HMS Caesar (R07): From Arctic Convoys to Leading a Cold War Destroyer Squadron

Built as Ranger, Renamed Caesar

HMS Caesar was built by John Brown and Company on the Clyde, her keel laid on 6 April 1943 under the name Ranger, before being renamed Caesar and launched on 14 February 1944, commissioning that October.

She commissioned on 5 October 1944 under Lieutenant Dudley Davenport, who had commanded her since May during her fitting-out and work-up. One of her first jobs, on 12 October, was escorting the veteran aircraft carrier HMS Furious away from Scapa Flow; judged no longer fit for front-line operations, Furious was on her way to a new life as an accommodation ship and, later, a target for shock trials, an inglorious next chapter for a carrier that had seen action since the First World War. Captain Godfrey Noel Brewer, DSO, took over as Caesar's commanding officer two days later, on 14 October, and remained in the role for virtually the whole of her active war service.

She was a Ca sub-class C-class destroyer built specifically as a flotilla leader, displacing 1,730 tons standard and up to 2,575 tons at deep load, driven by two geared steam turbines producing 40,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 36 knots.

Fittingly for a ship named after Julius Caesar, she carried the motto Veni, vidi, vici ("I came, I saw, I conquered") on a badge showing Caesar's own head in gold on a blue field, and gave her name to the wider group of sister ships, which contemporaries knew simply as the Caesar class.

She carried four 4.5-inch dual-purpose guns, a twin 40mm Bofors mount, six 20mm Oerlikon guns, four 21-inch torpedo tubes and substantial depth charge equipment, a well-armed and fast destroyer built at the very end of the war.

Arctic Convoys and a Voyage East

HMS Caesar was allocated to the 6th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet on commissioning, escorting Arctic convoys and capital ships through the final, still dangerous months of the war in Europe, work that continued right up until Germany's surrender despite the diminishing threat from a Kriegsmarine by then reduced to a fraction of its earlier strength.

In November 1944 she took part in Operations Counterblast and Steak, a joint strike against German shipping off south-west Norway. A first attempt was abandoned to bad weather on 8 November, but three days later a cruiser-and-destroyer force sank two merchant ships and five escorts from the German convoy KS-357 off Lister Fjord; HMS Caesar's own part was in the supporting Operation Steak, screening the escort carrier HMS Pursuer while her aircraft provided fighter cover and knocked out a German radar station.

From late November 1944 she sailed as part of the covering force for convoys JW 62 and RA 62 between Britain and northern Russia, built around the escort carriers HMS Campania and HMS Nairana and shadowing the convoys' own close escort of sloops, frigates and corvettes rather than sailing directly alongside the merchant ships. It was a reminder of how dangerous these waters still were: on the return leg, her fellow escort HMS Cassandra had her entire bow blown off by a torpedo from the German submarine U-365 on 11 December, and had to be towed stern-first, first by a British ship and then by a Soviet tug, all the way into the Kola Inlet.

The following June, with the war in Europe won, she had a rather more ceremonial outing: on 6 June 1945 she was one of four destroyers escorting the cruiser HMS Jamaica out of Portsmouth carrying King George VI and Queen Elizabeth on their visit to the newly liberated Channel Islands, returning the royal party safely the following evening.

With the war in Europe over, HMS Caesar transferred to the Far East in June 1945, joining the East Indies Fleet at Trincomalee that August, arriving just as the war against Japan itself was drawing to its close.

By the end of that month she was off Fremantle in Western Australia, where, in a neat reversal of roles, she and her sister ship HMS Cavendish spent a day acting as targets for practice attacks by the submarines HMS Taurus and HMS Tapir, rather than hunting anything themselves.

What came next was not a peacetime posting at all, and the article's decade of quieter service really began a good deal later than the war did. In the autumn of 1945 Caesar went to Java. She covered the passage of a military convoy carrying the 5th Indian Division to Surabaya, and from 1 November she was lying off the town with her sisters Carron and HMS Cavalier, first taking internees out of the place and then bombarding the coast in support of the army ashore.

