HMS Carysfort: Delayed by German Bombs, Then Into the Chaos of the Dutch East Indies

A Keel Laid Late, Because of the Enemy

HMS Carysfort was ordered on 24 March 1942 from J. Samuel White and Company of Cowes, Isle of Wight, under the name HMS Pique, before being renamed to fall in with her seven sister ships, all of whose names began with the letters "Ca".

Just six weeks after the order was placed, on the night of 4/5 May 1942, the Luftwaffe delivered the worst air raid Cowes suffered in the entire war, part of the retaliatory "Baedeker" campaign: more than 200 tonnes of bombs killed eleven of J. Samuel White's own workers and forced the demolition and rebuilding of some 70,000 square feet of the yard's floor space, destroying eight months' worth of finished joinery meant for six other destroyers in the process. Carysfort's own keel was not laid until 12 May 1943, in a yard still putting itself back together, almost exactly a year to the week after the raid that had so nearly stopped her ever being built at all, a small but telling reminder that even a shipyard building the next generation of Royal Navy destroyers was not immune to enemy air attack.

She was launched on 25 July 1944 and commissioned on 20 February 1945, a C-class destroyer armed with four 4.5-inch guns, Bofors and Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns, ten 21-inch torpedo tubes and substantial depth charge equipment, entering service in the closing months of the war.

Three Strikes Off Norway in the War's Final Weeks

HMS Carysfort's earliest operational service came in the last days of March 1945, when she screened the fleet during Operations Muscular and Prefix, two Fleet Air Arm strikes against German-controlled shipping off the Norwegian coast, part of the Home Fleet's steady effort to strangle the last German-held ports as the war in Europe entered its final weeks.

On 4 May 1945, the same day Field Marshal Montgomery accepted the German surrender in North-West Europe at Lüneburg Heath, Carysfort screened the escort carriers and cruisers of a force that struck the U-boat base at Kilbotn, near Harstad, in what became known as Operation Judgement, the last Fleet Air Arm air raid of the war in Europe. In a seven-minute attack, forty-four aircraft sank the German depot ship Black Watch and the flak ship Senja, along with the submarine U-711, which had been moored alongside.

Two days later she screened the cruiser HMS Norfolk through the Skagerrak into a newly liberated Copenhagen as part of Operation Cleaver, sailing alongside the destroyers Zambesi, Obedient, Opportune and Orwell, before closing out her war escorting the battlecruiser HMS Renown from Rosyth to Portsmouth in the second week of May.

Caught in the Turmoil of the Dutch East Indies

HMS Carysfort was deployed to the East Indies between 1945 and 1946, a period that placed her in the middle of the chaotic and often violent aftermath of Japan's surrender, as Indonesian nationalist forces fought to prevent the return of Dutch colonial rule, a conflict that drew in British and Commonwealth forces attempting to manage the transition and secure the release of Allied prisoners of war and internees held by the Japanese.

Crewman George Taylor, who joined the ship at the very end of December 1945, put it plainly in his own account of the commission: "a fair amount of this commission for Carysfort passed with us supporting the Dutch Government against the Indonesians who were actively fighting for their independence." That support was not always glamorous. One operation saw her steam some fifty miles up a Sumatran river to Palembang, where an oil refinery was under siege by rebel forces, a tense mission that ended, rather more prosaically than the situation suggested, with 400 live chickens being brought aboard.

On the passage home she embarked the Commander-in-Chief, East Indies Fleet, for a gunnery exercise using a wooden river gunboat as the target, and her lookouts spotted and destroyed a floating mine by rifle fire before she finally sailed into Portsmouth with her pennant flying to pay off, leaving behind a 6th Flotilla that also included her sisters Cavalier, Carron, Caesar and Petard.

It was exactly the kind of murky, politically fraught postwar operation that many Royal Navy ships found themselves drawn into once the formal fighting against Japan and Germany had ended.

A Decade in Reserve, Then Modernised for the Cold War

Carysfort paid off into reserve at the end of May 1946 and stayed there for the best part of a decade, one of dozens of wartime destroyers laid up as the Royal Navy shrank onto a peacetime footing. In January 1951 she was selected, with the rest of her "Ca" group sisters, for a full anti-submarine modernisation, spending nearly three years at Yarrow's Scotstoun yard on the Clyde before recommissioning in December 1956 with her armament thinned in favour of newer sonar and Squid mortars better suited to hunting Soviet submarines than fighting the last war.

Showing the Flag Twice Over with the 8th Destroyer Squadron

She recommissioned into the 6th Destroyer Squadron in December 1956, before paying off and recommissioning again for the Hong Kong-based 8th Destroyer Squadron on 8 September 1959. What followed was closer to a world cruise than a war footing: Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Colombo and the remote Maldivian atoll of Gan before the New Year, then Singapore, Trincomalee, Cairns, Brisbane, Darwin, Auckland, Sydney, Bangkok, Penang and Hong Kong through 1960, with a fleet review under Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten at Singapore among the highlights. Off Auckland the submarine HMS Anchorite struck an uncharted rock during exercises; during a weekend visit to nearby Tauranga, some 6,000 people crammed aboard for an open day, "sardines" by comparison, as one crewman put it.

