HMS Javelin (F61): The Destroyer That Lost Her Bow and Stern and Lived

Built on the Clyde

HMS Javelin was ordered on 25 March 1937 and built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down on 11 October 1937, launched on 21 December 1938 and commissioned on 10 June 1939, a J-class destroyer displacing 1,760 tons and armed with three twin 4.7-inch guns alongside two quintuple mounts of 21-inch torpedo tubes, a notably powerful armament for a ship of her size.

The J class was a genuine break with what had gone before, and the armament was only part of it. British destroyers of the 1930s had grown steadily and were becoming expensive, so the 1936 design went back to first principles: a shorter, beamier hull built on longitudinal rather than transverse framing, which is stronger for its weight and is the system used in almost every warship since; three boilers in three separate rooms reduced to two in two rooms, which is why the J class has one funnel where her predecessors had two; and the weight saved put into armament. She carried six 4.7-inch guns in three twin mountings, the first British destroyer class to have twins, and ten torpedo tubes in two quintuple mounts, which was the heaviest torpedo armament in any British destroyer. What it bought was a smaller, cheaper, harder-hitting ship, and the Navy liked it enough to build the K and N classes to the same design and then the L and M classes from the same thinking. What it did not buy was survivability against being hit, and the class was cut to pieces: of the twenty-four J, K and N boats, more than half were sunk, most of them in the Mediterranean.

Her early career gave little hint of the drama to come: she collided with her sister ship HMS Jersey on 22 September 1939, and then with a merchant vessel the following month, the kind of unglamorous mishaps that were an occupational hazard of destroyer work in crowded, blacked-out wartime waters.

Norway and Dunkirk

HMS Javelin escorted convoys to Norway during the campaign there in the spring of 1940, and on 21 April that year rescued 30 survivors from the merchant ship Cedarbank after she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-26, landing them safely at Aalesund.

The following month she took part in Operation Dynamo, the evacuation from Dunkirk, helping rescue survivors from the sinking SS Abukir amid the chaos of the beaches, exactly the kind of unglamorous rescue work that defined so much of the destroyer force's contribution to that operation.

The Night the Bow and Stern Came Off

HMS Javelin's war took its most dramatic turn on the night of 29 November 1940, when the 5th Destroyer Flotilla, comprising HMS Jupiter, Javelin, Jackal, Jersey and Kashmir under the command of Lord Louis Mountbatten, engaged the German destroyers Hans Lody, Richard Beitzen and Karl Galster off Plymouth. Under the command of Lieutenant Commander A. F. Pugsley, HMS Javelin was struck by enemy fire and, worse, by torpedoes, in an action that tore away both her bow and her stern in a single engagement, an almost unimaginable degree of damage for any ship to sustain and survive.

What actually happened that night is worth setting out, because it has been argued about ever since and it goes to the reputation of one of the most famous officers of the century. The three German destroyers were on a minelaying sortie and had no wish to fight; Mountbatten took his flotilla in to cut them off, and in doing so put his ships across the enemy's line of fire at close range in the dark. The mechanical detail is telling: a change of course at full speed and full helm threw Javelin's gunnery directors out of synchronisation, so that her director crews lost their targets at the exact moment they needed them. The Germans fired torpedoes and left. Javelin was hit forward and aft simultaneously, her after magazine went up, and three officers and forty-three ratings were killed. Mountbatten's contemporaries were not kind about it. He had a reputation in the fleet as a dashing, reckless and slightly unlucky commander, a Jonah in the old naval word, and a report written for the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet concluded flatly that he had blundered into a trap. Six months later he lost HMS Kelly and HMS Kashmir to dive bombers off Crete in a single morning, and inside two years he was a Vice Admiral and Chief of Combined Operations. Naval opinion of him has never entirely settled.

Of her original length of 353 feet, only some 155 feet remained afloat, and 45 of her crew were killed in the attack, a heavy loss suffered in the space of a particularly brutal few minutes at sea.

That HMS Javelin survived at all, let alone that she was subsequently towed home and rebuilt, stands as a remarkable testament to the basic toughness of a well-built destroyer hull, though it would take nearly a year of repair work before she was fit to fight again.

That she floated at all is a direct dividend of that design decision, and it is worth spelling out. Longitudinal framing runs the strength members fore and aft rather than in hoops around the hull, so the middle of the ship remains a rigid box even when both ends have gone; combined with properly built transverse bulkheads that were shored and held, it meant that when Javelin's bow and stern were blown off she was left as a 155-foot rectangular hull with intact ends, which is not a shape anybody designs but is a shape that floats. Getting her home was then a matter of towing a ship with no bow to shape the water and no rudder or propellers to steer with, at a few knots, in the Channel, in wartime. She was out of the line for well over a year, and given that she came back and fought for another three years, the yard work was worth every hour of it.

Back in the Fight

HMS Javelin returned to active service and went on to take part in Operation Ironclad, the invasion of Madagascar, helping seize the port of Diego-Suarez on 5 May 1942 alongside the battleship HMS Ramillies, and then Operation Vigorous the following month, the hard-fought attempt to run convoy MW-11 through to besieged Malta from Haifa and Port Said; heavy Axis air and sea opposition forced the convoy back to Alexandria on 16 June without ever reaching the island.

