HMS Beaufort (L14): Sirte, the Vigorous Convoy and an 88mm Shell off Kos

Built at Birkenhead

HMS Beaufort was ordered from Cammell Laird at Birkenhead on 20 December 1939, one of sixteen Type II Hunt Class escort destroyers in the first War Emergency Programme. The Hunts were small, quick to build ships of about a thousand tons, designed for escorting convoys on the coast and in the narrow seas, with six 4 inch anti-aircraft guns in three twin mountings and no torpedo tubes.

Like all of her class she was named after a fox hunt, in her case the Duke of Beaufort's. She was laid down on 17 July 1940, launched on 9 June 1941 and completed on 3 November that year, the second ship of the name, and her first captain was Lieutenant Standish Roche.

Her badge was a portcullis inside an upturned horseshoe, and in March 1942, after a Warship Week savings campaign, she was adopted by the Bathavon Rural District near Bath.

Round the Cape to Alexandria

After working up at Scapa Flow she was sent to the 5th Destroyer Flotilla at Alexandria, and there was only one way to get there.

On 13 December 1941 she sailed with the troop convoy WS 14, in company with the battleship Ramillies and her sister Badsworth, went south by Freetown to Cape Town, where she arrived on 4 January 1942, and then went on alone up the east coast of Africa and through the Red Sea to join the Mediterranean Fleet.

The Malta Convoys of 1942

She arrived at the worst time of the war for Malta. On 12 February she sailed in the close escort of MW 9, three fast merchant ships for the island, with the anti-aircraft cruiser Carlisle and seven other Hunts. The German bombers found them the next day.

One ship was damaged and had to go into Tobruk, a second was sunk on the 14th and the third was lost before she reached Malta. By the end the escorts had fired off most of their anti-aircraft ammunition, and they turned back to Egypt with the empty ships coming the other way.

On 20 March she sailed again with MW 10, four ships with the same close escort, while Rear Admiral Vian's cruisers Cleopatra, Dido and Euryalus and his fleet destroyers covered them.

On 22 March the Italian fleet came out, battleship Littorio and all, and in the Second Battle of Sirte Vian's ships held it off all afternoon behind their smoke, while Beaufort and the other Hunts stayed with the merchant ships and fought off the bombers. The next day the air attacks went on, and the Clan Campbell was sunk short of the island; of the four ships only two reached Grand Harbour.

Through April and May she was on the run to besieged Tobruk.

Vigorous

In June 1942 came the biggest attempt yet: two convoys at once, Harpoon from Gibraltar and Vigorous from Alexandria. Beaufort was in the escort of MW 11C, a small decoy convoy sent ahead with the cruiser Coventry and seven Hunts, among them Exmoor and Aldenham, in the hope of drawing the Italian fleet out early.

Each merchant ship towed a motor torpedo boat. The Italians did not take the bait, the City of Calcutta was damaged by bombers on 12 June, and the decoy ships turned back and joined the main convoy.

For the next three days the convoy was under almost continuous air attack, with no fighters to cover it, while the Italian battle fleet came south to cut it off. On the night of the 14th German E-boats attacked, hitting the cruiser Newcastle and the destroyer Hasty, which had to be sunk.

The old battleship Centurion, disguised as a modern one, was hit, and the destroyers Airedale and Nestor were so badly damaged they had to be scuttled. With ammunition running low and the Italian fleet between them and Malta, the convoy turned back for Alexandria, and on the way home the cruiser Hermione was torpedoed by U-205. Not one ship of Vigorous reached Malta.

Mersa Matruh, Port Said and Tobruk

That summer Rommel's army reached El Alamein, and on 11 July Beaufort bombarded the port of Mersa Matruh behind the German lines with Dulverton, Eridge and Hurworth. In August she sailed with a dummy convoy from Port Said meant to draw attention away from Pedestal at the other end of the Mediterranean.

On 17 August, in the escort of a troop convoy off Port Said, she saw the transport Princess Marguerite torpedoed by U-83. Kelvin and Hero picked up 1,074 survivors while Beaufort went after the U-boat with depth charges, without result.

In September she was in the supporting force for Operation Agreement, the raid on Tobruk from the sea. It went badly from the start: the destroyers Sikh and Zulu and the cruiser Coventry were all lost, and Beaufort came back to Alexandria with the survivors of the force.

In October she and Tetcott took a troop convoy down the Red Sea to Aden.

In November, after El Alamein, she was in the close escort of MW 13, Operation Stoneage. The cruiser Arethusa was torpedoed by aircraft on the 18th and had to be towed home, but all four merchant ships reached Malta on 20 November, and the siege of the island was at last broken.

In late December she hunted U-617 after it fired a spread of torpedoes at another of her convoys.

Sicily and Salerno

In May 1943 she patrolled off Cape Bon to stop the German and Italian armies escaping from Tunisia by sea. In July she escorted an assault convoy from Port Said to Sicily and covered the British landings south of Syracuse, firing in support of the troops and patrolling against E-boats and aircraft off the beaches.

In September, under Lieutenant John Moore, she escorted the follow-up convoy TSF 1 from Tripoli to Salerno and stayed off the beachhead for the first week of the battle.

The Aegean

When Italy surrendered, British troops were put into Kos, Leros and the other Dodecanese islands, and the Germans counter-attacked at once with complete control of the air. Beaufort spent October and November 1943 in that campaign, much of it in company with her sister Belvoir, lying up by day in Turkish waters and going out at night to intercept German convoys and bombard their positions.

On 12 October she and Belvoir sailed with the cruiser Phoebe after a German convoy and were driven off by bombers. On the night of 18 October she and Hurworth shelled the roads on Kos, firing about 300 rounds between them, and Beaufort was hit by a German 88mm shell that killed one of her men.

On 21 October she and Fury landed troops at Alinda Bay on Leros and bombarded the invasion craft gathering in Kos harbour. On 29 October she embarked sixty soldiers and a jeep for Castelorizo, and the next day, when the cruiser Aurora was hit by bombs and set on fire, Beaufort escorted her back to Alexandria.

In November she was back again with Faulknor and the Greek destroyer Pindos to bombard Kos harbour, and on 13 November she fired on the German positions on Mount Clidi on Leros in support of the garrison. Leros fell three days later.

Anzio and the South of France

In December 1943 she moved to Algiers for the convoys between the North African ports and Naples. On 22 January 1944 she was off Anzio with the assault convoy and stayed for the anti-aircraft defence of the anchorage.

In August she escorted a convoy from Naples for the landings in the south of France, and that autumn she went back to the Aegean as the Germans pulled out, intercepting their evacuation craft and supporting the return of British troops to Greece. The photograph at the top of this page was taken on 8 May 1945, VE Day, with her ship's company gathered on deck.

Haugesund

She came home that summer for a refit at Cardiff, and was paid off into reserve at Devonport soon after it was finished. In 1951, after a refit on the Tyne, she was lent to the Royal Norwegian Navy and renamed Haugesund, and Norway bought her outright in 1956.

The Norwegians rebuilt her as a frigate with a lattice mast and two Squid anti-submarine mortars in place of her after gun, and she served under the pennant F312 until she was taken out of service in 1965 and scrapped. The other prints of her class are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.