HMS Wakeful (F159): Present at Tokyo Bay, Later a Hollywood Extra

Renamed Before She Was Launched

HMS Wakeful was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, laid down on 3 June 1942 under the provisional name Zebra before being renamed Wakeful in January 1943 and launched later that year, joining the Home Fleet on 17 February 1944.

Why the Name Was Given Away in January 1943

Renaming a ship after she has been laid down is not done casually, and the reason this one stopped being Zebra in January 1943 is worth knowing.

There had been an HMS Wakeful before her, a V-class destroyer of 1917. At about half past midnight on 29 May 1940 she was crossing the North Sea from Dunkirk with some six hundred and forty soldiers aboard, most of them asleep in her messdecks and below, when a German motor torpedo boat put a torpedo into her. She broke in half and went down in about fifteen seconds. Almost nobody below decks got out; the standard accounts of that night put the number of surviving soldiers at one.

It did not end there. HMS Grafton stopped to pick up survivors, and while she was stopped and lit she was torpedoed by a U-boat and sunk in her turn. That sequence is told in HMS Grafton (H89), and it is one of the worst nights of the whole Dunkirk operation.

The Royal Navy's habit is to put a name straight back to sea after a loss like that, and quickly. Two and a half years later a new hull on the stocks at Govan had her provisional name taken off her and Wakeful put on instead.

Striking the Tirpitz and Norwegian Waters

Wakeful served as an escort during Operation Tungsten's air raids on the German battleship Tirpitz, and in May 1944 supported attacks on German shipping off the coast of Norway, before transferring to the Eastern Fleet for operations in the Indian Ocean.

With the Fleet at the Japanese Surrender

Joining the British Pacific Fleet in November 1944, Wakeful took part in Operations Meridian One and Two against oil refineries, before escorting air raids on Japanese territory in August 1945. She was with the fleet in Japanese waters for the surrender on 2 September 1945, returning to the UK that December with battle honours for North Sea and East Indies service. The Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet's own list of ships present in Tokyo Bay during the ceremony names seven British destroyers and she is not among them, so she was almost certainly in Sagami Bay, the outer anchorage under Mount Fuji where the bulk of the Allied fleet lay that week, rather than inside Tokyo Bay itself.

Rebuilt as a Type 15 Frigate

After a spell as a Boys Training ship, Wakeful was converted into a Type 15 anti-submarine frigate between 1951 and 1953, emerging with the pennant number F159 and serving in the Mediterranean with the 5th Frigate Squadron until 1957, including participation in Operation Musketeer during the Suez Crisis.

A Solemn Duty and a Film Role

Wakeful went on to take up training duties and, in 1960, hosted the burial at sea of Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma. In a rather different turn, she also appeared in the 1965 Cold War thriller The Bedford Incident, and took part in various Navy Days and fleet reviews through the decade.

The Funeral

The burial at sea of Edwina Mountbatten deserves the detail, because it is one of the more remarkable ceremonies the Royal Navy has ever carried out.

Edwina Mountbatten died in North Borneo in February 1960, on the last of the endless overseas tours she made for the St John Ambulance Brigade and the Red Cross; she was found in the morning surrounded by the papers she had been working through the night before. She had been Vicereine of India at the partition, had run relief operations for refugees on a scale nobody else was attempting, and had asked to be buried at sea.

On 25 February 1960 there was a service at Romsey Abbey, conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and then the coffin was taken to Portsmouth and carried aboard HMS Wakeful. Mountbatten noted afterwards that his wife was piped aboard, which he recorded as an honour never known to have been afforded to any woman other than the reigning Sovereign. She was buried in the Channel a few miles south of the Isle of Wight, with her husband and her two daughters and the Princess Alice aboard.

The part that lifts it is what India did. The Indian Navy frigate INS Trishul happened to be at Portsmouth for repairs. Nehru, who had been closer to Edwina Mountbatten than to almost anybody outside his own family, ordered Trishul to sea to escort Wakeful and to cast a wreath on the water. So the last Vicereine of India was buried from a British destroyer with an Indian warship in company, thirteen years after the country she had left had ceased to be British, on the orders of the man who had taken it over.

Which Bits of the Film She Is In

The Bedford Incident is worth more than a passing mention, both because it is a genuinely good film and because Wakeful's part in it is oddly specific.

It came out in 1965, directed by James B Harris, with Richard Widmark as the captain of an American destroyer hunting a Soviet submarine under the Greenland ice and Sidney Poitier as a photojournalist watching him do it. The captain pushes his exhausted crew and the submarine past the point of sense, and at the climax an officer at the end of his endurance mishears an order and fires a nuclear anti-submarine rocket. The submarine gets her torpedoes away before she dies. The film ends with both of them destroyed and nothing whatever resolved. It was made three years after the Cuban missile crisis and it has aged very well.

The USS Bedford herself was mostly a large model. The interiors were shot in a Royal Navy Type 15, HMS Troubridge, whose distinctive forward-sloping bridge windows and rack of Lee-Enfields are visible to anybody who knows what they are looking at. Wakeful is the ship in the sequence where Poitier arrives by helicopter, and her pennant number, F159, is legible on her side in the shot. An American destroyer with a Royal Navy pennant number painted on her is exactly the sort of thing that gets noticed by exactly the sort of person who buys prints of warships.

Scrapped at Inverkeithing

HMS Wakeful was sold to Thos. W. Ward for scrapping on 10 July 1971 and demolished at Inverkeithing, bringing to a close a career that had taken her from the Tirpitz raids to Japanese waters and finally onto the silver screen.