HMS St Kitts: The Destroyer With No Stories to Tell

A Unique Name in Royal Navy History

HMS St Kitts holds a small but genuine distinction, being the only ship in the entire history of the Royal Navy to bear the name. It was chosen not simply for the Caribbean island itself but for the Battle of St Kitts, fought there on 25 and 26 January 1782, when Rear-Admiral Sir Samuel Hood, heavily outnumbered by the Comte de Grasse's French fleet, anchored his own ships in a defensive L-shape across Frigate Bay and beat off three separate attacks in succession, a tactical masterstroke still studied today even though he ultimately failed to stop the island itself falling to the French a few weeks later.

The battle is worth telling properly, because it is one of the cleverest things anybody has done with a fleet. In January 1782 the Comte de Grasse, fresh from the victory at the Chesapeake that had cost Britain the American colonies, was besieging St Kitts with twenty-nine ships of the line and his fleet was lying at anchor in the roadstead off Basseterre. Sir Samuel Hood had twenty-two. He could not fight de Grasse at sea and win, so he did not try. He stood towards the anchorage as though intending to attack, drew the French out to meet him, worked round them in the night, and at first light was sitting in the anchorage they had just left with his own ships moored bow to stern in a line so tight that no Frenchman could get between them or turn the end of it.

De Grasse attacked three times on 25 and 26 January and was beaten off each time by ships that were not going anywhere and could therefore concentrate every gun on the same bearing. It made no difference in the end: the garrison on Brimstone Hill surrendered a fortnight later, the island fell, and Hood slipped his cables one night and took his whole fleet out past the French without being noticed. Losing the campaign while winning every action in it is a very British sort of victory, and the Admiralty was still putting the name on ships a hundred and sixty years afterwards.

Beyond that single point of naval-history trivia, HMS St Kitts had a career with no combat in it at all. She never fired a shot at an enemy in eleven years of commission, which is unusual enough in itself for a ship laid down in wartime. An empty record is not quite the same thing as an uneventful one, though, and three episodes are worth setting out.

Built Too Late, Like So Many of Her Sisters

Built by Swan Hunter on the Tyne, laid down on 8 September 1943 and launched on 4 October 1944, HMS St Kitts was, as with several of her Battle class sisters, only commissioned on 21 January 1946, missing entirely the conflict that had prompted her construction.

Her early service therefore consisted of the standard postwar pattern of trials, exercises and fleet duties common to destroyers of her generation, joining the 5th Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet and having her pennant number changed from R18 to D18 in 1948 along with the rest of the fleet, a perfectly respectable if unremarkable start to what would prove to be a similarly unremarkable career throughout.

Three Things That Did Happen

The first is the strangest. In February 1949 St Kitts went north as one of the escorts for Operation Rusty, an experimental Arctic cruise mounted to find out, in the plainest possible terms, what extreme cold does to warships, aircraft and the people inside them. The light fleet carrier HMS Vengeance was the centrepiece, with St Kitts, HMS Gabbard, the frigate Loch Arkaig, the submarine Artful and the tanker Wave President in company at various times, and the whole force spent the better part of two months in Arctic waters between 5 February and 30 March. The lowest temperature recorded on the trip was five degrees Fahrenheit, which is twenty-seven below freezing.

It went about as well as that sounds. On 15 February the carrier ran into a piece of ice hard enough to hole her forward, and although the damage control parties patched her up in conditions that must have been indescribable, the repair never quite held and the leak dogged the rest of the trial; Vengeance went back to Rosyth on 9 March and into dry dock. The lesson learned was the one the Navy had gone looking for, which is that the Arctic breaks equipment designed for the Atlantic, and it is the sort of finding that only comes from sending real ships to find out. St Kitts was there for all of it.

The second is more decorative. On 15 June 1953 she was at Spithead for the Coronation Review, moored in the lines between two of her own sisters, HMS Camperdown (D32) and HMS Barfleur (D80), the latter being the one ship of the class that did manage to fire at somebody. And the third happened later the same year at Plymouth, where she was rammed by the Coreopsis, a former Flower-class corvette by then out of naval service, and had her hull plating extensively damaged. Being run into by a retired corvette in your own home port is not a distinguished entry in a service record, but it is an entry.

A Supporting Role in the Suez Crisis

The closest HMS St Kitts came to genuine historical significance was in 1956, when, having joined the 3rd Destroyer Squadron in the Mediterranean Fleet two years earlier, she took part in Operation Musketeer, the Suez Crisis invasion of Egypt, serving as part of the escort screen protecting the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle during operations that included the bombardment of Port Said.

It was a real and legitimate piece of Cold War era naval history, Britain and France's ill-fated attempt to seize control of the Suez Canal, but HMS St Kitts's own part in it was that of a supporting escort rather than a ship in the thick of the action, which is very much in keeping with the general shape of her career. The whole of the 3rd Destroyer Squadron left the Mediterranean for the Home Fleet once the operation was over, and St Kitts went with it.

It is worth saying what a screen destroyer at Suez was actually doing, because "supporting escort" undersells a genuinely demanding job. A carrier flying strikes has to steam into the wind to launch and recover, which means she cannot manoeuvre freely, cannot zigzag, and is for long periods entirely predictable. The destroyers around her exist to make that survivable: anti-submarine screening on a fixed station, anti-aircraft cover, plane guard duty astern in case an aircraft goes into the sea on take-off, and the running about that follows when one does. It is unglamorous and it is why carriers get to do their work at all, and the classic instance is HMS Armada (D14), another Battle whose career reads like this one.

A Quiet Retirement

HMS St Kitts was decommissioned in 1957 after little more than a decade in service, spending her final years in reserve before being scrapped at Sunderland in 1962, bringing to a close a service life notable chiefly for its lack of notable events.

There is a certain honesty in recording that not every warship built for the Royal Navy goes on to fight famous battles or survive dramatic scrapes, and HMS St Kitts stands as a perfectly good example of the many solid, workmanlike vessels that simply did their job without ever making headlines, which is no small thing in itself.