HMS Cossack (R57): Fourteen Years East of Suez

The Second Cossack

HMS Cossack was the second ship of the name to serve in the Second World War, and the seventh in the Navy. The first, the Tribal Class destroyer Cossack of the Altmark incident and Narvik, had been torpedoed and sunk in October 1941, and the name was given to one of the new C Class destroyers of the Co group.

She was ordered from Vickers-Armstrongs on the Tyne on 12 September 1942, laid down on 18 March 1943 and launched on 10 May 1944. Her completion was held up by trouble with her new gunnery fire-control system, and she was not finished until 4 September 1945, two days after the Japanese surrender.

The photograph at the top of this page shows her under tow on 30 August 1945, a few days before.

The Far East

In the autumn of 1945 she sailed to join the British Pacific Fleet as senior officer's ship of a destroyer flotilla, and she would not come home for fourteen years. The war was over, but there was a great deal to do.

Her first months were spent supporting the return of the Dutch to the East Indies, where nationalists were fighting against the restoration of colonial rule, carrying civilians released from Japanese camps to Singapore, helping with the reoccupation of Indo-China, and serving as guardship in occupied Japan.

As China's civil war went on she patrolled the Chinese coast and the Formosa Strait to protect British merchant ships. She led what became the 8th Destroyer Flotilla, with Consort, Concord, Constance, Cockade and the rest, based on Hong Kong and Singapore.

From 1948 the flotilla's destroyers were also giving gunfire support to the army in the Malayan Emergency, shelling the jungle camps of the communist insurgents from the sea.

Korea

When North Korea invaded the South in June 1950, Cossack was among the first British ships to go.

With the carrier Triumph, the cruiser Jamaica, her flotilla-mate Consort, a fleet tanker and an Australian frigate, she sailed from Japan for Okinawa and then on to Korean waters, and that summer she was in action off the Pusan Perimeter, where the United Nations armies were holding the last corner of the peninsula.

From 1950 to 1952 she was commanded by Captain Varyl Begg, who rose to become First Sea Lord in the 1960s.

In May 1951, patrolling to enforce the United Nations embargo on war materials for China, she stopped the cargo ship Nancy Moller off the island of Hainan, carrying rubber for a Chinese port, and escorted her to Singapore.

After the armistice of 1953 the Royal Navy kept up a presence off the Korean coast for several years, and Cossack took her turn there between exercises with the American, Australian, New Zealand and Dutch navies.

Grapple

In the mid 1950s the ships of the Far East Station were drawn into Britain's nuclear weapons programme. In 1957 Cossack was among the ships supporting Operation Grapple, the hydrogen bomb tests off Christmas Island in the Pacific.

Home at Last

In November 1959 she sailed from Singapore for home, after fourteen years of continuous service on the Far East Station, and arrived at Devonport in December. She was paid off into reserve, sold for scrap in 1960, and arrived at Troon to be broken up on 1 March 1961. Her flotilla-mates are in the C Class destroyers collection.