HMS Bleasdale: From the Dieppe Raid to Escorting the Rodney Off the D-Day Beaches

Built on the Tyne

HMS Bleasdale was ordered from Vickers Armstrong at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 19 July 1940, laid down that October, launched on 23 July 1941 and commissioned on 16 April 1942, a Type III Hunt-class escort destroyer, one of a large family of small, fast destroyers named after English hunting country rather than the more traditional pattern of naval heroes or virtues, in her case after the hunting country around Bleasdale in Lancashire's Forest of Bowland, and the first Royal Navy warship to carry the name. She had not yet sailed a mile when, in March 1942, a Warship Week National Savings campaign saw her formally adopted by the civil community of Garstang, the market town nearest her Bowland namesake, binding the two places together for the rest of the war on the strength of little more than a shared postcode and a great deal of local enthusiasm.

She displaced 1,050 tons standard and 1,435 tons at full load, and carried four QF 4-inch guns on twin mounts, a quadruple 2-pounder pom-pom, two 20mm Oerlikon guns, two 21-inch torpedo tubes and depth charge equipment capable of deploying 110 charges, a well-rounded fit for the escort and coastal warfare duties the class was built around.

Into the Channel War

HMS Bleasdale worked up with anti-submarine exercises at Scapa Flow from May 1942, including escort work alongside the battleship HMS Rodney, before joining the 1st Destroyer Flotilla at Portsmouth and moving into convoy escort duties that summer, protecting armed merchant cruisers between the Solent, Greenock, Portland and Portsmouth alongside six Hunt-class sisters, HMS Albrighton, Berkeley, Brocklesby, Calpe, Fernie and Garth, plus the Polish-crewed ORP Slazak, a tight-knit group of eight that would still be operating together three months later off a rather less friendly stretch of coastline.

That same flotilla provided the entire destroyer escort for Operation Jubilee, the Dieppe Raid, on 18 and 19 August 1942. Bleasdale escorted the assault craft across the Channel on the 18th, then stood off the beaches throughout the raid itself on the 19th, taking minor damage of her own while screening the badly mauled landing craft as they withdrew under fire. Dieppe was a costly failure ashore, but the hard lessons it taught about naval gunfire support, beach defences and the sheer difficulty of storming a defended port head-on fed directly into the planning for the invasion of Normandy two years later.

Six weeks after Dieppe, on 10 October 1942, Bleasdale struck a mine off the Nab Tower and had to be docked at Portsmouth for structural repairs, rejoining her flotilla within the month in time to escort a military convoy to Gibraltar that November in support of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa. Through 1943 she settled into the steady, unglamorous rhythm of Channel convoy defence, punctuated by sharper moments such as a July detachment, alongside the destroyer HMS Stevenstone, to cover the return of Light Coastal Force steam gunboats that had tangled with German minesweepers off Pointe de Barfleur.

By March 1944 HMS Bleasdale had been made leader of her flotilla, now swollen with additional Hunt-class arrivals ahead of the coming invasion, though seniority brought no immunity from the ordinary hazards of a crowded wartime Channel: that April she collided with a trawler off Portland while escorting a military convoy out of Spithead, damaging her bows badly enough to need another spell in a Portsmouth dry dock before rejoining the build-up.

Patched up in time, she took part on 2 May 1944 in Exercise Fabius, the largest amphibious rehearsal of the war, escorting the landing craft of Force J as they staged a mock invasion of Bracklesham Bay in Sussex, complete with tanks, smoke and live coastal gunnery, and, by one enduring local account, a farmer who burst from his front door to swear furiously at the invading troops trampling his hedges, only to be met with the relieved reply, "Thank Christ, you're English!" It was an oddly comic dress rehearsal, barely five weeks before the real thing, for the very naval support role and the very Canadian troops Bleasdale would be escorting onto Juno Beach itself.

There was a grim reason Fabius was covered so heavily. Days earlier, on the night of 27 and 28 April, a convoy of tank landing ships rehearsing the American landings at Slapton Sands in Devon, under the codename Exercise Tiger, had been found in the dark by German E-boats out of Cherbourg. Two of the landing ships were sunk and a third badly damaged, and seven hundred and forty-nine American soldiers and sailors were killed, which is more than died taking Utah Beach itself on the day. It was kept quiet at the time, partly for morale and partly for a colder reason: several of the officers missing had been briefed on the invasion plan, and until every one of them was accounted for, dead rather than captured, the whole operation was potentially compromised. Fabius went ahead a few days later with every destroyer the Channel could spare in company.

Escorting the Rodney to Normandy

HMS Bleasdale's most significant moment came with Operation Neptune, the naval component of the D-Day landings. On 5 June 1944 she joined the escort for the headquarters ship of assault Force J2 as Convoy J10, sailing for the beachhead alongside HM Destroyers Kempenfelt and the Royal Norwegian Navy's Glaisdale; the next morning she was deployed with Support Force E off Juno Beach, providing anti-aircraft and anti-submarine defence as well as naval gunfire support for the Canadian troops fighting their way ashore. On the 7th she took up escort of the battleship HMS Rodney, screening the far larger warship, together with the cruiser HMS Sirius and the Canadian frigate HMCS Riou, as Rodney's 16-inch guns pounded targets inland from her bombardment position off the beaches.

