HMS Glasgow (C21): She Evacuated a King, Then Sank the Wrong Ship Twice

HMS Glasgow (C21)

Built for Speed

HMS Glasgow was laid down on 16 April 1935 and launched on 20 June 1936 by Lucy Baldwin, wife of the then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, a Town-class light cruiser displacing 9,100 tons standard, rising to 11,350 tons at full load. Her Admiralty boilers produced 75,000 shaft horsepower, and though designed for 32 knots, she exceeded that comfortably, reaching 33 knots on trials. She carried twelve 6-inch guns in quadruple turrets, along with 4-inch anti-aircraft guns and torpedo tubes, and commissioned on 9 September 1937, joining the 2nd Cruiser Squadron of the Home Fleet. In one of her earliest notable duties, she escorted the royal liners carrying King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to North America in May and June 1939, a prestigious peacetime assignment just months before war broke out.

Rescuing a King

HMS Glasgow patrolled Scandinavian waters from September 1939, and on 9 October that year, operating with Humber Force alongside the cruisers HMS Southampton and HMS Edinburgh, she endured a heavy Luftwaffe air attack that saw around 120 bombs dropped, remarkably without a single hit landing on any of the three ships.

HMS Glasgow took part in the Norwegian Campaign in April 1940, supporting troop landings near Harstad, Namsos and Åndalsnes. Her most historically significant moment came on 29 April, when she evacuated King Haakon VII and Crown Prince Olav of Norway, along with government officials and a portion of Norway's gold reserves, from the country as German forces overran it, a genuinely dramatic rescue that helped preserve Norway's exiled government and royal family through the remainder of the war.

Two Tragic Cases of Mistaken Identity

HMS Glasgow's war included two genuinely tragic incidents of mistaken identity. On 16 July 1940, she accidentally rammed and sank the destroyer HMS Imogen in thick fog off Duncansby Head; most of the destroyer's crew were rescued, but 19 of Imogen's men were lost, along with two of HMS Glasgow's own crew, a devastating accident with no enemy involvement at all. On 9 December 1941, while en route to Karachi, HMS Glasgow sank the Royal Indian Navy patrol vessel HMIS Prabhavati with 6-inch shellfire at 6,000 yards, having mistaken the vessel, then alongside two lighters she was towing, for a surfaced Japanese submarine, a genuinely grim example of the confusion and danger inherent in wartime naval identification, especially in the tense early weeks after Japan's entry into the war.

Torpedoed at Suda Bay

HMS Glasgow supported the Taranto raid operations in the Mediterranean in November 1940, and on 3 December that year, while anchored at Suda Bay in Crete, was struck by two torpedoes fired by an Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bomber flown by Carlo Emanuele Buscaglia. The torpedoes damaged her propeller shafts, though she was ultimately repaired well enough to return to secondary duties, a genuinely significant piece of damage to absorb and still remain a useful fighting ship.

The Battle of the Bay of Biscay

HMS Glasgow escorted Arctic convoys in January and February 1943, and in December that year took part in one of her most decisive single actions, the Battle of the Bay of Biscay, fighting alongside HMS Enterprise in a three-hour engagement against eleven German destroyers and torpedo boats, sinking three of them and damaging four more, a genuinely impressive result against a numerically superior enemy force.

Supporting Omaha Beach

HMS Glasgow took part in Operation Neptune, the naval component of the D-Day landings, on 6 June 1944, assigned to Gunfire Bombardment Support Force C supporting the American landings at Omaha Beach, alongside the American battleships USS Texas and USS Arkansas, French cruisers and a screen of destroyers. On 25 and 26 June, she bombarded German positions near Cherbourg, and during that exchange of fire, HMS Glasgow was herself hit and damaged, a reminder that shore bombardment duty, however essential to the invasion's success, carried genuine risk from German coastal artillery.

A Postwar Career and the End

Following her D-Day damage, HMS Glasgow underwent extensive modernisation from July 1944, her aft 6-inch turret removed to make room for additional anti-aircraft guns and new radar, completed by 29 June 1945. She sailed for the East Indies as acting flagship on 22 August 1945, relieving HMS Phoebe as flagship of the 5th Cruiser Squadron at Colombo that October.

HMS Glasgow returned to Portsmouth and reserve status after two further years in the Indian Ocean, before recommissioning in September 1948 to serve as flagship at Bermuda's Royal Naval Dockyard, and later as flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet in 1952 under Admiral Mountbatten. She took part in the Coronation Fleet Review of 1953 and escorted the royal yacht Britannia to Malta in May 1954, before being paid off at Portsmouth in November 1956, rendered surplus to requirements in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis. She was placed on the disposal list in March 1958, sold to BISCO for demolition, and departed Portsmouth on 4 July that year, arriving under tow at Hughes Bolckow's yard in Blyth on 8 July to be broken up, closing out the career of a cruiser whose service had ranged from rescuing a king to two genuinely tragic cases of mistaken-identity friendly fire.