HMS Chevron (R51): Rescuing 800 Shipwrecked Refugees, Then a Downed US Aircrew

An Intermediate C-Class Destroyer

HMS Chevron was built by Alexander Stephen and Sons at Glasgow, her keel laid on 18 March 1943, launched on 23 February 1944, and commissioned on 23 August 1945, a Ch-class 'Intermediate' variant C-class destroyer displacing 1,900 tons standard and up to 2,535 tons at full load.

One of her early commanding officers, John Bush, went on to considerably grander things, later serving as Vice Chief of the Naval Staff and ending his career as a knighted full Admiral and the first Commander-in-Chief of the Western Fleet.

Considerably grander things is putting it mildly, and his earlier career is the more interesting half. John Bush entered the Navy in 1933 from Clifton College at the age of nineteen, and when the war began he was a lieutenant and second in command of the Tribal-class destroyer HMS Nubian. He was at Cape Matapan. He collected three Distinguished Service Crosses, which is to say a DSC and two bars, in a war fought largely in the Mediterranean in ships that were being shot at from the air more or less continuously, came home to command the destroyer HMS Zephyr on the Arctic convoy run, and was given Chevron, brand new, as the war ended. He was made commander in 1946, at thirty-two.

He went on to command HMS Cadiz (D79) and then the 6th Frigate Squadron, was Director of Naval Plans from 1959 to 1961, which is the senior captain's job on the naval staff, became Vice Chief of the Naval Staff in 1965 and in 1967 the first Commander-in-Chief of the newly created Western Fleet. In that capacity, in January 1968, he presided at Portland over the commissioning of the Standing Naval Force Atlantic, the first permanent multinational naval squadron in history, as the article on HMS Brighton (F106) describes.

His subordinates called him the Burning Bush, on account of a forcefully expressed impatience with anything that got in the way, and he lived to ninety-eight, dying in 2013. It is worth holding that span in mind. The same man was a lieutenant in a destroyer off Crete in 1941 and was still alive when the Type 45s were commissioning.

She carried four QF 4.5-inch guns, twin 40mm Bofors guns, 2-pounder and Oerlikon cannon, and eight 21-inch torpedo tubes across two quadruple mounts, alongside depth charge equipment capable of deploying 80 charges, a heavily armed destroyer entering service just as the Second World War came to its close.

Rescuing Eight Hundred Souls

HMS Chevron's most significant humanitarian achievement came during Palestine Patrol duties in December 1946. The refugee ship Athina Rafiah, a Greek steamer built in 1897 and renamed by the Haganah for members deported to a camp at Rafah, struck rocks off the tiny Dodecanese island of Syrna in heavy weather and sank within 45 minutes, drowning eight of the roughly 800 Jewish refugees aboard; most of the rest scrambled ashore onto the barren island itself. HMS Chevron and the minesweeper HMS Providence arrived a few days later to bring them off, Providence alone lifting 256 survivors, seventeen of them in a critical enough state to need bedding in her wardroom, sick bay and even the captain's own cabin, before the whole party was ferried onward to internment camps in Cyprus.

Whatever the wider political tensions surrounding the immigration patrols the Royal Navy was simultaneously tasked with enforcing during the final years of the British Mandate, the immediate humanitarian imperative of saving hundreds of lives from a wrecked, overcrowded vessel took clear precedence, and HMS Chevron's crew carried out the rescue successfully, reportedly without ever receiving the official recognition for it that was recommended at the time.

A Collision, and a Cock of the Fleet

Her peacetime service wasn't entirely without incident. On the night of 30 May 1949, steaming blacked out in line abreast during a fleet exercise, Chevron missed a turn signal thanks to a faulty radio set and collided with her sister destroyer HMS Comet, holing Comet near her boiler room and badly damaging her own bow; both ships had to be towed into Malta's Grand Harbour, though nobody was hurt.

She made up for it before long, winning the title "Cock of the Fleet" from the cruiser HMS Gambia and repeatedly shooting sleeve targets clean out of the sky with her main armament to carry off the Mediterranean Fleet's own Gunnery Shield outright.

The Cock of the Fleet needs explaining to anybody who has not served, because it sounds like a joke and was taken extremely seriously. It was the prize for the fleet regatta, and the regatta was rowing: ships' boats, pulled by crews from every part of the ship's company, racing each other over a set course with points totalled across the events, and the ship that scored highest took the title. The winner was given a model cockerel, and hoisted a very large replica of one somewhere the rest of the fleet could not avoid looking at it. Ships trained for months. Stokers who never saw daylight were discovered to have shoulders on them and were quietly moved into a boat's crew. In a fleet with nothing to fight, it was the fight.

Saving an American Aircrew

On 6 February 1952, HMS Chevron carried out a further dramatic rescue, saving fourteen of the fifteen crew aboard a United States Navy Martin P4M-1Q Mercator, an electronic-reconnaissance aircraft that had been eavesdropping on Soviet signals over the Black Sea before making a dead-stick, engines-out landing in open water east of Cyprus. The aircraft commander was lost, but Chevron had the rest of the crew aboard within about seven hours of the ditching, a properly impressive rescue rate for a night landing far from land, and a reminder of just how often Royal Navy warships found themselves called upon for search and rescue work entirely separate from their formal military duties, Cold War espionage included.

