HMS Zambesi (R66): Her Bell Still Rings in a Portsmouth Church

Constructed at Birkenhead

HMS Zambesi was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, launched on 21 December 1942 and commissioned on 18 July 1944, a Z-class destroyer that worked up with the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow before joining the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla for screening and patrol duties in the North Western Approaches.

What a Z-Class Destroyer Was

A Z-class destroyer is worth defining, because the letter is the least informative thing about her and the class was genuinely a step forward.

Britain built its wartime destroyers in flotillas of eight, lettered in sequence, under what was called the War Emergency Programme. The Z ships were the 10th of those flotillas: eight of them, led by HMS Myngs, and completed between 1944 and early 1945. They were the last of the emergency destroyers to be built to the old hull form before the Battle class arrived, and they were also the best of them.

The reason is the gun. Every emergency destroyer before them carried the 4.7-inch, a fine anti-ship weapon that could not elevate far enough to be much use against aircraft, which by 1943 was very obviously the wrong way round. The Z class were the first British destroyers designed from the keel up around the 4.5-inch dual-purpose gun in single mountings, with a Director Mark I Type K that could follow an aircraft as well as a ship. It meant that for the first time a British destroyer could genuinely defend herself, and the fleet she was screening, from the air.

It shows in the record. Not one of the eight was lost during the war, which for a class of destroyers that spent it in the Arctic and the North Sea is remarkable. Her flotilla leader's own account is in HMS Myngs (R06).

Hunting the Tirpitz

Zambesi took part in operations against the German battleship Tirpitz and escorted a number of Arctic convoys on the dangerous route to northern Russia, alongside further operations in the North Sea and Scandinavian waters, before her late-war duties turned to supporting the reoccupation of formerly German-occupied territories as the conflict drew to its close.

Operations Against Tirpitz

Operations against the German battleship Tirpitz is a phrase covering the longest and most obsessive campaign of the naval war.

Tirpitz spent almost her entire career at anchor in a Norwegian fjord and almost never fired a shot at a British ship. She did not have to. As long as she existed, and was within a day's steaming of the convoy route to Russia, the Home Fleet had to keep a battleship and a carrier group in northern waters to cover every convoy, and the whole balance of the Atlantic was affected. So she was attacked by midget submarines, by carrier aircraft again and again through 1944, and finally by Lancasters with twelve-thousand-pound bombs, which turned her over in November 1944.

Zambesi's part was the screen, which is where a destroyer always is: out on the edge of the force, watching for submarines, in weather that in an Arctic winter is genuinely dangerous on its own account. The strikes themselves are described from the flight decks in HMS Pursuer (D73) and HMS Implacable (R86).

One of her Scandinavian operations deserves naming, because it is one of the best things any of these ships did. In February 1945 she was one of four Home Fleet destroyers sent to the island of Soroya, off the far north of Norway, to take off five hundred and twenty-five civilians who had spent three months hiding in the mountains from the German destruction of Finnmark. It was called Operation Open Door and it is told in HMS Zealous (R39), who was there with her.

A Long Spell in Reserve

Joining the 4th Destroyer Flotilla after the war, Zambesi was paid off in 1947 and placed in the Plymouth Reserve Fleet, receiving a refit at Gibraltar in 1948 and serving as a target ship for submarines in 1951, before a further refit at Penarth between 1953 and 1954 and a final long stretch in reserve at Cardiff until 1959, a career increasingly defined by waiting rather than active service.

Why She Spent Twelve Years Waiting

A career increasingly defined by waiting is exactly right and it was not her fault. Paid off in 1947 at three years old, she then sat, with intervals, until 1959.

The arithmetic is brutal and it applied to hundreds of ships. In 1945 the Royal Navy had around nine hundred major warships and about eight hundred thousand people. By 1948 it had a fraction of the money and a fraction of the manpower, and it had a very large number of nearly new destroyers built at emergency speed. There was no possibility of manning them all and no sense at all in scrapping ships that were three years old and might be needed within a decade, so they were dehumidified, sealed and laid up in the Reserve Fleet, in creeks and estuaries all round the coast, with care and maintenance parties moving between them.

Her intervals are the interesting part. The Gibraltar refit in 1948 and the Penarth refit of 1953 to 1954 were both done to keep her genuinely capable of being brought forward rather than merely afloat, which cost real money and tells you the Admiralty still expected to want her. And in 1951 she was a target ship for submarines, which is a job worth explaining: she went to sea and was attacked, repeatedly, by British submarines firing practice torpedoes set to run underneath her, so that both the submarine crews and her own operators could learn their trade against a real ship making real noise. It is the least glamorous and most useful thing a spare destroyer can do.

What ended it was the Defence White Paper of 1957, which concluded that the next war would be nuclear and short, that a reserve fleet would never be mobilised in time, and that the money should go on missiles. The Reserve Fleet was effectively abolished, and several hundred perfectly serviceable ships went to the breakers over the following three years. Zambesi was one of them.

Scrapped, But Not Forgotten

HMS Zambesi was sold to Thos. W. Ward for scrapping in 1959, arriving in tow at their yard at Briton Ferry in Wales on 12 February that year.

Her ship's bell was preserved and presented to St Cuthbert's Church in Portsmouth, where it remains to this day, a small but enduring physical link to a destroyer whose wartime service against the Tirpitz and on the Arctic convoys deserves to be remembered.

The Bell at St Cuthbert's

The bell is not a sentimental afterthought, and it is worth saying why these things end up where they do.

A ship's bell is the one object aboard that is unmistakably hers. It carries her name and the year she was built, cast into the metal. It strikes the watches, so the whole rhythm of life aboard runs off it. And by long custom it is turned upside down and filled with water to serve as the font when a child is christened aboard, with the baby's name afterwards engraved inside the bell. A great many bells in British churches have a list of names inside them that nobody in the congregation now recognises.

So when a ship is broken up, the bell is the thing that is saved, and it usually goes somewhere with a claim on her: the town she was named for, a church her people worshipped in, or a naval parish. Hers went to St Cuthbert's in Portsmouth, which is about as appropriate a home as a Home Fleet destroyer's bell can have, and it is still rung there.

Everything else about her went to Briton Ferry in February 1959 and was cut up for scrap. Fifteen years old, four of them in commission, a Tirpitz operation, a run of Arctic convoys, five hundred and twenty-five Norwegians and a bell in a Portsmouth church.