HMS Crossbow (D96): From Home Fleet Destroyer to Cold War Radar Picket

Built by Thornycroft

HMS Crossbow was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company, laid down on 26 August 1944, launched on 20 December 1945 and completed on 4 March 1948, a Weapon-class destroyer that, like so many of her generation, arrived just after the Second World War had ended and consequently never saw a single day of wartime action, entering instead directly into the very different demands of the postwar Royal Navy.

Her class was built as a scaled-down cousin of the bigger Battle-class destroyers, with an unusual "unit" layout of alternating boiler and engine rooms so a single hit amidships could not knock out her whole propulsion plant at once. Her original anti-aircraft fit centred on the STAAG Mark II, a stabilised, radar-directed twin Bofors mount reckoned on paper to be the best 40mm anti-aircraft system in the world. In practice, the vibration of actually firing the thing wrecked its reliability, and the class never got the chance to find out how it would have coped in a real war.

The Weapon class is one of the great might-have-beens of British destroyer design. They were ordered in numbers under the wartime emergency programmes and exactly four were finished: Battleaxe, Broadsword, Crossbow and Scorpion. The rest were cancelled in three batches between November 1944 and December 1945, most of them still barely more than paper. The unit machinery arrangement, boiler room, engine room, boiler room, engine room, so that one hit amidships could not stop the ship, was a genuine advance and became standard in British destroyers afterwards. The turbines were not. All four had trouble with them from the beginning, and the eventual remedy, cutting the steam feed to half of the reversing turbine, halved their astern power, so that a Weapon took a very long time to stop and handled sluggishly for the rest of her life. Four ships, all of them awkward, and between them not one shot fired at an enemy.

The STAAG deserves its own note, because it is a small masterpiece of the wrong kind. The Admiralty had watched what kamikazes did to ships whose gunners could not track fast enough, and asked for a mounting that carried its own radar, its own predictor and its own stabilisation, so that the gun stayed pointed at the target regardless of what the ship was doing underneath it. On paper it was the best light anti-aircraft weapon in the world. In practice, the whole delicate apparatus was bolted directly to a pair of Bofors guns firing 120 rounds a minute, and the vibration shook it to pieces. Crews came to loathe them. The Navy eventually took them out and put plain, unstabilised, hand-worked Bofors back in, which worked.

Home Fleet Service

From 1948 to 1955, HMS Crossbow formed part of the 6th Destroyer Flotilla, later redesignated the 6th Destroyer Squadron, serving with the Home Fleet alongside her Weapon-class sister ships. In 1953, under the command of Commander C. D. Madden, HMS Crossbow took part in the Fleet Review at Spithead celebrating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 15 June that year, one of the great ceremonial gatherings of the postwar fleet: 197 British warships mustered alongside 13 Commonwealth and 16 foreign vessels, some 300 Fleet Air Arm aircraft flew past, and the evening closed with the fleet illuminated and a fireworks display over the Solent, by any measure the single largest assembly of naval power Crossbow ever sailed alongside.

She was replaced in the 6th Destroyer Squadron by HMS Contest in 1955 and sent into reserve, one of a whole class of ships the Admiralty was, for the moment, unsure what to do with: too new to scrap, already outpaced by faster jets and longer-range radar, and waiting on a decision that would eventually give them a second career entirely.

Converted to a Radar Picket

Between 1957 and 1959, HMS Crossbow underwent a substantial conversion at Chatham Dockyard to serve as a radar picket destroyer, work that saw her torpedo tubes removed and a lattice mast fitted, carrying Type 965 radar, an imposing "single bedstead" aerial array, to give her the long-range air search capability the role demanded. She also gained a UA-3 electronic warfare suite, the first fitted to a conventional Royal Navy destroyer, and a lighter director to help offset all that new weight riding high up the mast; her crew shrank by around fifty men as the torpedo tubes and their operators made way for radar offices. She recommissioned in 1959 under the command of Commander D. Hay and joined the 2nd Destroyer Squadron, a role reflecting the Cold War Royal Navy's growing emphasis on early air warning as the threat from high-speed jet aircraft and missiles increasingly outpaced what conventional gun-armed destroyers could handle alone. It proved a short-lived answer. The whole radar picket conversion was only ever meant as a stop-gap until purpose-built ships could take over, and it was overtaken within a few years by a new generation of longer-range radars, meaning Crossbow's expensively rebuilt lattice mast had barely a decade left to earn its keep.

