HMS Campbeltown (F86): Carrying a Borrowed Bell From the Most Daring Raid of the War

The Last and Largest of the Type 22s

HMS Campbeltown was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, her keel laid on 4 December 1985, launched on 7 October 1987, and commissioned on 27 May 1989, one of the Batch 3 Type 22 frigates, larger than their predecessors and fitted with improved close-in weapons systems reflecting hard lessons learned during the 1982 Falklands War.

She carried a 4.5-inch Mark 8 gun, two Sea Wolf anti-air missile systems with 72 missiles between them, two quadruple Harpoon anti-ship missile launchers, torpedo tubes, 20mm guns and a Goalkeeper close-in weapon system, a formidable and comprehensive combat fit reflecting the class's final and most capable iteration.

A Bell Borrowed From Pennsylvania

HMS Campbeltown carried a name laden with history.

The original HMS Campbeltown, a Town-class destroyer, achieved lasting fame for her role in the St Nazaire Raid of 1942, when she was rammed into the dry dock gates at St Nazaire and detonated with a delayed-action explosive charge, destroying the only dry dock on the Atlantic coast large enough to service the German battleship Tirpitz, one of the most audacious and successful special operations of the entire war.

The raid, Operation Chariot, was gambled on that single strategic fact: with the Tirpitz lurking in Norwegian waters, St Nazaire was the only dock on the Atlantic coast that could service her, and four separate bombing raids aimed at crippling it had already failed, costing twelve aircraft. Campbeltown herself, a former American lend-lease destroyer originally named USS Buchanan, was disguised to pass for a German vessel and flew a German ensign as she crept up the Loire estuary at just five knots, touching bottom twice on the way in, before striking the dock gates at 0134 on 28 March 1942, four minutes behind schedule, under Lieutenant-Commander Stephen Beattie, who brought her in under point-blank fire from the bridge.

Beattie was one of five men awarded the Victoria Cross for that night's work, alongside the raid's naval commander Captain Robert Ryder, gun-layer Able Seaman William Savage (killed at his gun covering the withdrawal), Royal Engineer Sergeant Thomas Durrant (who died of wounds after fighting on from a captured launch) and the military commander Lieutenant-Colonel Augustus Newman; a further four DSOs, seventeen DSCs and dozens of other decorations went to the rest of the raiding force. A 12-pounder gun salvaged from Campbeltown's own wreck stands today at the raid memorial in St Nazaire, a permanent French monument to the same ship whose bell would later cross the Atlantic twice more.

The bell has a story of its own, and it runs in the opposite direction to the one usually told. The fifty destroyers came from the United States government under the Destroyers for Bases Agreement of 1940, not from any particular town; this one had been USS Buchanan, launched in 1919, and she was renamed for Campbeltown in Argyll under the convention that the transferred ships would take names common to both countries. The American half of that pairing was Campbelltown, a village in South Londonderry Township, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania.

What survived the explosion at St Nazaire included her bell, and after the war it was kept in the Scottish Campbeltown. Then, in 1950, the British consul-general, H. C. McClelland, wrote to the mayor of Lebanon to say that the bell was being bequeathed to the Pennsylvania community, as a thank you for lend-lease. So a bell recovered from a destroyer that had been deliberately blown up in a French dock crossed the Atlantic as a gift, and stayed in a Pennsylvania village for the best part of forty years.

When the new frigate commissioned in 1989 the Royal Navy asked whether it might be lent back, and Campbelltown put the question to a vote. It was not a landslide. The bell came anyway, served at sea for twenty-two years, and went home to Pennsylvania when she paid off in 2011. A new bell was cast for the Type 31 frigate now carrying the name, and the frigate's own bell went to the museum in Campbeltown. Three ships, three bells, and one of them has crossed the Atlantic more times than most of the sailors who rang it.

Her first real deployment came within eighteen months of commissioning and it was the one the class had been built for. In January 1991 she sailed from Portsmouth with Task Group 323.2, in company with the carrier Ark Royal, for the eastern Mediterranean, where the group worked alongside the American Sixth Fleet covering the western flank of Desert Shield and Desert Storm and supporting the Armilla Patrol further east. That is precisely the job a Batch 3 Type 22 existed to do: a large, well-armed anti-submarine frigate with a heavy close-range air defence fit, screening a carrier in confined water where the threat was aircraft and missiles rather than submarines. She went back out in August 1993 with another group, escorting Invincible and the stores ship Fort Grange through the Mediterranean and into the Gulf, and was home again by that December.

Then in June 1998 she got the West Indies, and the six months that followed are the most human part of her record. The Guardship in that station spends her time on drug interdiction, showing the flag round a long string of small islands and, above all, waiting for the hurricane season, because when one comes through the nearest warship is the only organisation for several hundred miles with boats, helicopters, engineers, medical staff, fresh water and radios that still work. Hurricane Georges came through in September 1998 and Campbeltown went to St Kitts with relief. Then came Mitch, which killed something in the order of ten thousand people in Central America, and among everything else her people did that autumn they picked out of the sea a Honduran woman who had been swept from her own home by the storm surge. That is not the sort of thing a Sea Wolf launcher is for, and it is the kind of work that has kept a British warship in the Caribbean every hurricane season for decades.

A Wreath Over the Kursk

HMS Campbeltown visited Arkhangelsk in August 2001 for the sixtieth anniversary commemorations of the Arctic Convoys, a fitting deployment given her wartime namesake's own service in that era, and on 28 August 2001, sailing in company with the Russian warships Zadorniy and Alexander Otrakovski, she laid a wreath in the Barents Sea near the site where the Russian submarine Kursk had been lost the previous year, a solemn gesture of respect across former Cold War lines.

She went on to serve as part of NATO's Standing Naval Force Atlantic in early 2004, and between 2007 and 2008 completed a seven-month deployment to the Persian Gulf, supporting Operation Calash, a counter-piracy and counter-smuggling patrol covering the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the North Indian Ocean, and Operation Telic, securing Iraqi territorial waters.

Decommissioned, and a Bell Comes Home

HMS Campbeltown entered refit at HMNB Devonport in September 2008 and was eventually decommissioned on 7 April 2011, following a final emotional visit to the town of Campbeltown in Argyll that March, marked by a parade of her own ship's company through the town centre, and a final entrance to Plymouth on 31 March.

She was laid up at Portsmouth before being sold to the Turkish company Leyal for demolition in July 2013, towed to Turkey that October and arriving at the Aliağa ship-breaking yard on 29 October 2013.

What ended her was a document rather than a defect. The 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review took all four Batch 3 Type 22s out at once, Cornwall, Cumberland, Chatham and Campbeltown, on the reasoning that they were expensive to man and lacked the area air defence and towed array of the ships the Navy wanted to keep. They were the largest, newest and most heavily armed frigates in the fleet, and the youngest of them was twenty-two years old. All four went, and the four together fetched in the region of three million pounds from the breakers, which for four ocean-going warships is a remarkable figure to have to write down. Two of the others appear elsewhere in this series: HMS Cumberland (F85), who was actually recalled from her own farewell voyage to evacuate civilians from Libya, and HMS Chatham (F87).

The borrowed bell from the original wartime HMS Campbeltown was returned to Pennsylvania after decommissioning, and a new bell was cast for her successor, the Type 31 frigate HMS Campbeltown, with the original frigate's own bell now on display in Campbeltown's local museum, a tangible link between three generations of ships bearing one of the Royal Navy's most storied names.