HMS Nepal (D125): Nearly Cut in Two by a Bomb, Renamed to Honour an Ally

Nearly Destroyed Before Her Career Began

HMS Nepal was laid down on 9 September 1939 by John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston in Hampshire, originally under the name HMS Norseman, and launched on 4 December 1941 at a cost of £402,939.

Disaster struck almost immediately: an air raid that same month scored a direct hit that nearly cut the destroyer clean in two, a properly severe blow for a ship that had not yet even entered service.

During the lengthy repairs that followed, she was renamed Nepal, in recognition of that nation's substantial wartime contribution to the Allied cause, a fitting tribute considering the tens of thousands of Nepalese Gurkha soldiers then serving in British and Indian forces around the world.

The tribute was more pointed than a name usually is. Nepal was not a colony, a protectorate or a dominion. The Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Friendship, signed on 21 December 1923, had been Britain's first formal recognition of Nepal as a sovereign and independent state, which made her one of the very few genuinely independent allies Britain had anywhere in Asia.

What that ally provided was men, in numbers no country of its size had any business producing. By the end of the war there were forty Gurkha battalions in British service, together with parachute, garrison and training units, something over a hundred and twelve thousand men. Across the two world wars the Gurkha Brigade took forty-three thousand casualties, and twenty-six Victoria Crosses have been won within it, thirteen by Gurkhas and thirteen by their British officers. What the regiments did when a ship named for them was lost is described in the article on HMS Gurkha (F122). Putting the name of an independent Himalayan kingdom on a Thornycroft destroyer was not a courtesy. It was an acknowledgement of a debt.

Commissioned Into an Ally's Navy

HMS Nepal was commissioned on 11 May 1942, not into the Royal Navy directly but into the Royal Australian Navy, though she remained Royal Navy property throughout, an arrangement not uncommon for ships of her class. She briefly found herself before the cameras as well, used to represent the fictional HMS Torrin in the acclaimed 1942 war film In Which We Serve, a role with a genuine pedigree: the film itself was based on the real wartime career of HMS Kelly under the command of Lord Louis Mountbatten.

Not uncommon is putting it mildly. Eight N-class destroyers were laid down in British yards in 1939 to Royal Navy order, and not one of them fought the war with a British ship's company aboard. Five went on loan to the Royal Australian Navy: Napier, Nestor, Nizam, Norman and Nepal. Two were bought outright by the Dutch government while they were still on the stocks, to replace the destroyers the Netherlands had lost in 1940, and became Van Galen and Tjerk Hiddes. The eighth, laid down as Nerissa, was handed to the Polish Navy in October 1940 before she was finished.

That last one is worth the detour. As ORP Piorun she was in the screen searching for the Bismarck in May 1941, found her in the dark, and rather than shadowing quietly turned in and engaged a battleship with 4.7-inch guns, holding contact and drawing fire while the heavy ships came up. Of the eight, Nestor was the only one lost, sunk by air attack in the Mediterranean on 16 June 1942.

And Nepal was very nearly one of the Dutch pair. Norseman, as she then was, and Norman had originally been earmarked for the Netherlands; it was the bomb that nearly cut her in half at Woolston that put her out of the running, and Noble and Nonpareil went instead. The air raid that almost ended her before she started is also the reason she is called Nepal.

Escort Duty Across the Indian Ocean

HMS Nepal was reassigned to the British Eastern Fleet in July 1942, and took part in the Madagascar campaign that September, screening the battleship HMS Warspite for the landings at Majunga under Operation Stream and again at Tamatave under Operation Jane, before settling into a long stretch of convoy escort and anti-submarine patrol work operating out of Kilindini in East Africa.

In late November 1942 she diverted to search for survivors of the torpedoed merchantman SS Pierce Butler, pulling 62 of her crew from the water, and the following few months saw her ship's mascot, a bull terrier named Major kitted out in his own miniature navy-blue coat and rank badges, finally left behind, by all accounts reluctantly, in South Africa.

