HMS Venus (F50): The Destroyer That Helped Sink the Japanese Cruiser Haguro

Built at Govan

HMS Venus was built by Fairfield Shipbuilding at Govan, launched on 23 February 1943, a V-class destroyer that went on to see substantial action in the final year of the Second World War, including escort duty for the 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron during Operation Dracula, the assault on Rangoon, between April and May 1945.

The Battle of the Malacca Strait

Venus's most significant wartime action came at the Battle of the Malacca Strait, where she joined a force of destroyers that hunted down and sank the Japanese heavy cruiser Haguro on 16 May 1945, one of the last major surface actions fought by the Royal Navy in the Second World War and a notable feather in a single destroyer's cap.

She Found the Enemy, Lost Her Shot, and Fired the Last Two

Venus did not merely join a force that hunted down the Haguro. She is the reason the force found her. On the night of 15 May 1945, working ahead of the flotilla in rain squalls and lightning at the northern entrance to the Malacca Strait, she got a radar contact at thirty-four nautical miles: a range at which nobody could see anything at all, on a set that was only a couple of years old, on a target that was doing everything possible not to be found. That contact turned a search into a battle.

The 26th Destroyer Flotilla was Saumarez, Verulam, Venus, Vigilant and Virago, under Captain Manley Power in Saumarez, and the plan was as old as destroyers: spread into a crescent, come in from five directions at once, and give the cruiser five different problems in the dark so that she could not solve any of them. The full shape of the action is in HMS Verulam (F29), and the cruiser whose aircraft had located Haguro in the first place is HMS Royalist (C89).

What happened to Venus at five past one in the morning is the part nobody puts on a battle honour, and it is the most human thing in the whole account. She came out of the dark on Haguro's beam in what her own report calls a perfect attacking position: eight torpedo tubes, a heavy cruiser broadside on at close range, the situation every destroyer officer trains for and almost none ever gets. The wrong angle settings had been put on the tubes. The moment passed, and she had to break off and go round again.

She came back. At 0125 a torpedo from Venus hit. Virago stopped the cruiser with two more a couple of minutes later, Vigilant put another into her, and at 0202 Venus fired her last two, which were the last torpedoes fired at Haguro by anybody. The cruiser went down a few minutes afterwards, and with her went the last major surface gun and torpedo action the Royal Navy has ever fought.

A single destroyer's cap is the right image and it can be sharpened. Venus found her, missed her, hit her, and finished her.

Patrolling Against Illegal Immigration to Palestine

Between 1946 and 1949, Venus served with the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean, including the difficult and politically fraught duty of patrolling to prevent illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine, and took part in rescue operations following the explosion of the tanker Empire Cross in August 1946.

What the Palestine Patrol Was Actually Like

The Mediterranean commission that followed is described with a caution the job deserves, and it is worth being specific about what those ships were doing. Between 1945 and 1948 the Royal Navy was ordered to intercept ships carrying Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to Palestine and turn them back, or take them to internment on Cyprus. The ships were old, overloaded and unseaworthy; the people aboard them had nowhere else to go; and the boarding parties were British sailors, most of them very young, who had spent the previous years fighting the regime those passengers had escaped. It was the least popular duty in the postwar Navy, and the fullest account of it is in HMS Chequers (R61).

The Empire Cross belongs to the same picture. She was a tanker of some three thousand seven hundred tons, less than a year old, lying in Haifa Roads on 2 August 1946 and discharging aviation fuel, when she exploded, caught fire and sank. Up to twenty-five men were killed. Venus and Virago went in and took survivors out of the water.

There is a detail in the aftermath that says more about that year than any amount of description. One theory current at the time was that the explosion had been set off by a depth charge dropped by a British destroyer, as part of the routine practice of putting small charges into the water around ships in Haifa to discourage swimmers from attaching limpet mines to them. The Admiralty discounted it. That the theory was plausible enough to need discounting tells you what harbour routine in Palestine had become by the summer of 1946.

Rebuilt as a Type 15 Frigate

Between 1951 and 1952, Venus was converted at Devonport into a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate, emerging with the new pennant number F50 and taking part in the 1953 Fleet Review for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, before later serving with the Dartmouth Training Squadron helping to train the next generation of naval officers.

A Missile Test Target

Venus entered reserve in 1964, and in a common enough fate for veteran frigates of her generation, was subsequently used as a missile test target in 1969, before being sold to Thos. W. Ward for scrapping and arriving at their Briton Ferry yard on 20 December 1972 to be broken up, closing out the career of a destroyer that had once helped sink one of the Imperial Japanese Navy's heavy cruisers.

Used as a missile test target in 1969 is worth a moment, because it is not quite the ignominious end it sounds. A ship shot at deliberately, under instrumentation, with the results measured, teaches a navy more about what a warhead does to a hull than any amount of calculation, and every one of those trials fed into the design of the ships that went south in 1982. Venus survived hers. She was not sold until 1972 and reached the breakers at Briton Ferry that December, twenty-nine years after she was launched on the Clyde.