Converting string to numeric

Hey all,
I have imported a csv file into Stata that contains a date variable formatted as a string variable in the form, DD/MM/YY. I want to convert this variable to numeric in order to apply date functions and ultimately perform time series analysis, can someone please provide the commands to do this. I tried the command, "destring date, replace", and received an error message. Also, I tried converting the variable to numeric in the data editor but in doing so the data seemed to end up corrupted and null values were returned.

Thanks,
Andrew