11,760 km; 7,310 mi) at 15 knots (28 km/h; 17 mph).

[3] To compensate for the weight of her 60 Mark XIV mines and their rails, two of Express's 4.7-inch guns, their ammunition, both sets of torpedo tubes, her Two-Speed Destroyer Sweep (TSDS) minesweeping paravanes, and her large boats and their davits had to be removed.

[5] Express, the eighth ship of that name to serve with the Royal Navy,[6] was ordered 1 November 1932, from Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson at Wallsend under the 1931 Naval Programme, for use as a destroyer that could quickly be converted for use as a minelayer when required.

The ship was attached to the Mediterranean Fleet, together with most of the rest of her flotilla, beginning in September 1935, during the Abyssinian Crisis, and returned home in March 1936.

She then spent the rest of the year at home, before patrolling Spanish waters in the Mediterranean in January–March 1937, enforcing the edicts of the Non-Intervention Committee.

Shortly afterwards, the ship had a fire in her forward boiler room that badly damaged her electrical cabling; she was repaired at Gibraltar from 24 October to 3 December.

[13] Express and Esk began to lay more defensive minefields in February 1940, often with the large auxiliary minelayers Princess Victoria and Teviot Bank.

[16] After resuming defensive minelaying later that month, Express was damaged in a collision with the fishing trawler Manx Admiral off Kinnaird Head on 23 March and was under repair until 24 April.

This began an intensive series of minelaying sorties in Dutch waters during the rest of the month that saw three German minesweepers sunk on 26 July.

[18] On 29 May, Express towed the disabled destroyer Jaguar clear of a wreck in Dunkirk harbour and transferred many of her evacuees aboard before she could repair her engines later that day.

[22] On the evening of 31 August 1940, Express, Esk, Icarus, Intrepid, and Ivanhoe departed Immingham to lay an offensive minefield off Texel, with cover provided by three destroyers of the 5th DF.

At 23:07 it became clear that the ships of the 20th Flotilla had entered a German minefield when Express struck a mine abreast 'B' gun, losing her entire bow up to the bridge.

Esk and Ivanhoe, the closest ships to Express, closed to render assistance, while the other two destroyers turned hard to starboard and retraced their route to exit the minefield, according to standing orders.

[23] The Admiralty dispatched nine motor torpedo boats (MTB) to go to the assistance of Express and Ivanhoe once they had been notified of the incident by Intrepid and ordered that the destroyers of the 5th DF were not to enter the minefield.

Captain Louis Mountbatten of the 5th DF complied until he received the report of a Royal Air Force Lockheed Hudson bomber that had spotted the two damaged destroyers about 07:00 about 25 miles (40 km) east of his position.

[25] Express was ordered to escort the battleship Prince of Wales to the Far East with her sister Electra where the ships would form the nucleus of a new Eastern Fleet intended to deter Japanese aggression.

[27] After receiving the reports of the attack on Pearl Harbor and landings in Malaya by the Japanese, Force Z put to sea in the late afternoon of 8 December in an attempt to intercept the invasion convoys.

At 00:50 on 10 December Admiral Philips received a signal of enemy landings at Kuantan and correspondingly altered course so that he would arrive shortly after dawn.

[31] Afterwards, Express escorted the minelayers Teviot Bank, Kung Wo, and the Dutch Willem van der Zaan as they laid defensive minefield around Singapore.

Despite a boiler room fire on 6 February that damaged some of her electrical cabling and fuel tanks, the ship remained on escort duties until she arrived at Simonstown, South Africa, on 25 April to begin repairs that lasted until 26 June.

Two months later, Gatineau was transferred to the 11th Escort Group, based at Derry, to prepare for the invasion of France (Operation Overlord) by patrolling British waters.