HMS Barfleur (D80): The Only One of Her Class to See a Shot Fired in War

A Late Arrival to the War

HMS Barfleur was built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend on the Tyne, laid down on 28 October 1942 and launched on 1 November 1943. She commissioned on 4 September 1944, though delays in equipment availability meant she was not fully accepted into service until that November, a common enough frustration for ships completing in the war's final, equipment-strained years.

She displaced 2,315 tons standard, could make 34 knots, and carried a substantial armament of twin 4.5-inch gun mounts, a single 4-inch gun, eight Bofors guns and torpedo tubes.

The name reaches a long way back. Barfleur is the battle fought off the Cotentin in May 1692, when an Anglo-Dutch fleet under Admiral Russell met the French under Tourville and beat them, and then over the following days destroyed a dozen French ships of the line trapped in the shallows at La Hougue. The immediate consequence was that Louis XIV's plan to put the exiled James II back on the English throne by seaborne invasion collapsed, and it never seriously revived. A British destroyer carrying that name into Tokyo Bay in 1945 is two and a half centuries of the same institution turning up to watch a war end.

The Only Battle-Class Ship to See Real Action

Despite her late start, Barfleur holds a truly notable distinction: she was the only ship of the entire Battle class to see actual wartime action during the Second World War, a reflection of just how late most of her sister ships arrived relative to the fighting.

She reached the Pacific in July 1945, escorting HMS Indefatigable, and was present in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 for the formal Japanese surrender, one of the substantial British naval presence witnessing the ceremony aboard USS Missouri that brought the entire war to its official close.

She had earned her place there over the preceding weeks, joining the US Navy's Task Force 37 off Japan and screening carrier strikes against airfields and shipping from 23 July.

Task Force 37 needs a word of explanation, because the British Pacific Fleet spent 1945 changing its number without changing a single ship. The Americans ran their fast carrier force on a two-team system: the same ships, with a different admiral and staff taking over every few months, and a different fleet number to go with them. Under Spruance it was the Fifth Fleet and the British contingent was Task Force 57, as it had been off Okinawa. Under Halsey it was the Third Fleet and the same British force became Task Force 37. Nothing about it changed except the paperwork and the man giving the orders.

And there is an ungenerous piece of allied politics buried in what she was sent to do. In late July 1945 the American carriers went for Kure, where the remains of the Imperial Japanese Navy were lying at their moorings, and the British were directed instead against airfields and the port at Osaka. The reason recorded at the time was straightforward enough: Britain was not to be in a position to claim a share in the destruction of the Japanese fleet. It is a small decision and a mean one, taken at the end of four years of alliance, and it does not appear in any of the ceremonial photographs from Tokyo Bay six weeks later.

On 13 August, during strikes on Onagawa, the task force came under attack from Japanese aircraft, twenty-five of which were shot down, and two bombs fell close enough to HMS Indefatigable to count as a genuine near miss; the final strikes of the war, on airfields at Hitachi and Nobara, followed on 15 August, the very day Japan announced its surrender.

The strikes of 15 August are among the strangest of the whole war. Aircraft from the fleet were already in the air over Hitachi and Nobara when the announcement came through, and the recall had to chase them. Some got the signal and turned for home. Some were intercepted on the way back by Japanese fighters who had either not heard or did not accept it. Men were killed on the last morning of the Second World War, in an action that had already been rendered pointless by an announcement none of them had heard, which is about as bleak a way to finish six years as anybody could devise.

She subsequently helped transport prisoners of war and civilian internees home, unglamorous but deeply important work in the war's immediate aftermath, before joining the Hong Kong-based 19th Destroyer Flotilla in 1946, protecting British shipping off the coasts of China and Indochina.

The repatriation work she did afterwards deserves rather more than a clause. When the camps in Japan and across occupied Asia were opened, the men who came out of them were in a condition that shocked the ships sent to collect them, and the death rate among Allied prisoners of the Japanese had run at many times that among prisoners held in Europe. Ships like Barfleur carried them out: fed them, treated them, gave them clothes, and took them somewhere they could be looked after properly. It is not a battle honour and it does not appear on any board. For several thousand men it was the most important thing the Royal Navy did that year.

Coronation, Then Suez

Barfleur returned to Britain in 1947 and was placed in reserve, undergoing a modernisation refit between 1948 and 1952 that fitted her with new gun mountings, updated Bofors anti-aircraft guns and modern radar, before being recommissioned on 11 March 1953 for Mediterranean service.

That June she took part in the Coronation Fleet Review marking Elizabeth II's accession, one of the grand ceremonial set pieces of the decade, and returned to more serious business in 1956, participating in the Suez War, the ill-fated Anglo-French intervention in Egypt that marked something of a watershed moment for British imperial power.

Her part in Suez is worth pinning down, because a destroyer armed with 4.5-inch guns was in an unusual position that November. Ministers in London, conscious that Port Said was a city of a couple of hundred thousand people and that the world was watching, prohibited the use of any naval gun of larger calibre than 4.5 inches, and cancelled the planned bombardment of the town outright immediately before the Royal Marines went ashore. That single instruction silenced the cruisers, whose 6-inch guns were the fleet's main weight of fire, and left the destroyers as the only ships permitted to shoot at all. Barfleur was one of them, and the landings on 6 November took place under the guns of ships like her because everything heavier had been ruled out.

What happened next is one of the more uncomfortable footnotes of the operation. A bombardment, in naval usage, means firing directly at targets ashore; naval gunfire support means firing over the heads of your own troops at whatever is threatening them, which is a different thing on paper and can look very similar from the receiving end. Commanders afloat used the second description to do a good deal of what the first had been forbidden. Something like a thousand civilians died at Port Said. Whether the restriction saved lives or merely moved the paperwork is a question that has never been comfortably answered, and it is the sort of decision that gets made when a government has committed to a military operation it is not confident it can defend politically.

A Quiet Retirement

Barfleur was put into reserve in 1958 and was eventually sold to Arnott Young and broken up at Dalmuir in 1966, closing out a career that had, against the odds of her late completion, still managed to bear witness to two of the twentieth century's most significant moments of imperial transition, the Japanese surrender and the Suez Crisis, within little more than a decade of each other.

The whole thing lasted a week, and the political collapse that followed it took rather longer to work through the fleet. Barfleur came home to the Home Fleet, spent barely a year with it, and was laid up at fourteen years old with a modernisation only six years behind her. The Battle class as a whole went the same way inside a decade: a handful were rebuilt as radar pickets and the rest were laid up and sold, and the last of them was gone by the early 1970s. She had been in commission for the surrender of Japan and for Suez, which are the two events usually chosen to mark the beginning and the end of Britain's position as a first-rank world power, and there were eleven years between them.