HMS Kempenfelt (R03): From Anzio to Okinawa, and On to the Yugoslav Navy

Built at Clydebank

HMS Kempenfelt was ordered in December 1941 and laid down at the Clydebank yards of John Brown and Company, originally intended to be named HMS Valentine before the name was changed during construction as part of a wider wartime rationalisation of destroyer names.

The name she ended up with belonged to Rear Admiral Richard Kempenfelt, an innovative Georgian-era tactician remembered less for his victories, real as they were, than for the extraordinary way he died: he went down with almost 900 others when HMS Royal George rolled over and sank at anchor off Spithead in 1782 while being heeled for routine repairs, one of the worst peacetime disasters in Royal Navy history.

The admiral deserves rather better than to be remembered chiefly for the manner of his drowning, because he was one of the most quietly consequential officers the Royal Navy has ever had. Richard Kempenfelt was born in Westminster in October 1718, the son of a Swedish-born lieutenant-colonel in English service, went to sea in 1727 at the age of ten, made captain in 1757 and spent much of the Seven Years War off the Indian coast. His one celebrated action came in December 1781, when he fell on a French convoy off Ushant with twelve ships of the line against an escort of nineteen and came away with fifteen transports and no losses of his own, which is the sort of arithmetic that gets a man called the brains of the navy. It was not, however, what he was actually for. Kempenfelt was a reformer, and two of his ideas outlived every ship he ever served in.

The first was the signal book. Before him, the Navy signalled by hanging a particular flag in a particular place to mean a particular order, which meant the number of things a fleet could be told was limited by the number of flags and hoisting positions available, and admirals spent a good deal of their time being unable to say what they meant. Kempenfelt's answer was to stop treating flags as words and start treating them as numbers: a short hoist referred to a page and an entry in a printed book carried by every ship, so the vocabulary was no longer limited by the bunting but by the size of the volume, which could be as thick as anybody liked. Howe took the principle and built a numerical signal book on it in 1790, Sir Home Popham layered a vocabulary of some three thousand words and phrases on top of that in 1800, and the result is the reason Nelson was able to say something as long-winded as England expects that every man will do his duty from a quarterdeck at Trafalgar, in twelve hoists, with the word duty spelt out letter by letter because it was not in the book. His second idea was the divisional system: dividing a ship's company into divisions, each with a named officer answerable for the welfare, training and conduct of the men in it, which sounds obvious and was not, and which is still the way the Royal Navy organises itself today. Not bad for a man best known for going down with his ship at anchor.

The disaster itself is worth telling properly, because it was one of those accidents that happens for entirely mundane reasons. The Royal George was a hundred-gun three-decker of 1756, lying at Spithead in August 1782 storing for sea with Howe's fleet, which was about to sail for the relief of Gibraltar. A salt-water cistern pipe some three feet below the waterline needed replacing, and rather than dock a first rate for a plumbing job the ship was heeled by running her guns across to one side, with a lighter alongside loading stores and the lower gunports open. She heeled a little further than intended, took water through the ports, and went down upright on the bottom within a few minutes on the morning of 29 August. Kempenfelt was in his cabin, and the list had jammed the doors. Nobody has ever established how many died, because a ship storing for sea in a home port was full of wives, children, tradesmen and visitors, and no list of them existed; the estimates run from about eight hundred to well over nine hundred, and it stood as the worst British shipping disaster until the Titanic. The court martial acquitted every surviving officer and man and blamed the decay of her timbers. William Cowper, who was the most widely read poet in England at the time, wrote a lament for her the same day in Latin and later in English, and generations of Victorian schoolchildren learned the result, which begins Toll for the brave, by heart.

She was launched on 8 May 1943 and commissioned on 25 October that year, a W-class destroyer built to serve as a flotilla leader, and was adopted by the civil community of Hammersmith during a Warship Week fundraising campaign, one of many such adoptions that linked individual Royal Navy vessels to specific towns and boroughs back home, a small but remarkably meaningful gesture that helped ordinary Britons feel a personal stake in ships fighting a war a very long way from their own front doors.

