HMS Constance (R71): A C-Class Destroyer's Quiet Service Through Korea

A Destroyer Launched Late in the War

HMS Constance was ordered from Vickers-Armstrong's Newcastle yard on 12 September 1942, laid down the following March, launched on 22 June 1944 and completed on 6 June 1945, a C-class destroyer displacing 1,885 tons standard and up to 2,545 tons at full load, armed with four QF 4.5-inch guns, twin and single 40mm Bofors mounts, 2-pounder and Oerlikon cannon, and eight 21-inch torpedo tubes across her mounts, alongside depth charge equipment capable of deploying 96 charges, a well-armed destroyer entering service just as the war in Europe was ending.

Her first commanding officer, Commander George David Archibald Gregory, DSO, RN, took charge that July, seeing her through working-up trials in home waters before the long passage east.

Far East Service and Korea

HMS Constance made the long passage out to Hong Kong between January and June 1946, joining the 8th Destroyer Flotilla as tender to the shore base HMS Tamar. From that July she settled into the steady rhythm of a peacetime Far East posting, patrolling to protect British shipping, taking part in fleet exercises, and making port visits across Japan, Malaya and French Indo-China, always returning to Hong Kong as her home base.

The passage out is worth pausing on as well, because five months from Britain to Hong Kong looks slow until you consider what it involved. She sailed in January 1946 and did not arrive until June. In between there was the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, with fuel to be taken at every stage from a network of bases that was itself only just being put back together after four years of Japanese occupation. Ports had to be cleared of wrecks and mines before a destroyer could use them at all. Ships' companies were being demobilised and replaced en route. And a great deal of the passage was made in company with other ships going the same way, which means at convoy speed. It is a useful corrective to the idea of a fast fleet destroyer: most of a destroyer's life is spent going somewhere slowly.

Being a tender to HMS Tamar is worth explaining, because it sounds like an administrative footnote and describes something quite specific. Tamar was the Royal Navy's shore establishment in Hong Kong, and it took its name from a troopship that had arrived in 1897 and stayed as a depot ship for the next forty-four years until she was scuttled in the harbour in December 1941 to keep her out of Japanese hands. The name went ashore after the war and stayed there. For a destroyer, being on the books of Tamar meant Hong Kong was home: the dockyard, the mail, the married quarters, the canteen and the sick bay were all there, and however far she wandered, that was where she came back to. The 8th Destroyer Flotilla she joined had only been formed out east in 1947 and lasted until May 1963, when it was renamed the 24th Escort Squadron. Constance was there for the first half of its existence.

When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, Constance and her squadron-mates, among them HMS Comus, Cockade, Concord, Consort, Cossack and Charity, fell into a punishing but sustainable rhythm of their own: roughly two months on active United Nations duty off Korea, followed by a spell of rest and recreation based at Sasebo in Japan, before rotating back to Hong Kong. She kept up that pattern through the armistice in June 1953 and beyond, her final Far East years spent on continuing United Nations duty alongside renewed operations off Malaya through to 1954.

The rotation she settled into during Korea is worth spelling out because it is the actual texture of the war for the ships that fought it. Two months on station off the west coast, then a spell at Sasebo in southern Japan, then back to Hong Kong, then round again. Sasebo was the forward base for the whole United Nations naval effort, a former Imperial Japanese Navy port turned into an Allied one within five years of the Pacific war ending, and for the crews it meant fuel, ammunition, repairs, mail and a few days of not being shot at. Hong Kong meant a proper dockyard and leave. The cycle was designed to be sustainable indefinitely, because nobody knew how long the war would last, and it went on for three years. Constance kept it up past the armistice of July 1953 and then went straight into operations off Malaya, where the Emergency was still running, before finally coming home in 1955.

The scale of the Royal Navy's part in Korea is one of the things that has fallen out of the public memory of the war, and it was considerable: second only to the United States and a long way ahead of anybody else. The whole west coast of the peninsula was a British responsibility. Task Group 95.1, the West Coast Blockade Group, was an American-numbered formation under a British admiral, Rear-Admiral W. G. Andrewes, and its usual shape was a British light fleet carrier, alternating with an American one, screened by four destroyers, covering an inshore group of a Royal Navy cruiser, four escorts, American minesweepers and South Korean patrol craft. Over the course of the war the Fleet Air Arm flew some twenty-three thousand sorties from those carriers. Constance was one of the four destroyers, over and over again.

