HMS Whelp (R37): The Destroyer That Led the Allied Fleet Into Tokyo Bay

Adopted by Wembley

HMS Whelp was built by Hawthorn Leslie and Company at Hebburn, laid down on 1 May 1942, launched on 3 June 1943 and completed on 14 July 1944, a W-class destroyer adopted by the London Borough of Wembley using funds raised during Warship Week 1942.

Spitsbergen, Then South

Initial service with the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow covers rather more ground than it sounds, and one of the jobs took her a very long way north.

In the summer of 1944 she was one of the escorts for HMS Jamaica on Operation Gearbox, the supply run to the garrison on Spitsbergen. Britain kept a small Norwegian force on that archipelago for the whole war, largely so that the weather station there reported to London rather than to Berlin, and keeping it fed meant sending warships to seventy-eight degrees north. She also worked through the Home Fleet exercises that preceded the Normandy landings.

In August she went south with the battleship HMS Ramillies, who was on her way to bombard the beaches of southern France, and detached at Algiers to carry on through the Suez Canal for Trincomalee. She arrived in September and did not see home waters again for sixteen months.

A Future Duke of Edinburgh as First Lieutenant

Whelp's most notable connection came through her crew rather than her armament: the future Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, served aboard as First Lieutenant under Commander G. A. F. Norfolk, giving this modest destroyer a direct link to the British royal family that would endure for the rest of his long life.

Getting HMS Shakespeare Home

One episode from that first winter deserves rescuing from the record, because it is a small masterpiece of the unglamorous.

On 3 January 1945 the submarine HMS Shakespeare surfaced in the Andaman Sea to sink a Japanese auxiliary minesweeper by gunfire, and lost the argument. She was hit repeatedly, her engine room and control room were partly flooded, and she could no longer dive. A submarine that cannot dive, in daylight, within range of Japanese airfields, is the most helpless object in warfare. She spent the day on the surface fighting off twenty-five separate air attacks with her own guns, shot one aircraft down, and lost two men killed and thirteen wounded.

She got to Trincomalee on 8 January because destroyers were sent out to bring her in, and Whelp was one of them. One of Whelp's people left an account of the manoeuvring that has the authentic flavour of the lower deck: their captain put the stern a little too close to the submarine's bows and collected, in his words, a nice two-foot slice. Nobody writes battle honours for that sort of afternoon.

Striking Japanese Targets Across the Pacific

After initial service with the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, Whelp joined the 27th Destroyer Flotilla bound for the Far East, escorting aircraft carriers on strikes against Japanese targets throughout 1944 and 1945, including operations against the Nicobar Islands, the Dutch East Indies, Formosa and Okinawa, a demanding and dangerous run of deployments through the war's final year.

Into Sagami Bay With the War Not Quite Over

The twenty-seventh of August 1945 was not a victory parade, and it is worth being clear about what the ships steaming into Sagami Bay that morning were actually doing.

Japan had accepted the Allied terms on 15 August. The surrender would not be signed for another six days. In between sat a fortnight in which several million armed men were technically still at war under a government that had never surrendered anything before, in which the approaches to Tokyo were thickly mined, in which nobody could be certain every Japanese unit had received or would obey the order, and in which a single coastal battery or a single pilot who had decided otherwise could have restarted the entire war.

Into that went a fleet, and at the front of it small ships. Sagami Bay is the outer anchorage south-west of Tokyo Bay proper, under the shadow of Mount Fuji, and Whelp led HMS Duke of York in with the American battleships behind her. Two other ships of the same flotilla have their own accounts of those days: HMS Wakeful and HMS Wrangler.

What Prince Philip Saw

A direct link to the British royal family is a thin way to put it, because the man was twenty-four, he was the first lieutenant, and he was standing on this deck for the two most extraordinary days of the twentieth century. He described both, years later, and his own words are better than any summary.

On the surrender: being in Tokyo Bay with the ceremony taking place in the battleship which was, what, two hundred yards away. You could see what was going on with a pair of binoculars. That is the whole thing in two sentences. The end of the Second World War, watched through binoculars from the deck of a destroyer, by a young officer who had no idea what the next seventy-five years of his life were going to look like.

And then the job that came after it, which was ferrying released prisoners of war out of Tokyo Bay. Some of them were Royal Navy men who had been in Japanese hands for years. His account of it: these people were naval people, they had not been in a naval atmosphere for three or four years, sometimes longer. Our ship's company recognised that they were also fellow sailors, so we gave them a cup of tea. They just sat there, both sides, our own and theirs, tears pouring down their cheeks. They really could not speak. It was the most extraordinary sensation. It affected everybody.

