HMS Badsworth (L03): Mined Twice, Repaired Twice, and Sold to Norway

A Destroyer Ready by Late 1941

HMS Badsworth was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, her keel laid on 15 May 1940 and completing trials on 18 August 1941. A Type II Hunt-class escort destroyer, she displaced 1,050 tons standard and carried six 4-inch guns alongside machine guns, 20mm cannon and depth charge throwers.

Six 4-inch guns marks her out as a Type II Hunt, and the number is the whole story of the class. The first Hunts had been designed round six guns and then discovered, on an inclining test, that the hull could not carry them, so a mounting had to come off. The Type IIs were given an extra foot of beam specifically so that the six could be carried after all, which is a very small change with a very large consequence. Her sisters Albrighton and Aldenham were Type IIIs, which gave one mounting back again in exchange for torpedo tubes.

She proceeded to Scapa Flow that August and joined the Londonderry Escort Force in September, beginning a war that would see her survive two separate mine strikes, an achievement not every Hunt-class destroyer managed.

Command passed through three officers during her wartime career: Lieutenant Commander Michael Townsend, DSC, from her commissioning until January 1942, then Lieutenant Gordon Gray, DSC, who was in command through both mine strikes, and finally Lieutenant Gilbert Davies from the middle of 1943.

Arctic Convoys and a Mercy Killing

After North Western Approaches convoy work through 1941, Badsworth supported Operation Myrmidon, a commando raid on Bayonne, in April 1942, before escorting the Arctic convoy PQ 15 to Murmansk between 28 April and 5 May that year.

Operation Myrmidon is worth a paragraph, because it is one of the great forgotten near-misses of the war. It was a Franco-British raid on the Basque coast, prepared by Mountbatten's Combined Operations staff at the same time as the planning for Dieppe, and the object was to cut the road and rail traffic running between France and Spain. Something like three thousand men were embarked: Nos 1 and 6 Commandos, a battalion and a half of Royal Marines, an armoured regiment and a motor battalion. The plan required them to go up the estuary of the Adour towards Bayonne in the dark. A breakdown aboard the Princess Beatrix put the launch back an hour, by which time the tide was higher than anybody had allowed for, and when the landing craft closed the mouth of the estuary in bad weather they found a sandbar across it that was not on any chart. There was no way over it. The whole operation was called off on the spot.

Nobody was killed, which is the only good thing about it and is more than can be said for Dieppe four months later. The force turned round, was attacked from the air on the way home, was covered by its escorts and got back into Falmouth intact. Three thousand men, weeks of planning and a considerable slice of Britain's amphibious capacity had been defeated by a bank of sand. It is a useful corrective to the way raiding operations are usually written up: most of the difficulty in an amphibious landing is not the enemy but the water, and the water in front of Bayonne had not been surveyed by anybody who was going to tell the British about it.

On 2 May, she was ordered to sink the stricken merchant vessel Botavon by gunfire, a grim but necessary act of finishing off a ship too badly damaged to save, part of the harsh practical realities of Arctic convoy warfare.

The convoy she was ordered to do that in had already had a bad week. PQ 15 left Reykjavik on 26 April 1942, and on 1 May the battleship King George V, part of the covering force, ran into the destroyer Punjabi in fog; Punjabi sank and the battleship had to turn back for repairs. Shortly afterwards the escorts got a submarine contact and depth-charged it to the surface, whereupon it turned out to be the Polish submarine Jastrzab, a long way from where she should have been, damaged past saving and scuttled by her own side. Then, at half past one in the morning of 3 May, in the peculiar half-light of an Arctic summer night, six Heinkel 111s of I Gruppe of Kampfgeschwader 26 came in low with torpedoes. It was the first German torpedo bomber attack of the entire war, and the Luftwaffe had chosen a convoy in perpetual daylight to try it on.

Three ships were hit. Two went down and the third was finished off afterwards by U-251; two of the aircraft were shot down and a third crashed on the way home. Botavon was one of the three, and finishing her with gunfire was the job that fell to Badsworth. That is the part of Arctic convoy work that is hardest to write about and impossible to leave out: a ship that cannot be saved and cannot be left afloat as a marker for the next aircraft has to be put down, and the escort ordered to do it has usually just spent an hour taking her people off. Twenty-two of PQ 15's ships reached Russia. It was, by the standards of the following two months, a successful convoy.

