HMS Boxer (F121): The Tank Landing Ship That Carried Spike Milligan to War

Built to Put Tanks on Beaches

HMS Boxer was ordered on 6 March 1941 and built by Harland and Wolff at Belfast, her keel laid on 31 July 1941, launched on 12 December 1942, and commissioned in April 1943, one of the original Landing Ship, Tank Mark 1 vessels developed to solve one of the Second World War's most pressing tactical problems: how to land heavy armour directly onto an enemy-held beach rather than relying on smaller craft that could carry only troops and light equipment.

HMS Boxer was designed to carry thirteen Churchill tanks alongside twenty-seven other vehicles and 193 personnel, a substantial cargo that made ships of her type indispensable to every major Allied amphibious operation of the war.

Carrying a Future Comedy Legend to War

HMS Boxer's war began two months before the voyage she is best remembered for. In late June 1943, under the command of Lieutenant Commander G. B. Herbert-Jones RNR, she sailed with Convoy KMF 18 for the invasion of Sicily, arriving off the island in the early hours of 10 July 1943 alongside the headquarters ship HMS Hilary, flying the flag of Rear Admiral Philip Vian, and the fighter direction ship HMS Ulster Queen, a role Boxer herself would take on the following year. She went on to take part in the Allied invasion of the Italian mainland that September, and among the troops she transported from North Africa to Italy was the 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery, whose ranks included a young gunner named Spike Milligan, later to become one of Britain's most celebrated comedians and the creator of The Goon Show.

Milligan, Gunner 954024 of D Battery, later wrote up the voyage himself in "Monty: His Part in My Victory", the third volume of his war memoirs. His regiment embarked at Bizerta on 22 September 1943, and the book closes not with any grand invasion drama but with Milligan lying on top of a huge Scammell lorry parked on the tank deck, the ship still at anchor overnight, smoking cigarettes and laughing with his mates about who should inherit his "birds" back home once he was gone, a thoroughly Milligan way to sign off before landing at Salerno the following day. It is a small but delightful footnote in HMS Boxer's history that a vessel built for the grim business of landing tanks under fire also carried, quite incidentally, one of the twentieth century's great comic talents into the Italian campaign, one who would later be wounded near Monte Cassino before the war was out. By the year's end HMS Boxer herself had moved on too, running convoys out of Aden in December 1943 and January 1944, a reminder that a landing ship's usefulness didn't end the moment the tanks rolled off her ramp.

Normandy and a New Role

HMS Boxer went on to take part in the Normandy landings in 1944, and that same year was refitted as a fighter direction ship, taking on the specialist role of ground-controlled interception, coordinating Allied fighter aircraft against German air attacks over the invasion beaches, a considerable technical departure from her original tank-carrying role but one that put her still-useful hull and space to good use during one of the most air-contested operations of the entire war.

Training Ship, Then the Coronation

HMS Boxer was converted to a radar training vessel in 1946, teaching a new generation of sailors the increasingly vital skills of radar operation in the early Cold War fleet, and in 1953 she took part in the Coronation Fleet Review for Queen Elizabeth II at Spithead, one of the great ceremonial gatherings of the postwar Royal Navy and a fitting moment of pageantry for a ship whose working life had been spent doing rather less glamorous jobs.

The End of the Line

HMS Boxer was placed in reserve in 1956 and sold for scrap on 1 December 1958, arriving at Barrow-in-Furness to be broken up four days later, bringing to a close the career of a ship that had helped carry the invasions of Sicily, Italy and Normandy, guided fighter aircraft over the D-Day beaches, trained radar operators for the peacetime fleet, and, almost as an aside, given a young Spike Milligan his first taste of the war that would later fuel some of his most memorable comic writing.