A second Far East commission with the 8th Destroyer Squadron followed from May 1961, again out of Singapore, taking her to Thursday Island, Adelaide, Sydney and Hong Kong before a rather more unusual set of ports for a British destroyer: Inchon and Chinhae in South Korea, then Yokohama and Okinawa, before she sailed home via the Gulf and Suez to pay off in late 1962.

Confrontation, a Collision, and Crisis in the Seychelles

Carysfort recommissioned for general service at Gibraltar on 14 May 1964 under Commander G.M.K. Brewer, joining the 27th Escort Squadron for a commission split between the Mediterranean and operations east of Suez out of Malta. It was during this commission that she deployed to the Far East in support of British and Commonwealth forces during the Indonesian Confrontation with Malaysia, operating in company with the Australian carrier HMAS Melbourne, and, during an anti-submarine exercise elsewhere in the commission, collided with a French submarine, damage serious enough to send her back to Devonport for the best part of a month in dry dock.

In the late summer of 1966, while running the Beira Patrol in the Mozambique Channel, the Royal Navy's blockade against oil reaching Ian Smith's breakaway Rhodesia, she was diverted to the Seychelles, where a workers' strike had tipped into civil unrest, and landed an armed party to help restore order; Coxswain "Blood" Reid was later commended for his part in the operation. The deployment came at a price: around 35 of her crew went down with acute enteritis, a salmonella infection that put men in Victoria's government hospital and required one sailor to undergo emergency abdominal surgery in Mombasa, while the ship herself was fumigated alongside HMS Sheba in Aden. Carysfort returned to Plymouth via Malta and Gibraltar and paid off in October 1966, having proved that not every hazard a destroyer's crew faced came from an enemy at all.

First on the Scene at the Torrey Canyon, Then a Final Voyage Round the World

Carysfort's final commission began at Devonport in the second half of 1966 under Commander Martin Sands, working up at Portland into the new year. That work-up was cut short in March 1967 by the wreck of the supertanker Torrey Canyon off the Cornish coast, one of the worst oil spills Britain had ever seen; Carysfort was the first Royal Navy ship on the scene and remained on station through the extraordinary operation in which aircraft of the Fleet Air Arm's 800 Naval Air Squadron and the RAF bombed the stricken tanker in an attempt to burn off the escaping oil.

It is hard now to convey how strange that operation was. Torrey Canyon had gone onto the Seven Stones reef on 18 March with about 120,000 tons of Kuwaiti crude in her, and having tried and failed to refloat her, the government decided the answer was to set fire to the cargo. On 28 March the Fleet Air Arm's Buccaneers put forty-two 1,000lb bombs into her. Over three days the total came to something like 161,000 pounds of explosives, sixteen rockets, 3,200 gallons of napalm and 9,800 gallons of kerosene, dropped on a stationary target the size of three football pitches. A good number missed. The wreck burned, went out with the tide, was set alight again, and declined to sink for the better part of a week.

It remains the largest oil spill in British history, and the clean-up did as much harm as the oil. Around ten thousand tons of solvent-based dispersant were poured onto the beaches and the slicks, chemicals far more toxic than anything permitted now and used in concentrations nobody would sanction today, and a good deal of what died on the Cornish shore that spring was killed by the cure rather than the crude. Almost every piece of oil spill law and practice in the world since, from tanker construction rules to the way a response is organised, traces back to those weeks. Carysfort was the first Royal Navy ship there, and she sat through the lot of it.

What followed was among the most far-ranging deployments of her career: Gibraltar, Kiel Week in Germany and Stavanger in Norway, then east via Aden, Mombasa, Freetown and Simonstown to a second stint on the Beira Patrol, a call at Mauritius for the island's independence celebrations on 12 March 1968, and on through Singapore and Subic Bay in the Philippines to the Pacific, where she detached independently to Tonga for a treaty-signing ceremony before continuing on to Fiji, New Zealand, Sydney, Townsville, Darwin, and the New Hebrides and New Caledonia.

She decommissioned in February 1969, was sold to BISCO for scrap on 20 October 1970, and was broken up by J. Cashmore, arriving at the Newport breakers' yard on 15 November that year, closing out a career that had begun in a shipyard still rebuilding after German bombs and gone on to touch two entirely separate crises in Indonesian history, a Cold War stand-off during the Confrontation with Malaysia, a collision with a French submarine, an outbreak of salmonella in the Seychelles, and the first response to one of Britain's worst-ever oil spills.