HMS Cadiz (D79): From the Home Fleet to Sunk by Missiles in the Battle of Karachi

A Postwar Battle-Class Destroyer

HMS Cadiz was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, launched on 16 September 1944 and commissioned on 12 April 1946, a Battle-class destroyer displacing 2,315 tons standard and up to 3,290 tons at full load. She was heavily armed for her size, carrying two dual 4.5-inch gun mounts, no fewer than fourteen 40mm Bofors guns, ten 21-inch torpedo tubes and a Squid anti-submarine mortar, joining the 5th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet on commissioning.

A Standard Peacetime Career

HMS Cadiz's Royal Navy service followed the steady, unremarkable pattern typical of a postwar destroyer: escorting HMS Vengeance to Norway in 1947, taking part in a Mediterranean Spring Cruise in 1950, and participating in the Coronation Review at Spithead in 1953 marking Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, the kind of solid, dependable service that rarely generates headlines but that formed the backbone of the postwar fleet.

A New Flag, and a New Name

On 29 February 1956, the Admiralty announced the sale of HMS Cadiz to the Pakistan Navy, and following modernisation work by Alex Stephens and Sons in Glasgow, she was formally handed over on 1 February 1957 and commissioned as PNS Khaibar, becoming one of the more capable destroyers in a young navy still building up its strength in the years following Pakistan's independence.

Sunk in the Battle of Karachi

PNS Khaibar met her end on 4 December 1971, during Operation Trident, India's daring fast-attack naval strike against the Pakistani naval headquarters at Karachi during the Indo-Pakistani War. A force of Indian Vidyut-class missile boats, Nipat, Nirghat and Veer, escorted by two Arnala-class corvettes, launched a surprise attack against Pakistani naval assets in and around the port. The missile boat Nirghat fired two SS-N-2 Styx missiles at the largest available target, identified as Khaibar some 45 miles to the northwest, and both missiles struck the former HMS Cadiz, sinking her with most of her crew still aboard, a devastating loss of life in a single, sudden strike. The same operation also sank the Pakistani minesweeper Muhafiz and left the destroyer Shah Jahan so badly damaged she was later scrapped, before the attacking missile boats went on to hit fuel storage tanks at Karachi Harbour, setting them ablaze and compounding the damage inflicted on Pakistan's naval infrastructure in what proved to be one of the most consequential single naval actions of the war.

A Sobering Legacy

The loss of PNS Khaibar, the former HMS Cadiz, stands as a stark illustration of how quickly naval warfare had changed since the ship's own construction in the final year of the Second World War: a destroyer built to fight gun and torpedo actions against conventional surface warships was instead destroyed in seconds by guided missiles fired from a far smaller and less expensive vessel, a lesson in the transformative power of anti-ship missile technology that navies around the world, including the Royal Navy that had originally built her, studied closely in the years that followed.