HMS Whirlwind (F187): From Sumatran Air Strikes to Recovering a Crashed Comet

Built at Hebburn

HMS Whirlwind was built by Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn on Tyneside, laid down on 31 July 1942, launched on 30 August 1943 and completed on 20 July 1944, a W-class destroyer that joined the Eastern Fleet in October 1944, in time to take part in some of the war's final major operations.

What King George V Was Shooting At

A Mediterranean bombardment is a phrase that hides a specific afternoon, and it is worth naming.

The battleship King George V left Britain at the end of October 1944 for Trincomalee, to join the newly formed British Pacific Fleet, and she went the short way, through the Mediterranean. On 15 November, in passing, she turned aside and shelled the Lakida battery on Milos, in the Aegean. The Germans still held a scattering of Greek islands months after the mainland had gone, cut off, unsupplied and militarily pointless, and this was a battleship on her way somewhere else stopping to knock over a gun position because it happened to be on the route.

Whirlwind was on her screen for it, which means the first shots fired in anger anywhere near her were fourteen-inch, at an island most people could not find on a map, aimed at a garrison that was going nowhere. Then she carried on east. The Sumatran strikes she went on to, Robson in December and Meridian in January, are described from the fleet in HMS Wessex (R78) and from a flight deck in HMS Illustrious (87).

Striking Sumatran Targets

Whirlwind escorted HMS King George V during a Mediterranean bombardment before joining the British Pacific Fleet in November 1944, taking part in Operation Robson and Operation Meridian, both strikes against Japanese-controlled targets in Sumatra through early 1945, a demanding run of operations in the war's closing months.

Rebuilt as a Type 15 Frigate

Between 1952 and 1953, Whirlwind was converted by Palmers into a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate, recommissioning on 28 July 1953 with the new pennant number F187 and joining the 5th Frigate Squadron for a busy programme of Cold War duties.

The conversion turned her into something genuinely different rather than a modernised destroyer. A Type 15 had her entire upper works cut away and rebuilt: a long enclosed superstructure running most of the length of the hull, a low bridge, one twin 4-inch mounting aft instead of a destroyer battery forward, and two three-barrelled Limbo mortars in wells in the quarterdeck. The whole ship was rearranged around the sonar and the mortars, because the enemy was now a fast Soviet submarine and nothing else mattered. Why the Royal Navy rebuilt forty-odd wartime destroyers this way rather than building new ships is set out in HMS Rapid (F138).

Helping Solve the Comet Mystery

In 1954, Whirlwind took part in the recovery operation following the crashes of the de Havilland Comet, Britain's pioneering jet airliner, whose catastrophic failures were later traced to metal fatigue around the aircraft's windows. Recovering wreckage from the sea was a painstaking but properly vital contribution to an investigation that reshaped aviation safety worldwide.

Operation Elba Isle

The Comet recovery is the most consequential thing she was ever part of, and it deserves rather more than a sentence, because what happened off Elba in the spring of 1954 changed the design of every airliner flying today.

On the morning of 10 January 1954 the BOAC Comet Yoke Peter left Rome for London, was still climbing twenty minutes later, and came apart in the air. All thirty-five people aboard died. Comets had been lost before, and no agreed explanation existed for any of it. The Comet was the first jet airliner in the world, it was British, it was two years ahead of anything the Americans had, and the entire future of British civil aviation was riding on finding out what had gone wrong.

The wreckage was on the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea in up to five hundred and forty feet of water, which in 1954 might as well have been the far side of the Moon. Divers of the day could not work at that depth. Nobody had ever laid salvage moorings that deep. There were no submersibles, no side-scan sonar and no remote vehicles.

So the Royal Navy did it anyway, and it took eleven weeks. HMS Wrangler was the headquarters ship, the salvage vessel RFA Sea Salvor did the lifting, the boom defence vessel Barhill laid moorings in ninety fathoms and then carried the heaviest pieces to Leghorn, and Whirlwind and HMS Wakeful worked the search. Three ships of the same wartime flotilla, reunited over a hole in the sea.

