HMS Broke: The Destroyer That Rammed Algiers' Harbour Boom Under Fire

A Great War Design, Commissioned Years Late

HMS Broke was built by J. I. Thornycroft at Woolston, her keel laid in October 1918 as the First World War drew to a close, launched on 16 September 1920, but not commissioned until 15 April 1925, a truly long gestation reflecting the postwar slowdown in naval construction and the reduced urgency once the war she had been designed for was over.

A Thornycroft-type, or Shakespeare-class, flotilla leader, she displaced 1,554 tons standard and up to 2,009 tons at full load, armed with five 4.7-inch guns, a 3-inch anti-aircraft gun, two 2-pounder pom-poms and two triple 21-inch torpedo tube mounts, driven by Brown-Curtis steam turbines producing 40,000 shaft horsepower for a design speed of 36.5 knots, a notably fast and powerful ship for her era.

She spent her early career as a Mediterranean flotilla leader between 1925 and 1931.

The name was worth living up to. It commemorates Rear Admiral Sir Philip Broke, who in June 1813, commanding the frigate HMS Shannon, took the American frigate USS Chesapeake off Boston in fifteen minutes of close action, one of the most celebrated single-ship fights in the history of either navy. Broke himself was cut down by a cutlass on the Chesapeake's deck and never served at sea again. It is a name the Royal Navy has given only to ships it expected to do something with.

The Broke immediately before this one certainly did. On the night of 20 April 1917, six German torpedo boats came out of Zeebrugge to attack the Dover Barrage and ran into the destroyer leaders Swift and Broke. In the confusion Broke put her bow straight into SMS G42 and the two ships locked together, at which point German sailors came over the side and there was hand-to-hand fighting on a British destroyer's deck, in 1917, with cutlasses and anything else that came to hand. Broke eventually worked herself free and G42 went down. Twenty-one of Broke's company were killed and thirty-six wounded, and she had to be towed into Dover. Her captain, Edward Evans, got the Distinguished Service Order and spent the rest of the war being called Evans of the Broke by every newspaper in the country. He had been second-in-command of Captain Scott's last expedition five years earlier, which by any reasonable standard is enough adventure for one lifetime.

All of which gives the events of November 1942 a certain symmetry. One Broke rammed a German destroyer in the Dover Strait and fought off a boarding party. The next one rammed a harbour boom at Algiers under the guns of a hostile shore battery, three times, until it gave way. It is not a family tradition anybody planned, but it is a consistent one.

Convoys, Dunkirk-Style Evacuation, and Rescue at Sea

HMS Broke returned to active war service on convoy escort duties from 1939, first under Captain Ralph Kerr and, from 27 September that year, under Commander Bryan Scurfield, and took part in Operation Cycle, the evacuation of Allied troops from Normandy in June 1940 following the fall of France.

That summer she also picked up survivors from two separate torpedoed merchantmen within a day of each other, fifteen from the Estonian steamer Vapper on 7 July and twenty from the Swedish Bissen on 8 July, and in October 1940 took part in Operation Medium, a Royal Navy bombardment of Cherbourg. She was later converted to a short-range escort, trading some of her 4.7-inch guns for extra anti-aircraft and anti-submarine weapons better suited to the daily grind of convoy escort than to the fleet action she would now never fight.

The Comorin rescue came in April 1941, still under Scurfield's command, when the armed merchant cruiser caught fire and had to be abandoned; Broke was one of three ships, alongside HMS Glenartney and HMS Lincoln, that pulled her survivors from the sea.

Command passed to Commander Walter Couchman that July, and then, in April 1942, to Lieutenant Commander Arthur Layard, who would remain in charge of HMS Broke for the rest of her career. It was Layard who took her into the defence of Convoy SC 94 in August 1942, one of the many hard-fought Battle of the Atlantic convoy actions that defined the middle years of the war, work that, whatever its lower profile compared to her final action, kept HMS Broke and her crew in the thick of the fighting for years before her most dramatic moment arrived.

Smashing the Boom at Algiers

HMS Broke's defining moment came on 8 November 1942, when she and the destroyer HMS Malcolm took part in Operation Terminal, part of the wider Operation Torch landings in North Africa. Captain Henry Fancourt, commanding the two-ship flotilla, was embarked aboard Broke for the operation, while Layard remained in command of the ship herself, the two men sharing her bridge for what would prove HMS Broke's last and greatest action.

Fancourt is the more remarkable of the two, and his part in the war had already been played eighteen months before Algiers. From 1940 he commanded the Royal Naval Air Station at Hatston in Orkney, and on 22 May 1941 the Admiralty was in an extremely uncomfortable position: Bismarck and Prinz Eugen had been photographed at Bergen, the weather over Norway had closed in solid, and nobody could establish whether they were still there. Fancourt, on his own initiative and without asking anybody, sent a Martin Maryland to go and look, flown under the weather by a crew who got right down to the water to do it.

