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.

The name she was given is a good deal more crowded than most. Cadiz was not a battle so much as a habit: the Royal Navy and its predecessors went there, in force and with hostile intent, at least six times in two hundred and ten years. Drake sailed into the harbour in April 1587 and burned something like thirty-seven ships, an operation he cheerfully described himself as singeing the King of Spain's beard. Howard and Essex came back in 1596 with a hundred and twenty ships, took the city and sacked it. Sir Edward Cecil arrived in 1625, landed, marched his army into the Andalusian wine country, lost complete control of it within hours and re-embarked, at a cost to the Crown of about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Robert Blake blockaded the port in 1656 and one of his captains, Richard Stayner, caught the homebound treasure fleet outside it and took or sank all but two. Sir George Rooke failed before Cadiz in September 1702. And in 1797 Nelson was bombarding the place under Jervis. Whichever of those the Admiralty had in mind, it was spoiled for choice.

There is a small joke buried in the Battle class list, too. Rooke's 1702 attempt on Cadiz was a failure, and on the way home he redeemed it by breaking into Vigo Bay and destroying or capturing the entire Spanish silver fleet and its French escort. The Admiralty named destroyers after both. Cadiz and Vigo, the fiasco and the consolation prize, from the same voyage, sitting next to each other on the same class list a quarter of a millennium later. Nobody at Bath appears to have noticed, or possibly somebody did and said nothing.

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.

That armament list looks lopsided until you know what it was for. The Battle class was designed late in the war, after the Royal Navy had spent two years watching what aircraft did to ships in the Mediterranean and was preparing to go to the Pacific, where it expected worse. So both twin 4.5-inch mountings went forward, superimposed, and the entire after part of the ship was given over to close-range anti-aircraft weapons. Fourteen 40mm Bofors on a 2,300-ton destroyer is not a gun armament, it is a wall. She was built on the assumption that the thing most likely to kill her would arrive from above, and in the end she was right about the direction and wrong only about what would be flying.

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 alongside her sister ship HMS Sluys, 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, before entering reserve later that year, the kind of solid, dependable service that rarely generates headlines but that formed the backbone of the postwar fleet.

Ten years of Royal Navy service is not much for a ship that took nineteen months to complete, and it is worth saying what filled them. The 5th Destroyer Flotilla was a Home Fleet formation, which meant Scapa, Portland, Portsmouth, exercises in the Western Approaches and the annual round of showing the flag; the 1947 Norwegian trip with Vengeance and Sluys was exactly that sort of work, two years after the occupation ended and with a good deal of goodwill to be spent. The 1950 Spring Cruise was on an altogether different scale: the Home Fleet took three aircraft carriers and the battleship Vanguard into the Mediterranean for exercises and port visits, which was the last decade in which the Royal Navy could do such a thing without thinking about it. Then in 1953, at seven years old, she went into reserve along with every other ship of the 5th Destroyer Squadron. That was not a judgement on her. It was arithmetic. Britain had built far more destroyers than a postwar economy could man, and the ones that survived did so by being sold.

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 Alexander Stephen and Sons at Linthouse in Glasgow, funded under the United States Mutual Defense Assistance Program as part of Washington's wider Cold War strategy of underwriting allied navies across South Asia, 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.

The 1956 sale was part of a package and worth setting out. In February that year the British government announced that Pakistan would receive a cruiser and four destroyers, and the money came not from Karachi but from Washington, under the American military assistance programme: the United States was building up allied navies across South Asia and the Middle East, and Britain had the second-hand hulls. The cruiser was HMS Diadem, which became the Pakistani flagship Babur; Cadiz and her sister Gabbard went as Khaibar and Badr. The modernisation was done by Alexander Stephen and Sons at Linthouse in Govan, a firm that had been building ships since about 1750 and was better known for cargo liners and a profitable sideline in banana boats than for warships. There is a bleak symmetry in the dates. Stephen's shipbuilding was folded into Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1968, UCS collapsed in 1971, and the Linthouse yard was closed and pulled down. The yard and the ship it had refitted went in the same year, five thousand miles apart. Diadem's own second career is covered in the article on HMS Diadem (84).

