HMS Broadsword (D31): The Destroyer That Accidentally Shelled Portsmouth

A Wartime Design, Built Too Late for War

HMS Broadsword was built by Yarrow Shipbuilders at Scotstoun, her keel laid on 20 July 1944, but by the time she was launched on 5 February 1946 the war she had been designed to fight was already over.

She did not complete trials until 17 September 1948 and entered full operational service on 4 October that year, a Weapon-class destroyer displacing 1,980 tons standard and up to 2,850 tons at full load, entering a peacetime, Cold War fleet rather than the wartime one for which she had originally been conceived.

The class had been drawn up around three twin 4-inch dual-purpose gun mounts, but Broadsword and her sister HMS Battleaxe were unusual even within their own class: to make room for the new Squid anti-submarine mortar fitted aft, the two of them gave up the superfiring B turret rather than X, as every other Weapon-class ship did, leaving them completed with just two twin 4-inch mounts, six 40mm Bofors guns, ten 21-inch torpedo tubes on a pair of revolving pentad mountings, and a single Squid mortar, an oddly asymmetric arsenal for two ships that were otherwise identical to the rest of their class.

The class barely happened at all. Twenty Weapons were planned, thirteen were laid down, seven got as far as the water and exactly four were completed for service: Battleaxe, Broadsword, Crossbow and Scorpion. The rest were cancelled where they stood when the war ended. It is worth pausing on that, because it says something about how quickly the Admiralty's arithmetic changed in 1945. These were not obsolete designs. They were modern, well-armed anti-submarine destroyers that would have been extremely useful had the war run another two years, and the moment it stopped they became an expense rather than a necessity.

They also look peculiar, and there is a good reason for it. The Weapons were the first British destroyers built around the unit system of machinery, with the boiler rooms and engine rooms arranged alternately rather than grouped together, so that a single hit in the wrong place could not stop the ship dead. The price of that arrangement is two separate uptakes at opposite ends of the machinery spaces, which meant two funnels on a hull that had really only been drawn for one. The answer was to trunk the forward funnel up through the lattice foremast, which is why Broadsword appears in photographs to be venting smoke out of her mast, and to put a small stump funnel further aft between the torpedo tubes. Nobody has ever called the result handsome. It was, however, a great deal harder to kill.

An Unscheduled Shot Over the City

After a spell at Chatham having an electronics workshop fitted and her initial defects put right, HMS Broadsword joined the 6th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet on 29 December 1948, but her most memorable moment came not at sea but alongside her berth at Portsmouth, when on 25 March 1949 one of her 4-inch guns discharged accidentally, sending a live shell passing directly over the city, an alarming incident for anyone within earshot and a story that no doubt circulated around Portsmouth's pubs for years afterwards, even if the Admiralty's own account of the affair was considerably more measured than the version residents likely told their friends.

Malta, Chatham and a Spell with the US Navy

The gun incident did not slow her down much. In June 1949 Broadsword was attached temporarily to the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla for gunnery trials off Malta, returning to the UK in early September to rejoin the 6th Flotilla, before spending the rest of the year under refit at Chatham.

A further spell alongside at Portsmouth in the spring of 1950 saw her sonar and electrical systems overhauled, and on 29 May 1950, fresh from the Home Fleet's Spring cruise, she left for Norfolk, Virginia, to work with the United States Navy's Operational Development Force, mainly on gunnery trials, an unusual posting for a British destroyer and a reminder that NATO cooperation in these early Cold War years went rather further than joint exercises on paper. She left America on 21 August and arrived back at Sheerness on 1 September, in time for a short docking and a place in that year's Home Fleet Autumn Cruise.

A Fire at Chatham

The following year brought a much darker incident. At eight o'clock on the morning of Sunday 14 January 1951, bales of waste and canvas awnings were found smouldering in Broadsword's tiller flat, and an ordinary seaman was discovered unconscious nearby. Despite every effort to revive him, he could not be saved. A coroner later found that he had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, with no signs of injury on his body, and recorded a verdict of misadventure; a second seaman was hurt attempting to rescue him.

