HMS Alamein (D17): The Destroyer That Caught Fire in Her Own Dockyard

Named for a Victory, Launched for a Peace

HMS Alamein carried the name of one of the Second World War's genuine turning points, the desert battle that broke the Axis grip on North Africa in 1942, but by the time she actually took to the water the war she was named after had been over for days. Built by R. and W. Hawthorn, Leslie and Company on the Tyne, she was laid down on 1 March 1944 and launched on 12 May 1945, and would not be commissioned for almost another two years, finally entering service on 20 March 1947.

She was a solidly built Battle-class fleet destroyer, carrying five 4.5-inch guns, eight Bofors anti-aircraft guns, ten torpedo tubes and two Squid anti-submarine mortars, capable of a genuinely brisk 35.75 knots, more than enough ship for the peacetime Royal Navy she was about to join.

A Solid Postwar Working Life

Alamein joined the 4th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet in 1946, ahead of her formal commissioning, and settled into the sort of varied service that filled the careers of most postwar destroyers: escort duties in 1948, a 1950 Mediterranean cruise alongside the carrier HMS Victorious and the battleship HMS Vanguard, and in 1956 active participation in the Suez Crisis, as Britain, France and Israel moved against Egypt over control of the canal, a genuinely significant operational deployment for a ship that had otherwise settled into routine fleet life.

A Fire of Her Own Making

Alamein's most memorable individual incident had nothing to do with an enemy at all. On 5 November 1958, while she was in Chatham Dockyard, faulty radio wiring sparked a fire aboard the ship serious enough to require multiple fire brigades to bring under control. It is an oddly domestic sort of drama for a warship's record, a reminder that a destroyer's greatest hazard was not always the sea or the enemy, but occasionally just its own electrics.

A Modest Finish

Alamein was decommissioned in 1959, only a little over a decade after finally entering service, and was broken up at Blyth in Northumberland in 1964. Hers was not a career built around single dramatic engagements, but rather the steady, useful sort of service that made up most of the postwar destroyer fleet's real working life, punctuated by one memorably inconvenient night at Chatham.