It is worth being clear about what that aircraft was and what it was doing, because the phrase electronic reconnaissance covers one of the most dangerous jobs of the early Cold War. The Martin P4M Mercator was a big four-engined patrol aircraft, and from 1951 the eighteen surviving production machines were converted into P4M-1Qs: the bomb bay filled with receivers and recorders, and the crew increased from nine to fourteen or more, most of them operators sitting in the dark listening. Their job was to fly along the coasts of the Soviet Union, China and North Korea, usually about thirty miles off, and provoke the air defence system into switching on so that its radars and radio nets could be catalogued.

The trade name for it was ferreting, and it was neither theoretical nor safe. On 22 August 1956 a Mercator was shot down by Chinese fighters near Shanghai and all sixteen men aboard were killed. Another was attacked by two North Korean MiG-17s on 16 June 1959 and came home badly shot about with her tail gunner seriously wounded. A third was lost with her whole crew in the Mediterranean after being intercepted by Soviet MiGs. These aircraft flew unarmed except for tail guns, alone, at night, along hostile coasts, for years, and when one did not come back the loss was generally explained as a training accident.

The one Chevron went out to on 6 February 1952 was among the first of the converted aircraft and had been working over the Black Sea. She lost her engines and went into the water east of Cyprus in the dark, and the aircraft commander was killed. Fourteen men came out of the sea inside about seven hours, in February, at night, a long way from land, because a British destroyer went and got them. It was not Chevron's war and it was not her country's aeroplane, and the men she pulled out were doing a job neither government was admitting to.

Suez, and a Quiet Retirement

HMS Chevron opened her decks to visitors during a call at Malta in October 1954, and returned from the Mediterranean to Portsmouth that year, before being brought out of reserve in November 1955 under Commander Ian David McLaughlan to rejoin the 1st Destroyer Squadron alongside her sisters Chieftain and Chaplet.

Her recommissioned career opened with an unexpectedly glamorous engagement: on 16 April 1956, Chevron tied up at Monte Carlo just in time for the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier two days later, her commanding officer and first lieutenant attending the ceremony as guests, before Cyprus patrols and then, that November, Operation Musketeer, the Suez Crisis, one of the most politically contentious operations of the entire postwar Royal Navy.

According to at least one of her own crew, Chevron's part in Musketeer was rather bigger than the official record admits: on the night of 5 to 6 November 1956, the operation's most senior commanders were transferred at sea by breeches buoy from the French battleship Jean Bart onto Chevron, who is said to have served as the invasion's effective command ship until the party moved ashore to HMS Forth two days later, a role that goes unmentioned in most published accounts of the raid. What's beyond dispute is that Chevron escorted landing craft into Port Fuad on 6 November, and that her crew later saw the toppled bronze statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps lying face down in the sand at Port Said, dynamited by Egyptian resistance fighters that December. Commander McLaughlan was Mentioned in Despatches for his part in the operation, and Acting Yeoman of Signals Reginald Dainty received the British Empire Medal.

Chevron stayed on in the Canal Zone under the Naval Officer in Charge once the fighting stopped, helping direct the long, awkward business of clearing the twenty-two wrecks Egypt had sunk to block the waterway, before going on, by one crew member's account, to become the first Royal Navy ship to visit the newly independent state of Israel, giving the crowds a fireworks display from outside Haifa harbour as she left.

She subsequently served as an accommodation ship at Rosyth from 1957 until 1969, a role considerably less dramatic than her earlier rescue operations, before being sold to Thos. W. Ward and scrapped at Inverkeithing in December 1969.

Her bell survives, though, thanks to Rear Admiral Richard Washbourn, a New Zealander who had won the DSO for staying at his post in HMS Achilles's shell-shattered gun director tower during the Battle of the River Plate in 1939. In December 1964, by then Chief of Naval Staff of the Royal New Zealand Navy, Washbourn bought Chevron's bell as a job lot from Rosyth dockyard for eight pounds and had it sent home by diplomatic bag to Collingwood Area School in Golden Bay, whose own bell had gone missing back in the 1920s. Writing to a naval historian while chasing up the ship's history for the school, Washbourn admitted, with the dry understatement of a man who had once been shot through the head and carried on regardless: "pity we can't make it a bit more glamorous; however she got around a bit, and the pupils of Collingwood will have a bell which will have covered the waters between the Eastern Atlantic and the Persian Gulf."

Washbourn's own moment is worth knowing. On 13 December 1939, in the Battle of the River Plate, he was the gunnery officer of the New Zealand-manned cruiser HMS Achilles, up in the director tower controlling her guns against the Graf Spee, when a shell burst outside it and sprayed the tower with splinters. Four of the men with him were killed. He was wounded in the head and stayed where he was, still directing the ship's fire, and was given the DSO for it. Twenty-five years later he was buying a scrapped destroyer's bell for eight pounds so a school in Golden Bay could have something to ring.