HMS Wrangler (F157): Present at Tokyo Bay, Later Sunk by a South African Submarine

The Build: Barrow

HMS Wrangler was built by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 23 September 1942, launched on 30 December 1943 and completed on 14 July 1944, one of eight W-class destroyers built for the Royal Navy during the Second World War, joining the 27th Destroyer Flotilla and working up at Scapa Flow before deploying to the Mediterranean.

Striking a Sumatran Oil Refinery

By late 1944, Wrangler had transferred to the Eastern Fleet, escorting aircraft carriers during attacks on Japanese-occupied territory and taking part in Operation Robson against a Sumatran oil refinery that December, before undergoing major boiler maintenance in Bombay from January to May 1945.

With the Token Force at the Surrender

Wrangler reinforced the British Pacific Fleet in the summer of 1945 and was with the British Token Force in Japanese waters when Japan formally surrendered aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September that year, a significant front-row seat to the end of the Second World War, before helping ferry former prisoners of war home.

How Close to the Missouri, Exactly

The Tokyo Bay claim is worth examining rather than simply repeating, because two good sources do not entirely agree and it is more interesting to say so.

Her published service record has her present with the other ships of the Token Force at the formal surrender in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. The Token Force was the British contingent detached from the British Pacific Fleet to be there for the ceremony, and she was one of the destroyers of the 27th Flotilla with it.

Against that, the American list of ships present in the bay during the ceremony, drawn up by the Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet in February 1946, names seven British destroyers, and she is not among them. Those seven were Quality, Teazer, Tenacious, Terpsichore, Wager, Whelp and Wizard.

The likely reconciliation is geography rather than contradiction. Sagami Bay, the outer anchorage under Mount Fuji, held a very large part of the Allied fleet that week, while only a fraction of it moved into Tokyo Bay proper for the ceremony itself. A ship in Sagami Bay on 2 September 1945 was unquestionably there, in every sense that matters to the people aboard, and was equally unquestionably not within binocular range of the Missouri's quarterdeck. Both things can be true and this is very probably which one she was.

What is not in dispute is what came next, and it was the better job. She helped ferry released prisoners of war home. Men who had been in Japanese hands for three and a half years came aboard a British destroyer and were fed, clothed and taken away, and for a good many of them that deck was the first safe place they had stood on since 1942.

The First of Her Class Rebuilt

Returning to Plymouth in December 1945, Wrangler served as a training vessel until 1950, before becoming, in 1951, the first ship of her class to be converted into a Type 15 anti-submarine frigate, receiving the new pennant number F157 during a major reconstruction at Harland and Wolff in Belfast that ran from June 1951 to March 1953, complete with a redesigned superstructure and new radar systems.

The First One They Tried It On

The first ship of her class to be converted is the single most important line in her record, and it is doing a lot of quiet work.

By 1950 the Royal Navy had a problem it could not spend its way out of. Soviet submarine development, built on captured German Type XXI technology, had produced boats that could outrun the Royal Navy's existing escorts underwater. New anti-submarine frigates were needed in numbers and there was no money to build them. What there was, in reserve creeks all over Britain, was a large stock of nearly new wartime emergency destroyers with good hulls, good machinery and entirely obsolete weapons.

The Type 15 was the answer: strip the ship to the upper deck and build a new one on top. A continuous superstructure the full length of the hull, a low bridge set well aft, the entire gun armament reduced to a single twin 4-inch mounting right at the stern, and the space and weight so released given over to sonar, an operations room and two Limbo mortars firing from wells in the quarterdeck. What came out was, on paper, a better submarine hunter than anything that could have been built new for the money.

Wrangler was the ship they proved it on. She went into Harland and Wolff at Belfast in June 1951 and did not come out until March 1953, which is twenty-one months, and which is the length of time it takes to find out what does not work. Everything learned on her went into the forty-odd conversions that followed, and those took nowhere near as long. The programme as a whole is described in HMS Rapid (F138).

