HMS Armada (D14): A Warship Named for Battle That Arrived Just Too Late For One

Built for a War Nearly Finished

HMS Armada was a Battle-class destroyer built by Hawthorn Leslie and Company on the Tyne, ordered on 27 April 1942 and laid down that December, launched on 9 December 1943 and commissioned on 2 July 1945 under her original pennant number, R14, later changed to D14, just weeks before the Second World War came to its final close.

She displaced 2,325 tons, could make nearly 36 knots with a range of 4,400 nautical miles at a more economical 20, and carried a solid destroyer armament of four 4.5-inch guns, a single 4-inch gun and eight torpedo tubes; she joined the British Pacific Fleet that year, but her timing meant she never actually saw wartime action, a common enough fate for ships whose construction, delayed by the demands of a six-year war, simply outlasted the conflict itself.

The armament listed above is the signature of the first group of Battles, the 1942 ships, and it tells you exactly what they were designed for. Four 4.5-inch guns, all of them forward in two twin turrets with a very high angle of elevation, and nothing at all aft except a single 4-inch whose job was firing starshell. That is not a layout for fighting other destroyers. It is a layout for shooting at aircraft coming in low over the bow, and it exists because the Royal Navy had spent 1941 and 1942 losing ships to air attack and expected to spend the rest of the war doing it in the Pacific against the Japanese. The later 1943 Battles put a gun back aft, having noticed that a ship with nothing astern of the funnel looks distinctly foolish to anybody approaching from that direction.

It is worth saying what the name actually commemorates, because the popular version is mostly wrong. The Armada sailed from Lisbon in May 1588 under the Duke of Medina Sidonia, a competent administrator who had asked not to be given the job and who had it because Spain's best admiral, the Marquess of Santa Cruz, had died in February. He had about a hundred and thirty ships, eight thousand seamen and as many as nineteen thousand soldiers, and his orders were not to fight the English fleet but to sail up the Channel, meet the Duke of Parma's army in the Netherlands, and put it ashore in Kent. The running fight up the Channel achieved remarkably little: a week of long-range gunnery in which the English could not get close enough to do real damage and the Spanish could not close to board. On 27 July the Armada anchored off Gravelines, near Calais, to wait for Parma.

What broke it was six old ships and the weather. On the following night the English sent six fireships down on the anchored fleet with the tide behind them, and the Spanish captains, packed together and unable to manoeuvre, cut their cables rather than burn. That was the decisive moment of the whole campaign and not a shot was fired in it. The formation that had held all the way up the Channel came apart, the fleet was driven north-east towards the Dutch shoals with the English on its heels, Medina Sidonia lost three of his best ships, and by the time he had his fleet together again the wind had put him past the point where he could return to Parma. With his supplies going and sickness spreading, he took the only route left and went home the long way, north about round Scotland and down the western coast of Ireland into some of the worst water in Europe. Of the hundred and thirty ships that had left Lisbon, as many as sixty never came back, and something like fifteen thousand men died. The great majority of both figures were the weather, not the Royal Navy.

She went to the right ocean at the wrong moment. By the time Armada joined the British Pacific Fleet the kamikaze campaign she had effectively been designed against was almost over, and within weeks the war ended entirely. There is something quietly poignant in a ship built with every gun pointing forwards for a fight that finished before she arrived, and it is the story of a great many British warships completed in 1945.

That is the victory the destroyer was named for, and there is a certain fitness in the pairing that the Admiralty cannot have intended. The Armada was not sunk in a battle. It was defeated by preparation, by a defending fleet that stayed in being, by six burning hulks that nobody was aboard, and by a fortnight of foul weather in the North Atlantic; the decisive English contribution was refusing to be beaten rather than winning. A ship called Armada who spent fifteen years being ready for a war that never asked anything of her is, on that reading, rather well named. Deterrence and presence do not photograph well and they do not generate battle honours, and they are what navies mostly do.

In June 1945, the town of Brentwood in Essex had adopted her under the wartime Warship Week savings campaign, a common patriotic gesture pairing towns with a particular ship. She began her career under her first commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Robert Fell RN, taking part in torpedo firing exercises off Scapa Flow that July alongside the Dutch destroyer HrMs Van Galen, before heading out to the Pacific.

The adoption is worth explaining, because Warship Weeks were a considerably bigger business than the phrase suggests. Between October 1941 and March 1942 towns and cities across Britain were each given a savings target scaled to their population and prosperity, with a class of warship attached to it. Hit the figure and you got the ship. A village might raise enough for a motor launch; a city needed something like two million pounds for a battleship. The money came in through government bonds and savings certificates, so people were lending it rather than giving it, and it came back with interest. Over twelve hundred vessels were adopted this way and the campaign raised something close to a billion pounds in the money of the day.

What followed the fundraising was the part that lasted. The town received a plaque carrying the ship's crest, the ship received one carrying the town's arms, and thereafter the two kept up a correspondence: letters, photographs, comforts sent out to the ship's company, visits when she was in a home port. For a great many small English towns the connection outlived the war and in some cases outlived the ship. Brentwood put its name to a destroyer that never fired a shot in anger, which is a considerably better outcome than a good many of the other twelve hundred.

A Peacetime Working Life

Armada's real career was, in the end, an entirely peacetime one.

She deployed to the Far East with the 19th Destroyer Flotilla between 1946 and 1947, carrying out a variety of duties before returning home with a round of port visits, and joined the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla for a Mediterranean deployment in 1949, a posting that came with its own share of hazards: she was involved in a collision while operating in the Mediterranean in 1950.

The Pacific posting deserves the detail, because it explains the shape of everything that followed. The British Pacific Fleet was based at Sydney, seven thousand miles from its own dockyards, and getting a newly commissioned destroyer from the Tyne to it took months; Armada arrived after the Japanese surrender. She spent the following months doing what the fleet then had to do instead of fighting, which was to be visibly and reassuringly present across an enormous ocean full of newly liberated territory and repatriated prisoners, calling at Melbourne in early 1946 before going north with the 19th Destroyer Flotilla. Then in 1949 she went to the Mediterranean and to Malta, and Malta is where she stayed for most of the rest of her career. Fifteen years in commission, and the majority of them spent based on a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean that the Royal Navy had made the pivot of its whole position between Gibraltar and Suez.

She was present during the Suez Crisis of 1956, part of the substantial Royal Navy presence assembled during that fraught episode, and subsequently became Captain (D) of the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla before joining the Home Fleet.

Royalty and Arms Smugglers

In 1958 Armada took on the considerably more ceremonial duty of escorting the Royal Yacht during a visit by the Queen to north-east England, before switching almost immediately to a far less glamorous assignment, patrolling the waters off Cyprus to help prevent arms smuggling during the island's ongoing unrest, the kind of quiet, unglamorous but particularly necessary work that filled much of a peacetime destroyer's career.

The Cyprus patrols had a very specific object. The EOKA campaign against British rule on the island depended on weapons and explosives brought in by sea, mostly in small craft from Greece, and the Royal Navy's job was to stop them. That meant a destroyer spending long weeks doing something no destroyer is designed for: closing small boats at night, putting a boarding party across, searching a fishing vessel by torchlight and moving on to the next one. It is police work carried out by a ship built to shoot down aeroplanes, and it filled a good deal of the fleet's time in the late 1950s.

A Modest End

Armada was decommissioned in 1960, having spent her entire career without ever having to prove herself in the kind of combat her name might have suggested, and was eventually sold to Thos. W. Ward on 12 November 1965, arriving at the breakers in Inverkeithing that December, a quiet close for a ship whose real legacy was steady, dependable peacetime service rather than any single dramatic engagement.