HMS Vigilant: From Sinking a Japanese Cruiser to Training Dartmouth's Cadets

Built on the Tyne for a War Nearly Won

HMS Vigilant began her career as a V-class fleet destroyer, ordered in September 1941, laid down at Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson on the Tyne in January 1942, launched that December and commissioned in September 1943 under the pennant R93, reportedly the nineteenth Royal Navy ship to carry the name.

She joined the 26th Destroyer Flotilla with the Home Fleet, and her first taste of active service came escorting the battleship HMS Anson to Spitsbergen before taking up the grim, relentless business of shepherding Arctic convoys JW54B, JW56A, JW56B and JW57 through some of the most hostile waters any Royal Navy ship faced during the entire war.

Spitsbergen, and What the Four Convoys Cost

Escorting HMS Anson to Spitsbergen sounds like a routine passage and was the consequence of one of the strangest German operations of the war. On 8 September 1943 the Tirpitz and the Scharnhorst came out of their fjords with ten destroyers, steamed to Spitsbergen, and used the heaviest guns in the German navy to shell a coal town and a weather station eight hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle. It was the only time Tirpitz fired her main armament at a target in her entire career. Troops were landed, the installations were wrecked and the garrison was carried off, and the Allies then had to go back and put it all up again, which is what Vigilant was escorting a battleship for.

The four convoy numbers deserve unpacking too, because two of them are not routine. JW 56A, in January 1944, lost three merchant ships in a heavy U-boat attack. JW 56B, which followed a few days later, cost the Navy HMS Hardy, the flotilla leader, torpedoed on 30 January and so badly damaged that she had to be sunk by one of her own consorts.

JW 57 was worse. On 25 February 1944 the destroyer Mahratta was hit by an acoustic torpedo astern of the convoy in a rising sea. She sank in a few minutes, in water at about four degrees, in the dark. Of a ship's company of well over two hundred, seventeen men were pulled out alive. Vigilant was in that screen. The point of listing the convoy numbers is that behind each of them is a night of that kind, and a ship that got through four of them in three months had used up a good deal of whatever it is that ships use up.

D-Day and the Voyage East

In the spring of 1944 Vigilant screened HMS Anson during Operation Tungsten, the carrier strikes launched against the German battleship Tirpitz in Altenfjord, before taking her place as part of Bombardment Force E for the Normandy landings that June, escorting convoy J2 to Juno Beach overnight and providing naval gunfire support off Langrune-sur-Mer, then continuing Channel patrol duties into late June 1944.

Langrune-sur-Mer, incidentally, is worth a note. It was a strongpoint at the eastern end of Juno beach, and it did not fall on 6 June: the Royal Marine commando sent to take it was stopped by a wall and a minefield, and the position held out until the following day, which is why the ships lying off it were still being asked for fire. Naval gunfire support in that sector was not a bombardment before the landing; it was a running argument with a house full of Germans a few hundred yards from Canadian infantry.

With the European war entering its final phase, Vigilant and the rest of the 26th Destroyer Flotilla were redeployed to the Eastern Fleet, bound for the Indian Ocean and the Pacific theatre, where a very different kind of action awaited her.

A Torpedo Attack Off the Andaman Islands

On 25 March 1945, working alongside her flotilla mates Saumarez, Virago and Volage, Vigilant intercepted a Japanese resupply convoy off Khota Andaman and fired a full spread of eight torpedoes, sinking the Japanese subchaser CH-63.

It is worth noting that some secondary sources give this action as 26 March and credit the kill jointly with Virago, while the specialist Japanese naval loss records at combinedfleet.com place it a day earlier and credit the sinking primarily to Vigilant's own torpedoes, a small discrepancy worth flagging honestly rather than picking a version to suit the story.

The Battle of the Malacca Strait

Vigilant's finest hour came on the night of 15 to 16 May 1945, when the 26th Destroyer Flotilla, comprising Saumarez, Verulam, Venus, Vigilant and Virago under Captain Manley Power, intercepted the Japanese heavy cruiser Haguro attempting to withdraw from the Andaman Islands.

In a fast-moving night action of torpedoes and gunfire, Saumarez, Verulam and Venus struck first, Virago then stopped the stricken cruiser with two further torpedo hits, and Vigilant delivered a final torpedo strike at around 01:27 before Haguro finally sank at 02:06.

It stands as the last major surface gun and torpedo action fought by any navy in the Second World War, and Vigilant earned battle honours for Arctic 1943 to 1944, Normandy 1944, Malaya 1945 and Burma 1945 across a wartime career that had taken her from the ice of the Barents Sea to the tropical waters of the Andaman Sea.

