HMS Corunna (D97): From Suez to Radar Picket, a Battle-Class Destroyer's Long Second Act

Built on the Tyne, Too Late for the War

HMS Corunna was built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson on the River Tyne, her keel laid on 12 April 1944 and launched on 29 May 1945, a later, 1943-programme Battle-class fleet destroyer named in honour of the Battle of Corunna fought during the Peninsular War in 1809.

It is a slightly odd battle to name a ship after. Corunna, fought on 16 January 1809, was the end of a long winter retreat across northern Spain by a British army that had been outmanoeuvred and was trying to get to its ships. Sir John Moore fought the French off the beaches for long enough to get his men embarked, and was killed doing it. The army got away. Nobody called it a victory at the time. What it was, was a professional fighting retreat conducted by an army that had lost, ending with the Royal Navy taking everybody off, which is a tradition the Navy has upheld often enough since to have earned the right to put the name on a destroyer.

Like a great many warships laid down in the war's final years, HMS Corunna arrived too late to see any wartime action herself, not entering service until 23 May 1947 and formally completing on 6 June that year, joining the 4th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet in a Royal Navy already adjusting to peacetime footing.

An Early Setback

HMS Corunna was placed in reserve from October 1947, only months after commissioning, owing to manning shortages within the postwar Royal Navy, a common enough fate for ships entering service just as wartime crew numbers were being rapidly demobilised.

On 8 December 1948, she collided with the oiler Wave Sovereign during refuelling operations, damage serious enough to require repairs at Chatham Dockyard that ran from 16 December 1948 through to 18 February 1949, an inauspicious start to a career that would, in fact, go on to span more than two further decades of active service.

Coronation, Suez and the Mediterranean

HMS Corunna took part in the 1953 Fleet Review celebrating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, one of the great set-piece displays of British naval strength of the entire postwar period, before deploying to the Mediterranean between 1954 and 1955. Based at Malta with the 4th Destroyer Squadron alongside her sister ships HMS Aisne, HMS Agincourt and HMS Barrosa, she spent much of the mid-1950s on the less glamorous business of the Cyprus patrol, watching for EOKA infiltration during the opening phase of the Cyprus Emergency.

She went on to participate in the 1956 Suez Crisis, the ill-fated Anglo-French-Israeli intervention against Egypt that marked, for many historians, the moment Britain's status as a global naval power gave way to a more modest, though still substantial, regional one, under the command of a young officer named Terence Lewin, who had taken charge of Corunna in October 1955, his very first command. Lewin went on to become Admiral of the Fleet Lord Lewin, serving as Chief of the Defence Staff during the Falklands War a quarter of a century later, a rather more senior perspective on naval crises than the one he held aboard a single Battle-class destroyer off Egypt in 1956.

Lewin deserves the same treatment his successor gets below, because his war was not a quiet one. His first ship as a midshipman was the brand new cruiser HMS Belfast, and he had been in her a matter of weeks when a German magnetic mine broke her back in the Firth of Forth in November 1939. He went from there to the battleship HMS Valiant and the Norwegian campaign of spring 1940, and in January 1942 he joined the Tribal-class destroyer HMS Ashanti as her gunnery and watch-keeping officer. That is the posting that made him. Ashanti went to Malta with Operation Pedestal in August 1942, to North Africa for the landings that November, and back to the Arctic in between. He was mentioned in despatches three times.

The Distinguished Service Cross came out of one of the grimmest four days the Arctic convoys produced. On 20 September 1942, covering convoy QP 14 on the way home from Russia, the destroyer HMS Somali was torpedoed by U-703 and hit in the engine room. Ashanti put a wire across and started towing her, and kept towing her for four days and something like four hundred and twenty miles, most of the way to Iceland, with the weather getting worse the whole time and a skeleton crew still aboard the casualty. On the night of 24 September Somali's back broke. She folded in half like a hinge, bow and stern rising, hung there a moment and went down. Thirty-five men came out of the water. Lewin's DSC was for the recovery of survivors, in the dark, in the North Atlantic short of Iceland, in September.

He was twenty-one at the time, and thirty-four when he was given Corunna. Long afterwards he took the carrier HMS Hermes (R12) as her captain, and in 1982, as Chief of the Defence Staff, he sat in the War Cabinet that sent her south. But a man who has spent four days watching a wire and a wrecked destroyer in an Arctic gale, and then spent a night pulling men out of that water, has a rather more direct acquaintance with the cost of naval operations than the phrase Chief of the Defence Staff suggests, and it is worth knowing that before the Falklands part of the story starts.

When Lewin moved on the following year, command passed to another officer with a considerably more dramatic wartime past behind him: Godfrey Place, VC, DSC, who as a young lieutenant had commanded the midget submarine X7 in the audacious 1943 attack that crippled the German battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord, and who now found himself commanding a destroyer barely a third the length of the battleship he had once helped put out of action.