What was going on there is one of the least comfortable episodes of the months after the war. Japan surrendered in August 1945; Indonesian nationalists declared independence two days later; and the troops sent in to disarm the Japanese garrisons and release the internees were British and Indian, arriving in a country with no intention whatever of going back to being Dutch. The British commander at Surabaya, Brigadier Mallaby, was killed on 30 October when an agreement he had made with the Republican governor collapsed over a leaflet drop demanding that Indonesian units hand in their weapons. On 10 November two brigades of the 5th Indian Division under Major General Mansergh went into the city behind a naval and air bombardment, the cruisers opening fire from off the coast at six in the morning. The fighting went on for three weeks.

Indonesia commemorates 10 November as Heroes' Day and Surabaya is known there as the City of Heroes, which gives some idea of how differently the two sides remember it. So a destroyer built on the Clyde to escort convoys to Murmansk spent the winter after the war supporting an infantry assault on an Indonesian city, three months after the shooting was supposed to have stopped, on behalf of a colonial arrangement that did not survive the decade. And eighteen years later she was back in the same part of the world, leading a destroyer squadron through the years when Britain and Indonesia were in undeclared confrontation all over again.

She then settled into a decade of quieter peacetime and reserve service in home and Far Eastern waters before, in the late 1950s, the Admiralty judged her wartime-built hull worth a full rebuild for another decade of front-line life.

A Thorough Cold War Rebuild

HMS Caesar underwent a substantial modernisation at Rosyth between 1957 and 1960, receiving a new bridge, a Mark 6M gunnery fire control system and Squid anti-submarine mortars, a comprehensive rebuild that brought a wartime-designed hull up to a standard fit for continued Cold War service.

It is worth setting out what a rebuild of that kind actually involved, because it was not a refit with new paint. To make room for the two triple-barrelled Squid mortars she had to give up one of her 4.5-inch guns and one of her two banks of torpedo tubes. Her original Mk I Type K gunnery director, which was obsolete before she was launched, came out in favour of the Mk 6M then being fitted in new frigates, and the guns she kept were given remote power control so that the director could lay them directly. She went into Rosyth in 1957 as a wartime fleet destroyer built to fight surface ships with guns and torpedoes, and came out in 1960 as an anti-submarine escort that happened to have some guns left over.

The reason is money, as it usually is. The Royal Navy came out of the war with a very large number of modern destroyer hulls and no realistic prospect of replacing them, while the threat it now had to plan against was a Soviet submarine force of a size nobody had faced before. Rebuilding was the only affordable answer. Dozens of wartime destroyers were cut down into Type 15 and Type 16 frigates, and the eight Ca-class ships, of which Caesar was one, got their own programme, HMS Carron leading the way out of Chatham in 1955. It is why a ship laid down in April 1943 was still leading a destroyer squadron in the Far East twenty years later, and it is a rather better piece of value for public money than anything the Ministry of Defence has managed since.

It was not a quick programme, though, and the timetable is worth having alongside the praise. The decision that the Ca-class ships lying in reserve should be modernised was taken in January 1951. Carron was the first out, from Chatham, in 1955. Caesar did not go into Rosyth until 1957 and did not recommission until September 1960, which is nine and a half years from the decision to the ship. She then had four and a half years at sea before she paid off in June 1965, and she went to the breakers eighteen months after that.

Set out end to end, her life reads oddly. Laid down in April 1943 and at sea within eighteen months. Eight months of war. A winter off Java. Reserve from 1946 to 1957, eleven years of it. Three years being rebuilt. Under five years in commission afterwards. Of the twenty-three years between her keel going down and her arrival at Blyth, she spent something like six of them at sea. That is not a criticism of the rebuild, which was the only affordable answer available. It is a fair description of what happened to the enormous destroyer force Britain finished the war with, and of how much of a warship's existence is spent waiting for somebody to decide what to do with her.

She recommissioned in September 1960 as leader of the 8th Destroyer Squadron, a role of genuine responsibility that reflected the confidence placed in her rebuilt capabilities, commanding a squadron of destroyers through the early 1960s, with most of her subsequent service spent in the Far East, a long way from the Arctic waters of her first commission.

A Quiet Retirement

HMS Caesar was paid off in June 1965 and de-equipped at Chatham, her long service, spanning the final desperate months of the Second World War and a full Cold War modernisation, finally at an end.

She was sold to Hughes Bolckow on 13 December 1966 and scrapped at Blyth in Northumberland, arriving there on 6 January 1967, closing out the career of a destroyer that had begun life under one name, fought under another, and ended her days leading a squadron in a navy transformed almost beyond recognition from the one she had originally joined.