HMS Myngs (R06): From Screening Tirpitz Strikes to Sunk by Israeli Jets as an Egyptian Destroyer

Laid Down at High Walker

HMS Myngs was ordered on 12 February 1942 and built by Vickers-Armstrongs at High Walker on the Tyne, laid down on 27 May that year, launched on 31 May 1943 and commissioned on 23 June 1944, a Z-class destroyer serving as a flotilla leader, displacing 1,710 tons and capable of a properly fast 37 knots, armed with four 4.5-inch guns, five 40mm guns and eight torpedo tubes.

The name deserves a paragraph of its own, because Christopher Myngs is one of the more remarkable men the Royal Navy has ever named a ship after. He came up through the Commonwealth navy and the Caribbean, was a vice-admiral by his early forties, and on the last day of the Four Days' Battle in June 1666 he took his flagship Victory alongside the Dutch vice-admiral De Liefde so close that the yardarms nearly touched. Dutch marksmen shot him through the cheek and then the shoulder. He was carried home to Whitechapel and died there.

Samuel Pepys went to the funeral, and what he wrote afterwards is the best thing anybody ever wrote about the affection of sailors for an officer. As he was getting into his coach to leave, about a dozen of Myngs's seamen came up to the window in tears, and one of them spoke for the rest:

"We are here a dozen of us that have long known and loved and served our dead commander, Sir Christopher Myngs, and have now done the last office of laying him in the ground. We would be glad we had any other to offer after him and in revenge of him. All we have is our lives; if you will please to get his Royal Highness to give us a fireship among us all, choose you one to be commander, and the rest of us, whoever he is, will serve him, and if possible, do that that shall show our memory of our dead commander and our revenge."

One correction is owed to the record. Pepys also wrote that Myngs was a shoemaker's son who made a habit of boasting about it, and that part is now generally reckoned to be largely invention; his family were comfortable enough people in north Norfolk. The dozen men at the coach window are not in doubt. Which makes the name on a Z-class destroyer rather more than a label: she was carrying the name of a man whose crew, having just buried him, asked for one burning ship between them so they could go and say something about it.

Screening the Strikes on the Tirpitz

HMS Myngs joined the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet on commissioning, and spent much of her wartime service operating in the North West Approaches and escorting Russian convoys through the perilous Arctic waters.

She also took part in operations against the German battleship Tirpitz, providing protective screening for the aircraft carriers whose bombers repeatedly struck at the great battleship in her Norwegian fjord anchorage, a particularly important, if largely unglamorous, contribution to one of the most sustained naval campaigns of the entire war.

Her part in that came chiefly during Operation Goodwood that August, screening the carrier force that launched a series of raids against Tirpitz in her Kaafjord anchorage on 22, 24 and 29 August 1944, none of which managed to put the battleship permanently out of action. That job was finally left to RAF Lancasters and their Tallboy bombs that November, well after Myngs and her fellow escorts had done everything they could from the sea.

She transferred to the 4th Destroyer Flotilla in April 1945, in time to take part in Victory in Europe celebrations in London.

A Coronation and a Quiet Postwar Decade

HMS Myngs served through various flotilla assignments in the years after the war, attending the Coronation Review at Spithead in 1953 to mark the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II, before being placed in reserve pending conversion in May 1955, at which point she was earmarked for transfer to an entirely new owner.

Becoming El Qaher

HMS Myngs was transferred to Egypt and, following refits carried out by J. Samuel White at Cowes, was commissioned into the Egyptian Navy as El Qaher on 28 August 1956, joining the not inconsiderable ranks of former Royal Navy destroyers that went on to serve friendly and allied fleets around the world in their later years.

She wasn't alone in making that journey: her sister ship HMS Zenith was refitted and handed over on exactly the same day, becoming the Egyptian destroyer El Fateh. The timing, with hindsight, was remarkable. Both ships were formally commissioned into the Egyptian Navy on 28 August 1956, just nine weeks before Britain, in company with France and Israel, invaded Egypt over control of the Suez Canal; London had seriously considered cancelling the handover as the crisis escalated that same month, but let it go ahead regardless, meaning two of its own former destroyers briefly found themselves, at least on paper, flying the colours of a country its old owner was about to go to war with.

Sunk in the War of Attrition

HMS Myngs met her end far from British waters and long after her Royal Navy service had ended: on 16 May 1970, as El Qaher, she was sunk by Israeli Air Force aircraft at Berenice, Egypt, during the War of Attrition, the prolonged and bitter conflict fought between Egypt and Israel following the Six-Day War of 1967.

It was a notably sobering end for a destroyer that had once helped shield Allied carriers from one of the most feared warships in the German fleet, sunk in turn by aircraft in a conflict fought a quarter of a century after her own war had ended.

The attack came without warning while El Qaher lay at anchor off Berenice, Israeli jets, variously reported as Mirages or Phantoms, catching her at rest, and despite her crew returning fire with their anti-aircraft guns, the ship's bow was torn open against the adjacent reef under the weight of the attack. She never fully sank. Her wreck still lies there today, partly breaking the surface and running down to about 21 metres, anchor still gripping the seabed and her internal watertight doors standing open, now a popular Red Sea dive site patrolled by giant groupers rather than the German battleship she once helped keep bottled up in a Norwegian fjord.