The change of name from Valentine is a small thing that reveals how the wartime destroyer programme worked. From 1940 the Admiralty ordered destroyers not as classes but as flotillas, eight ships at a time, each flotilla taking a letter of the alphabet, and it worked through the alphabet twice over the course of the war. The first instinct was simply to reuse the names of the V and W boats of 1917, which is where Valentine came from. Then a tidier convention took hold: the eight ships of a flotilla take the class letter, and the ninth, the leader, takes the name of a distinguished dead officer instead. So the Q flotilla got Quilliam, who was Nelson's first lieutenant in Victory at Trafalgar, the R flotilla Rotherham, the S Saumarez, the T Troubridge, the U Grenville, the V Hardy, the Z Myngs, and the W flotilla got Kempenfelt. There was a second and more prosaic reason the name was going spare. The previous HMS Kempenfelt, a flotilla leader of 1931, had been handed over to the Royal Canadian Navy in October 1939 and renamed HMCS Assiniboine, under which name she rammed and sank a U-boat in the North Atlantic in 1942. The Royal Navy had lent the name out and simply issued it again. The U-class leader's own career is set out in the article on HMS Grenville (F197).

Anzio and Normandy

HMS Kempenfelt joined the 24th Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean in December 1943, in good time to support the Anzio landings the following month. On 21 January 1944 she and the destroyer HMS Inglefield, together with the Free French Le Malin, bombarded Gaeta, before screening the cruisers HMS Orion and Spartan the next day; on 27 January she turned her guns on a train near Formia and spent the rest of the day engaging crossroads, enemy mechanised infantry and gun positions ashore, unglamorous but essential fire support work in one of the harder-fought Italian campaigns of the war.

What she was doing off Anzio has a name that flattens it out completely, and naval gunfire support was in fact the single most useful thing the fleet did there. The landing on 22 January 1944 achieved total surprise and then stopped dead, and the beachhead spent four months penned into a strip of coastal plain overlooked from the Alban Hills, so that the Germans could see the ships and the ships could not see the Germans. Until enough field artillery had been landed across an open beach, a destroyer's 4.7-inch guns firing on a map reference were the heaviest weapons the beachhead had in any quantity, which is how Kempenfelt came to spend 27 January shooting at a train near Formia and then working through a list of crossroads, gun positions and columns of mechanised infantry. The reply came from two Krupp K5 railway guns of 280 millimetres, called Leopold and Robert by their crews and Anzio Annie and the Anzio Express by everybody being shot at, which lived in a railway tunnel on the Ciampino to Frascati line some thirty kilometres away, ran out to fire a few rounds under direction from forward observers and reversed back under cover before anybody could bomb them. A good deal of what they fired was aimed not at the soldiers but out to sea at the ships. What the beachhead was like for the vessels that supplied it is described in the article on HMS Anzio (L3003).

The other reply was more modern and a great deal harder to answer. The cruiser Spartan, which Kempenfelt had helped screen off the beaches on 22 January, was lying at anchor providing anti-aircraft cover a week later when the Luftwaffe came in at dusk on 29 January with radio-controlled glide bombs, attacking from over the land so that the ships were silhouetted against the afterglow and the shore echoes swamped the radar. One Henschel Hs 293 hit her by the after end of the second funnel, went through her and burst against the port side of a boiler room; she lost steam and power, burned, and rolled onto her beam ends in about thirty feet of water an hour later, with five officers and forty-one ratings killed or missing. The German guided bomb, what it could do to a warship and how the Allies eventually learned to jam it are described in the article on HMS Jervis (F00/G00). Anzio is where the Royal Navy discovered that a ship at anchor within sight of the enemy was no longer merely a target but an aimed one.

