HMS Frobisher (D81): A Cadet Training Ship That Bombarded Sword Beach

A Slow Build

HMS Frobisher was one of five Hawkins-class heavy cruisers ordered in December 1915, designed for the demanding task of hunting enemy commerce raiders across open ocean, a role that called for heavy armament, genuine speed and long range all at once.

She was laid down at Devonport Dockyard on 2 August 1916 and launched on 20 March 1920, but was not actually completed until 20 September 1924, over four years after her launch, a particularly sluggish gestation reflecting the drastically reduced naval spending of the immediate postwar years.

She displaced 9,860 tons standard, measured 604 feet 2 inches in length, and her Yarrow boilers and Brown-Curtis turbines produced 65,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 30.5 knots. Her original armament comprised seven 7.5-inch guns, anti-aircraft guns and torpedo tubes, carried by a crew of 37 officers and 672 ratings.

Those figures are more historically important than they look, because this class is the reason every heavy cruiser of the next twenty years was the size it was. When the naval powers met at Washington in 1921 to limit the arms race, they had to fix a ceiling for cruisers, and they did the obvious thing: they took the largest cruiser anybody had actually built and drew the line just above it. That ship was the Hawkins class. Britain, having just built five of them, was anxious that they should not be rendered obsolete by some new breed of super-cruiser, so the treaty settled on 10,000 tons and 8-inch guns, which is Frobisher rounded up. Everything that followed, the British County class, the American Pensacolas, the Japanese Mogamis, the German Hipper, was designed to those numbers, and the compromises they all shared are described in the articles on HMS Cornwall (56) and HMS Exeter (68). Frobisher herself never fought another cruiser. She simply defined what one was allowed to be.

What became of the other four is the part that gives the argument its edge, because for a class that set the shape of every heavy cruiser built anywhere for the next twenty years, they had an extraordinarily poor time of it themselves.

Raleigh did not last four years. On 8 August 1922 she ran onto the shore at Point Amour in Forteau Bay, on the Labrador coast; she was a total loss, and what remained of her was stripped and blown up in 1926. Effingham went the same way eighteen years later and rather more expensively: during the Norwegian campaign in 1940 she hit an uncharted shoal, could not be got off, and had to be destroyed by her own side. Two of the five wrecked, neither of them by an enemy.

The fifth never became a cruiser at all. She was laid down as Cavendish and, while still on the stocks, was converted into an aircraft carrier instead and renamed Vindictive, to carry on the name of the old cruiser filled with concrete and sunk in the entrance at Ostend. She spent the next quarter of a century being turned into whatever was needed, ending as a repair ship, and was scrapped in 1946. That leaves Hawkins, who escorted convoys in the Indian Ocean and shelled the Normandy beaches, and Frobisher, who taught cadets for half her life and did the same thing off Sword.

Five ships built to hunt commerce raiders across the open ocean. Two lost on rocks, one turned into a carrier before she was finished, one used as a floating school for a decade and a half, and one that did roughly the job intended. And between them they fixed the ten thousand ton, eight-inch limit that every navy in the world then designed to, which is a considerably larger legacy than any of them earned at sea.

She was named for Admiral Sir Martin Frobisher, one of the commanders who helped defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588, and remains the only Royal Navy ship ever to carry his name.

The man was worth a ship, too. Martin Frobisher had made three voyages into the Canadian Arctic in the 1570s looking for the North-West Passage, and came back the second time with two hundred tons of ore that assayers in London confidently declared to be gold-bearing and which turned out to be worthless hornblende; the third voyage brought back thirteen hundred tons of the same and ruined his backers. He then spent the 1580s as a privateer and a fighting seaman, commanded the Triumph against the Armada in 1588 and was knighted at sea during the campaign, and died in 1594 of a wound taken storming a Spanish fort at Crozon in Brittany. Explorer, sailor, unsuccessful gold prospector and thoroughly successful pirate: it is a very Elizabethan career, and no other ship has ever carried the name.

Interwar Service and a Training Ship Conversion

HMS Frobisher joined the 1st Cruiser Squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet upon completion, serving there through the mid-1920s, hosting a Royal Marines amphibious landing exercise in June 1926 and briefly carrying a prototype aircraft catapult and crane in 1927 and 1928.

She transferred to the Atlantic Fleet in 1929, occasionally serving as flagship, before being placed in reserve in June 1930 and converted into a cadet training ship in 1932, a role she continued in, with a brief return to reserve status in 1937, right through to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Reconverted for War

The Royal Navy decided to reconvert HMS Frobisher back into a proper heavy cruiser before the war began, though the work initially proceeded at very low priority from 5 January 1940 onwards, gradually restoring her main armament and adding modern anti-aircraft weapons and radar.