She did fire her guns in anger once under the new flag, six years before the end. On 7 September 1965, during the second India-Pakistan war, Khaibar, under Captain A Hanif, sailed as part of a seven-ship task group: the cruiser Babur leading, with Khaibar, Badr, Jahangir, Alamgir, Shah Jahan and Tipu Sultan, and the submarine Ghazi waiting offshore. Their orders were to reach a position 239 degrees and one hundred and twenty miles from the Dwarka lighthouse and bombard the town around midnight, fifty rounds a ship. The object was a radar station thought to be guiding Indian bombers, and the larger hope was to provoke Indian warships out of Bombay and into Ghazi's path. About three hundred and fifty shells went ashore in four minutes and the group withdrew without a scratch. What those shells actually achieved is argued about to this day, and the argument is set out in the article on HMS Creole (R82). What is not in doubt is that a wartime British destroyer, twenty-one years old, spent four minutes shelling India, which is not an outcome anybody at Govan had in mind in 1944.

Sunk in the Battle of Karachi

PNS Khaibar met her end on the night of 4 to 5 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 three Indian Osa-class missile boats, Nipat, Nirghat and Veer, escorted by the Petya-class anti-submarine ships Kiltan and Katchall for communications and control, launched a surprise attack against Pakistani naval assets in and around the port.

At around 10:45pm, Nirghat detected Khaibar closing at roughly 20 knots and fired two SS-N-2 Styx missiles in succession. The first struck her starboard side below the aft galley, knocking out her propulsion and power and setting off an explosion in her forward boiler room; the second, minutes later, hit her aft boiler room and sealed her fate. So novel and unexpected was the threat that Khaibar's own confused final signal blamed the wrong enemy entirely: "Enemy aircraft attacked in position 020 FF 20. No 1 Boiler hit. Ship stopped." She sank with 222 of her crew, and a chaotic overnight search eventually recovered survivors from a life raft the following afternoon.

One detail of that night deserves to be set beside the design. The first missile hit at about a quarter to eleven, low on the starboard side, exploding below the aft galley in the electricians' mess deck; the ship lost her propulsion, went dark, and the forward boiler room blew. Four minutes later the second one was seen coming. Khaibar's people opened fire on it with her anti-aircraft guns. They were shooting, with the close-range weapons of 1944, at a Soviet-built cruise missile flying at them out of the dark at close to the speed of sound, and it is entirely possible that nobody aboard yet knew what it was, because her own signal to headquarters reported an air attack. It hit the after boiler room and she went down. Two hundred and twenty-two of her people were killed, and the search for the rest was badly delayed because the position in that signal was wrong. The ship had been built on the assumption that what killed her would come out of the sky, and her crew fought it exactly as they had been trained to. The assumption was right. The training was twenty-seven years out of date.

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.

She was not the only former Royal Navy destroyer in the water that night. PNS Shah Jahan, the ex-HMS Charity, was in company with the freighter Venus Challenger when the missile boat Nipat engaged them both, and was left too badly damaged to answer when headquarters ordered her to Khaibar's assistance; she was written off rather than repaired. Her account of the same few hours is in the article on HMS Charity (D29).

For India the raid was a considerable success and remains one: no Indian ship was lost, and 4 December is still observed each year as Indian Navy Day in commemoration of it. For everybody else it was a demonstration. Three small missile boats, towed most of the way to the target because their range was short, sank a destroyer and a minesweeper, wrecked another destroyer beyond repair and set the fuel farm of a major naval base on fire, in a single night, without loss.

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.

It was not the first warning, either. Four years earlier, on 21 October 1967, the Israeli destroyer Eilat had been sunk off Port Said by Styx missiles fired from Egyptian Komar-class boats sitting inside the harbour, the first ship ever sunk in war by a missile boat. Eilat was herself a former Royal Navy destroyer, the Z-class HMS Zealous, launched in 1944 and a veteran of the North Sea, the Norwegian coast and the Arctic convoys. So the two most famous early victims of the anti-ship missile were both British-built destroyers of the same wartime generation, sold on to other navies and then destroyed by a weapon that had not existed when they were laid down. Navies took the point. Within a decade every serious fleet was buying missiles of its own and building the close-in weapon systems to stop them, and the Royal Navy learned the rest of the lesson the hard way in 1982.