HMS Brave (J305): Sweeping Mines Through Anzio, Corsica and the Invasion of Southern France

Built on the Blyth

HMS Brave was built by the Blyth Shipbuilding Company in Northumberland, her keel laid on 23 April 1942, launched on 4 February 1943, and commissioned on 3 August 1943 under Temporary Acting Lieutenant Commander Frank Seymour Tolliday RNR, an Algerine-class minesweeper displacing 850 tons standard and up to 1,125 tons at deep load. Tolliday would remain in command for the rest of the war and on into 1946, seeing the ship through practically her entire active career.

She was the fifth ship to carry the name, and the name is older than almost anything else about her. The first Brave was not a warship at all but a vessel hired by the City of London in 1566, which went on to fight the Armada, and two of the three battle honours on her board, Armada 1588 and Cadiz 1596, were earned nearly four centuries before her keel was laid. The name had last been used for a gunboat built by Laird in 1856 and broken up in 1869. In 1942 the Admiralty proposed to revive it for a light fleet aircraft carrier, then changed its mind and called that ship HMS Warrior instead, which left the name free for a minesweeper from Blyth. The third battle honour, South France 1944, is hers alone.

She also came with a home town, or rather four of them. Warship Weeks were a National Savings device: a community raised enough in war savings to notionally cover the cost of a hull, and in return adopted the ship. Beccles, the urban districts of Bungay and Halesworth and the rural district of Wainford, all in Suffolk and none of them within sixty miles of the sea she would sweep, were set a combined target of £136,000 in the spring of 1942. They raised £233,366. Beccles alone was asked for £60,000 and produced £95,941. Their ship was HMS Brave, and a warship plaque went up in Beccles Town Hall to say so.

She measured 225 feet overall with an 85-strong crew, driven by two Parsons geared steam turbines feeding two Admiralty three-drum boilers to a top speed of 16.5 knots, and armed with a single 4-inch anti-aircraft gun, four twin 20mm Oerlikon mounts (later upgraded to 40mm Bofors), and depth charge throwers and rails, a solid, versatile fit for a class built to clear the way for Allied amphibious operations across multiple theatres.

Clearing the Way for Anzio

Before any of that, HMS Brave did her work-up off Tobermory, the Royal Navy's famous training base in the Sound of Mull, taking part in an exercise with the submarine HMS H50 on 16 September 1943, then moved to Port Edgar for minesweeping training in the Firth of Forth. In October she went north to join the 19th Minesweeping Flotilla on its formation: five Algerines working up in the lochs of western Scotland, with HMS Rinaldo as senior officer and Rosario, Spanker and Waterwitch alongside Brave.

Their first job together was not sweeping. In November 1943 the flotilla took convoy KX12 from Milford Haven to Gibraltar, and the staff record of that passage is quietly comic: two merchantmen, eight smaller minesweepers and one coal-burning trawler whose best speed held the entire convoy to six knots and whose smoke, in the phrasing of the record, was a constant source of danger. From Gibraltar the flotilla scattered to whatever needed doing, and Brave went on to Malta for local sweeping and escort work, which is how she came to be escorting the submarine HMS Ultimatum out of Malta towards Beirut on 8 January 1944. Six days later she sailed for Naples, and the war proper.

She joined the 2nd Minesweeping Group for Operation Shingle, the landings at Anzio, and very nearly missed the whole thing. She was still under repair at Naples on 21 January and did not sail with HMS Waterwitch to clear the water ahead of the assault ships, catching up with the group off Anzio on the 23rd and sweeping there until she was released on the 26th. Anzio went on to become one of the most gruelling and protracted operations of the Italian campaign, and almost nothing written about it since has spared a line for the ships that opened its approaches.

The spring was spent on loan. She worked the west coast of Italy with the 12th Flotilla through March, rejoined her own ships in April for preliminary sweeping off Pantelleria, and in May went with the flotilla to the Straits of Bonifacio, the narrow gap between Corsica and Sardinia, operating out of Maddalena. Clearing Bonifacio was a shared effort between the Algerines of the 12th and 19th Flotillas and the Bangors of the 13th, which had already lost HMS Cromarty to a mine in those waters the previous October. By the time the job was declared finished more than four hundred mines had been raised from that one stretch of water.

On 16 June the flotilla swept ahead of the ships carrying the landing force to Elba for Operation Brassard, lifting forty mines and opening water close enough inshore for the river gunboats HMS Aphis, HMS Cockchafer and HMS Scarab to come in and bombard the defences. July brought Operation Lobster, a joint effort by the 12th, 13th and 19th Flotillas working off Civitavecchia to clear a channel north of Cape Corso, the northern tip of Corsica. That done, she carried on up the coast opening a passage towards Leghorn, painstaking work that let both ports be brought back into use behind the advancing Allied armies.

