HMS Cockade (D34): Too Late for One War, Three Tours in the Next

Built at Scotstoun, a Month Too Late

HMS Cockade was laid down by Yarrow at Scotstoun on the Clyde on 11 March 1943 and launched a year later, in March 1944. She was one of the C class, the last of the war emergency destroyer flotillas, and like her sisters she arrived too late for the war she had been ordered for.

She was completed on 29 September 1945, about six weeks after Japan surrendered, under Lieutenant Commander Terence Herrick. What that meant for her whole class is set out in the article on HMS Comus (R43).

A cockade is the rosette worn on a hat to show whose side you are on. She carried the pennant R34 when she was launched and D34 after the renumbering of 1948, which is the number painted amidships in the photograph at the top of this page.

East

She went out to the Far East in 1946, like most of the C class, and joined the destroyers based on Hong Kong. The long passage, life as a tender to the shore base there and the rhythm of a peacetime Far East commission are described in HMS Constance (R71), which made the same journey a few months before her.

She came home at the end of 1947, then went out again for the commission that took her into her war.

Sasebo, July 1950

When North Korea invaded the South on 25 June 1950, the British ships in Japanese waters were placed at the disposal of the United Nations within days.

By the middle of July Cockade was one of the destroyers under Rear Admiral William Andrewes working in the Yellow Sea off the west coast of Korea, with the cruisers Jamaica, Kenya and Belfast, her sisters Cossack and Charity, the Australian Bataan and the Dutch Evertsen. The photograph at the top of this page was taken at Sasebo in Kyushu that month, the base all the Commonwealth ships worked from.

Late in July she and Cossack were sent to Mokpo on the south-west coast, where intelligence had reported supply craft gathering. An American Neptune patrol aircraft spotted for them and found that most of the craft had gone, so the two destroyers shelled the docks and the railway sidings instead, to good effect.

It was the shape of the next three years: small ships close inshore, shooting at things that moved supplies.

Three Tours

She made several tours of Korean waters between 1950 and 1953, two months or so on the line at a time and then a spell at Sasebo or back at Hong Kong. The work was blockade and bombardment, on both coasts, and screening the British and American carriers whose aircraft were striking the North.

Along with American and other British destroyers she shelled troop positions, gun sites and transport around Kosong near the 38th parallel.

On 21 June 1951, for example, she sailed from Kure in company with the light fleet carrier Glory, whose Sea Furies and Fireflies were flying strikes up the west coast, and an Australian photographer caught her a few days later pulling away from the carrier after taking on stores. The Imperial War Museum holds photographs of her off the west coast again in March 1952.

Carrier pilots were often shot down over the sea, and one of her seamen remembered taking part in pulling an American airman out of the water; his family still remember that the airman was called Eugene.

Taehwa-do

Off the west coast of North Korea, the United Nations held a string of small islands, used by guerrillas, agents and radar stations, which the Chinese wanted back. On 30 November 1951 Chinese troops crossed in boats and junks and stormed Taehwa-do.

As the island fell, friendly troops and islanders were taken off by junk, and Cockade was in close covering the evacuation when an enemy shore battery found her. She was hit, and one of her men was killed, the price of getting close enough inshore to be useful.

Songjin and the Sampans

By 1953 she was on the east coast, where the railway ran along the shore between the mountains and the sea and was within range of a destroyer's guns for most of its length. In February or March 1953 she caught a group of enemy sampans between Tanchon and Yangdok and sank one large one and seven small ones.

In May, attacking rail facilities near Songjin, she was fired on by a shore battery that put twenty-nine rounds into the water around her, the nearest of them thirty yards away. None hit. The armistice was signed at Panmunjom that July.

Her service in Korea is less well recorded than it deserves, and that is true of most of the Commonwealth destroyers that did the same work. HMS Opossum (U33) and Comus have accounts of their own Korean tours for comparison.

Malaya, and a Royal Escort

After Korea she stayed in the Far East with the 8th Destroyer Squadron at Singapore and Hong Kong, and served in the Malayan Emergency, the long campaign against the Communist insurgency on the peninsula.

In her last commission, from 1956 to 1958, her captain was Commander Cobb, and one of her young sailors, who went on to serve in submarines and wrote about her afterwards, described her as the happiest ship he ever knew.

In November 1956 she was photographed in Singapore Roads with her company fallen in, and later that year she went south to Australia at the time of the Melbourne Olympic Games, which the Duke of Edinburgh opened; her men remembered it as escorting the Royal Yacht.

On the way home she crossed to Bluff in New Zealand with cadets aboard and called at Pacific islands on the way back to Hong Kong, where her football team, the Cockatoos, was beaten by a barefoot island side. Ashore in Malaya they were beaten seven-one by an army team playing in jungle boots.

Not every memory of that commission is a happy one. On the night of 26 April 1957, during an exercise off Malaya, a star shell fired by Cockade to light up the sea came down on the Australian destroyer HMAS Tobruk, killing one of her seamen and badly wounding another.

It was an accident of exactly the kind night gunnery practice exists to rehearse for, and it is remembered in the Australian navy's own history of the Emergency.

She was an old-fashioned ship by then in one particular way: she was the only ship that sailor ever served in where the men still slept in hammocks rather than bunks, slung over the mess tables, with some of them dragging camp beds onto the upper deck on the hottest nights.

Paid Off at Devonport

In 1957 HMS Cavalier came out to relieve her at Hong Kong, and Cavalier is still afloat today as a museum at Chatham. Cockade came home in 1958, by way of the Suez Canal, reportedly one of the first Royal Navy ships through after the canal reopened under Egyptian control, and was paid off at Devonport for the last time.

She was laid up in reserve far up the creek, where one of her old company walked her rusting decks in 1961. In 1964 she was sold to John Cashmore and towed to Newport in South Wales to be broken up, and another of her former sailors went to watch it done.

A destroyer that never fired a shot in the war she was built for spent the next thirteen years in a different one and in the long policing of an empire's end, and the men who served in her kept a reunion going every October for years afterwards.