HMS Rapid (F138): The Destroyer That Fought On, Trained On, and Was Finally Torpedoed by Her Own Side

Adopted by Suburban London

HMS Rapid began her career as an R-class destroyer, built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead and commissioned on 20 February 1943 under her first captain, Lieutenant Commander Michael Wilfred Tomkinson, DSC.

That year she was formally adopted by the communities of Sutton and Cheam under the wartime Warship Week savings campaign, a scheme that linked ordinary British towns to individual warships in exchange for raising money towards the war effort, giving sailors far from home a tangible connection to a specific corner of England rooted for their safe return.

Convoys to the Indian Ocean

Assigned to the 11th Destroyer Flotilla, Rapid spent her early service on Atlantic convoy defence duties down to Freetown, before transferring to the Eastern Fleet in Ceylon by the end of 1943. From there her war took her deep into the Indian Ocean and Pacific theatres, and by March 1945 she was operating with Force 68 in support of the Burma campaign.

Hit by Shore Batteries

That campaign cost Rapid dearly. Left to guard the seaward entrance to Stewart Sound, she was caught off guard by a hidden 6.1-inch Japanese shore battery, which put five shells into her and tore open her boiler rooms. When her sister ship HMS Saumarez arrived, she found Rapid dead in the water, on fire amidships and trailing steam and smoke from her funnels. The action killed eleven of her crew and wounded a further twenty-three, a heavy toll for a single engagement, and it was avenged in short order when the battleships HMS Queen Elizabeth and the Free French Richelieu pounded the offending battery at Stewart Sound into a series of craters.

The battleship that did the avenging has an article of her own here, and by March 1945 she was a very old ship indeed: HMS Queen Elizabeth had been commissioned in December 1914, fought at the Dardanelles, missed Jutland in dry dock, been sunk at her moorings in Alexandria by Italian frogmen and raised again. The 15-inch guns she put onto Stewart Sound were the same ones bought untested off a drawing board in 1912.

The destroyer that found Rapid burning is worth following too, because she had eighteen extraordinary months in front of her. HMS Saumarez was the leader of the 26th Destroyer Flotilla, and on the night of 15 and 16 May 1945, eight weeks after she pulled up alongside Rapid, she took five destroyers into the entrance of the Malacca Strait and sank the Japanese heavy cruiser Haguro in about an hour. It was the last major surface gun and torpedo action the Royal Navy has ever fought. Three of the ships that were with her that night have accounts here: HMS Venus (F50), HMS Verulam (F29) and HMS Vigilant.

What happened to Saumarez afterwards changed international law. On 22 October 1946 she was steaming through the Corfu Channel with the cruisers Mauritius and Leander and the destroyer Volage when she and Volage both struck mines. Forty-four men were killed. Britain took Albania to the International Court of Justice over it, and the court found that Albania had known the mines were there and had said nothing. The Corfu Channel case was the first contentious case the ICJ ever decided, and it is still the starting point for the law on a state's duty to warn. Saumarez herself was too badly damaged to be worth repairing and went for scrap.

She was towed to Akyab for repairs, work that was not completed until August 1945, by which point she was being prepared for Operation Zipper, the planned invasion of Malaya.

That operation was cancelled following the atomic bombings of Japan and the country's subsequent surrender, sparing Rapid and her crew from what would have been an even more dangerous undertaking.

Rebuilt as a Cold War Frigate

After a spell as an air training target ship attendant to aircraft carriers from 1946, Rapid underwent a major conversion at Alexander Stephen's yard on the Clyde between June 1951 and October 1953, emerging as a Type 15 anti-submarine frigate under the new pennant F138, one of many wartime destroyer hulls given a thorough Cold War makeover to extend their useful lives against a very different kind of threat.

She spent much of the following decade in the Reserve Fleet, appearing at Portsmouth Navy Days in 1959, before taking on a further training role between 1966 and 1973, teaching engine room artificers from Rosyth Dockyard the practicalities of keeping a warship running.

Target Practice for the Fleet She Once Served

Rapid's final years took on a rather different character. In 1976 she was deliberately used as a target, struck by missiles fired from HMS Bristol as part of weapons trials, and in 1977 she served as a target ship at Milford Haven, the fate that awaited many decommissioned warships whose hulls remained useful for testing the weapons meant to sink real enemies.

The two ships that finished her both have accounts here as well, which gives the whole business a slightly awkward family quality. HMS Bristol (D23), who put missiles into her in 1976, was herself the sole survivor of a class of four cancelled with the carriers they were meant to escort, and spent her long afterlife as a static training ship at Portsmouth. And HMS Onyx (S21), the boat usually credited with the torpedo, went on to be the only diesel submarine Britain sent to the Falklands the following year. Rapid's last service to the Royal Navy was to be shot at by two ships that had a good deal of career left in them.

Her career finally ended in September 1981, sunk as a target off the Pembrokeshire coast in what is commonly reported as a torpedo exercise by the submarine HMS Onyx, though Onyx's own detailed service record makes no mention of the sinking and sources differ on the exact date, giving it as either the 3rd or the 13th. Whichever vessel and date prove correct, it was a fittingly thorough end for a ship that had, by then, spent nearly four decades in one form of naval service or another.

A Long Service, Honestly Earned

From a wartime destroyer badly hurt by Japanese shore batteries in Burma to a rebuilt Cold War frigate and finally a truly useful target ship helping the Royal Navy test its own weapons, HMS Rapid's nearly forty-year career reflects just how much value the Navy continued to extract from a well-built wartime hull long after her original fighting days were over, right up to the moment she finally, deliberately, went to the bottom.