On the night of 19 and 20 January 1943, in what became known as the Action off Zuwarah, some 55 miles west of Tripoli, she and HMS Kelvin caught the last Italian ships fleeing the city and wiped out the whole group by morning: the flotilla leader RD36 sunk with all hands, RD37 and the Scorfano sunk with no survivors, the Marconi set ablaze though her crew got off in time, and the Irma finished off with a torpedo, a satisfying return to offensive action for a ship that had so nearly been lost off Plymouth little more than two years earlier.

The Zuwarah action is a small footnote to a large moment. Tripoli was the last major port the Axis held in Libya, and by mid-January 1943 the Eighth Army was closing on it from the east after Alamein; the city fell on 23 January. What Javelin and Kelvin caught on the night of the 19th were the last ships getting out, small auxiliaries and coasters loaded with whatever could be moved, running west along the coast in the dark. They destroyed the lot. It is an unglamorous piece of work and it is exactly what destroyers were for: the point of controlling a sea is that the other side cannot use it, including to run away. She had also been at Operation Vigorous the previous June, the failed attempt to fight a convoy through to Malta from the eastern end, described in the article on HMS Inconstant (H49). Seven months separates the worst convoy operation of the Mediterranean war from an action in which the Axis were the ones running.

A Difficult End and a Quiet Scrapping

HMS Javelin's service was not without further trouble. Early on the morning of 17 September 1945, off Rhodes, a number of her wartime-only "Hostilities Only" ratings simply refused to fall in for work, fed up with a return to strict pre-war spit-and-polish discipline months after the war in Europe had actually ended, and with demobilisation for men who had signed up only "for the duration" still nowhere in sight.

What happened aboard her off Rhodes in September 1945 was not an isolated act of bad temper; it was the leading edge of something that came very close to breaking the British armed forces. Millions of men and women had signed on for the duration and the duration was over, and the machinery for getting them home was slow, complicated and manifestly unfair, with shipping being used to repatriate American troops while British servicemen sat in the Middle East and Asia doing drill. What made it worse was the return of peacetime discipline: brasswork, divisions, ceremonial, the whole apparatus that had been suspended for six years, reimposed on men who had spent those years being shot at and who could not see why any of it mattered now. In January 1946 the same grievance produced the largest mutiny in the history of the Royal Air Force, when about fifty thousand men on some sixty stations across India, Ceylon and Singapore stopped work; it was entirely peaceful and lasted up to eleven days. The following month the Royal Indian Navy revolted, more than ten thousand sailors and seventy-eight of eighty-eight ships, and that one turned violent and helped convince the British government that India could no longer be held. The Viceroy blamed the RAF example directly. Javelin's ratings were four months ahead of all of it.

Three courts martial followed at Malta between 5 and 13 November 1945. Eighteen ratings were charged with mutiny and wilful disobedience; two were acquitted of mutiny but found guilty of absence from duty, and the other sixteen were acquitted of mutiny too but convicted of wilful disobedience, each given sixty days' detention suspended after the first thirty. A leading seaman had his own mutiny charge withdrawn but was convicted on the lesser counts. The heaviest sentences fell on eight petty officers, found guilty of mutiny itself and sentenced to a full year's imprisonment with dismissal from the service, a strikingly severe outcome for men whose actual offence, at bottom, was refusing to polish brass a few months after helping win a war.

The case was raised in the House of Commons that December by the MP Tom Driberg, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander, having reviewed the sentences, ordered the eight petty officers released immediately as an act of grace rather than serve out their year, though they still forfeited their campaign medals and reverted to a lower rank, a genuinely rare example of Whitehall softening a court martial's verdict once the full circumstances became public.

The sentences and the reprieve are both worth understanding. Mutiny in British naval law does not require violence or any attempt to take a ship; a combination of two or more people to disobey an order in circumstances subversive of discipline is enough, which is why sixteen ratings who refused to fall in could be charged with it, and why the eight petty officers, who were expected to enforce discipline rather than join in refusing it, were treated far more harshly. The definition, and the last time the Royal Navy used it, are described in the article on HMS Iveston (M1151). What is unusual here is the ending. Courts martial verdicts were very rarely disturbed, and the First Lord releasing eight convicted men as an act of grace after a question in the Commons is close to unheard of. It suggests that somebody in the Admiralty had looked at the circumstances, looked at the calendar, and concluded that a year in prison for declining to polish brass in September 1945 was not a defensible thing to have on the record.

She was eventually sold for scrap on 11 June 1949 and broken up at Troon in Scotland, closing out the career of a destroyer whose survival of a single catastrophic night off Plymouth remains, on its own, one of the more remarkable stories to come out of the Royal Navy's J-class destroyers.

Her ship's bell survives today at the Royal Canadian Legion in Burin, Newfoundland, a small, faraway memorial to a ship that came closer to being cut in two than almost any other Royal Navy vessel to survive the war.

The bell in Newfoundland is the sort of detail nobody can quite explain and everybody likes. Burin is a small town on the Burin Peninsula, a fishing community on the south coast of what was then a separate British dominion, and a Royal Canadian Legion hall there has HMS Javelin's bell hanging in it, several thousand miles from Clydebank and from Plymouth Sound. Ships' bells were often given away when a ship was scrapped, to affiliated towns, to churches, to units, and Newfoundland had a long and close relationship with the Royal Navy that ended when it joined Canada in 1949, the same year Javelin went to the breakers at Troon. Somewhere in that coincidence there is a story that has not been written down. What is certain is that a bell from a ship that had two thirds of herself blown off in the Channel in 1940 now hangs in a Legion hall in a Newfoundland fishing town, and that is a considerably better memorial than most destroyers get.