The west coast was also the awkward side to work. It has one of the largest tidal ranges on earth, which means shallow water, shifting mudbanks and currents that run hard enough to matter to a ship's handling; it is scattered with hundreds of small islands, some held by friendly guerrillas and some not; and the weather runs from fog through blizzards to typhoons without a great deal of warning. Add several hundred junks and sampans going about entirely lawful business among which anything might be hiding, and the job of a destroyer on that station becomes clear. It was pilotage, boarding, gunfire support for the islands, screening a carrier and doing all of it in poor visibility on a coast nobody had properly charted. It does not make headlines. It is also the sort of work that a badly handled ship does not survive.

One surviving photograph, taken from the Australian carrier HMAS Sydney between August 1951 and February 1952, shows Constance alongside her during a replenishment at sea, a fuel line stretched between the two ships while Sydney's own Sea Fury and Firefly aircraft struck at targets ashore, a rare surviving glimpse of the unglamorous but essential escort work that filled most of her time on station. No single dramatic action defines her Korean service, a situation common enough among the many C-class destroyers that rotated through the peninsula's waters, whose collective contribution of patrol, escort and replenishment duty rarely produced the kind of headline engagement that survives in detailed individual ship records.

One action does survive in her record, and it is worth having. Off the Wolsari Peninsula, Constance came under fire from shore batteries. She and the cruiser HMS Belfast turned their guns on the position and silenced it. The weapons firing at them were afterwards assessed as three-inch mortars, which is to say that a destroyer and a six-inch-gun cruiser were being shot at by infantry weapons, from a shore they could not occupy, in a war where that happened often enough not to be remarkable. Her squadron-mate HMS Charity had a rather more spectacular time of it and shot up a train.

The Wolsari action deserves one more sentence about the company she was in. HMS Belfast, the ship she silenced that battery with, is now moored in the Pool of London with several million visitors having walked her decks, and her Korean service is the part of her career that almost none of them know about. She fired more rounds in Korea than she did in the Second World War. Two of Constance's squadron-mates have their own accounts here as well: HMS Charity, who caught a train on the coastal line, and HMS Comus, who was bombed. It was the same squadron doing the same job on the same coast, and which ship ended up with a story was very largely a matter of where each of them happened to be on a given morning.

A Standard Retirement

HMS Constance took passage home to Chatham in 1955, her wartime and Korean War service complete, and was paid off into reserve there before being sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation and taken in tow to Thos. W. Ward's yard at Inverkeithing, arriving there on 8 March 1956.

Her disposal in 1956 looks premature and it was, but there is a reason for it. At the end of the war the Royal Navy still had forty-seven War Emergency Programme destroyers, most of them nearly new and barely used, and no money to run them all. Its answer was to rebuild the best of them into fast anti-submarine frigates: twenty-three became Type 15s and ten more got the cheaper Type 16 conversion, and those ships served on into the 1970s and in one case 1983. But the conversions were done on the older R, T, U, V, W and Z flotillas, not the C class, because a C-class destroyer was newer, better armed and more useful as a destroyer. The eight Ca-class ships were consequently given a full modernisation instead and served for another twenty years, as described in the article on HMS Caesar (R07). The Ch, Co and Cr groups mostly were not.

That left ships like Constance in an awkward position: too new to be obsolete, too numerous to be kept, and not chosen for either of the two programmes that would have given them a second life. She was the first of the whole class to go. Comus followed in 1958, Contest in 1960, Chieftain, Consort and Cossack in 1961, Cheviot, Comet and Concord in 1962, and so on through the decade, while four of the class were sold to Pakistan and had long careers there instead. Constance was eleven years old when Thos. W. Ward took her, and she had spent five of those years on a war station. There is nothing wrong with the ship in that story. It is simply what happens when a country builds a fleet for a war and then has to pay for it afterwards.

Her career, spanning the final months of the Second World War through to the Korean conflict, reflects the steady, dependable service that so many of the Royal Navy's C-class destroyers provided across two very different wars, even where the historical record of any single ship's specific contribution has not always survived in the same detail as her more famous sister vessels.