HMS Urania (R05): From Gold Beach to the Skies Over Japan

Laid Down at Barrow

HMS Urania was built by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow, laid down on 18 June 1942, launched on 19 May 1943 and commissioned in January 1944, a U-class destroyer that joined the 25th Destroyer Flotilla and took passage to the Mediterranean for convoy defence before being earmarked for the planned Allied landings in Normandy.

Urania was the muse of astronomy, and the Admiralty heralds knew it: her badge is a white crescent moon inside a ring of stars on a blue field, which is one of the prettier devices in a service that mostly went in for lions and anchors. The name arrived in the Royal Navy the way a good many did, off a captured ship: a French prize called the Tortue, taken in 1797 and renamed. Heston, then a village in Middlesex and now buried under the approach to Heathrow, adopted her after a Warship Week savings campaign in March 1942.

The Rehearsal at Hayling Island

Before the landings there was Exercise Fabius, and it is worth a paragraph because it is the part of D-Day nobody films. Between 2 and 6 May 1944 four of the five assault forces, O, S, J and G, went through the entire operation on the south coast of England: berthing, loading, sailing, forming up, passage, and a landing on a beach. Urania was there for all of it, and on 4 May she supported Force G putting troops ashore at Hayling Island, which is a shingle beach in Hampshire standing in for a shingle beach in Normandy.

On 18 May there was a second rehearsal of a different kind, off Brighton, in which the assembled forces were subjected to simulated attacks by E-boats, midget submarines, aircraft and minelaying craft, all at once. The point of both exercises was less to practise the landing than to find out what went wrong when several thousand vessels tried to do the same thing at the same time, and a great deal did.

Gunfire Support at Gold Beach

On 5 and 6 June 1944, Urania sailed from the assembly area as escort for Convoy G9 and provided naval gunfire support during the assault landings on Gold Beach, before escorting the cruiser HMS Arethusa back across to the beachhead on 16 June with His Majesty King George VI embarked, a solid contribution to one of the most consequential operations of the war.

The King Goes to the Beachhead

She sailed from the assembly area on 5 June as one of three escorts for convoy G9, with HMS Jervis and HMS Ulysses, and spent the morning of the 6th firing in support of the Gold beaches. Her sisters Ulster and Undaunted were doing the same along the same stretch of coast.

Ten days later she was given a rather different job. On 16 June 1944 King George VI crossed to Normandy to see the beachhead for himself, and he went in the cruiser HMS Arethusa, escorted by Urania and HMS Scourge. The King went ashore for the day, held an investiture at Montgomery's headquarters, and was back across the Channel that night; Urania and Scourge brought Arethusa home the following day.

It is easy to be cynical about royal visits and it would be a mistake here. The beachhead on 16 June was ten days old, under regular shellfire, and by no means certainly going to hold: the Americans had not yet taken Cherbourg, Caen was still German and the great storm that would wreck the Mulberry harbours was three days away. Putting the head of state onto that beach was a genuine risk taken deliberately, and the two destroyers screening the cruiser that carried him were the people responsible for it not going wrong.

July put her on a job that has almost vanished from the histories. With the Allied armies breaking out and the German garrisons of the French Atlantic ports beginning to think about leaving, Urania was patrolling the Bay of Biscay and the South-West Approaches to intercept the craft trying to evacuate them. It was small, sharp, unrecorded work against trawlers, coasters and armed launches in the dark, and it is the reason a great many German troops spent the rest of the war in Lorient and Saint-Nazaire rather than back in Germany.

Striking Sumatran Oil Refineries

After a refit, Urania sailed to Trincomalee in late 1944 to join the British Pacific Fleet, and in January 1945 took part in carrier strike operations against Japanese-held oil refineries in Sumatra, attacks aimed squarely at the fuel supplies keeping the Japanese war machine running.

Operation Lentil, and the One She Missed

The Sumatra strike has a name: Operation Lentil, part of a larger series called Outflank. On 1 January 1945 she sailed from Trincomalee with Kempenfelt, Whelp, Wager, Grenville, Undaunted, Undine and Ursa, screening the carriers Implacable, Indefatigable and Victorious and four cruisers, and on the 4th the aircraft flew off from a position north-east of Simalur and hit the refinery at Pangkalan Brandan.

She then went to Sydney, which meant she missed the operation everybody remembers. Three weeks later the same carriers flew the Meridian strikes against the far larger refineries at Palembang, the most damaging blow the British Pacific Fleet struck at Japanese oil and the costliest in aircrew. Urania was on passage. Fleets are like that: one destroyer sails for Australia on the wrong Tuesday and misses the battle her sisters spend the rest of their lives talking about.

Task Force 57 Off Japan

Urania went on to serve with Task Force 57 off the Sakishima Gunto islands in support of the Okinawa campaign, before joining Task Force 37 for operations directly off the coast of Japan through to August 1945, putting her at the very sharp end of the war's final months before returning to Sydney and being paid off in early 1946.

What followed was a long way round to a war. Sydney in February, a pennant number changed to D27 so American signalmen could read her, Manus in the Admiralty Islands on 7 March, Ulithi on the 20th, and then out on the 23rd to join the American Task Force 58 off the Sakishima islands as part of Task Force 57. The whole business of getting there had taken most of six months, and the British contribution to the Okinawa campaign, set out in HMS Howe (32), lasted about ten weeks.

Rebuilt as a Type 15 Frigate

After an extended reserve period and a spell as an accommodation vessel from 1949, Urania was converted into a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate at Harland and Wolff in Liverpool from April 1953, emerging with the new pennant number F08 and recommissioning on 2 January 1955 to serve with the 6th Frigate Squadron in the Mediterranean, including the Suez Operation and the Cyprus emergency.

Broken Up at Faslane

After further spells in reserve through the late 1950s and 1960s, HMS Urania was sold for scrap and arrived at Faslane for breaking up on 2 February 1971, bringing to a close the career of a destroyer that had fought at both Gold Beach and the very edge of the Japanese home islands.