She sailed to Australia in February 1943 as part of Operation Pamphlet, escorting troopships carrying the Australian 9th Division home from the Middle East, a voyage that turned genuinely hazardous when a severe cyclone struck the convoy between Mauritius and Diego Garcia. After a two-month refit she resumed Eastern Fleet operations from Trincomalee from June that year onward, and in April and May 1944 provided carrier escort for USS Saratoga and HMS Illustrious during Operations Cockpit and Transom, striking Japanese-held Sabang and Surabaya respectively.

Supporting the Army in Burma

HMS Nepal supported the 74th Indian Infantry Brigade alongside her sister ship HMAS Napier during the Burma campaign between December 1944 and February 1945, coastal operations that called for close cooperation between naval gunfire and troops fighting ashore. She helped land Royal Marine Commandos for the assault on Akyab Island on 3 January 1945, only to find the Japanese garrison had already withdrawn, then embarked Admiral Sir Arthur Power for the operation against Cheduba Island later that month, before supporting further landings on Ramree Island in early February. Electrical Artificer 4th Class Edward Chapman earned a Mention in Dispatches for gallantry during this stretch of the campaign. On 5 February 1945 she struck a submerged rock in the Kaleindaung River, damaging a propeller, but remarkably continued operations regardless.

Into the Pacific Fleet

HMS Nepal transferred to the British Pacific Fleet in March 1945, her pennant number changing from G25 to D125 around this period, and remained with the fleet through to the end of the war, earning battle honours for the Indian Ocean, Burma, the wider Pacific campaign and Okinawa, a broad and demanding span of service for a single destroyer across some of the most difficult naval theatres of the entire war.

Her Pacific Fleet service put her in the thick of the kamikaze war: as part of the destroyer screen protecting the fleet's carriers, she watched HMS Formidable and HMS Illustrious both take kamikaze hits during the fighting for Okinawa, which finally fell to American forces on 2 July 1945 after a brutal 98-day battle. On 8 July she rescued a downed pilot from the escort carrier HMS Ruler, one small mercy amid months of relentless air attacks.

Nepal was anchored at Manus Island on 15 August 1945 when word came through of Japan's surrender, and went on to reach Tokyo Bay on 6 September, four days after the formal surrender ceremony aboard USS Missouri had already taken place. She made up for the near miss later that month, embarking Vice Admiral Sir Bernard Rawlings for the reopening of the British Embassy in Tokyo on 17 September, with her own sailors marching in the accompanying parade.

Home After Three and a Half Years

HMS Nepal arrived at Sydney on 22 October 1945, was decommissioned from Australian service and formally returned to the Royal Navy, recommissioning under her original flag just eight days later, on 19 November, and arriving back in the United Kingdom on 28 December 1945 after a deployment lasting some three and a half years and, by her own log, some 224,628 miles steamed. Her only fatality of the entire war came almost as an afterthought to it: Lieutenant Hector Roberts, RANVR, died in Japan on 19 November 1945 and was laid to rest in the Yokohama War Cemetery.

She subsequently served as a minesweeper trials vessel based first at Portsmouth and later at Rosyth, before becoming a sea training vessel based at HMS Lochinvar on the Firth of Forth.

A Cancelled Conversion, Then Scrapped

HMS Nepal was reduced to reserve in early 1951 and was nominated for conversion to a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate in 1954, a modernisation programme that transformed many surplus wartime destroyers into useful Cold War escorts, though the project was cancelled that May before work began. She sat in reserve at Plymouth and then Penarth until finally being sold for scrap in May 1955.

She passed to the British Iron and Steel Corporation in January 1956 and arrived at the Briton Ferry yard for scrapping on 16 January that year, closing out the career of a destroyer whose service had begun with a bomb that nearly ended her before she started, and ended with a modernisation that never quite got the chance to begin.