HMS Brissenden: One of Only Two, and a Fighter Against German Torpedo Boats

A Rare Variant

HMS Brissenden was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company on the Clyde, her keel laid on 28 February 1941, launched on 15 September 1942, and commissioned on 12 February 1943. She was a Type IV Hunt-class escort destroyer, a variant of which only two ships were ever completed, making her a genuinely rare example within a class otherwise built in large numbers. She measured 296 feet 9 inches overall, driven by two Admiralty three-drum boilers feeding two-shaft Parsons geared steam turbines producing 19,000 shaft horsepower, giving her the speed and manoeuvrability the Hunt class needed for its escort and coastal warfare duties.

Sicily and the Channel War

HMS Brissenden began her operational career on patrol in the Western Approaches in 1943, before supporting the Allied invasion of Sicily between May and July that year. On 13 July 1943, during this period, she collided with HMS Blankney, sustaining damage to her port bow, an occupational hazard of the crowded, high-tempo waters around an active invasion fleet. She returned to English Channel convoy escort and patrol duties through the rest of 1943 and into 1944, and in February 1944 took part in Operation Tunnel, a series of Royal Navy sweeps against German E-boats and other light coastal forces operating in the Channel.

Repelling Torpedo Boats Off Normandy

HMS Brissenden repelled German torpedo boat attacks on 15 March and again on 12 June 1944, the second coming in the immediate aftermath of the Normandy landings, in which she took part as part of Force B, one of the covering forces protecting the invasion fleet from German naval interference. She came under air attack during the Normandy operations on 22 June 1944, a reminder that Allied ships off the beachhead faced danger from above as well as from the sea, in a period when German aircraft, though increasingly outmatched, could still mount dangerous strikes against shipping in the crowded invasion anchorages.

A Difficult Peacetime Posting

HMS Brissenden served in the Mediterranean as a reserve vessel with the Eastern Fleet between June 1945 and 1947, and in this period was assigned to coastal patrol duties off Mandatory Palestine, part of the Royal Navy's difficult and often thankless role attempting to intercept ships carrying Jewish refugees seeking to enter Palestine in defiance of British immigration restrictions in the tense final years of the Mandate, a task that placed British sailors in the middle of one of the most emotionally and politically fraught episodes of the immediate postwar period.

A Quiet End

HMS Brissenden was decommissioned on 19 June 1948 at Portsmouth and spent over fifteen years in reserve before finally being sold to BISCO on 18 February 1965 for £29,000, scrapped by W. H. Arnott, Young and Company, arriving at their yard on 3 March 1965. Her career, spanning the invasion of Sicily, the Normandy landings and the fraught patrols off Palestine, stands as a genuinely eventful record for one of only two ships of her particular Hunt-class variant ever built.