HMS Creole (R82): Built for a War That Ended Before She Could Join It

Laid Down at Cowes, Too Late for War

HMS Creole was built by J. Samuel White at Cowes on the Isle of Wight between 1944 and 1946, a C-class destroyer belonging to the Crescent group, or Cr subclass, that arrived just after the Second World War had already ended, commissioning too late to see any wartime service at all.

J. Samuel White is one of the great forgotten shipbuilders, and Creole came very near the end of it. Thomas White moved his business from Broadstairs to East Cowes in 1802 and took a yard on the east bank of the Medina where ships had already been built for more than a century; the various family yards were pulled together under the name J. Samuel White in 1860, and by the 1850s the place was employing around five hundred craftsmen in its docks, sawmills, engine shops and mast and block shops. What it became famous for in the twentieth century was destroyers. In the First World War the yard turned out twenty-seven of them, plus eleven patrol vessels, two submarines and two hundred seaplanes, which is a startling range for one firm on one small island. In the Second it built twenty-six more destroyers, a minelayer and two hundred and eighty-five small craft.

It did not survive the peace by much. The East Cowes yard closed in 1964 because there was no economic way to modernise it, the last naval ship, the frigate Arethusa, came off the slips in 1965, and with that some three hundred years of shipbuilding on that stretch of river came to an end. The Isle of Wight had built warships for the Royal Navy since the seventeenth century and then, quite suddenly, did not. Creole was one of the last destroyers the yard produced, and the odd thing about her career is that she outlived the firm that built her by nearly twenty years, under a flag that did not exist when her keel was laid.

The Cr group is worth a note, because almost none of it ever wore the White Ensign. Eight ships were ordered and the war ended while they were still on the stocks, so the Admiralty sold most of them where they stood. Croziers, Crystal, Cromwell and Crown went to Norway in 1946 and became Trondheim, Stavanger, Bergen and Oslo, giving a navy that had spent the war in exile a modern destroyer flotilla overnight. Crescent and Crusader went to Canada. That left exactly two in British hands, Creole and Crispin, which is why the pair of them spent their careers tied up together at Londonderry.

Her pennant number, originally R82, was later changed to D82 as the Royal Navy standardised its destroyer pennant numbering system in the postwar years.

That renumbering was the 1948 reorganisation of the whole system, set out in the article on HMS Cheviot, which gave D to destroyers, F to frigates and S to submarines, and which NATO went on to adopt.

A Career Built Around Training

HMS Creole spent much of her Royal Navy career with the 3rd Training Squadron, based at Londonderry alongside her sister ship HMS Crispin, work focused on preparing new sailors and officers for service rather than the combat operations her class had originally been designed around.

In 1948, her 'B' gun turret was removed and replaced with a deckhouse, a modification reflecting her training role rather than any expectation of front-line combat duty.

Londonderry was not a backwater posting, whatever training duty sounds like. The approaches to the Foyle had been the Royal Navy's forward base for the Battle of the Atlantic, and after the war the Admiralty kept it as the centre of British anti-submarine work, running the Joint Anti-Submarine School there with the Royal Air Force. Ships like Creole spent their days off the Antrim coast being hunted by submarines and hunting them back, in the deep water where it could be done properly, so that new officers and ratings arrived in the fleet already knowing what a submarine sounds like. It is not a glamorous entry on a service record. It is arguably the most useful thing a surplus destroyer can do.

HMS Creole took part in the 1953 Coronation Review celebrating the accession of Queen Elizabeth II, one of the great ceremonial gatherings of the Royal Navy's postwar fleet, before being laid up in reserve in 1954, her modest training career at an end.

A Second Career as PNS Alamgir

HMS Creole was sold to Pakistan on 29 February 1956 and renamed PNS Alamgir, refitted by Thornycroft at Woolston ahead of the transfer, with her original 'B' gun turret reinstated and her 'X' position gun replaced by two Squid anti-submarine mortars, a substantial modernisation carried out under the American Military Assistance Program that facilitated the transfer.

She was formally handed over to Pakistan at Southampton on 20 June 1958, and went on to serve in the Pakistan Navy for a further quarter of a century, considerably longer than the entirety of her original Royal Navy career, before finally being scrapped in 1982.

Her name did not stop there either. In 1982, the year the first Alamgir went to the breakers, the Pakistan Navy put the name straight onto another ship: a Gearing-class destroyer transferred from the United States, the former USS Cone, who carried it until 1998. That is the shape of the whole story in one detail. Pakistan built a navy in the 1950s out of British hulls, wore them out over twenty-five years, and then replaced them with American ones, keeping the names and letting the ships change underneath. Creole was one of the first British ships in that sequence and her name was one of the first handed on.

That second career included the one genuine taste of combat her whole story ever offered. On the night of 7-8 September 1965, during the second India-Pakistan war, PNS Alamgir formed part of a seven-ship task group, led by the cruiser PNS Babur alongside Khaibar, Badr, Jahangir, Shahjahan and Tipu Sultan, sent to bombard the Indian coastal town of Dwarka. The plan was as much a lure as an attack: destroying the radar station there while, it was hoped, provoking Indian warships out into the Arabian Sea, where the Pakistani submarine Ghazi lay waiting in ambush.

The results were rather less dramatic than the plan. Each ship fired around fifty rounds from a range of five or six miles, closing all the while, the whole bombardment over in a matter of minutes, but a rising tide between the ships taking position and opening fire sent most of the shells sailing over the town and into open fields; eyewitnesses found no casualties and only a single building hit, a railway retiring room, while some two dozen unexploded shells later recovered turned out to be elderly pre-partition British ordnance, dating from the 1940s, that Pakistan had inherited at independence and which mostly failed to go off at all. Alamgir's only combat action, then, amounted to rather more noise than damage, a fittingly anticlimactic footnote for a ship that had, after all, been built for a war that finished without her.

The two countries have never agreed about it since, which is itself part of the story. Pakistan calls it Operation Somnath, treats it as a naval victory and commemorates it every year; Indian accounts describe a militarily insignificant raid on an undefended fishing town that hit almost nothing. The physical evidence, one railway building and a field full of unexploded 1940s British shells, tends to support the Indian version, and the ambush the whole thing was designed to spring never happened because no Indian warship came out. Alamgir fired her guns in anger once in thirty-six years, and the argument about what it achieved has now been running for longer than she was afloat.

HMS Creole's story, arriving just too late for the war she was built to fight, spending her Royal Navy years quietly training the next generation of sailors, and then finding a remarkably long second career under a different flag, one that finally brought her within range of an actual enemy shore, reflects a pattern common enough among the many C-class destroyers completed in the last stages or immediate aftermath of the Second World War: ships whose real usefulness lay less in the fighting they were designed for than in the decades of steady, adaptable service, punctuated by the odd unexpected footnote, that followed instead.