Headquarters Ship Off Elba

Between coming out of Belfast and going to South Africa she did one thing that changed the world, and it is missing from her record entirely.

On 10 January 1954 the BOAC Comet Yoke Peter broke up in the air off the island of Elba and fell into the Tyrrhenian Sea, killing all thirty-five people aboard. The Comet was the first jet airliner in the world and it was British, and nobody knew why it had come apart. The wreckage was on the bottom in up to five hundred and forty feet of water, and getting it back was beyond the diving technology of the day.

The Royal Navy went and got it anyway, in an eleven-week operation that recovered over seventy per cent of the aircraft, using underwater television cameras for the first time in history to find things on the seabed. Wrangler was the headquarters ship for it. She was the ship the whole operation was run from: the moorings, the salvage vessel, the boom defence vessel laying ground tackle in ninety fathoms, the destroyers searching, the specialists from the Admiralty Research Laboratory, the liaison with the Italians and with Farnborough.

What the pieces then proved, and why every pressurised aircraft window in the world has rounded corners because of it, is set out in HMS Whirlwind (F187), who was one of the ships working the search under her direction. It is a fair claim that a converted 1944 destroyer, sitting off an Italian island directing a salvage operation, did more for the safety of air travel than any warship before or since.

A South African Career and a Submarine's Target

Sold to South Africa in 1956 for £1,425,000, Wrangler was commissioned into the South African Navy as SAS Vrystaat on 29 November that year, going on to conduct numerous port visits across Africa and take part in naval reviews until corrosion problems forced her into reserve in 1963.

Vrystaat, and Why She Rusted

The name she took in 1956 is a political statement in one word. Vrystaat is Afrikaans for Free State, meaning the Orange Free State, the Boer republic annexed by Britain in 1900 after a war that had taken Britain two and a half years, the best part of half a million men and the concentration camps to win.

So in 1956 the South African Navy bought a British destroyer, paid Britain one and a quarter million pounds for her, and named her after the republic Britain had destroyed. Her two older consorts had been named for Dutch colonial governors, Jan van Riebeeck and Simon van der Stel. This one was named for something rather closer to the bone.

The corrosion that finished her in 1963 was not neglect. She was an emergency-programme wartime hull, built at Barrow in 1943 to a specification that assumed a short and violent life, put together at speed and expected to be either sunk or scrapped inside a decade. Move a ship like that to the South African coast, where the water is warm, the air is salty and the ship spends her life alongside rather than at sea, and she will eat herself. Seventeen years is not a scandal for a hull built to last five. It is simply what happens.

Vrystaat was finally sunk as a target by the submarine SAS Maria van Riebeeck on 14 April 1976, eight nautical miles southwest of Cape Point, closing out the career of a destroyer that had once lain among the Allied fleet off Japan on the morning the Second World War ended.

Sunk by a Submarine That Should Not Have Existed

The ship that sank her is the last good detail. SAS Maria van Riebeeck was a Daphne class submarine, and there is a story in how South Africa came to have her.

By the mid-1960s South Africa was under a growing international arms embargo, voluntary at first and mandatory from 1977, and the list of countries willing to sell it warships was short and shrinking. France was on it. Three Daphne class boats were bought from Dubigeon at Nantes and commissioned between 1970 and 1972, and they were, for a quarter of a century, the only submarines the country had. Maria van Riebeeck was the first, named for the wife of the man the first of the three destroyers had been named after.

On 14 April 1976, eight miles south-west of Cape Point, she put a torpedo into Vrystaat. It is the neatest possible ending for a Type 15: a ship rebuilt from the keel up for the sole purpose of killing submarines, expended thirty-three years later to prove that a submarine could kill her. Four years after that, in the same stretch of water, her old consort Jan van Riebeeck was sunk in her turn by a missile from a strike craft. The whole South African destroyer force ended as target practice for the weapons that had replaced it.