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 another three years, finally entering service on 21 May 1948.

The name was brand new, for the obvious reason that until 1942 the place had meant nothing to anyone outside Egypt. El Alamein was a railway halt on the coast road roughly sixty miles west of Alexandria, chosen as a defensive line because the Qattara Depression closes in behind it and leaves a gap only about forty miles wide, which is to say a stretch of desert narrow enough that an army could not simply be driven round. The second battle fought there began on 23 October 1942 and ended the Axis advance on Egypt for good. Churchill's verdict on it, that it was not the end nor even the beginning of the end but perhaps the end of the beginning, has been quoted so often since that it is easy to forget he was talking about the fighting this ship was named for.

Hebburn on the south bank of the Tyne was a serious destroyer yard. Hawthorn Leslie turned out an aircraft carrier, three cruisers, two fast minelayers and sixteen destroyers and flotilla leaders during the Second World War alone, and among the earlier ones was HMS Kelly, Mountbatten's ship, laid down there in 1937 as yard job number 615. Kelly lived 639 days between commissioning and being bombed off Crete, and spent 303 of them back at Hebburn under repair, which says something about both the ship's luck and the yard's patience. Alamein was built by the same hands a few slipways and a few years along.

The three years she then spent tied up are the real story of her early life. She went down the ways on 12 May 1945, four days after the German surrender, on the same day that HMS Aisne was launched from Vickers-Armstrongs a short way up the same river. Neither ship was wanted in any hurry. The Navy of 1945 had more hulls in the water than it had money, men or reason to finish them quickly, and Alamein sat at a fitting-out berth while the Admiralty worked out how much fleet the country could still afford. When she was finally commissioned in the spring of 1948 there was still no rush: she did not sail on her first proper deployment, out of Rosyth for the Western Isles and northern waters, until that August.

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 notably brisk 35.75 knots, more than enough ship for the peacetime Royal Navy she was about to join.

She belonged to the second batch, the Later or 1943 Battles, ordered in two groups during 1943 and drawn up while the first ships of the class were still on the stocks. The obvious difference is that fifth gun. The 1942 ships carried four 4.5-inch in two twin turrets forward and nothing much aft, an arrangement that made sense for a Pacific war fought against aircraft and looked distinctly odd to anyone who might have to shoot at a ship. The Later Battles gained a single 4.5-inch mounting on a bandstand aft, which is why Alamein has an odd number of guns and her elder sisters do not. The two Squid mortars were a genuinely modern touch, throwing a pattern of bombs ahead of the ship rather than rolling charges off the stern and hoping.

A Solid Postwar Working Life

Alamein joined the 4th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet on commissioning in May 1948, 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 remarkably significant operational deployment for a ship that had otherwise settled into routine fleet life.

What followed was less a career than a series of postings interrupted by long silences. She left the 4th Destroyer Flotilla in March 1950 and was placed in reserve that May, came back for a Mediterranean detachment with the 4th Destroyer Squadron across 1951 and 1952, and was still on the squadron's books in 1956, when it was an unusually tidy formation: Agincourt as leader, with Aisne, Barrosa, Corunna and Alamein, five Later Battles kept together as a matched set. It is worth adding that the fire support plan for the Suez landings banned heavy naval guns outright, which left the close work to destroyers of exactly this kind. She was still in commission the following May for the Home Fleet Review in the Cromarty Firth, and left the squadron later that year.

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.

The detail is worth having. The fire was traced to faulty wiring on radio equipment in the wardroom, which is about the least warlike compartment on the ship, and it spread from there into the Ops Room. Putting it out took Alamein's own fire party, the fire party of HMS Corunna lying alongside her, and the Chatham and Gillingham fire brigades on top of that. The date, for anyone keeping score, was 5 November, which is a coincidence no novelist would have the nerve to invent.

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

There is a reason her sisters lasted and she did not. In 1955 the Admiralty settled on converting four of the Later Battles into fast air detection escorts, radar pickets to stand out ahead of a carrier group and see what was coming: Agincourt, Aisne, Barrosa and Corunna were the four chosen, and the work began in 1959. They came out of it with a lattice foremast carrying the four-ton Type 965 double bedstead aerial, a Sea Cat launcher aft, and enough new equipment to keep them useful into the following decade and beyond. Alamein was not on the list. She was decommissioned in the same year the conversions started, and the ships she had spent 1956 keeping station with went on without her.

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.

The class as a whole did rather better than she did, and it scattered in a surprising number of directions. Twenty-six of the thirty-two Battles ordered were finished. Two of them were built on the far side of the world: HMAS Anzac at Williamstown, completed in 1950, and HMAS Tobruk at Cockatoo Island in Sydney, completed the year after. Tobruk went into reserve in 1960 after a friendly-fire accident; Anzac served on as a training ship, losing B turret to a deckhouse in 1966, and both were broken up in 1975.

Two more went east. Cadiz and Gabbard were sold to Pakistan in 1957 and became Khaibar and Badr, and Khaibar was sunk off Karachi by Indian missile boats in December 1971, an end nobody at Hebburn or Swan Hunter had drawn her for; that night is set out in HMS Cadiz (D79). Sluys spent thirteen years lying in the Devonport reserve before Iran bought her in 1966 and Vosper Thornycroft spent three years rebuilding her at Southampton as Artemiz. And four, including HMS Corunna (D97), became radar pickets.

That is a considerable spread of destinies for a class designed in 1942 to shoot down Japanese aircraft in the Pacific and finished too late to shoot at anything. They were, by common consent, the most powerful destroyers Britain built during the war, and the reward for it was that most of them spent the years immediately afterwards tied up, because there was no money and no obvious enemy, before being brought back in the 1950s and worked hard for a decade.

Alamein is the one who missed both halves of that. Three years fitting out for a war that had ended, eleven years on the list with a long spell in reserve in the middle, one Mediterranean crisis, one fire in her own dockyard, and then the breakers at Blyth while the four ships she had kept station with in 1956 went off to be rebuilt and carry on for another decade. Nothing went wrong with her. She simply arrived at the wrong end of a war and was not chosen at the one moment when being chosen mattered.