HMS Nadder (K392): The Only Bombay-Based Ship That Refused to Mutiny

Built on Teesside

HMS Nadder was built by Smiths Dock Co. Ltd at South Bank-on-Tees in 1943, a River-class frigate displacing 1,370 tons standard, armed with two 4-inch guns, eight 20mm anti-aircraft guns and a Hedgehog anti-submarine projector, one of a highly successful class of ocean-going escorts that did much of the unglamorous but essential work of keeping Allied convoys safe through the worst years of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Fighting Through the Strait of Gibraltar

HMS Nadder escorted Convoy UGS 37 through the Strait of Gibraltar in April 1944, a passage that came under heavy German air and submarine attack, during which she engaged three separate enemy submarines, a notably intense baptism of fire for a frigate not long into active service.

Capturing a Mutinous Corvette

HMS Nadder played an unusual role that same month in the Greek Naval Mutiny, an uprising among Greek naval personnel serving alongside Allied forces, capturing the corvette Apostolis during the episode, a task that called for rather different skills than the anti-submarine work she had been built for.

The operation to retake the mutinous ships came on the night of 22 to 23 April 1944, led by the cruiser HMS Phoebe against Greek vessels anchored in Alexandria harbour. Apostolis put up fierce initial resistance before her crew's defence collapsed and she surrendered within half an hour, a considerably shorter fight than the two Greek destroyers boarded alongside her that same night.

It is worth saying what the Greeks were mutinying about, because it was not pay or food. Their government had been driven out of Greece in 1941 and was sitting in Egypt while the actual fighting at home was being done largely by the resistance, and a very large part of that resistance answered to the National Liberation Front, EAM, which the government-in-exile did not represent at all. From 4 April 1944 sailors on five Royal Hellenic Navy ships formed committees and refused to sail until the government was reconstituted to include them.

The Prime Minister, Tsouderos, resigned; his successor made no difference and the thing spread. A vice-admiral, Petros Voulgaris, was brought out of retirement to end it, which he did with British help over the following three weeks. Apostolis, which Nadder took, was one of three ships that held out longest, along with the destroyer Ierax and the corvette Sakhtouris; the old armoured cruiser Averof gave in without a shot at Port Said on 29 April. It was a political argument settled by boarding parties, and the argument itself went on to become the Greek civil war.

Sinking U-198

HMS Nadder contributed to the sinking of the German submarine U-198 near the Seychelles on 12 August 1944, sharing the kill with the frigate HMS Findhorn and the Indian sloop HMIS Godavari, a genuine and confirmed anti-submarine success against a U-boat that had already sunk eleven Allied ships and would take all 66 of her own crew down with her, before going on, less than a month later on 10 September, to rescue 95 survivors from the merchant vessel SS Troilus, torpedoed by the submarine U-859, a rescue that undoubtedly meant a great deal more to those 95 men than any statistic could ever convey.

Commended for Bravery Off Sumatra

HMS Nadder took part in Special Operations Executive support operations off Sumatra between 7 and 11 August 1945, and her crew received commendations for bravery, skill and determination during enemy air attacks encountered during that mission, a fitting close to a wartime record that had already combined hard combat, rescue work and a fair share of the unexpected.

The Only Ship That Didn't Mutiny

HMS Nadder was transferred to the Royal Indian Navy in 1945 and renamed HMIS Shamsher, and in February 1946 achieved a truly remarkable distinction: she was the only Bombay-based ship of the Royal Indian Navy that did not join the widespread mutiny among Indian naval personnel that broke out that month, a major uprising driven by grievances over pay, conditions and colonial treatment that shook British authority across the subcontinent in the final months before independence.

The Indian mutiny needs the same treatment, because it is one of the more consequential things she was caught up in. It began on 18 February 1946 at HMIS Talwar, the signal school in Bombay, when the ratings refused duty. The grievances were the food, the racial abuse they took from British officers, and the plain fact that they were paid on a different and lower scale than the Royal Navy men standing next to them doing the same job.

It went off like a fuse. By 20 February seven thousand men were out in Bombay; within days it was more than twenty thousand ratings in seventy-eight ships and shore establishments across India. Fourteen delegates put a list of demands to the flag officer at Bombay: action against Talwar's commanding officer, decent Indian food, and Royal Navy rates of pay and family allowance. There was shooting in the streets. The House of Commons was debating it on the 22nd.

It ended on 23 February, when Sardar Patel and, from the other side of the partition that was coming, Muhammad Ali Jinnah both told the strike committee to stop, on an assurance that nobody would be punished. Historians generally reckon the mutiny, following the trials of the Indian National Army officers, was one of the things that finally convinced London that holding India was no longer a practical proposition. Britain announced its departure within the year.

Which puts Shamsher's abstention in a rather different light from loyalty. She was at sea, which helped. But her captain's own explanation to the Commission of Inquiry was that his officers were mostly Indian, so the specific grievance that set the rest of the fleet alight, being commanded by men who did not respect you, did not exist aboard his ship. The one Bombay-based ship that did not mutiny did not mutiny because it had already fixed the thing everyone else was mutinying about.

Shamsher happened to be at sea when the mutiny broke out on 18 February, which certainly helped keep her out of it, but her commanding officer, Lieutenant Nilakanta Krishnan, later gave evidence to the official Commission of Inquiry suggesting there was more to it than simple timing: unlike most RIN ships, Shamsher's officers were predominantly Indian themselves, which he believed did much to defuse the racial friction fuelling unrest elsewhere in the fleet. Krishnan went on to considerably bigger things, rising to Vice Admiral, earning the Padma Bhushan, and commanding the Eastern Naval Command during India's 1971 war with Pakistan, not a bad career trajectory for a young officer whose first taste of real command came aboard a former Royal Navy frigate that quietly refused to join a mutiny.

Serving Pakistan

HMS Nadder passed to the newly formed Pakistani Navy in 1947 following the partition of British India, serving there as a training vessel under the name PNS Shamsher, a fitting final role for a ship whose wartime record of hard-won competence made her well suited to teaching the next generation of a brand new navy's sailors, before being sold for scrap on 2 March 1959.