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

HMS Barfleur (D80)

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 Only Battle-Class Ship to See Real Action

Despite her late start, Barfleur holds a genuinely 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 subsequently helped transport prisoners of war and civilian internees home, unglamorous but deeply important work in the war's immediate aftermath.

Coronation, Then Suez

Barfleur returned to Britain in 1947 and was placed in reserve, 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.

A Quiet Retirement

Barfleur was put into reserve in 1958 and was eventually 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.