The picket idea is worth understanding as a whole, because the Royal Navy tried it three different ways in about ten years and abandoned all of them. Crossbow and three of her sisters were converted with Type 965 and a single bedstead aerial. Four Battle-class destroyers got a heavier conversion with the larger double bedstead, which is set out in the article on HMS Corunna. And a whole class of frigates, the Type 61s, was purpose-built for the job from the keel up, as set out in the article on HMS Chichester. Within a decade all three approaches had been overtaken, first by better radar and then by the arrival of the guided missile destroyer, which could see the raid and shoot at it from the same hull.

HMS Crossbow appeared at Chatham Navy Days in April 1960, a public-facing appearance typical of the era's efforts to keep the Royal Navy visible and engaged with the wider public.

A Quiet Retirement

HMS Crossbow was reduced to operational reserve in 1963, and from 1966 served as a harbour training ship for HMS Sultan, a role she filled until replaced by HMS Diamond in early 1970.

HMS Sultan, incidentally, is not a ship. It is the Royal Navy's engineering school at Gosport, and the point of giving it a real destroyer to sit alongside was that marine engineering artificers need something with actual machinery in it to take apart and put back together. Crossbow spent her last four working years being dismantled and reassembled by apprentices, which for a ship that never fired her guns in anger is arguably the most useful thing she ever did.

She was sold on 14 December 1971 and broken up at Briton Ferry, arriving at the breakers' yard on 21 January 1972, closing out a career of more than two decades spent almost entirely on the less glamorous but notably essential work of Home Fleet service, coronation ceremony, Cold War radar picket duty and, finally, training the next generation of naval engineers.

The other three deserve finishing off, because the class is only really comprehensible as a set of four. All of them were converted to air direction pickets in 1958 and 1959, Broadsword at Rosyth and the rest elsewhere, each getting the same aft lattice mast and the same enormous aerial. Battleaxe lasted the shortest time of any of them: on 1 August 1962 she was badly damaged in a collision with the frigate Ursa, was laid up and never went to sea again, and was broken up in 1964, sixteen years after completion. Broadsword paid off in 1963 and was expended as a target in 1968. Scorpion, the last of the four to recommission, served with the 7th Destroyer Squadron until she too went into reserve in April 1963, and was scrapped at Bo'ness in 1971. Crossbow, sold that December, was the last of the class to go.

Scorpion's name has a small grace note to it as well. She was ordered as Tomahawk, and in 1946 the Admiralty changed it to Scorpion, after the destroyer Andrew Cunningham had commanded as a young officer in the First World War, in the year Cunningham stepped down as First Sea Lord. So four ships: ordered for a war they missed, given what was reckoned the finest light anti-aircraft mounting in the world and unable to use it, rebuilt at expense for a radar role that was obsolete within a decade, and all four gone within eight years of one another without a shot fired at anybody. The one genuinely good idea in them, the unit machinery layout, went into every British destroyer built afterwards, which is a real legacy and one no member of their ship's companies would ever have been told about.

Briton Ferry is worth a paragraph in its own right, because the name turns up at the end of a great many of these stories and never gets explained in any of them. The yard was at Giant's Grave on the river Neath in South Wales, and it belonged to Thos. W. Ward of Sheffield, a firm that had begun in the 1870s as coal and coke merchants, moved into scrap metal, and started breaking ships in 1894. The Briton Ferry wharf opened in 1906 and closed in 1979, and in those seventy-three years it took 291 vessels apart: 197 merchant ships and 94 Admiralty ones. Ninety-four warships reduced to plate and scrap on a single Welsh riverbank.

What closed the shipbreakers was not sentiment. It was arithmetic. By the middle of the 1970s there were simply not enough ships coming down the coast to keep the yards in work, because Britain had stopped building them at anything like the old rate and the ones it had were being kept much longer. Ward's remaining business was bought out in 1982. Crossbow arrived at Briton Ferry on 21 January 1972, roughly two thirds of the way through that yard's life and rather near the end of the era it existed to serve.