HMS Relentless (H85/F185): From an East Indies Destroyer to a Cold War Frigate

Commissioned for a War in the East

HMS Relentless was an R-class destroyer built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, laid down on 20 June 1941 and commissioned at Greenock on 30 November 1942, and unlike many of her sister ships whose war was fought largely in home and Atlantic waters, Relentless spent the bulk of her wartime service in the East Indies and Far East theatres.

Fulham's Destroyer

She was very nearly not a John Brown ship at all. The order went to Fairfield at Govan with the 4th Emergency Flotilla in May 1940 and was moved to Clydebank, where it then sat, because every yard on the Clyde was busy putting back together the ships that had come home from Norway and the Channel ports. She was laid down on 20 June 1941, launched on 15 July 1942 and completed on 30 November, and she was the second ship of the name after a First World War destroyer sold off in 1926. In March 1942, while she was still an unfinished hull, the London Borough of Fulham raised enough in a Warship Week savings campaign to adopt her, a scheme explained at greater length in the article on HMS Redpole (U69), who was adopted the same month by the Rural District of Kettering.

Her first job was not in the east at all. In December 1942 she was part of the destroyer screen for the battleships King George V and Howe and the cruisers Kent, Berwick and Bermuda, covering the passage of convoy RA51 home from the Kola Inlet. A month later she was on the Clyde joining a military convoy for Freetown, and she did not see British waters again for nearly three years.

Serving with the 11th Destroyer Flotilla, she carried out submarine-chasing operations and convoy escort duties across the Indian Ocean, work that earned her two battle honours, East Indies 1943 to 1944 and Sabang 1944, the latter marking her part in Operation Cockpit, the 19 April 1944 multinational carrier strike against Japanese shipping and airfields on Sumatra that brought together warships from six Allied navies.

Operation Canned, and the U-Boats' Petrol Station

This is the thing Relentless should be remembered for, and it is worth explaining why it mattered. In 1943 Germany began sending U-boats into the Indian Ocean, working from Penang, in what became the Monsun group. A U-boat is a short-legged animal a long way from Kiel, and the whole enterprise depended on a handful of surface tankers meeting them in empty water and handing over fuel. Kill the tankers and the boats go home. The most important of them was the Charlotte Schliemann, 7,747 tons, built at Nakskov in Denmark in 1928 as the Norwegian Sir Karl Knudsen, sold to a Hamburg owner in 1939 and taken over by the Kriegsmarine. She had refuelled U-178 and U-510 a hundred miles south-east of Mauritius on 28 January 1944.

The Navy had already had one go and missed. In June 1943 Relentless spent a week in the Indian Ocean hunting the same ship with the cruisers Suffolk and HMS Newcastle (C76) and the destroyers Nizam and Racehorse, and on the last day of the month the search was called off without a sighting. The ocean is very large and a tanker that does not want to be found is very small.

February 1944 was different, because this time the searchers had a rough idea where to look and Catalina flying boats out of Mauritius to look with. An aircraft found her on 11 February, about 950 miles east of Madagascar. U-532 was supposed to be refuelling from her and the weather had stopped it. Some time after midnight the tanker's people saw a warship, tried to run and could not. Her master ordered her scuttled and abandoned, and Relentless closed to two hundred yards and fired a salvo of eight torpedoes into her, one of which hit amidships and finished the job.

What happened next is one of the odder scenes of the war. Forty-one of her crew were pulled out of the water by a British destroyer, and the rest were picked up in the dark by the German submarine that had come to meet her. A month later the Navy caught her replacement, the tanker Brake. Between them those two sinkings ended the German submarine campaign in the Indian Ocean as a serious proposition. Relentless has no U-boat to her name, and she did more damage to the U-boat war out east than most ships that do.

The Sabang honour is worth pinning down too, because she earned it with her guns. On 25 July 1944 she was in the destroyer screen for one of the largest Allied forces ever assembled in the Indian Ocean: the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant, the battlecruiser HMS Renown, the French Richelieu, the Dutch Tromp and the cruisers Cumberland, Nigeria, Kenya, Ceylon, Gambia and HMS Phoebe (43). When the carrier aircraft had finished with Sabang, the fleet simply steamed in and shelled it, which was a deliberate piece of theatre as much as anything: after two years of being the weaker side out there, the Eastern Fleet wanted to be seen doing it in daylight.

In October she was at it again in a rather stranger cause. Operation Millet was a diversion, mounted against the Nicobar Islands specifically so that the Japanese would look west while the Americans landed on Leyte. Relentless screened the cruisers London, Cumberland and Suffolk in Group 2 of Force 63, bombarded shore targets on the 17th, and on the 19th watched the carrier aircraft see off the Japanese retaliation. The operation succeeded on its own terms, which is to say it convinced somebody of something several thousand miles away. Three of her flotilla mates have accounts here as well: HMS Rapid (F138) and HMS Roebuck (F195) were both in the 11th Destroyer Flotilla with her.

A Difficult Moment in 1945

Not every part of Relentless's wartime record was straightforward. On 13 June 1945 the ship experienced a documented mutiny among her crew, investigated by a Board of Inquiry convened at Trincomalee under orders from the Commander-in-Chief, East Indies. The timing explains much of it: Relentless had left the UK in January 1943, most of her ship's company had well over two years on the station behind them, and VE Day that May had brought news of Europe's war ending while the Far East campaign, and their own time away from home, showed no sign of stopping. Over half the crew, by contrast, had joined the ship only in the previous two months, junior ratings thrown together with little experience and even less patience for the delay, a genuinely combustible mix.

Naval discipline of the period dealt with such incidents firmly, and Relentless continued in active service through the last months of the war against Japan.