Both the Gillingham police and a naval Board of Inquiry investigated. The Board concluded the death was accidental, but even it could not say for certain how the fire had actually started, an unsettling loose end in what was, officially, a closed case, and a stark reminder that routine peacetime service aboard a warship carried real danger of its own, regardless of whether a shot was ever fired.

A New Role as a Radar Picket

HMS Broadsword entered reserve at Chatham in April 1953, replaced in the 6th Destroyer Squadron by HMS Comet, and by August was in a state of preservation and dehumidification. Going into reserve also meant a lighter armament: one of her two remaining twin 4-inch mounts was removed along with her depth charges, and her single Squid mortar was swapped for a double mounting, an odd bit of housekeeping for a ship that would not fire a shot for another five years.

She transferred to Portsmouth in April 1955 and was formally removed from the Special Reserve that August, before being towed to Rosyth in November 1956 for a much more thorough refit and conversion to a radar picket, a role intended to supplement the Royal Navy's newly-introduced Salisbury-class frigates. The work was not completed until October 1958, when she recommissioned with her torpedo tubes removed entirely to make way for the additional radar and command facilities the role demanded, reflecting the Cold War's growing emphasis on early warning and air defence coordination over traditional torpedo attack.

The radar picket idea is worth explaining, because it was a job invented by the Pacific war and made urgent by the nuclear one. A picket steams out ahead of the fleet, alone, with the best long-range air warning radar available, so that the ships behind her get a few extra minutes of notice. That is a valuable few minutes and a thoroughly unenviable posting, since the picket is by definition the first thing an attacker meets. The conversion gave Broadsword a large mainmast amidships carrying the Type 965 set with its AKE-1 aerial, the enormous flat mesh rectangle universally known in the fleet as the single bedstead, and took out her torpedo tubes to pay for it. She went to sea in 1958 as a ship whose principal weapon was a radio wave.

Iceland, Malta and a Rescue at Sea

Newly recommissioned and allocated to the 7th Destroyer Squadron, Broadsword worked up and joined that year's Home Fleet cruise before heading to the Mediterranean for exercises in early 1959. She returned to Portsmouth and then Chatham that April, and spent two spells that summer on the Iceland Patrol, from 19 May to 3 June and again from 24 July to 12 August, unglamorous but strategically important Cold War picket duty watching the gap between Britain and the Arctic. Repairs at Chatham kept her occupied until the end of October.

March 1960 brought a transfer to the Mediterranean Fleet proper, where Broadsword spent the year on NATO and national exercises, steaming some 36,000 miles in the process. Her most useful day at sea that year came on 29 July 1960, when she went to the aid of the merchant ship SS Hartismere after an explosion aboard off Malta. A refit at Gibraltar followed, running from August to mid-November, and by 25 March 1961 she was back at Chatham, having fitted in one more exercise on the way home.

A second Iceland Patrol, from 6 to 25 September 1961, was followed by a further spell of Mediterranean exercises and visits from April 1962, including one photographed in May that year off the Libyan coast by a helicopter of 824 Naval Air Squadron, flying from the carrier HMS Centaur, a rare surviving image of a radar picket destroyer earning her keep rather than sitting in reserve. Broadsword left Gibraltar for the last time on 6 December 1962, arriving at Portsmouth four days later to enter the Reserve Fleet, and was placed on the Disposal List on 24 January 1964.

Target Practice, and the Scrapyard

HMS Broadsword was towed to Rosyth on 25 April 1968, her hull put to one final use in torpedo trials before she was sold to T. W. Ward Ltd on 18 July 1968 for breaking up, arriving at Inverkeithing on 8 October 1968, closing out the career of a ship whose most enduring legacy was probably not her decade and a half of solid Cold War service, but the memorable afternoon in 1949 when Portsmouth briefly found itself, quite unintentionally, within range of one of its own destroyers.

The name did not stay idle for long. Within twelve years of Broadsword reaching the breakers at Inverkeithing, another HMS Broadsword was in commission, the first of the Type 22 frigates, and she went to the Falklands and gave her name to a class of her own. There are worse ways for a name to be inherited than by a ship that ends up defining the class she leads.