HMS Wessex (R78): From Sumatran Oil Refineries to a South African Flagship

Renamed Before Launch

HMS Wessex was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, originally ordered under the name Zenith in December 1941 before being renamed Wessex in January 1943, launched on 2 September that year and completed on 11 May 1944, joining the Eastern Fleet as part of the escort screen for aircraft carrier operations against Japanese targets.

The Name Was Free Because Its Owner Was on the Bottom

Renamed Wessex in January 1943 is a quiet line for what is much the best story attached to this ship, because there had already been an HMS Wessex, and by January 1943 she had been lying in thirty-five metres of water off Calais for two and a half years.

The first Wessex was a V and W class destroyer launched in March 1918, and on 24 May 1940 she was one of a small group of ships trying to hold the ring at Calais while the town was surrounded. The garrison there was buying time for Dunkirk, and it knew it. What the Royal Navy could offer was gunfire from seaward, so Wessex, HMS Vimiera, HMS Wolfhound and the Polish destroyer Burza spent the afternoon shelling German troops working their way in from the south.

Twenty-seven Junkers 87s arrived at half past four. Wessex took three bombs between the funnels and went down; Vimiera and Burza were both damaged and stayed. Vimiera picked her survivors out of the water, which is the sort of thing that is recorded in one clause and remembered for the rest of a life. Her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander William Cartwright, had held the ship for less than ten months.

So when the Admiralty went through its lists in January 1943 and moved the name onto a hull building at Govan, it was not tidying up. It was putting a name back into commission. The swap was a straight exchange, too: the hull at Dumbarton that had been intended for the name Wessex became Zenith instead, and went on to have the odd career described in HMS Zenith (R95). Two ships changed names on the same piece of paper and both kept the one they were given for the rest of their lives.

Between commissioning in May 1944 and going east she had one job at home that is easily overlooked. She worked up with the Home Fleet and then joined the screening forces for the Normandy landings, which for a brand new destroyer meant several weeks of anti-submarine and anti-E-boat patrol in the Channel, in an assault area containing more shipping per square mile than anywhere on earth had ever held.

She transferred to the 27th Destroyer Flotilla in July, refitted at Portsmouth, and sailed on 4 August 1944 for Ceylon in company with HMS Whelp. That detail is worth holding on to. The two of them would still be in company thirty years later, on the other side of the world, under a different flag and different names.

Striking Refineries Across the Indian Ocean

Wessex took part in Operation Millet against the Nicobar Islands in October 1944, Operation Robson targeting Sumatran oil refineries that December, and Operation Meridian's further refinery strikes in January 1945, before joining the British Pacific Fleet to screen carrier operations during the Battle of Okinawa, a properly demanding string of deployments across the final year of the war.

Three Operations and a Cloud Bank

The three code names deserve unpacking, because one of them was a bluff, one of them failed, and one of them was among the most ambitious things the Fleet Air Arm ever attempted.

Millet, on 17 to 19 October 1944, was the bluff. Force 63 went for Nancowry harbour and the airfields on Car Nicobar with carrier aircraft and then closed the coast and shelled it, twice, in the manner of a fleet preparing the ground for a landing. Wessex was one of the destroyers on the screen, along with Whelp, Wager and HMS Wakeful. What the whole performance was for, and whether anybody in Tokyo was fooled, is set out in HMS Relentless.

Robson, on 20 December, is the one that did not work, and it is more instructive than the successes. The target was the Pangkalan Brandan refinery in northern Sumatra. On the morning of the strike the weather over it was appalling, and Rear Admiral Vian ordered the launch anyway: twenty-seven Avengers off Indomitable and Illustrious with twenty-eight Hellcats and Corsairs above them. They flew to Sumatra, could not find Pangkalan Brandan through the cloud and rain, and went instead for the secondary target at Belawan Deli, where the bomb-carrying Corsairs could not identify their objectives either. One Japanese bomber was shot down. What damage was done to anything on the ground has never been satisfactorily established.

That is what a large part of carrier warfare actually looked like: several thousand men, four ships' worth of aircraft and a fleet at sea for six days, defeated by cloud. The refinery was hit properly a fortnight later in Operation Lentil, and the Palembang strikes of Operation Meridian in January 1945, which were the big one, are described from a flight deck in HMS Illustrious (87).

Off Okinawa she spent part of her time as a radar picket, which was the single most dangerous job a surface ship could be given in that war. The British arrangement off the Sakishima Gunto, and the numbers behind that claim, are in HMS Kempenfelt (R03). It is enough to say here that being the ship stationed thirty miles out on the bearing of the enemy, alone, is a duty nobody volunteered for twice.

