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

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 dramatic rescue that helped preserve Norway's exiled government and royal family through the remainder of the war.

It is worth knowing what she was actually carrying away, because the King of Norway was by that point the most important thing in the country. When the Germans demanded that Haakon appoint Vidkun Quisling as prime minister and legitimise the occupation, he told his Cabinet at Nybergsund that he could not do it while he knew that neither the Storting nor the Norwegian people supported the man, and that if the government felt otherwise he would abdicate rather than sign. The government backed him. That refusal is the reason Norway was an ally rather than a client for the next five years, and it is why the Germans then spent a fortnight trying to kill him with bombers, chasing the royal party from one village to the next up the length of the country.

The scene at Molde on 29 April deserves describing. The town was on fire; something like seventy per cent of it was destroyed in the bombing, and enough of the quay was left standing for a cruiser to get alongside and no more. Glasgow took off the King, Crown Prince Olav, the Norwegian government and twenty-three tons of the national gold reserve, in the dark, from a burning port, and sailed for Tromso. Earlier that day the King and the Crown Prince had sheltered from the bombers under a birch tree on the edge of the town, and a photographer named Per Bratland took a picture of the two of them standing under it. That tree became the Kongebjorka, the King's Birch, one of the central images of the Norwegian resistance; Haakon came back and unveiled a memorial on the spot in 1955. It is one of the very few occasions on which a Royal Navy cruiser is a supporting character in another country's founding story.

Two Tragic Cases of Mistaken Identity

HMS Glasgow's war included two particularly 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.

Collisions of this kind were far commoner than the record suggests, and there is a reason. In 1940 a squadron kept station on the ship ahead by eye, with a stopwatch, a bearing and a great deal of experience; at night and in fog it did so by dead reckoning and hope, in complete darkness and radio silence, at twenty knots. Radar sets capable of showing the officer of the watch where his consorts actually were did not reach the fleet in numbers until later. Something like a third of the Royal Navy's destroyer losses in the early war years had nothing to do with the enemy at all. Duncansby Head in July 1940 was a nine-thousand-ton cruiser and a fifteen-hundred-ton destroyer trying to keep company in fog, and the physics of that meeting were never going to favour the destroyer.

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 notably 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.

The Prabhavati case deserves its context too, because it is easy to read as carelessness and it was not. On 9 December 1941 the war with Japan was thirty-six hours old, Force Z was still at sea and would be sunk the following day, and every ship in the Indian Ocean had been told that Japanese submarines were operating in it. What Glasgow saw at six thousand yards, in poor light, was a low, dark shape on the surface with two smaller objects close alongside, which is very nearly a textbook description of a surfaced submarine with her casing awash. It was in fact a small Royal Indian Navy patrol vessel towing two lighters. Recognition at sea before radar and reliable identification systems came down to a silhouette and a judgement, made in seconds by a man who would be court-martialled if he hesitated and turned out to be wrong the other way.

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, a torpedo-bomber pilot who had rather made a habit of hitting Royal Navy cruisers, having badly damaged HMS Kent with the very same tactic less than three months earlier, and who went on to become one of Italy's most highly decorated airmen of the entire war.

The torpedoes damaged her propeller shafts, though she was ultimately repaired well enough to return to secondary duties, a properly 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 on 28 December that year took part in one of her most decisive single actions, the Battle of the Bay of Biscay. Alerted by signals intelligence to a German force sent to escort the blockade runners Osorno and Alsterufer into port, she and HMS Enterprise intercepted a flotilla of eleven German destroyers and torpedo boats, sinking three of them, the Z27, T25 and T26, and damaging four more in a three-hour engagement, a particularly impressive result against a numerically superior enemy force. Only 283 of the 672 German sailors aboard the three sunken ships were pulled from the water.

What happened to those German survivors afterwards is one of the strangest episodes of the whole naval war, and it is told in the article on HMS Enterprise (D52): a small neutral Irish coaster with a crew of twelve, homeward bound from Lisbon, was signalled to the position by a circling German aircraft, spent ten hours pulling men out of the water, took 168 of them aboard and landed them in Ireland. Between the two cruisers and one Irish merchant ship, a great many more men came out of that action alive than the numbers here suggest.

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 the German coastal battery at Querqueville near Cherbourg, and during that exchange of fire, HMS Glasgow was herself struck twice and damaged badly enough to be sent home to British waters for repairs, 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 truly tragic cases of mistaken-identity friendly fire.