She was then assigned to Force J for the Normandy landings that June, providing fire support for the invasion beaches and subsequent operations ashore, adding a second major amphibious campaign to her growing list of credits within the space of just a few months.

Force J is worth naming properly, because the letter is not arbitrary: J was for Juno, and Force J was the naval force that put the Canadians ashore there. Kempenfelt came home in May 1944 and joined the 26th Destroyer Flotilla for it, and the flotilla's task on the morning of 6 June was the beach defences at Lagrune sur Mer, at the eastern end of Juno, where the seafront villas had been wired, mined and built into a continuous strongpoint. She sailed on 5 June as escort to one of the invasion convoys and spent D-Day itself with Bombardment Force E alongside the cruisers Belfast and Diadem, then went on shooting for another week as the fighting moved inland. There is a particular oddity in this stretch of her life that is easy to miss: within five months she had provided fire support for two opposed landings, on two different coasts, in two different seas, for two different armies, and would be doing the same thing on the other side of the world within a year.

From the Tirpitz to Okinawa

Before she ever reached the Far East, HMS Kempenfelt spent the summer of 1944 with the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, and on 22 August screened the carriers HMS Indefatigable, Furious and Formidable, the battleship HMS Duke of York and the cruisers HMS Berwick and Devonshire during Operation Goodwood, one of a series of carrier strikes launched against the German battleship Tirpitz in her Norwegian fjord anchorage.

Operation Goodwood was five separate carrier strikes flown between 22 and 29 August 1944, and for all the tonnage involved it very nearly did not scratch the paint. Tirpitz was hit once, by a 1,600lb armour-piercing bomb that failed to explode, and the plain truth was that the Fleet Air Arm had no aircraft that could carry a weapon heavy enough to get through her deck armour from the height needed to arm it. The job was finished in November by RAF Lancasters with 12,000lb Tallboys. What the carriers went through to achieve so little is set out in the article on HMS Indefatigable (R10). For the destroyers of the screen it was a fortnight of station-keeping in bad Arctic visibility with nothing whatever to shoot at, which is most of what screening actually consists of.

She was then sent out to the Far East, taking command of the 27th Destroyer Flotilla, whose other ships, HMS Wakeful, Whirlwind, Wager, Wessex and Whelp, were all fellow W-class sisters. Sailing from Trincomalee on 16 January 1945 as part of Force 63, she screened the carrier strikes of Operation Meridian against the Japanese-held oil refineries at Palembang in Sumatra, which between them supplied the bulk of Japan's aviation fuel, hit on 24 and 29 January in two of the most economically damaging raids the British Pacific Fleet ever carried out.

Leading the 27th Destroyer Flotilla made her Captain (D), and the job was rather more than seniority. A flotilla leader carried the extra accommodation, offices, signal staff and wireless for a captain commanding eight ships as a unit, which meant that when the flotilla was screening a fleet it was Kempenfelt's bridge that worked out the stations, ordered the zigzags, ran the anti-submarine plot and dealt with the endless administrative traffic that eight destroyers generate. Her flotilla contained a young first lieutenant who would become considerably better known than any of the ships in it: Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, later the Duke of Edinburgh, was second in command of HMS Whelp, and would be standing on her deck in Tokyo Bay for the surrender. His ship's story is told in the article on HMS Whelp (R37).

The Palembang strikes were an extraordinary piece of work and the reasons why are set out in the article on HMS Illustrious (87), including the murder of the nine captured aircrew after the Japanese surrender. What is worth adding here is the part that fell to the destroyers, which was fuel. Palembang is the better part of seventeen hundred miles from Trincomalee, there was no Allied harbour anywhere near it, and the British Pacific Fleet had to do the whole operation out of its own pocket: no base, no shore support, and a fleet train of mostly chartered merchant tankers assembled at short notice, using replenishment-at-sea techniques the Royal Navy had barely practised while the Americans had been refining them for three years. Destroyers burn fuel faster than anything else in a fleet and have the smallest tanks to burn it from, so the W-class ships were the constraint on the entire operation. The two-day pause between the strikes of 24 and 29 January was not tactical subtlety; it was fuelling, and it took very much longer than the plan allowed because the tankers could not deliver at the rate the fleet needed. Two of the most economically damaging air raids of the Pacific war were governed, in the end, by how fast oil could be pumped through a hose in a swell.

