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

Built on the Tyne

HMS Bleasdale was built by Vickers Armstrong at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 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 HMS Bleasdale's case after the Bleasdale Fells in Lancashire. 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 moving into convoy escort duties that summer, protecting armed merchant cruisers between the Solent, Greenock, Portland and Portsmouth. In July 1942, HMS Bleasdale took part in escorting the Dieppe Raid, the costly Allied assault on the French coast that, whatever its heavy losses ashore, provided hard lessons that shaped the planning for the eventual invasion of Normandy two years later. She continued English Channel and North Sea operations through 1943 and into 1944, part of the steady, unglamorous work of keeping Britain's coastal waters secure against German surface raiders, aircraft and submarines.

Escorting the Rodney to Normandy

HMS Bleasdale's most significant moment came with Operation Neptune, the naval component of the D-Day landings in June 1944, when she escorted the battleship HMS Rodney to her bombardment position off the Normandy beaches, providing gunfire support to the troops fighting ashore on Juno Beach and screening the far larger warship from the very real threat of German submarines and E-boats operating in the crowded invasion waters. She continued escort operations through the following weeks as the Allied build-up in Normandy continued, one of dozens of smaller escorts whose quiet, essential work protecting the capital ships and merchant convoys off the beachhead rarely made the newsreels but without which the entire invasion fleet would have been dangerously exposed.

East, and Home Again

HMS Bleasdale went on to serve in the Far East in 1945 as the war against Japan entered its final phase, and by July that year was operating in the Mediterranean, departing Suez as part of an escort group. She was paid off on 16 November 1945 at the war's end, recommissioned briefly in February 1946, and in 1947 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.

The Scrapyard at Blyth

HMS Bleasdale was placed in reserve on 21 April 1952 and eventually sold for scrap to Hughes Bolckow, arriving at their breaking yard at Blyth on 14 September 1956, 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.