She had one more thing to be present at. Operation Zipper, the planned landings in Malaya, was overtaken by the surrender, and in September 1945 the fleet went in to reoccupy rather than to fight. On the 8th Relentless sailed from Penang for Singapore in company with the battleship HMS Nelson (28), and she was there for the formal surrender of Japanese forces in South East Asia. She had sailed from the Clyde in January 1943 and had not seen home since. A month after Singapore she was on her way back.

From Reserve to a New Role Entirely

With Japan's surrender, Relentless returned home and was placed in reserve, her wartime job done.

Rather than being scrapped as so many of her contemporaries were, she was selected for one of the Royal Navy's more thorough post-war transformations: between 1949 and 1951 she was rebuilt as a Type 15 anti-submarine frigate, re-emerging under the new pennant F185, part of a programme explicitly designed as a quick-fix deterrent against the fast, quiet submarines the Soviet Union was developing as the Cold War took shape.

She was not simply an example of the programme. She and her sister Rocket were the two prototypes for it, picked in 1949 to show the Royal Dockyards whether the idea worked at all. She was towed to Portsmouth and effectively taken apart above the waterline: the entire upper deck structure redesigned, a long low superstructure built the length of her, two anti-submarine mortars aft and a new asdic outfit fitted, and most of the gun armament simply deleted. What came out in July 1951 was recognisably the same hull and nothing else. A couple of dozen wartime destroyers followed her through the same rebuild, which is a great deal of anti-submarine capability bought for a fraction of what new construction would have cost, at a moment when the Treasury had nothing to spare.

Coronation Fleet Review and Colonial Patrols

As a frigate, Relentless led the 3rd Training Squadron between 1951 and 1952 under Captain Michael Le Fanu, a future First Sea Lord, and took part in the Coronation Fleet Review for Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, one of the great set-piece displays of British naval strength in the post-war era.

Her later service included Bahamas Patrol and Beira Patrol duties, the latter part of the international effort to enforce sanctions against Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence, along with a response to the 1967 Hong Kong riots, a global spread of postings for a hull originally built for a single theatre of a single war.

The Captain Who Stopped the Rum

Captain Michael Le Fanu is worth rather more than a subordinate clause. He had joined as a cadet in 1926, specialised in gunnery, and spent the first half of the war as gunnery officer of the cruiser Aurora: mentioned in despatches off Norway in 1940, and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in November 1941 for the night an Italian convoy was destroyed in the Mediterranean. He moved to the battleship Howe with the Eastern Fleet in 1944 and then, in January 1945, became the liaison officer between the British Pacific Fleet and the American Third Fleet, a job that won him the United States Legion of Merit and got him invited aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945 to watch the Japanese sign.

He took Relentless in October 1951 as Captain (F) of the Third Training Squadron. After her came HMS Ganges, then the carrier HMS Eagle (R05), then Controller of the Navy, then joint command of all three services in the Middle East during the withdrawal, and in August 1968 First Sea Lord. He was known throughout the service as Dry Ginger, and he is the man who abolished the rum ration: the signal went out on 17 December 1969 and the last tot was issued on 31 July 1970, a day the lower deck marked with black armbands and mock funerals and has called Black Tot Day ever since. His own farewell message to the fleet was in verse, and ended: very sad about tot, but thank you, good luck and goodbye.

He was to have been Chief of the Defence Staff. Instead he was found to have leukaemia, was promoted Admiral of the Fleet on his retirement on 3 July 1970, and died in London on 28 November that year, aged fifty-seven, four months after the last tot he had ordered stopped.

A Collision, a Long Reserve, and the End

Relentless's frigate career was not without incident, including a collision with the destroyer HMS Vigilant in 1954. She spent a long stretch in reserve from October 1956 to 1964, before recommissioning that June for service with the 29th Escort Squadron. That November brought an alarming reminder that a warship's dangers were not confined to wartime: leaving Cork Harbour on the morning of 21 November 1964, Relentless came under rifle fire from at least two gunmen ashore, who put around ten rounds into her from some 400 yards before vanishing, leaving a single bullet hole, a dent, and no casualties, an incident serious enough to be raised in the House of Commons within days.

The Commons exchange is worth reading, because it is a period piece. Captain Orr asked the Secretary of State for Defence what had happened. Christopher Mayhew replied on 30 November 1964 that Relentless had been leaving harbour, a mile upstream of Passage West, when at twenty-five to nine in the morning at least two men opened fire from about four hundred yards with .303 rifles or something like them. Around ten rounds were fired. The damage was one bullet hole and one dent. A police cordon went out and caught nobody, and the men were never identified.

Asked what the Irish Government had said about it, Mayhew replied that it had been mentioned to them, but that it was too minor an incident to expect a protest. Emanuel Shinwell suggested, with heavy irony, that the House might care to declare war on Ireland to satisfy certain interests. The Minister observed that the Navy had faced rather tougher engagements, and made a remark about the standard of marksmanship. Nobody was hurt, and Relentless carried on out to sea.

As newer, purpose-built Type 12 and Leander-class frigates entered the fleet through the 1960s, Relentless's role gradually diminished.

She paid off in 1968 and was laid up at Portsmouth, went onto the disposal list in 1970, was sold to Thos. W. Ward on 29 April 1971 and was towed to Inverkeithing that June for demolition.

One Hull, Two Careers

Very few Royal Navy ships were rebuilt so thoroughly, or served so long, under two entirely different identities.

From a wartime destroyer hunting submarines in the East Indies and weathering a serious crew mutiny, to a rebuilt Cold War frigate leading training squadrons and enforcing sanctions off the African coast, HMS Relentless packed the equivalent of two distinct naval careers into a single, remarkably durable hull.