She escorted the return convoy QP 12 from North Russia later that month.

A Mine in Grand Harbour

Badsworth took part in Operation Harpoon, the Malta convoy operation, in June 1942, and on 16 June suffered major structural damage after detonating a mine while entering Grand Harbour itself, tearing a gash roughly twelve by fifteen feet in her forward hull below the waterline and causing fourteen casualties, a remarkably dangerous way to arrive at your destination after already surviving the gauntlet of the convoy run itself.

Operation Harpoon is worth explaining, because it was one of the worst-mauled convoys of the entire Malta campaign. Six merchant ships left Gibraltar on 12 June carrying some forty-three thousand tons of cargo and fuel, and they were attacked more or less continuously by aircraft, submarines and finally by Italian surface warships. Two of the six got through. Everything Malta had to eat, burn and shoot with for the following weeks came out of those two hulls, and the island was so short that the arrival of a convoy was a public event.

Which is what makes what happened at the harbour mouth so bitter. Having survived four days of that, the survivors arrived off Valletta in the small hours of 16 June and ran into a minefield in the approaches. Orari, one of the two surviving merchantmen, was mined. So was the destroyer Matchless. So was the minesweeper Hebe. So was Badsworth. And so was the Polish destroyer Kujawiak, which had gone in to help the others and struck a mine on her port side; she heeled over and sank in under half an hour, taking thirteen of her men with her. Four ships damaged and one sunk, within sight of the harbour they had crossed the Mediterranean to reach.

Temporary repairs were completed by August and she departed Malta on 11 August.

It is worth appreciating what temporary repairs meant in Malta in the summer of 1942. The island was under near-daily air attack, the dockyard had been bombed repeatedly, materials had to come in by the same convoys that were being destroyed on the way, and every man working on a hull was doing it in a place with no food to spare. It took from June to 11 August to make Badsworth fit to leave, and when she went she went as an escort, working her passage back to Gibraltar with Matchless and two merchant ships. Nobody in that dockyard was getting a gash twelve feet by fifteen closed up in a hurry.

Mined a Second Time

After further North Atlantic convoy defence work into early 1943, Badsworth transferred to the Mediterranean with the 60th Destroyer Division that March, and on 22 April was mined a second time, off Bône in Algeria, sustaining major structural damage to her aft section. She underwent temporary repairs at Malta before being towed all the way to Liverpool for the extensive rebuilding work she now properly needed.

A Long Norwegian Career

Badsworth was transferred on loan to the Royal Norwegian Navy on 8 August 1944, renamed HNoMS Arendal, and formally decommissioned from the Royal Navy that November. She served with the 16th Destroyer Flotilla out of Harwich on North Sea and Channel patrols, and fought German E-boats in the Thames Estuary on 25 March 1945.

The Norwegian chapter deserves more than a line as well. Norway had been occupied since 1940, and the Royal Norwegian Navy spent the war operating from British ports with British ships, crewed by men who had got out in 1940 or escaped later, most of whom had no way of knowing what had happened to their families. Handing over a repaired Hunt to that navy in August 1944 was not a disposal; it was giving a government in exile a warship to fight with. That she then escorted the Crown Prince home to Oslo, and afterwards brought back four hundred urns of Norwegian dead from Britain, is about as complete a piece of symmetry as a ship's career offers.

After VE Day, still on loan to Norway, she took part in Operation Kingdom, escorting Crown Prince Olav back to Oslo, helped escort German repatriation vessels, and in September 1945 retrieved 400 urns containing the remains of Norwegian war dead from Britain, a particularly moving final wartime duty.

Norway purchased her outright in 1946, and she was reclassified as a frigate in 1956, going on to serve as a training ship for naval cadets until being removed from the active list in 1961 and finally scrapped in 1965, a long, varied and occasionally dangerous career for a ship that had, quite literally, survived being blown up twice before her war was even over.