Sold to South Africa

Returning home in December 1945, Wessex entered reserve before transferring to Simon's Town in South Africa in 1947, and was formally sold to the South African Navy on 29 March 1950 for £450,000, commissioning that same day as SAS Jan van Riebeeck, taking on a substantial new career under a new flag.

Who Jan van Riebeeck Was

The name she was given in 1950 was not chosen lightly. Jan van Riebeeck was the Dutch East India Company official who landed at Table Bay in April 1652 with orders to plant a vegetable garden. That is genuinely all he was sent to do: the Company wanted a refreshment station halfway to Batavia so that its crews would stop dying of scurvy, and it explicitly did not want a colony.

What he actually founded, over ten years, was Cape Town, and by the twentieth century white South Africa had made him its origin story, which is why his face was on the banknotes and his name went on the first warship the country ever owned outright.

The timing was very nearly too good. In April 1952 South Africa held a festival at Cape Town for the three hundredth anniversary of the landing, and the ship sent to represent the South African Navy was the one carrying his name. Two years old in her new flag, thirty-four years after her predecessor had been launched under another, she lay in Table Bay for the tercentenary of a man arriving there in a small Dutch ship with a bag of seeds.

A Long South African Career

Jan van Riebeeck underwent conversion into a helicopter-carrying anti-submarine frigate between 1964 and 1966, and went on to serve as a training ship from 1972 until late 1975, giving the South African Navy a particularly long return on their 1950 investment in a well-travelled British destroyer.

One Crew, Two Ships

A great deal of her South African career is explained by a shortage of people rather than a shortage of ship.

HMS Whelp followed her south and commissioned as SAS Simon van der Stel on 23 February 1953. The crew to commission her came from Jan van Riebeeck, who was laid up at Simon's Town to provide it, and that became the settled arrangement for the next twenty years: one destroyer in commission, one destroyer in reserve, one ship's company moving between them. It is why neither ship has a continuous service record and why both spent so much of their lives alongside.

The conversion was a good deal more thorough than the phrase suggests, and it is often filed under the Royal Navy's Type 16 rebuilds, which it was not: no Type 16 ever carried a helicopter. Both ships were rebuilt at Simon's Town, Simon van der Stel first from 1962 and Jan van Riebeeck from 1964, and what came out was not quite like anything in the Royal Navy: the four single 4.7-inch guns replaced by twin 4-inch Mark 19 mountings fore and aft, a much enlarged operations room, new radar and fire control, triple Mark 32 anti-submarine torpedo tubes, and, most striking of all, a flight deck and hangar aft for two Westland Wasp helicopters. The point was reach. A helicopter with a torpedo can attack a submarine the ship has detected but cannot get near, and by 1960 that was the only way a 1943 destroyer was going to trouble a modern boat. It gave the pair a silhouette shared with no other ships anywhere.

The reward for all that work was another spell in reserve. She completed her trials in July 1966 and was laid up almost immediately, because the South African Navy had just commissioned three brand new Type 12 frigates of the President class and simply did not have the sailors for everything at once. She came out again in April 1972, after a refit, to take over as training ship from her sister, and went back into reserve in late 1975.

Sunk as a Missile Target

SAS Jan van Riebeeck was finally sunk as a target sixty nautical miles south of Cape Town on 25 March 1980, struck first by a missile and finished off with gunfire, bringing to a close the career of a ship that had fought Japanese forces in the Indian Ocean and later helped train generations of South African sailors.

What killed her in 1980 says something about where South Africa had got to. She was expended to prove the weapon system of the navy's new Minister class strike craft: the Skerpioen, or Scorpion, a sea-skimming missile that was the Israeli Gabriel built under licence in South African factories, because a country under an international arms embargo cannot simply buy them. So the last thing the old destroyer did was to demonstrate that a small fast boat with a home-made missile could sink a fleet destroyer, which is precisely the argument that had put her out of a job in the first place.

Her sister ended less tidily. Simon van der Stel was found not to be worth refitting, was stripped, and was broken up at Durban in 1976, her helicopter hangar spending its retirement as a paint shop in the shipbreakers' yard. A third old British destroyer went the same way as Jan van Riebeeck: HMS Wrangler became SAS Vrystaat and was sunk as a target off Cape Point in 1976 by a submarine named, as it happens, Maria van Riebeeck.