HMS Charity (D29): The Destroyer That Sank a Train, Then Fell to Missiles as Shah Jahan

A Destroyer for the Postwar Fleet

HMS Charity was built by John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston, her keel laid on 9 July 1943, launched on 30 November 1944, and commissioned on 19 November 1945, a C-class destroyer armed with four QF 4.5-inch guns, Bofors and Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns and quadruple 21-inch torpedo tubes, entering service just after the Second World War had ended.

Commissioned too late to see any war service, she was commanded from the outset by Lieutenant Commander Richard Herbert Calcraft Wyld DSC RN, and her pennant number was soon changed from the wartime-style R29 she was launched under to the more familiar D29.

Patrolling Palestine

HMS Charity served with the 1st Destroyer Squadron in the Mediterranean, and in 1947 took part in operations preventing illegal immigration into Palestine, part of the Royal Navy's difficult and often thankless role attempting to intercept ships carrying Jewish refugees seeking to reach Palestine in defiance of British restrictions during the tense final years of the Mandate.

One of those operations was the most famous of the entire campaign, and it deserves naming. On 11 July 1947 a worn-out American excursion steamer, the President Warfield, sailed from Sete in the south of France with something like four and a half thousand survivors of the Holocaust aboard, bound for Palestine and renamed Exodus 1947 en route. She was shadowed from the moment she left. On 15 July the cruiser Ajax joined the chase with the destroyer Childers; on the 16th, Chequers, flying the pennant of the task force commander, came up at high speed with Chieftain and Charity. On the night of the 18th, in international waters about twenty miles off the coast, the boarding was made: destroyers went alongside from both sides, damaging her hull, her railings and her lifeboats, and the boarding parties met a defence of tinned food, timber and steam. Three people on the Exodus were killed, among them the American first mate William Bernstein, and something like a hundred and forty-six were hurt.

It was a substantial undertaking fleet-wide: across the whole of the Mandate period, Royal Navy ships arrested some 49 vessels attempting to run the blockade and detained in the region of 66,000 would-be immigrants, unglamorous and politically fraught work shared by other C-class destroyers on the same patrol, among them HMS Chevron.

What was done with those four and a half thousand people afterwards is why the name is remembered, and it went a long way beyond anything the destroyers were involved in: they were not sent to Cyprus but shipped back to France and, when France would not force them ashore, landed in the British zone of occupied Germany. That sequence, and what it cost Britain, is set out in the article on HMS Chequers (R61) and HMS Cheviot (D90).

A Train Destroyed Off the Korean Coast

HMS Charity served with the 8th Destroyer Flotilla during the Korean War, steaming an extraordinary 126,000 nautical miles over the course of her deployment, and in the course of coastal patrol and gunfire support duties, destroyed not one but two enemy trains with naval gunfire, work that illustrated just how effectively a destroyer's guns could be brought to bear against targets well inland from the immediate coastline, disrupting North Korean supply and transport links along the Korean peninsula's coast.

A hundred and twenty-six thousand nautical miles is worth converting, because it is not a figure that means much on its own. It is about six times round the world, done in a destroyer, in three years, in the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. Korean coastal work was continuous and physically punishing in a way the trainbusting stories rather disguise: the west coast has one of the largest tidal ranges on earth and is a maze of islands, mud and unmarked shoals, the east coast drops away steeply and is bordered by a coast road and a railway line that were the North Korean supply system, and the winter brings ice, fog and a wind straight off Siberia. Ships worked bombardment patrols in rotation for weeks at a time, closing the coast in daylight to shoot at bridges, tunnels and rolling stock and standing off at night. Two trains is an excellent tally. The mileage is the real measure of the job.

That feat earned her membership of the unofficial Trainbusters Club, a running competition among United Nations warships that began in July 1952 after the American destroyer USS Orleck flattened two trains in a single fortnight and dared anyone else to beat it. Of the eighteen ships that eventually qualified, mostly American with a handful of Canadian destroyers alongside, Charity was the solitary Royal Navy member, each successful ship receiving its own certificate "for her contribution to the United Nations' cause against Communist aggression by destroying Communist train(s)."

