HMS Aisne (D22): The First Warship Launched After Victory in Europe

Launched Just Too Late

HMS Aisne holds a small but genuine distinction: laid down on 26 August 1943 and built by Vickers-Armstrongs at High Walker on the Tyne, she was launched on 12 May 1945, making her the first warship launched by Britain after Victory in Europe had been declared just four days earlier. It was a strange moment for a warship to enter the water, timed almost exactly to miss the conflict she had been designed to fight.

Her name commemorated the Battles of the Aisne fought on the Western Front in the First World War, of which there were three in total, and quite possibly honoured all of them at once rather than any single engagement.

It is worth saying what those three battles were, because between them they bracket the entire war. The first, in September 1914, is where the Western Front came into existence. The German armies falling back from the Marne stopped on the Chemin des Dames, the ridge above the north bank of the Aisne, and began to dig; the British Expeditionary Force crossed the river against opposition on 13 September and was stopped dead on the slopes below by machine guns and artillery firing from ground the Germans had chosen. Neither side could move the other. So both dug in, and the line that would eventually run without a break from the Swiss frontier to the North Sea began on that ridge. Everything people picture when they picture the First World War starts there.

The second, in April 1917, is one of the worst days in French history. General Nivelle, a hero of Verdun, had persuaded his government that a sufficiently violent blow would rupture the German line in forty-eight hours, and on 16 April nineteen divisions of the Fifth and Sixth Armies went forward on an eighty-kilometre front between Soissons and Reims. The French took forty thousand casualties on the first day and the line barely moved. What followed was worse than the failure: on 4 May French soldiers began to refuse to attack, and the mutinies spread until they touched something approaching half the French infantry divisions on the Western Front. Nivelle was sacked on 15 May and Petain put in to restore the army, which he did, at the price of promising it no more offensives. The French made none until July 1918.

The third, in May 1918, is where the Germans came closest to winning. Operation Blucher-Yorck opened on 27 May with something like two million shells fired in four hours, one of the heaviest bombardments of the entire war, and seventeen divisions went in behind it across the same Chemin des Dames the British had failed to take in 1914. This time the line broke. The Germans advanced fifty-five kilometres in a week, the deepest penetration by either side since the opening months, and were halted on the Marne, within artillery range of the road to Paris. So the name on this destroyer's bow covers the birth of trench warfare, the collapse of the French army and the last great German offensive, all fought over the same twenty miles of French chalk ridge in four years. It is the only name on the Battle class list that has to carry that much.

The Battle names were chosen deliberately, and they are worth reading as a set: Trafalgar, Barfleur, Camperdown, Jutland, Cadiz, Corunna, Dunkirk, Agincourt. Aisne sits slightly oddly among them, a First World War name in a list mostly drawn from the age of sail, and it is the only one that has to cover three separate battles at once.

She would not actually enter service for nearly two more years, finally commissioning on 20 March 1947, well into a peace that showed no immediate sign of needing another Battle-class destroyer.

That did not make her useless.

A capable postwar fleet destroyer of 2,480 tons standard displacement, 379 feet long with a 40 foot 6 inch beam, and capable of nearly 36 knots with a crew of around 268, she carried five 4.5-inch guns, eight Bofors anti-aircraft guns, ten torpedo tubes and a pair of Squid anti-submarine mortars, more than enough to earn her keep in a Royal Navy quietly settling into its new Cold War role.

The Battle class she belonged to had been designed around a hard lesson. Destroyers built before the war carried guns that could barely elevate, on the assumption that their main enemy would be other destroyers; by 1943 the Royal Navy had lost enough ships to aircraft to know better. The Battles put twin high-angle 4.5-inch mountings forward and covered the rest of the ship in anti-aircraft weapons. Aisne was one of the later 1943 group, which is to say the version that had absorbed the most of that thinking, and by the time she was ready the aircraft she had been redesigned to fight had stopped coming.

A Career of Steady, Unspectacular Service

Aisne joined the Home Fleet on commissioning in 1947, and spent the following two decades in the sort of varied, dependable service that made up the bulk of the postwar destroyer force's working life. She was temporarily laid up in 1950, before joining the 4th Destroyer Squadron in 1951 for a mix of Mediterranean and Home Fleet deployments.

In 1953 she took part in the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead, one of the great ceremonial gatherings of the Royal Navy, anchored in line between her sister ships HMS Corunna and HMS Barrosa, before returning to the Mediterranean with her squadron through 1954 and 1955.

Not all of it was uneventful, and one episode deserves recording properly. On 5 February 1955, off Beirut, four members of Aisne's ship's company were lost and presumed drowned. An official inquiry was held, and the matter reached the House of Commons that July when Harold Wilson asked the First Lord of the Admiralty whether the inquiry's conclusions would be passed to the men's next of kin. Peacetime service is not the same as safe service, and destroyers lost men to the sea in years when nobody was shooting at them.

Reinvented for the Missile Age

The decision behind that conversion had been taken back in 1955, and then sat in a drawer for four years. Four Battles were picked out to become what the Navy called Fast Air Detection Escorts: Aisne herself, along with Agincourt, Barrosa and Corunna. The point was to station a fast ship well out ahead of the fleet carrying radar good enough to spot an air attack while there was still time to react to it.

Like several of her sister ships, Aisne was converted in 1959 into a radar picket, fitted with Sea Cat guided missiles and updated anti-aircraft weaponry in place of some of her older gun armament, adapting her for a role focused on airborne early warning rather than traditional gunnery duels.

Calling it a refit rather undersells what happened at Chatham. A new lattice foremast went up behind the bridge to carry a Type 965 aerial, the great double bedstead lattice that weighed four tons on its own, with a Type 293Q on a platform beneath. A deckhouse full of generators and radar offices went in abaft the funnel, a second lattice mast carried a Type 277Q height finder and a forest of electronic warfare aerials, and the after deckhouse was raised to take the Sea Cat launcher. Everything that got in the way came out, including all ten torpedo tubes and every one of the light anti-aircraft guns. When Chatham finished with her in 1962, the only parts of the 1945 destroyer still aboard were her hull, her engines, her funnel, her forward superstructure and her main guns.

In this new form she went on to serve with the 7th Destroyer Squadron and the 23rd and 30th Escort Squadrons between 1962 and 1968, taking her to the Mediterranean, the Far East, and the West Indies in a final decade of properly global service.

She and Corunna joined the 7th Destroyer Squadron together in July 1962, having recommissioned in the February and March, and found themselves in good company: the squadron of the early 1960s ran to Trafalgar as leader, with Broadsword, Jutland, Dunkirk, Scorpion, Corunna and Aisne. She was photographed entering Aden in 1966, and finished up in the West Indies from 1967 until she came home to pay off.

A Quiet Finish

Aisne was decommissioned in 1968 and scrapped by Thos. W. Ward at Inverkeithing in 1970, twenty-five years after she had first slipped into the water as, quite literally, the first new warship of the peace.

She never fired a shot in the war that shaped her design, but she gave the Royal Navy two solid decades of exactly the kind of steady, adaptable service that peacetime fleets actually run on.