HMS Blackmore (L43): From Salerno to a Danish Frigate

A Destroyer Built on the Clyde

HMS Blackmore was built by A. Stephen and Sons at their Glasgow yard, her keel laid on 10 February 1941.

A Type II Hunt-class escort destroyer displacing up to 1,490 tons full load, she carried six 4-inch guns on twin mounts alongside machine guns, cannon and depth charge throwers, with a wartime crew of around 164 officers and men, beginning sea trials in April 1942 before joining the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla and starting Atlantic convoy escort duties that June, including Convoy WS 19P alongside the battleship HMS Nelson.

The WS convoys are worth explaining, because the letters look like any other convoy code and the ships were anything but ordinary. Officially WS stood for William Sail. Nobody called them that. They were the Winston's Specials, and they existed because the Mediterranean was shut. With the direct route to Egypt closed, every soldier Britain wanted in the Middle East, and later in India and Burma, had to go the long way, out into the Atlantic, down the whole length of Africa, round the Cape and up the far side, which is four or five times the distance and took the better part of two months.

The ships doing the carrying were the requisitioned liners, the Cunarders and the Union-Castle boats among them, packed with troops and their equipment, and a full convoy might have twenty thousand men in it. Losing one would have been a catastrophe on a scale the war never actually produced, so they were escorted accordingly: battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers and every destroyer that could be spared, which is why a brand new Hunt on her first employment in June 1942 found herself in company with HMS Nelson. Thirty-three of these convoys sailed between 1940 and 1943, and they are the reason there was an Eighth Army at Alamein at all.

Six guns is the detail that matters, and there is a story behind it. The Hunt class was designed to carry three twin 4-inch mountings, which for a ship of that size was a very heavy battery indeed. Then somebody got the stability calculations wrong. The error was not caught until the first of class was nearly complete, at which point it became clear that she would be dangerously tender, in the sense of liable to lie over and stay there. The fix was brutal: the after superfiring mounting came out altogether, the superstructure and funnel were cut down, and ballast went into the bottom. The Type I ships therefore went to sea with two thirds of the armament they had been drawn with. The Type IIs, of which Blackmore was one, were given an extra two and a half feet of beam from the start and could carry the lot. It is the reason one Hunt has four guns and the next one along has six.

She was adopted by the civil community of Langport in Somerset after a successful Warship Week savings campaign, one of hundreds of British towns that raised enough in war bonds to symbolically pay for a ship of their own and claim it as theirs for the duration, a rather quaint bit of wartime civic pride for a destroyer about to see rather more of the world than most of Langport ever would.

The Warship Week scheme that produced the Langport connection was a far stranger and cleverer piece of machinery than it looks, and it is described in full in the article on HMS Bermuda (52). Langport, it is worth saying, is a small market town on the Somerset Levels, which gives a fair idea of what the scheme asked of very modest places.

South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean

HMS Blackmore spent from June 1942 to January 1943 on convoy defence duties in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean out of Simonstown, followed by a refit and further Indian Ocean escort work through May 1943, before transferring to the Mediterranean that August to join the 57th Fleet Division at Malta.

Salerno and the Adriatic

In September 1943, HMS Blackmore took part in the invasion of Italy, escorting Convoy TSF1X to the Salerno beachhead during one of the war's most fiercely contested amphibious landings.

Fiercely contested is putting it mildly. The landings went in on 9 September 1943 and by the 12th the Germans had recovered and were counter-attacking hard down the valley of the Sele, driving a wedge between the two Allied corps and getting to within a very few miles of the water. Plans were actually drawn up to lift one corps off its beaches and put it ashore on the other, which is about as close to an evacuation as a beachhead comes. What held the line, in the end, was artillery firing over open sights, every aircraft that could be got over the beaches, and naval gunfire: the battleships Warspite and Valiant were brought up from Malta to put 15-inch shells into the German assembly areas, and Warspite was very nearly lost to a guided bomb for her trouble. A convoy anchorage in the middle of that was not a restful place to be.

She joined the 60th Destroyer Division for operations in the Adriatic that November and December, and on 16 January 1944 took part, alongside the destroyer HMS Ledbury, in the bombardment of Durazzo in Albania. She stayed on Adriatic convoy and patrol duty into that June, when she and HMS Eggesford ran into a force of four German E-boats and sank one, a sharp and successful action ahead of the summer's major operations further west.

The Adriatic is one of the least known Allied campaigns of the war and one of the more interesting. From late 1943 the Royal Navy ran what amounted to a small private war out of the Italian east coast ports in support of Tito's Partisans: destroyers, motor gunboats and landing craft carrying arms and supplies across to the Dalmatian islands, taking off wounded, raiding German coastal convoys among the islands and shelling ports along the Albanian and Yugoslav coasts. It was close-range work in confined waters against an enemy who could see you from the hills, and it kept a great many German troops occupied in country they could not afford to leave. Durazzo, in Albania, was one of the ports on the receiving end.