Cut Down and Rebuilt as a Frigate

After returning to Britain in January 1946 and a period in reserve at Portsmouth, Vigilant was selected for one of the more dramatic transformations available to a surplus wartime destroyer, the Type 15 conversion. Between 1951 and 1952, John I. Thornycroft and Company at Woolston in Southampton cut down her original hull and superstructure, rebuilt her with a lower profile, and fitted her out as a fast anti-submarine escort armed with twin Squid mortars and updated sonar and radar, work completed in time for her to recommission in September 1953 under her new pennant, F93, a wartime fleet destroyer reborn as a purpose-built Cold War submarine hunter.

What the Squid Was For

Twin Squid mortars is the phrase that explains why the Royal Navy spent real money cutting down forty wartime destroyers, and it is worth setting out.

The problem with the depth charge was that it went over the stern. To attack a submarine a ship had to run over her, and asdic of the period lost contact at close range as the beam passed under the target; for the last thirty or forty seconds of every attack the escort was blind, dropping charges where she thought the submarine had been, while the submarine altered course and depth in the knowledge that she had that half minute to do it in. Most attacks missed.

Squid solved it by throwing the charges forwards. Three barrels, three depth charges of three hundred and ninety pounds each, fired about two hundred and seventy-five yards ahead into a triangular pattern, so that contact could be held right up to the moment of firing. It was aimed automatically: a separate depth-finding sonar measured how deep the target was, the charges were fused accordingly, and the mortar fired itself when the solution was good. Two of them together put six charges in the water in a pattern designed to bracket the submarine above and below.

The improvement was dramatic. A conventional depth charge attack succeeded perhaps one time in ten; Squid, in trained hands, was several times better than that. Put two of them in a hull that could make thirty knots and hold it for hours, which is what the Type 15 conversion produced, and you have the first genuinely effective submarine-hunting ship the Royal Navy ever had, which is the entire reason ships like HMS Relentless and HMS Roebuck were rebuilt rather than scrapped.

A Collision With Her Own Sister Ship

Vigilant's new career as part of the 6th Frigate Squadron, Home Fleet, brought her an alarming moment early on. In the small hours of 27 October 1954, during a NATO anti-submarine exercise in poor visibility and heavy weather off the Hebrides, Vigilant collided with her own sister ship, HMS Relentless, in the Minch, both vessels operating without navigation lights as part of the exercise.

Relentless's bow struck Vigilant's port side, buckling and holing Relentless's forward hull in several places, while Vigilant suffered damage to her wardroom pantry and upper deck fittings, though thankfully no injuries were recorded on either ship.

Both vessels made it back to Greenock under their own power, Vigilant returning to service quickly after brief dry-docking while Relentless required a longer repair and was later paid off into reserve.

Four separate courts martial followed, with both commanding officers ultimately reprimanded, a sober reminder of how easily even well-drilled peacetime exercises could go wrong.

Training the Next Generation at Dartmouth

From 1955 Vigilant took on a role well suited to a ship with her wartime pedigree, becoming leader of the Dartmouth Training Squadron, carrying midshipmen and cadets from the Royal Naval College out to sea to learn their trade alongside other training ships such as Venus, Roebuck, Carron, Jewel and Acute at various points.

In November 1957 the squadron, with Vigilant carrying a complement of 96 midshipmen and 33 cadets, made a courtesy visit to Gdynia in Poland, a small but genuine piece of Cold War naval diplomacy captured in surviving Imperial War Museums photographs of local children enjoying a party aboard ship.

A separately circulated period photograph also places Vigilant at Malta in 1959, though this detail comes only from an unverified commercial listing and should be treated as unconfirmed rather than established fact.

A Poignant Anniversary at the Breakers

Vigilant paid off from the training squadron in 1963 and was placed on the disposal list in 1965, sold that June to the British Iron and Steel Corporation for breaking up at Faslane.

Sources differ slightly on the exact date, with some giving 4 June as the date of sale and others 6 June as the date she arrived at the breakers, a gap most likely explained by the short interval between the two events rather than any real contradiction.

Several sources note, with a certain quiet poignancy, that 6 June 1965 fell exactly twenty one years to the day after Vigilant had supported the Normandy landings, a fitting enough final date for a ship whose career had run from the ice of the Arctic convoys to the night action against Haguro and on into the peacetime work of training the officers who would carry the Royal Navy forward.