HMS Verulam (F29): Shelled Off Norway, Then Present at the Sinking of the Haguro

Constructed at Govan

HMS Verulam was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, laid down on 26 January 1942, launched on 22 April 1943 and commissioned on 26 November 1943, a V-class destroyer that joined the 26th Destroyer Flotilla in January 1944 and took part in Arctic convoy escort duty to Russia.

The name is one of the more scholarly in the Navy List. Verulamium was the Roman city on the Ver, third largest in Roman Britain, sacked by Boudica and rebuilt; the town that grew up on the hill beside its ruins is St Albans, and St Albans duly adopted the ship. Francis Bacon took the same name when he was made Baron Verulam, which is where the Admiralty got it.

There had been one before her, and she did not last. The first HMS Verulam, a destroyer of 1917, was mined in the Gulf of Finland on 4 September 1919 during the Baltic campaign against the Bolsheviks and sank with sixteen of her men. That undeclared war, which cost the Royal Navy far more than most people realise, is described in HMS Vanity (D28).

Bombarding the Beaches at Lion-sur-Mer

Verulam played her part in Operation Neptune, the naval component of D-Day, escorting Convoy S7 and bombarding German beach defences around Lion-sur-Mer in June 1944, before turning later that year to operations against German shipping off the coast of Norway.

Sword, Not Gold

Most of the V and U-class destroyers spent 6 June 1944 off Gold Beach with Force G. Verulam did not. Convoy S7 and Lion-sur-Mer put her at the eastern end of the whole invasion, off Sword, which was the British beach closest to the German heavy batteries at Le Havre and the one place where the Germans mounted a serious armoured counter-attack on the first day.

Lion-sur-Mer in particular was a problem. The strongpoint there held out through 6 June, which left a gap between Sword and Juno that the 21st Panzer Division came very close to exploiting, and the ships lying off it spent the day being asked for fire on positions a few hundred yards from their own troops. It is the sort of shooting that does not appear in the honours list and is remembered vividly by the men who called for it.

Hit Twenty-Two Times Off Norway

During Operation Counterblast in November 1944, Verulam was struck twenty-two times by German 37mm and 20mm shellfire, a ferocious close-range engagement that killed two of her crew and wounded five more.

Seven Ships in a Night

Being struck twenty-two times by 37mm and 20mm fire is an extraordinary sentence and it needs the rest of the story. Operation Counterblast was a deliberate sweep against German coastal traffic off south-west Norway, and the force that sailed from Scapa Flow late on 11 November 1944 was heavy: the cruiser Kent, the cruiser Bellona, and the destroyers Myngs, Zambesi, Verulam and the Canadian Algonquin.

They found convoy KS-357 near the Lister Fjord, south-east of Egersund: four merchant ships and six escorts, hugging a coast studded with batteries, in the dark. What happened next is one of the most complete destructions of a convoy in the whole war. Two of the four merchantmen went down, the Greif and the ex-Belgian Cornouaille. Five of the six escorts went down with them: the minesweepers M 416 and M 427 and the submarine chasers UJ 1221, UJ 1223 and UJ 1713. Seven ships out of ten, in a single night action, in a fjord.

The twenty-two hits are the price of that. An action fought at that range against escorts armed with quick-firing 37mm and 20mm cannon is not a gunnery duel at sea; it is closer to street fighting. Those weapons will not sink a destroyer, but they will scour her upper deck, and the two men killed and five wounded aboard Verulam were almost certainly at exposed positions doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Aircraft from HMS Pursuer destroyed a German radar station during the same operation.

The Battle of the Malacca Strait

After repairs, Verulam transferred to the East Indies Fleet in April 1945, taking part in Operation Sunfish against Japanese targets before achieving a genuine distinction at the Battle of the Malacca Strait, where she was among the destroyers that sank the Japanese heavy cruiser Haguro on 16 May 1945.

She was one of five destroyers in the crescent that went in on the Haguro, and the flotilla's work that night is told from two other decks in HMS Venus (F50) and HMS Vigilant. Verulam was one of the three ships whose torpedoes struck first. It is worth registering what she had done in eleven months: the Arctic, the Normandy beaches, a night action in a Norwegian fjord that cost her two dead, and then the last major surface action the Royal Navy ever fought, on the other side of the world.

Testing Sonar for the Admiralty

Between 1951 and 1952, Verulam was converted into a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate at Portsmouth, receiving the new pennant number F29, and took part in Queen Elizabeth II's 1953 Coronation Fleet Review, before spending 1958 to 1961 as an Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment trials ship helping to develop new sonar technology, a quietly important scientific role for a ship with such an eventful combat record.

The Sonar She Proved

Helping to develop new sonar technology is doing a disservice to what is probably her most lasting contribution. From 1958 she worked for the Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment as the trials ship for Sonar 2001.

The 2001 was not a destroyer set. It was the very large bow sonar designed for Britain's new nuclear submarines, and it had to work at ranges and depths that nothing in the fleet had ever attempted: a nuclear boat can go anywhere, stay indefinitely and travel fast, and none of that is any use if she cannot hear. Every set of that kind has to be proved at sea against real water, real temperature layers and real targets, over years, before anybody will put it into a submarine that costs more than a squadron of frigates.

That is what Verulam did for three years, and Sonar 2001 went into the Valiant, Churchill, Swiftsure and Resolution classes and stayed in service for decades. A destroyer laid down on the Clyde in January 1942 spent her last useful years proving the ears of the ships that replaced everything she had ever been.

Broken Up at Newport

HMS Verulam was decommissioned on 21 December 1970 and broken up for scrap by John Cashmore Ltd, arriving at Newport, Wales on 23 October 1972, bringing to a close a career that spanned D-Day, a fierce action off Norway, and the last great cruiser battle of the Pacific War.