Southern France, Then East Again

HMS Blackmore took part in Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, that July and August. Command passed on 6 August 1944 to Lieutenant John Simon Kerans, who would see her through the rest of the war and go on, five years later, to rather greater fame as the captain of HMS Amethyst during the 1949 Yangtze Incident, leading her celebrated night-time dash down the river under Communist Chinese fire after ten weeks trapped and under bombardment, a story that made him a household name and later, briefly, a Member of Parliament. Blackmore herself underwent a refit at Sheerness between September 1944 and April 1945, after which she deployed with the Eastern Fleet.

The ship he took over five years later, and the hundred and one days that made his name, are covered in the article on HMS Amethyst. It is worth noting that when the Yangtze Incident began Kerans was not commanding anything at all; he was ashore in Nanking as an assistant naval attache, and was sent down the river to take over a ship whose captain was dying and whose crew had already been shot to pieces. Blackmore is where he learned the trade.

In May 1945 she served as a weather ship during the landings at Rangoon, and that September and October escorted aircraft carriers to the Malacca Strait for Operation Zipper, the planned (and ultimately unopposed, following Japan's surrender) recapture of Malaya.

Zipper is worth a footnote of its own. It was to be the invasion of Malaya, a full-scale opposed landing on the west coast, and the surrender in August 1945 meant it never had to be fought. The landings went ahead anyway as an administrative operation, and they were a shambles: the beaches turned out to be far softer and shallower than the reconnaissance had suggested, landing craft broached, vehicles bogged down and a good deal of equipment was lost getting ashore against no opposition whatever. The general verdict since has been that if the Japanese had still been shooting it would have been a very expensive day. Two atomic bombs and a Soviet declaration of war have rather crowded out the small mercies, but that was one of them.

She sailed homeward that October and was paid off at Devonport.

Fourteen Years as a Danish Frigate

HMS Blackmore was transferred to Denmark on loan on 18 July 1952, and formally commissioned into the Royal Danish Navy as HDMS Esbern Snare on 15 February 1954 once her conversion was complete. She didn't go alone: two more veteran Hunt-class destroyers, HMS Calpe and HMS Exmoor, joined her in Danish service around the same time, and together the three ex-Royal Navy ships formed the Danish navy's own Esbern Snare class.

The obvious question is why Denmark, a seafaring country with several hundred years of naval history, needed to borrow second-hand British escort destroyers at all. The answer is 29 August 1943. The Germans, having decided that the Danish armed forces could no longer be tolerated, moved to disarm them; the Danish Naval High Command got a warning signal out to its ships at eight minutes past four in the morning, and the first scuttling charge went off five minutes later.

The Royal Danish Navy then destroyed itself in its own harbours. Of fifty-two vessels on the list that morning, thirty-two were scuttled where they lay, four made a run for Sweden and got there, fourteen were seized intact and two were away in Greenland. The Germans salvaged and repaired fifteen of the sunken ships, which is a measure of how thoroughly the rest had been done. It was one of the more effective acts of collective defiance in occupied Europe and it left Denmark, in 1945, with essentially no navy whatsoever.

She signed the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949 and was handed the defence of the Baltic approaches, which is one of the more demanding pieces of water in Europe and requires actual warships. Rebuilding was done with Marshall Plan money, with ex-German vessels from the disarmed Kriegsmarine, and by buying and borrowing from Britain, much of it channelled through the American programme described in the article on HMS Hotham (K583). Three elderly Hunts from the Adriatic and the Indian Ocean were part of the answer, and for the best part of a decade the Blackmore that had shelled Durazzo was one of the more useful ships in the Baltic.

The name she was given is a good deal older than she was. Esbern Snare, which translates roughly as Esbern the Resolute, was a twelfth-century Danish magnate and soldier, brother of Absalon, the warrior bishop who founded Copenhagen and who is generally reckoned the most powerful man in medieval Denmark. The two brothers spent their lives fighting the Wends in the Baltic on behalf of King Valdemar, and eight centuries later they are still at sea together: the Royal Danish Navy's two Absalon class ships are named Absalon and Esbern Snare, and the modern Esbern Snare has been to the Gulf of Aden hunting pirates. A Glasgow-built escort destroyer of 1941 spent her second career carrying one of the oldest names in the Danish fleet, and handed it on.

She served as a frigate for the Danes for over a decade before being decommissioned in 1965 and scrapped the following year at Ystad in Sweden, closing out a career that had taken her from South Atlantic convoy duty to the Salerno beaches and finally into a long, useful second life defending an entirely different nation's coastline.