By March 1942, she had been fitted with Type 281 early-warning radar, Type 273 surface-search radar and Type 285 anti-aircraft gunnery radar, alongside depth-charge equipment and hydrophones, transforming her from a training vessel back into a properly capable warship.

HMS Frobisher joined the 4th Cruiser Squadron of the Eastern Fleet in March 1942, escorting convoys and capital ships across the Indian Ocean, and in December 1943 towed the damaged French light cruiser Le Triomphant to Diego Suarez in Madagascar, before returning to Britain in March 1944 to prepare for the invasion of Europe.

Bombarding Sword Beach

On 6 June 1944, D-Day itself, HMS Frobisher was assigned to Gunfire Bombardment Support Force D, targeting German defences behind Sword Beach.

She bombarded the coastal artillery position at Riva-Bella in Ouistreham, scoring a direct hit that knocked out the enemy fire-control observation post in the town itself, a 17 metre concrete tower that had commanded the German gun batteries along the Orne estuary, her manually loaded main guns reportedly managing a rate of fire of five rounds per minute, a remarkably demanding pace for guns of that calibre being served by hand. That same tower still stands today, restored as the Atlantic Wall's Grand Bunker museum, so anyone curious exactly what HMS Frobisher hit that morning can, these days, simply buy a ticket and climb it.

It was a striking return to front-line combat for a ship that, only a few years earlier, had been quietly training naval cadets.

The training role she kept coming back to is worth explaining, because it was a standing Royal Navy practice and it made a great deal of sense. Cadets could be taught navigation, seamanship, gunnery drill and the running of a ship's day in a classroom, but they could not be taught what a warship actually feels like, and a fleet unit could not be spared to show them. An obsolescent cruiser, too old for the battle line and too useful to scrap, was the perfect answer: big enough to have every department a real ship has, expendable enough that nobody minded her being used as a schoolroom, and cheap to run at low readiness. Frobisher spent almost half her life doing it, and the officers who fought the Second World War at sea had largely learned their trade in ships like her.

The Normandy campaign was not finished with her yet, either. On 18 July, German bombers caught her off Juno Beach, killing eight of her crew and wounding twelve more, a sharp reminder that fire support duty off the invasion beaches carried its own very real dangers weeks after the initial landings had succeeded.

HMS Frobisher's renewed combat career was cut short for good on 9 August 1944, when she and the repair ship HMS Albatross were both struck by German Dackel torpedoes fired from the E-boats S-174, S-180 and S-79, operating in the Baie de la Seine. The Dackel was a strange weapon even by torpedo standards, a long-range acoustic type that crawled along at just 9 knots but could run for the best part of 34 miles and stay in the water for three and a half hours, less a precision weapon than a slow, patient area-denial threat lurking wherever the traffic was heaviest.

That weapon was a response to a specific problem, and it says a good deal about the position Germany was in by August 1944. The Allies had put an entire invasion fleet into the Baie de la Seine and were unloading through it continuously; the Kriegsmarine had a handful of E-boats and no realistic way of attacking that anchorage directly. The Dackel was the answer of a navy that had run out of better ideas: fire a torpedo from a long way off in roughly the right direction and let it wander through the traffic for three and a half hours at nine knots until it hit something. It is closer to laying a slow-moving mine than to a torpedo attack. It also worked well enough to take a heavy cruiser out of the war.

Back to Training, For Good

While under repair at Chatham Dockyard, the Royal Navy made a final decision on HMS Frobisher's future: rather than repairing her fully for further combat service, she would be reconverted once more into a cadet training ship, this time for 150 cadets.

Major gun removals followed, stripping out much of the armament so recently restored, and the conversion was completed in May 1945, leaving her with a reduced final armament of three 7.5-inch guns, a single 6-inch gun, anti-aircraft guns and torpedo tubes, an unusual mixed fit reflecting her split identity between combat cruiser and training vessel.

HMS Frobisher served as a cadet training ship until replaced by HMS Devonshire in 1947, and was sold for scrap to John Cashmore Ltd on 26 March 1949, arriving for breaking up at Newport, Wales, on 11 May that year, closing out an unusual 25-year career that had oscillated between front-line combat cruiser and training vessel not once, but twice, including one memorable return to the guns just in time to help support the D-Day landings.