Place is worth a paragraph on his own, because the shape of his career is barely credible. He took X7 under the anti-torpedo nets in Kaafjord on 22 September 1943 at the age of twenty-two, laid his charges under Tirpitz, could not get out, and was taken prisoner as his boat sank; he spent the rest of the war in Marlag-Milag Nord, where he had a hand in the celebrated Albert RN escape, the one with the dummy head. He came home with a Victoria Cross. He then left submarines altogether, transferred to the Fleet Air Arm, learned to fly, and spent the Korean War flying Sea Furies off a carrier against ground targets. After that he commanded surface ships, of which Corunna was one, ran naval recruitment, and retired a rear admiral. Midget submariner, VC, prisoner of war, fighter pilot, destroyer captain: it is not a career path that exists any more, and it is not clear that it ever really did.

On 15 March 1959, HMS Corunna was involved in an accidental collision with her sister ship HMS Barrosa in the Bay of Biscay, the second serious collision of her career. The mishap came during a routine screen reorientation exercise: as one veteran of the squadron later recalled it, the whole destroyer screen turned smartly onto its new course together, all except Corunna, and something had to give. It did, Corunna losing a substantial part of her forecastle and later being photographed at Gibraltar bearing the scars, a reminder that naval accidents were hardly a rarity even among well-drilled postwar destroyer squadrons operating in difficult weather and busy shipping lanes.

Radar Picket and the Far East

By 1962, HMS Corunna had transferred to the 7th Destroyer Squadron in the Mediterranean, followed by assignment to the 21st Escort Squadron in 1963, and deployed to the Far East between 1964 and 1965.

During this later phase of her career, HMS Corunna was converted to a Radar Picket configuration, receiving new anti-aircraft armament and Sea Cat missile systems, a substantial modernisation that extended her useful service life well beyond what her original 1940s design and armament could otherwise have offered. She was one of only four Battle-class destroyers to receive this conversion, a select group reserved for hulls the Admiralty judged still had enough life left in them to be worth the considerable expense of rebuilding.

What that conversion involved is worth seeing. The Admiralty took the decision in 1955 and did not start work until 1959, and the four ships were Agincourt, Aisne, Barrosa and Corunna, which is to say the same four that had been together in the 4th Destroyer Squadron at Malta. Each of them lost her after gun mounting and gained a lattice mast whose base straddled the entire width of the ship, carrying a four-ton Type 965 double bedstead aerial with a Type 293Q underneath it, plus a Seacat launcher for close-in defence. The bill came to about £2.25 million a ship.

That figure had consequences well beyond Corunna. The Royal Navy had also been building purpose-designed aircraft direction frigates, the Type 61 Salisbury class, and had planned a second flotilla of them. Four converted Battles could do the same job, could keep up with a carrier where the diesel-engined Type 61s could not, and cost two-thirds of what a new frigate cost; HMS Chichester had been built for £3,291,000 a few years earlier. In 1961 the remaining Type 61s were cancelled outright. Corunna is one of the reasons a class of frigates was never finished.

A Long Retirement

HMS Corunna was placed in reserve in 1967, and added to the disposal list in 1972, before finally being broken up at Blyth, Northumberland, in 1975, closing out nearly three decades from her 1945 launch.

The ending was slower and less dignified than the record deserves. She was in reserve from 1967, which is to say laid up with a care and maintenance party while the Navy decided what to do with a twenty-year-old destroyer whose expensive rebuild had been designed around a carrier fleet that was itself being cancelled. She went onto the disposal list in 1972, sat at Portsmouth, and was finally towed north in late 1974 to Hughes, Bolckow at Blyth, the Northumberland yard that took apart a great deal of the Royal Navy across the twentieth century. She was still whole in the dry dock there in the middle of 1975. Agincourt and Barrosa were in the same yard. Three of the four converted radar pickets, the four that had cost two and a quarter million pounds apiece and killed off a class of frigates between them, went to pieces within sight of one another on the same stretch of the Blyth.

The frigates had the last word. Four Type 61s were completed before the programme was stopped, and they were still going long after the Battles had been cut up: Llandaff was sold to Bangladesh in 1978 and served on there for years as Umar Farooq, and Salisbury lasted until she was sunk as a target on 30 September 1985, a decade after Corunna had been scrapped. The conversion was the right decision on the arithmetic and the wrong one on the calendar. A rebuilt 1945 hull could do the job for two-thirds of the price, but it could only do it for ten years, and a purpose-built ship could do it for thirty. That lesson has had to be relearned by the Royal Navy roughly once a generation ever since.

Built too late for the war that gave her class its name, HMS Corunna nonetheless found no shortage of service in the postwar Royal Navy she actually inhabited, from coronation fleet reviews to the Suez Crisis and on into the missile age as a converted radar picket destroyer.