The fjords were empty. That single negative report is what set the entire Bismarck operation in motion: the Home Fleet sailed, Hood and Prince of Wales went to the Denmark Strait, and everything that followed over the next five days followed from an air station commander deciding not to wait for orders. Eighteen months later he was standing on the bridge of a twenty-two-year-old destroyer leader as she rammed a harbour boom at Algiers for the third time.

He went on to command HMS Argus (I49) and then the maintenance carrier HMS Unicorn in the Indian Ocean, and retired in 1951. He was born on 1 April 1900 and died on 8 January 2004, aged one hundred and three, by which point he was the last man alive who had been actively involved in the Battle of Jutland. A boy at Jutland in 1916, the man who found the Bismarck gone in 1941, on Broke's bridge in 1942, and still here in the twenty-first century.

Their mission was to land 600 American troops of the 3rd Battalion, 135th Infantry, part of the US 34th Infantry Division under Colonel Edwin Swenson, directly onto the port at Algiers to seize its facilities before Vichy French forces could destroy them, but the defenders opened fire the moment the two ships approached.

HMS Malcolm took a shell that killed ten of her crew, knocked out three of her four boilers and cut her speed to four knots, forcing her to retreat and play no further part in the action. HMS Broke pressed on, and on her third attempt sliced clean through the harbour boom, successfully landing her troops under fire on the Quai de Fécamp some four hours after the operation had begun, a remarkable feat of seamanship and determination carried out under sustained hostile fire.

A Costly Success

Ashore, Swenson's men held their ground for hours against a garrison many times their number, but with no prospect of reinforcement and Vichy tanks closing in, they were eventually surrounded and forced to surrender, having lost five killed and eight wounded. HMS Broke, meanwhile, having landed them, continued to take heavy fire from Vichy shore batteries and was forced to withdraw at 10:30, sustaining further damage on top of the wounds she had already taken forcing the boom.

She was taken in tow by the destroyer HMS Zetland, but the damage proved too severe, and HMS Broke sank two days later, on 10 November 1942, her loss coming almost as an afterthought to the genuine tactical success she had achieved in getting her troops ashore against defended opposition where her companion ship, a destroyer leader of an older class entirely, had been unable to.

One more thing belongs in this story, and it happened three years after the ship herself had gone. Commander Bryan Scurfield, who had HMS Broke from September 1939 to July 1941, took her through the Norwegian and Channel convoys, the June 1940 evacuations and the Comorin rescue, and along the way had the melancholy job in March 1940 of scuttling what was left of the Dutch tanker Eulota after U-28 torpedoed her. He went on to command the destroyer HMS Bedouin, and on 15 June 1942, south of Sardinia during Operation Harpoon, an Italian aircraft put a torpedo into her engine room and she sank in five minutes. Scurfield and 212 others spent hours in the water before an Italian Red Cross ship picked them up.

He was a prisoner for the rest of the war, first in Italy and then at Marlag O near Bremen, and on 11 April 1945, with the war three weeks from its end, the Germans marched the prisoners out towards Lubeck. That afternoon six Allied fighters came down on the column at low level, having taken it for German troops. Scurfield walked up and down the road in the open, ordering everybody to scatter, and was hit in the back by cannon fire from his own side. He died of the wound. He held the Distinguished Service Order, the Order of the British Empire and the Albert Medal, and had commanded HMS Broke through the two hardest years of her war.

Layard left something rather different behind. From the day he entered the Navy as a cadet in 1913 to the day he retired in 1947, he wrote in his diary almost every day, roughly a page at a time, for thirty-four years. It survived, and it was eventually edited by the Canadian naval historian Michael Whitby and published as Commanding Canadians. It is one of the very few continuous first-hand accounts of what commanding an escort actually felt like day after day, written by a man who was not performing for anybody and had no idea it would ever be read.

The title comes from what he did next. After Broke he went to the Royal Canadian Navy: senior officer of a support group out of Halifax from September 1943, and from January 1944 to the end of the war in Europe in command of Escort Group 9, flying his pennant in the frigate HMCS Matane and later HMCS Nene. EG 9 became one of the most effective anti-submarine groups the Canadian navy ever fielded. So a Royal Navy officer who had put six hundred American soldiers ashore at Algiers spent the last eighteen months of the war leading Canadians in the North Atlantic, and wrote down what it was like every single evening.

HMS Broke's career, spanning from a First World War design to a Second World War death, stands as a striking example of how thoroughly the Royal Navy relied on its interwar-built destroyers right through to the very end of the conflict.