By May 1945 she was off Okinawa with the British Pacific Fleet's Task Force 57, screening the fleet against Japanese air attack and, from 11 May, serving as a radar picket alongside HMS Swiftsure to give advance warning of incoming kamikazes during one of the largest and bloodiest amphibious operations of the entire Pacific War. She rescued the crew of a ditched Avenger during the campaign, and in late May escorted the carrier HMS Formidable, badly damaged by a kamikaze strike, first to Manus and then on to Sydney for repairs.

Radar picket duty off Okinawa was the most dangerous job any surface ship did in the Second World War, and the figures are not close. The Americans ringed the island with fifteen picket stations reaching out about eighty miles, each holding a destroyer or two supported by a pair of gun-armed landing craft, whose task was to see the kamikazes coming across the East China Sea and put fighters onto them before they reached the invasion fleet. Of the 101 destroyers that served on those stations, ten were sunk and thirty-two damaged; taken across all 206 ships that did picket duty, twenty-nine per cent were sunk or damaged. The reason is brutally simple. A picket is by definition the first thing an incoming pilot sees, and a pilot who has already accepted that he is going to die will very often settle for the first ship rather than search onwards for a better one. The pickets were, in effect, bait that could shoot back, and the men on them were entirely aware of it.

The British arrangement was different, because Task Force 57 was not guarding an invasion but operating as a self-contained force off the Sakishima Gunto, and it produced one genuinely elegant idea. Instead of a static ring, a cruiser and a destroyer were stationed roughly thirty miles out on the bearing of the target, and given a second duty alongside early warning: returning British strike aircraft were required to present themselves to a fighter patrol controlled by the picket and be looked over before they were allowed to close the fleet. The Japanese had worked out that the easiest way past a fighter screen was to tuck a suicide aircraft into the back of a formation coming home, and the fleet's own report on the campaign described the inspection expedient, with characteristic understatement, as having been of great value. Kempenfelt went out to the picket station with the cruiser Swiftsure when the arrangement was set up on 12 May 1945, and it was on that first day that a Firefly spotted a ditched Avenger crew in the water and she went and collected them.

The ship she escorted away at the end of the month had earned the trip. Formidable was hit by kamikazes twice in the space of a week early in May, absorbed both because she had an armoured flight deck, and went on flying, but by the third week of the month the accumulated damage below had told and she needed a proper yard. Her account of it is in the article on HMS Formidable (67). Nursing a damaged fleet carrier from off Okinawa to Manus and then on to Sydney is roughly four thousand miles of escorting a large, slow and conspicuous casualty across an ocean that still contained submarines, and it was among the least glamorous and most necessary things a destroyer could be given to do.

A Second Life as the Yugoslav Kotor

Her last wartime job was arguably her most quietly telling. On 27 August 1945 she sailed from Subic Bay with the destroyers Whirlwind, Quadrant and Ursa, screening the carriers HMS Indomitable and Venerable and the cruisers HMS Swiftsure, Euryalus and Black Prince, to reoccupy Hong Kong and accept the Japanese surrender there. It was Kempenfelt, not the flagship, that led the task force into Victoria Harbour, on the entirely practical logic that it was rather less expensive to lose a destroyer to an unswept mine than a cruiser, giving her a genuinely remarkable wartime range: from the beaches of Anzio and Normandy to the oilfields of Sumatra, the kamikazes of Okinawa and, finally, the minefields of Hong Kong harbour, all within about eighteen months.