Screening Rodney was a larger responsibility than the phrase suggests, and it is worth knowing what those guns could do. A Nelson-class battleship carried nine 16-inch guns, all of them mounted forward, each throwing a shell weighing close to a ton to a range of something like twenty miles. That gave her a reach far beyond any artillery the Allies had ashore in the first weeks, and she used it, firing over the beaches at road junctions, assembly areas and armoured concentrations that the army could see perfectly well and could not otherwise touch. The price is that a battleship doing this has to hold a predictable course in shallow, mined water within easy reach of the coast, which makes her the most conspicuous and least manoeuvrable target in the theatre. That is precisely what the destroyers around her were for.

Bleasdale escorted Rodney onward to Milford Haven on 9 June and back to Portsmouth two days later, before an altogether less heroic problem intervened: on the 12th she had to be withdrawn from operations to clear wire fouled around her propeller shafting, HMS Fury standing in to ferry army personnel to the beachhead in her place. Repairs done, she was back on patrol off the beachhead by the 15th and, the following night, escorted a force of motor torpedo boats laying protective minefields off Le Havre under Operation KN29, guarding the crowded invasion anchorage against submarine attack from the flank.

Through July and August she kept up patrols off the French coast in support of Light Coastal Force operations against German E-boats; on 6 July she deployed alongside HMS Cattistock covering motor torpedo boat operations the same day a fellow escort acting as control ship, the frigate HMS Trollope, was torpedoed and lost to an E-boat off Cap d'Antifer nearby, a sharp reminder that the Channel stayed dangerous long after the beaches themselves had been secured. On 24 August she took part in an action against enemy craft attempting to evacuate personnel from Le Havre as the port's garrison collapsed, and that October she transferred to the 21st Destroyer Flotilla at Sheerness, swapping the Channel for the North Sea, where German U-boats fitted with the new Schnorkel breathing tube were probing convoy routes through the Thames Estuary and the South West Approaches. Bleasdale spent the last winter of the war on exactly the kind of quiet, essential escort and interception work that rarely made the newsreels but kept those convoys running regardless.

The Schnorkel deserves a proper explanation, because it came close to undoing five years of Allied progress in a matter of months. A conventional U-boat had to surface to run her diesels and charge her batteries, and by 1944 that was the moment she died: aircraft with centimetric radar found surfaced boats at night and killed them, which is how the Atlantic was won. The Schnorkel was a simple breathing tube that let a boat run her diesels at periscope depth, so she never had to surface at all. Radar could not see her. Direction-finding could not find her, because a boat working alone off the British coast had almost nothing to transmit. And asdic struggled too, because the boats moved into shallow inshore water where the bottom is littered with wrecks, rocks, old moorings and thermal layers, every one of which gives an echo very like a submarine lying still on the sea bed. Hunting one in the Thames Estuary in the winter of 1944 meant investigating every contact on a chart already covered in them, over and over, in the cold and the dark, and there was no cleverer way of doing it.

East, and Home Again

In February 1945 HMS Bleasdale was earmarked for foreign service with the 18th Destroyer Flotilla at Trincomalee and taken in hand for a refit at a commercial shipyard in London; the work over, she sailed for the Mediterranean in May, worked up with the Mediterranean Fleet's Destroyer Command out of Malta in June, and passed on through Suez to Ceylon in July to finally join her new flotilla as the war against Japan entered its last phase.

By August she was preparing with the flotilla for Operation Zipper, the assault landings planned for the Malayan coast; Japan's surrender that month meant the fighting landing originally envisaged was called off, but the operation itself still went ahead in an unopposed form. Bleasdale sailed from Trincomalee on 4 September with the Eastern Fleet's aircraft carriers, joined the escort for assault convoy JME1F through the Malacca Strait two days later and reached the assault area, this time without a shot fired, on the 9th. From Port Swettenham she attended the Japanese surrender ceremony before returning east via Trincomalee, Ceylon, Madras and Calcutta, and eventually home to pay off into reserve at Chatham.

Her retirement did not last long: in February 1946 she was recommissioned for the Nore Local Flotilla, where she went on to serve for a further six years. In April 1947 she took part in Operation Big Bang, the demolition of Germany's wartime fortifications on the island of Heligoland, a fittingly emphatic full stop to the Nazi defences that ships like HMS Bleasdale had spent years working around.

Big Bang was not a modest piece of demolition. Heligoland's fortifications, submarine pens, magazines and tunnels had been cut into solid rock over decades, and rather than dismantle them the Royal Navy simply filled them with every piece of surplus German ordnance in reach: something in the order of four thousand torpedo warheads, nine thousand depth charges and ninety thousand shells, six thousand seven hundred tonnes of explosive in total, wired up over eight months by a naval engineer and a workforce of German labourers. It was fired at one o'clock in the afternoon of 18 April 1947, on the fourth pip of the BBC time signal. The blast released energy in the region of three kilotons, was felt on the German mainland some forty miles away, and remains among the largest deliberate non-nuclear explosions ever carried out anywhere. It permanently altered the shape of the island. Heligoland is still there, and is inhabited again.

The Scrapyard at Blyth

HMS Bleasdale was finally paid off into reserve at Sheerness in 1952 and transferred to Portsmouth the following year, her reserve category reduced and the ship placed on the Disposal List. She was sold for scrap to Hughes Bolckow in September 1956, arriving under tow at their breaking yard at Blyth on the 14th, bringing to a close a career that had taken her from the disaster at Dieppe to the triumph of Normandy and finally to the symbolic destruction of the very defences the D-Day landings had been fought to overcome.