The thing that made it possible was brand new. A team from the Admiralty Research Laboratory under George MacNeice brought underwater television cameras and lowered them over the side, and this was the first time in history that anyone had found something on the seabed by looking at it on a screen. By 9 April they had recovered more than seventy per cent of the aircraft and over ninety per cent of the engines, and it all went to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, where the recovered pieces were pinned out on a wooden frame in the shape of an aeroplane.

What Farnborough then found is worth getting right, because the popular version is not quite accurate. Another Comet was put in a water tank and pressurised and depressurised until she failed, and the failure was metal fatigue, and it did not begin at a passenger window. It began at the corner of a small, square, sharp-cornered aperture in the cabin roof, cut for a direction-finding aerial. Square corners concentrate stress. Every pressurised aircraft window in the world has been oval or round-cornered ever since, and that is the direct legacy of months of test-tank cycles and eleven weeks of Royal Navy sailors dragging aluminium off the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Suez and the Nassau Agreement

Whirlwind took part in operations during the 1956 Suez Crisis, and in December 1962 provided security at the Nassau Agreement talks in the Bahamas, the negotiations between Britain and the United States that shaped the future of Britain's independent nuclear deterrent, a significant piece of Cold War diplomacy for a modest frigate to be guarding.

The Week Britain Bought Polaris

Providing security at a conference sounds like the least interesting entry in a service record, and this one is not, because of which conference it was.

In December 1962 the Americans cancelled Skybolt, the air-launched missile Britain had been promised and had built its entire nuclear planning around. Britain's deterrent at that moment consisted of V-bombers carrying free-fall bombs, which Soviet air defences were on the point of making useless, and the cancellation left the country with no credible replacement and no time to design one. Harold Macmillan flew to Nassau to see President Kennedy about it, and stayed from 18 to 21 December.

What he came away with, in the teeth of considerable American reluctance, was Polaris: the missiles, without the warheads, to be carried in British-built submarines under British command, assigned to NATO except where supreme national interests were at stake. That last clause is the whole British deterrent in fourteen words. Every ballistic missile submarine the Royal Navy has operated since 1968 exists because of that week, and so does the argument about them.

Whirlwind was the guardship. A hull laid down on the Tyne twenty years earlier, in the middle of the Battle of the Atlantic, sitting off a Bahamian beach while a prime minister and a president settled what the next sixty years of British defence policy would look like.

Foundered as a Target Ship

Placed on the disposal list in 1966, Whirlwind was towed to Pembroke Dock in 1969 to serve as a target vessel for gunnery practice, and finally foundered at her moorings in Cardigan Bay on 29 October 1974, ending her days beneath the waves that had once carried her from the Sumatran coast to the conference rooms of Nassau.

She Is Still There

Foundered at her moorings is true and is not the end of her, because unlike almost every other ship in this fleet she was never broken up. She is on the bottom of Cardigan Bay, and people go and look at her.

Towed from Portsmouth to Pembroke Dock on 12 September 1969, she spent five years anchored on the firing range being shot at, with a pair of latticework target platforms welded to her deck fore and aft. On 29 October 1974 she had taken enough and went down overnight.

She lies in thirty-six metres, the bow rolled over on her port side, the wreck standing about six metres proud of the sand. Divers who go down her find the twin 4-inch turret with its barrels pointing forward, the two Limbo mortar wells in the quarterdeck, the fire-control position with the ring its radar sat on, both propeller shafts lying out on the seabed where they broke away from the A-frames, and the aft target platform standing bolt upright on the sand beside her, still perfect.

It makes her, so far as anybody knows, the only Type 15 frigate in the world that can be dived. Seventeen hundred tons of 1942 emergency-programme destroyer, rebuilt in 1953 as a Cold War submarine hunter, sunk in 1974 by her own navy's gunnery practice, and now a wreck that anybody with a boat out of Aberystwyth and the right qualifications can go and stand on.