Southern France and the War's Final Months

The flotilla's biggest day came on 15 August 1944. Operation Dragoon put Allied troops ashore on the French Riviera, and Brave was allocated to the Delta Attack Force for the landings at St Tropez, with the Royal Navy ships under the overall command of Vice Admiral Henry Hewitt of the United States Navy. She sailed from Naples on the 12th in company with Rinaldo, Rosario, Antares, Arcturus, Spanker and five American patrol craft, escorting convoy SF2A and its three infantry landing ships. They called at Ajaccio on the 13th, sailed again on the 14th, and on the 15th the sweepers detached to go in first and cut a channel for the assault convoy. The 19th was the lead flotilla, ahead of everything and everybody. They swept no mines at all.

That is the peculiar arithmetic of the job. Finding nothing means either that the water was clean or that you have missed something, and there is no way of telling which until the landing craft have come through behind you. With the channel open, Brave went on to clear the area the bombardment ships would use, which that morning meant the American battleships USS Texas and USS Nevada, the cruiser USS Philadelphia and the French cruisers Georges Leygues and Montcalm.

What finally caught her was not a mine. In the congestion off the beaches, inside a heavy smoke screen laid to cover the bombardment anchorage, HMS Brave was in collision with a tank landing craft and took structural damage bad enough to send her back to Naples. She had swept the way in for an invasion without a scratch and then been rammed in the traffic behind it. Repaired, she returned to the operational area and joined Task Group 80.1, clearing German and French mines out of the approaches so that Toulon and Marseilles could be reopened to shipping.

Nine Weeks Across the Adriatic

October found her not in Greece but at Ancona, on the other side of Italy. The flotilla arrived on the 2nd to open a swept channel clean across the Adriatic, from Ancona to Sibenik on the Yugoslav coast, and it turned into the hardest sustained work of her war: most days at sea for nine weeks, and 214 mines. On 11 November she went in with Arcturus, Antares, Rinaldo and Spanker to sweep ahead of the cruiser HMS Delhi through the islands into Split, which Partisan forces had retaken the day before. By night the same ships went out on interception patrols against German E-boats. By day they went back on the sweep. The channel was declared clear on 6 December.

It was in that water that the flotilla first met the mine the sweepers called Oboe, built to float to the surface after its mooring wire was cut and detonate there, close enough to damage whichever ship was following. Crews elsewhere in the Mediterranean were running into it at the same time and working out the answer afloat rather than in a classroom, as HMS Albacore found in the Aegean. The Adriatic also produced the flotilla's most-told story. HMS Waterwitch is reputed to have cut forty-nine mines in seventeen minutes there, a record for the war, which means HMS Spanker, next astern, watched forty-nine mines come past her in rapid succession and held her line without deviating. The Algerine Association's own account suggests the greater credit belongs to Spanker, and it is difficult to argue.

1945 was more of the same, and worse. Operation Antagonize III took the flotilla into the southern Adriatic from 25 January and cost them HMS Antares, mined badly enough that she never rejoined; HMS Fancy replaced her in March. From April the 19th worked north with the 5th Flotilla to open Venice and Trieste, finishing on 12 May for another seventy-seven mines, then spent the summer widening the channels they had already cut. On 2 July a mine exploded when HMS Aries's sweep wire parted, wrecking her and killing four of her ship's company. Over two and a half years in the Mediterranean the 19th Minesweeping Flotilla accounted for something in the order of 1,700 mines. HMS Brave's personal share was 318, second only to Spanker's 379. It is a strange sort of scoreboard, but it is the only one the sweepers ever got.

Aground on the Tyne, and a Quiet Retirement

She stayed on in the Mediterranean after the German surrender, sweeping off Malta and in the Aegean, and came home in May 1946 to pay off, de-store and go into reserve, where she sat for five years. Then, in 1951, the Navy found her a use. She was brought round to the Tyne to take over from HMS Melita as drill ship for the Tyne Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and to be renamed HMS Satellite.

She did not arrive cleanly. Shortly after coming into the river she went aground on the Black Middens, the rock ledge on the north side of the Tyne mouth at Tynemouth that covers at high water and has been catching ships for as long as there has been trade on the river. Three days of storms in 1864 cost five ships and thirty-four lives on those rocks, and the outrage that followed produced the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade, the first of its kind in the country and still going. A ship that had spent two and a half years working in mined water came to grief within a few miles of the yard that built her, on a reef you can stand on the bank and look at.

The damage was beyond a conventional repair. Dowsons of Tyne Dock dealt with it by pouring concrete into her lower hull to make her watertight again, and then converted her for her new role. It is not a treatment anyone would apply to a ship they expected to send back to sea, and she never did go back to sea, but it kept her afloat and useful for another six years, training the Tyne Division's reservists a short way up the river from the coast where she had been launched.

She was sold to BISCO for scrap in 1957 and arrived at Clayton and Davies' yard at Dunston for breaking up on 25 November that year, bringing her career full circle, launched, damaged and finally scrapped all within a few miles of the same North East coastline.