The mines that made her expendable were not Japanese. American aircraft and submarines had spent the previous two years sealing Hong Kong up to deny it to Japanese shipping, and the result by August 1945 was a harbour approached through fields that nobody on the British side had charted, because nobody on the British side had laid them. The positions had to be asked for by wireless from the Japanese commander of a garrison that was still, in the strictest legal sense, at war, and then acted upon on trust. On 29 August aircraft flew over the colony dropping messages; on the 30th Kempenfelt went in through the Lye Mun Pass ahead of Rear Admiral Cecil Harcourt in Swiftsure, with Euryalus and the Canadian anti-aircraft cruiser Prince Robert behind, and the battleship Anson and the carriers held outside the mineable water until it was known to be safe. What they found was a city that had been under occupation for three years and eight months, with prison camps to open, no functioning civil administration and no garrison at all beyond the ships' companies and a body of RAF personnel, until the commandos arrived some days later. There was also a flotilla of Japanese explosive motorboats based in the colony, and nobody knew for certain what their crews intended to do about a surrender announced on the radio a fortnight earlier. Prince Robert's presence was the sort of thing that only the Second World War could arrange: she had escorted the convoy that carried the Winnipeg Grenadiers and the Royal Rifles of Canada out to Hong Kong in 1941, and she had come back to take home whichever of them were still alive. The carrier's view of the same operation is in the article on HMS Indomitable (92).

HMS Kempenfelt returned to Britain in January 1946 and was placed in reserve, before being sold to Yugoslavia in 1956.

Renamed R-21 Kotor, she was recommissioned into the Yugoslav Navy on 10 September 1959, going on to serve for a further decade before finally being decommissioned and scrapped in 1971, closing out the career of a destroyer whose wartime record, taking in some of the most significant operations of both the European and Pacific theatres, was matched by an equally lengthy second act flying an entirely different flag.

Why Yugoslavia should have been shopping for British destroyers in 1956 takes a little explaining, and the answer is the most interesting political fact of her second career. Tito broke with Stalin in 1948 and was expelled from the Cominform, which left a communist state standing entirely alone outside the Soviet bloc and reasonably expecting to be invaded by it. The West, unable to believe its luck, began supplying arms from 1951, but the American aid programme handed over radar, navigational gear and anti-submarine equipment rather than ships, so anything that floated had to be bought. In the mid-1950s the cheapest serviceable destroyers on earth were British ones lying in reserve, and Kempenfelt and her sister Wager were towed away in October 1956 for a refit that took the better part of three years in a Yugoslav yard. They recommissioned in 1959 as Kotor and Pula, Kotor being the bay in Montenegro at the head of which the Yugoslav navy kept its principal base. There is a nice irony in the date. In July 1956 Tito had sat down on the island of Brioni with Nasser and Nehru to draft the declaration that became the founding document of the Non-Aligned Movement, and in October, while the Royal Navy was preparing to go into Suez against Nasser, it was selling two destroyers to the man who had just helped Nasser write it.

Add up her service and the proportions are startling. She was laid down in June 1942, commissioned in October 1943 and in reserve by January 1946, which is twenty-seven months of commissioned service in the Royal Navy; into that she fitted Anzio, Normandy, a strike on Tirpitz, the Sumatran oilfields, Okinawa and the reoccupation of Hong Kong, which is a fair summary of the last two years of the war on both sides of the world. Then came ten years laid up, three in a Yugoslav yard and twelve on the Adriatic under another flag. She spent roughly a tenth of her existence doing what she was built to do, and rather more of it than most. Her class bears that out: the eight W-class destroyers were ordered as expendable ships for a war of attrition and not one of them was lost. Three ended up in the South African navy, two in the Yugoslav, three stayed British, and every one of them outlived by decades the emergency that had caused them to be ordered in the first place. It is not the ending anybody designed for them, and it is a good deal better than the alternative.