Train-busting itself was harder than it sounds, and that is the point of the club. A locomotive on a coastal railway is a small, fast, armoured-by-accident target that only appears at night, runs between tunnels, and can be reversed out of trouble the moment the first shell lands. The technique that worked was to lie close inshore in the dark, listen, and put a shell into the track ahead of the train and then behind it, trapping it in the open before working along its length. It needed good radar, good gunnery and a captain willing to take a destroyer in close to a defended shore in the dark. Eighteen ships managed it in the whole war, mostly American with a few Canadians, and exactly one of them wore the White Ensign.

Modernised, Then Sold

HMS Charity was modernised with her rear gun turret removed and replaced by Squid anti-submarine mortars, extending her useful life before she was paid off into reserve in 1955. She was sold to the United States Navy on 16 June 1958, before being transferred onward to the Pakistan Navy that December, recommissioned as Shah Jahan.

The two-step sale is not the oddity it appears, and it is the same arrangement that sent her old squadron-mate Cadiz east. Britain did not give ships away, and Pakistan in 1958 could not readily pay for them. So the United States bought the ship under its military assistance programme and passed her on: Washington provided the money, Britain provided the hull, and Pakistan got a destroyer. It was Cold War arithmetic, repeated across a dozen navies from Turkey to Taiwan, and it is why so many British ships of the 1940s spent their second careers under flags that had nothing to do with the fleet they were built for. HMS Cadiz (D79) went out the same way two years earlier, and the two of them ended up in the same harbour on the same night in 1971.

Struck by Missiles Alongside Her Old Fleetmate

Shah Jahan, the former HMS Charity, met her most dramatic moment on the night of 4 to 5 December 1971, during Operation Trident, India's audacious missile boat raid on Karachi harbour in the Indo-Pakistani War, the same operation that sank PNS Khaibar, formerly the Battle-class destroyer HMS Cadiz. Operation Trident holds a genuine place in naval history as the first offensive use of missile boats against a defended harbour: three small Indian Osa-class boats, towed most of the way to save fuel, fired Soviet-built Styx missiles that sank Khaibar, the minesweeper PNS Muhafiz and the freighter MV Venus Challenger, the last of these carrying a near-full cargo of American ammunition shipped from Saigon for the Pakistani armed forces, all within about forty minutes.

The precedent for all of that had been set four years earlier and a long way west. On 21 October 1967 the Israeli destroyer Eilat, patrolling off Port Said, was hit by Styx missiles fired from Egyptian Komar-class boats lying inside the harbour itself, and sank. That was the first ship ever destroyed in war by an anti-ship missile, and it terrified every navy that read the report, because Eilat was a full-sized destroyer and the Komars were fifty-ton motor boats. Eilat had herself been a Royal Navy destroyer, the Z-class HMS Zealous, and so, of course, had PNS Khaibar, the former HMS Cadiz, sunk at Karachi in 1971. Two British-built destroyers of the same wartime generation, sold on and then killed by a weapon that had not existed when either was laid down.

What Trident did establish was something slightly different and arguably more alarming: that missile boats could be used offensively, against a defended naval base, rather than defensively off their own coast. The three Osa boats had a range problem, so they were towed most of the way to Karachi by larger ships and cast off close in. Nobody in Karachi expected an attack from seaward by craft that small. It is a template that has been studied by every navy with a coastline ever since, and Charity, by then twenty-six years old and flying somebody else's flag, was on the receiving end of the first outing.

Shah Jahan herself was in company with Venus Challenger when the Indian missile boat Nipat engaged both contacts at around eleven o'clock that night; the freighter broke in two and sank within minutes, while Shah Jahan was left badly damaged, though Indian accounts of the action differ over whether she was struck by a missile of her own or caught up in the same chaotic engagement some other way. Whatever the cause, she was in no state to answer when Pakistani headquarters radioed ordering her to the stricken Khaibar's aid; her reported reply, that she could not do so owing to unspecified problems, sums up her night rather well. Written off rather than repaired, she was not actually broken up until 1982, more than a decade later, a far quieter end than the missile strike that finished her as a fighting ship, closing out a Royal Navy career that had ranged from patrolling the tense waters off Mandatory Palestine to breaking up enemy rail transport during the Korean War.