HMS Rotherham (H09): The Flotilla Leader That Took the Surrender of the Japanese Navy at Singapore

A Leader Named for Trafalgar

HMS Rotherham was built as the flotilla leader of the R Class, the 4th War Emergency Flotilla, with the extra accommodation and signalling equipment needed to carry a captain commanding a flotilla and his staff.

John Brown and Company of Clydebank were given the order on 2 April 1940, but the yard was taken up with repairing ships damaged off Norway and in the evacuations from France, and she was not laid down until 10 April 1941. She was launched on 21 March 1942 and completed on 27 August 1942.

She was the first ship of the name, and she was named not after the town but after a man: Captain Edward Rotheram, who commanded Collingwood's flagship Royal Sovereign, the first British ship into action at Trafalgar. His name was spelled differently, but the ship took the spelling of the Yorkshire town of Rotherham, then in the West Riding, which adopted her after its Warship Week in March 1942.

Her badge was a gold stag within a wreath of oak leaves. Her first captain, Captain Francis de Winton, was Captain (D) of the 11th Destroyer Flotilla.

The photograph shows her in September 1942, newly completed and lying on a still river, in disruptive camouflage of pale and dark grey with green fields and trees along the bank behind her.

Troopships by Way of Brazil

After working up at Scapa Flow she sailed at the end of October 1942 with the escort of convoy WS 24, six troopships bound round the Cape for the Middle East and India. With the convoys for the North African landings filling the eastern Atlantic, WS 24 was routed far to the west, and instead of calling at Freetown it put into Bahia in Brazil, which had declared war on Germany and Italy that August.

The Brazilian authorities asked for the British troops to march through the city, and they did. Rotherham took the convoy on to Durban, arriving on 4 December, and for most of 1943 the 11th Flotilla was based there, escorting the troop convoys between Freetown, Cape Town and Durban, with her sisters Racehorse and Relentless often in company.

The Eastern Fleet

At the end of 1943 the flotilla moved to Trincomalee, and through 1944 Rotherham led it in the screen of the Eastern Fleet as the British carriers began to strike back at the Japanese.

In April she screened Queen Elizabeth, Valiant and the cruisers covering Illustrious and the American carrier Saratoga in the first strike on Sabang, and in May she went with them to Exmouth Gulf in Western Australia to refuel before the strike on Soerabaya in Java.

In June she screened the attack on Port Blair, and on 25 July, in Operation Crimson, she was in the screen when the battleships and cruisers bombarded Sabang. In August and September there were further strikes on Sumatra.

Captain Hilary Biggs took command in August 1944, and in the autumn she went to Simonstown for a refit.

Raiding the Burma Coast

By 1945 the Japanese garrisons in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and along the Burma coast depended on small ships and sailing craft for their supplies, and the destroyers of the East Indies Fleet went after them. In February Rotherham led Rocket, Rapid and Roebuck on a sweep of the Andaman Sea; finding no shipping, they bombarded Great Coco Island, firing more than a thousand 4.7 inch shells between them.

On 1 March, off Tavoy Island, the four ships caught three coasters and sank them, and two days later they shelled Port Blair, sinking two sailing vessels in the harbour.

In April she sank a junk and a coastal steamer in a night action near Narcondam Island and bombarded the radar station on Great Coco, and on 12 April she came across 68 survivors of the Japanese naval tender Agata Maru, sunk by Liberator bombers earlier that day, and took them on board.

At the end of April she screened the battleships and cruisers covering the landings at Rangoon, and in May she was with the force sent to stop the evacuation of the Andamans, the operation in which Saumarez, Virago and the 26th Destroyer Flotilla sank the cruiser Haguro.

In July she was in the screen for Operation Livery, the clearance of the minefields off Phuket with Nelson and Sussex, when Japanese suicide aircraft made their last attacks on the fleet.

The Surrender at Singapore

When the war ended Rotherham was chosen to escort Sussex, the flagship of the 5th Cruiser Squadron, from Penang to Singapore. On 4 September 1945, preceded through the swept channel by six Japanese minesweepers, they anchored off the city, and that day the surrender of the Japanese forces at Singapore, some 77,000 men, was signed on board Sussex.

The next day Rotherham went on alone, up the Johore Strait to the great Singapore Naval Base, which the Japanese had held since February 1942, to accept the surrender of the 34,000 officers and men of the Imperial Japanese Navy there. She went in at action stations, not knowing what to expect, but the surrender was peaceful, and it was formally signed ashore at the base on 8 September.

Captain Biggs then took command of the dockyard itself, so that for a while a destroyer captain was in charge of the base the Royal Navy had lost three and a half years before.

The Navy did not forget. A plaque recording the surrender hung in the wardroom of the naval base until the Royal Navy left Singapore in 1971, and the main entrance to the dockyard was renamed the Rotherham Gate.

INS Rajput

Rotherham left Singapore on 27 September 1945 and sailed home to Portsmouth, where she paid off into reserve. In 1948 she was sold to the newly independent India, and in July 1949 she was handed over to the Indian Navy as INS Rajput, one of three R Class destroyers bought at the same time.

She served the Indian Navy for more than a quarter of a century, much longer than she had served the Royal Navy, and was finally placed on the disposal list in 1976. Her battle honours from the Second World War were Sabang 1944 and Burma 1945.