He had come to Whelp from HMS Wallace, where he had been first lieutenant off Sicily at twenty-one, and he would go on to HMS Magpie, the only ship he ever commanded, before the throne took the career away from him.

First Into Sagami Bay

In a moment of genuine historical significance, Whelp became the first Allied ship to enter Sagami Bay on 27 August 1945, leading the way for HMS Duke of York and the American battleships Iowa and Missouri. She went on to witness Japan's formal surrender in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945, before proceeding to Hong Kong, where Rear Admiral Cecil Harcourt accepted the local Japanese surrender on 16 September.

The Hong Kong ceremony that followed was Rear Admiral Cecil Harcourt's, held at Government House on 16 September, and the ship that carried him in was the cruiser HMS Swiftsure (08). The destroyer that led that force into Victoria Harbour, on the reasoning that a mine is cheaper to find with a destroyer than a cruiser, was HMS Kempenfelt.

A Second Career as Simon van der Stel

Whelp returned to Portsmouth in January 1946 and was paid off, before recommissioning in 1947 and sailing to South Africa the following year. The South African Navy purchased her outright on 25 April 1952 for £420,000, renaming her Simon van der Stel.

Who Simon van der Stel Was

The name she took in 1953 carries a considerable irony, which is worth setting out because South Africa in the 1950s certainly did not.

Simon van der Stel arrived at the Cape in October 1679 as commander for the Dutch East India Company and was made governor in 1691. He is remembered for founding Stellenbosch, which is named after him, for laying out the farms along the Berg River, and for planting the vineyard at Constantia, so that a very large part of what the world now thinks of as the Western Cape is essentially his to-do list.

He was also the first man born outside Europe, and of mixed parentage, to govern the Cape. His mother Maria was the daughter of a Company man at Batavia and of Monica of the Coromandel, an Indian woman who had been a slave. The apartheid-era South African Navy therefore named one of its two destroyers after a man who under its own laws would not have been classified as white, and named the other after Jan van Riebeeck, the ex-HMS Wessex, who was Whelp's sister and remained her companion for the next twenty years.

Seventeen Thousand Miles and a Visit Nobody Has Repeated

The best thing she did under the new flag happened in her second year and has been almost entirely forgotten.

In July 1954, under Commander M R Terry Lloyd, she sailed from Durban for northern waters and was gone for one hundred and forty-seven days. She called at Walvis Bay, Freetown and Dakar, reached Portsmouth on 31 July, and lay there for a fortnight alongside the battleship HMS Vanguard. Then she went to Rotterdam, and remains, to this day, the only South African warship ever to visit the Netherlands, which for a ship named after a Dutch governor of the Cape is about as neat as history gets.

She went on to Londonderry and up the Clyde to Glasgow, where a good many South Africans would live a few years later while the country's new frigates were built there. Coming home she nursed the little seaward defence boat SAS Gelderland the whole way, and when the weather got so bad that the seas were breaking clean over Gelderland's bridge the pair of them put into Brest and waited it out. Lisbon, Las Palmas, Dakar, Abidjan, Pointe Noire, Walvis Bay, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and into Durban on 8 December, seventeen thousand two hundred miles later.

She was decommissioned in February 1957, two and a half years afterwards, and her crew went to her sister. That was the arrangement for the rest of both careers: one destroyer in commission, one in reserve, and a single ship's company moving between them, which is why the two of them between them managed about fifty years of existence and nothing like fifty years of sea time.

After modernisation between 1962 and 1964, she served as a training ship before finally being scrapped at Durban in late 1976, closing out the career of a destroyer that had once led the entire Allied fleet into the heart of Japan's home waters.

The modernisation is worth a note because it produced two of the odder-looking warships of the period. She was rebuilt at Simon's Town from 1962 and recommissioned in February 1964 with twin 4-inch mountings in place of her single 4.7s, a much enlarged operations room, and a flight deck and hangar aft for two Westland Wasp helicopters, which is described in full in her sister's account. The reward was another spell in reserve within a year, because the South African Navy had just commissioned three new frigates and did not have the men for everything.

Her end was undignified. Brought out of reserve in 1975 and towed to Durban to be refitted, she was surveyed there and found not to be worth the money. She was stripped of anything useful and broken up at Bayhead from late 1976, and her helicopter hangar spent its own retirement as a paint shop in the shipbreakers' yard, which is a strange afterlife for a structure built to house anti-submarine helicopters on a destroyer that had once led a fleet into Sagami Bay.