HMS Glaisdale (L44): The Norwegian Hunt, the Raider Komet and a Mine off Normandy

A Norwegian Ship From Birkenhead

HMS Glaisdale was ordered from Cammell Laird at Birkenhead in the summer of 1940, one of the Type III Hunt Class escort destroyers of the 1940 War Emergency Programme, which carried four 4 inch guns and two torpedo tubes. Like all the Hunts she took her name from a fox hunt, the Glaisdale in the Yorkshire dales.

She was laid down on 4 February 1941, but she never served under the White Ensign. On 23 December 1941, while she was still on the slipway, she was lent to the Royal Norwegian Navy, whose ships and men had escaped to Britain when Germany occupied their country in 1940 and were fighting on from British ports.

She was launched on 5 January 1942 and completed on 12 June, keeping her British name and pennant number but flying the Norwegian flag and manned by Norwegian sailors, under Lieutenant Commander Thore Horve.

Because she was never a Royal Navy ship in service, she was never given a Royal Navy badge. She did earn one British battle honour, English Channel 1942-44, which tells most of her story.

The Komet

After working up at Scapa Flow she joined the 1st Destroyer Flotilla at Portsmouth in July 1942, for the convoys and night patrols in the Channel. In October intelligence reported that the German auxiliary cruiser Komet, one of the disguised raiders that had preyed on Allied shipping all over the world, was trying to slip down the Channel from France to break out into the Atlantic again.

On the night of 13 October Glaisdale sailed with her sisters Cottesmore, Albrighton and the Norwegian Eskdale, working with a group of motor torpedo boats, to catch the raider and her escort off Le Havre and Cap de la Hague. In the fierce close range fight that followed the Komet was torpedoed by one of the MTBs and blew up, and none of her crew survived.

The Avenger and the Ettrick

In November she was lent to the escorts of the troop convoys for the North African landings. On 15 November 1942, about 120 miles north west of Gibraltar, U-155 torpedoed three ships of a homeward convoy one after another: the troopship Ettrick, the American transport Almaack and the escort carrier Avenger, which blew up and sank in minutes.

Glaisdale went in among the wreckage and picked up 312 men from the Ettrick, 188 from the Almaack and 12 from Avenger, the only men to survive from the carrier's ship's company of more than five hundred.

E-Boats and Minesweepers

She was back at Portsmouth in December, and 1943 was a year of night actions in the Channel. The two Norwegian Hunts, Glaisdale and Eskdale, usually worked as a pair; Eskdale was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Skule Storheill, one of the best known officers of the Norwegian navy in exile.

On 9 April they took the armed merchant cruiser Corfu out of the Solent after her refit and went on to Plymouth. Five nights later, on 14 April, they were defending the coastal convoy PW 232 off the Lizard when a flotilla of German E-boats came in to attack.

Eskdale was torpedoed and sunk; 25 of her men died, and 155 were saved. The records disagree over which E-boat fired the fatal torpedo, S 90 or S 112. Glaisdale was now the only Norwegian Hunt in the Channel. In June 1943 Lieutenant Dagfinn Kjeholt took command.

On the night of 11 July she sailed with her sisters Melbreak and Wensleydale to intercept a German convoy off Ushant, and in the battle that followed Glaisdale sank the minesweeper M 153 of its escort, while Melbreak was badly damaged by the German torpedo boats T 24 and T 25.

Through the rest of that year she was out on the night patrols against the E-boats and the German minesweepers off the French coast, and in one of those actions she was damaged by gunfire.

Juno Beach

In the spring of 1944 she was allocated to Force J, the Canadian assault force for Juno Beach, and took part in its rehearsal landings.

On 5 June, with the invasion delayed a day by the weather, she sailed with the destroyer Kempenfelt and her sister Bleasdale escorting convoy J 10 through the swept channel: the frigate Waveney, acting as a headquarters ship, eight landing ships full of Canadian infantry, three motor gunboats and three American Coast Guard cutters for rescue work.

On the morning of 6 June she was one of the ships giving close support to the assault on the Nan sector of Juno, with the Canadian destroyers Algonquin and Sioux, alongside Faulknor, Fury and Stevenstone and the Free French La Combattante. For the next two weeks she patrolled off the beachhead, and on the night of 10 June she was in action with E-boats laying mines off the anchorage.

On 23 June she set off an acoustic mine off the beaches. Her starboard engine was badly damaged, and she limped back to Portsmouth. She was surveyed there, and it was decided not to repair her while the war lasted.

In July 1944 she was paid off from Norwegian service, handed back to the Royal Navy and laid up in reserve at Hartlepool.

Narvik

That was not the end of her. In August 1946 Norway bought her outright, and on 23 October that year she was renamed Narvik, after the town where British and Norwegian forces had fought the Germans in 1940.

She was refitted at Chatham, and after the war her damage was finally put right at the Norwegian naval yard at Horten. She went into service with the Royal Norwegian Navy in February 1947 under the pennant F309, was reclassified as a frigate in 1956, and served until the early 1960s, when she was taken off the active list and broken up in Norway.

Several other Hunts also ended their days in Norway, among them Beaufort and Badsworth. The other prints of her class are in the Hunt Class destroyers collection.