HMS Chieftain (R36): The Palestine Patrol and the Chaim Arlosoroff

Built at Greenock

HMS Chieftain was one of the Ch group of the C Class destroyers, built by Scotts at Greenock, launched in February 1945 and commissioned on 7 March 1946, the last months of the war having overtaken her. The photograph at the top of this page was taken on the Clyde a week before, on 1 March 1946, with dark smoke pouring from her funnel as she ran her trials.

She joined the 1st Destroyer Squadron at Malta, with her sisters Chequers, Cheviot, Chivalrous and the rest of the group, and spent most of her career in the Mediterranean.

The Palestine Patrol

Her first years were spent on one of the least welcome tasks the Navy has ever been given. After the war tens of thousands of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Europe sought to reach Palestine, then governed by Britain under a League of Nations mandate, where the British government was restricting immigration in an attempt to keep the peace between Jews and Arabs.

The Jewish underground organised a fleet of old ships, packed with refugees, to run the blockade, and the Royal Navy's Palestine Patrol was sent to intercept them. The refugees were usually taken into Haifa and shipped on to camps in Cyprus.

In 1947 Chieftain intercepted three of these ships: a schooner, a former American coastguard cutter and a former American navy vessel. The cutter was the Chaim Arlosoroff, once the US Coast Guard cutter Unalga, carrying refugees from Europe.

Shadowed by British warships as she approached the coast, she made a run for the shore and ran herself aground at Bat Galim, just outside Haifa, so that her passengers could try to get ashore. British troops rounded them up, and they were interned and sent on to Cyprus. The other two ships were stopped at sea.

The work was hard on the sailors as well as the refugees, and the boarding of crowded ships at night often turned violent.

Abadan and Suez

In 1951, when Iran nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the British oil workers at Abadan were threatened, Chieftain was one of the destroyers sent to the Persian Gulf, with Chequers, Chevron and Chivalrous, until they were relieved by the 3rd Flotilla, led by Saintes.

In 1954 she was refitted, and her after gun mounting was replaced by a pair of Squid anti-submarine mortars, and in 1956 she served in the Suez operation.

The End

She was paid off after Suez and broken up at Sunderland in 1961, fifteen years after she was commissioned. Her sisters are in the C Class destroyers collection.