HMS Zealous (R39): Rescued Norwegian Civilians, Later the First Ship Ever Sunk by a Missile

The Build: Birkenhead

HMS Zealous was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, ordered in February 1942, laid down in May 1943, launched on 28 February 1944 and completed on 9 October that year, a Z-class destroyer that went on to serve on the demanding Arctic convoy route and in anti-shipping operations off the coast of Norway.

Rescuing Norwegian Civilians

In February 1945, Zealous took part in a truly remarkable rescue operation, helping to evacuate 525 Norwegian civilians who had been hiding from occupying German forces, a striking humanitarian achievement carried out under real wartime danger and a fine example of the Royal Navy's role protecting civilian lives even amid combat operations.

Operation Open Door

Five hundred and twenty-five civilians hiding from occupying German forces is the fact, and the reason behind it is the part worth knowing, because it is one of the ugliest orders of the war.

In October 1944 the Red Army crossed into the far north of Norway, and Hitler ordered Finnmark destroyed behind the retreating German army. Not damaged: destroyed. Every house, every quay, every boat, every telegraph pole, every stock of food, over an area the size of Denmark. The entire population, some fifty thousand people, was to be deported south. It was carried out through the winter of 1944 and 1945 and it is why almost nothing in Finnmark today is older than 1946.

Thousands of Norwegians refused to go. They took what they could carry and went into the mountains and the sea caves, in the Arctic, in winter, with the temperature at twenty below and no daylight at all for weeks, and they lived in caves and turf shelters and under upturned boats while German patrols hunted them. On the island of Soroya, off the north-west corner of Norway, several hundred of them had been doing this for three months by February 1945.

Word got out to the Home Fleet, and four destroyers were sent. Zealous was one; HMS Zambesi was another. On 15 February 1945 they went in to a hostile coast, put boats in the water, and took five hundred and twenty-five people off: families, old people, children, some of whom had been born in the caves. They then had to take them somewhere, which meant carrying them to Murmansk, transferring them, and getting them across to Scotland, all of which was done by the end of that month.

Consider the practicalities. A Z-class destroyer had a ship's company of about a hundred and eighty and accommodation for exactly that. Four of them took on five hundred and twenty-five extra people, most of them cold, wet, hungry and frightened, and fed and warmed them across the Barents Sea in February in a ship where there was no spare space of any kind. Somebody gave up a bunk for every one of them.

Sold to Israel

In 1955, the Royal Navy sold Zealous to Israel, where she was commissioned into the Israeli Navy as INS Eilat in July 1956, going on to see action against Egyptian naval forces near Haifa during the Suez Crisis that same year, a new chapter for a ship already well tested by war.

Eilat

The Israeli career needs a word of setting. Israel in 1955 was seven years old, had a navy of a few ex-British and ex-Italian vessels, and could not buy modern warships from anybody. Britain sold her two Z-class destroyers, Zealous and later HMS Zodiac, and for a decade they were the largest ships in the Israeli fleet. Egypt, meanwhile, had bought her own former Royal Navy destroyers, including HMS Myngs, so that when the two navies met off Haifa in 1956 it was very largely British-built ships on both sides, fighting each other with British guns.

The First Ship Sunk by a Missile

On 21 October 1967, during the War of Attrition, INS Eilat was struck off Port Said by three Soviet-made Styx missiles, fired in two separate waves an hour apart from two different Egyptian missile boats, and sank, a notably pivotal moment in naval history as the first warship ever sunk in wartime by an anti-ship missile, an event that reshaped naval doctrine worldwide almost overnight.

The Afternoon That Changed Every Navy in the World

Reshaped naval doctrine worldwide almost overnight is a strong claim, and it is if anything an understatement, so it is worth setting out exactly what happened and exactly why it mattered so much.

On the afternoon of 21 October 1967, Eilat was patrolling off Port Said, about thirteen miles out, in international water, doing what she had done many times before. The Egyptian Komar-class missile boats that killed her never left harbour. They fired from inside Port Said, over the horizon, and the first two Styx missiles arrived without warning.

That is the whole point, and it is worth dwelling on. A Komar was a hundred-ton wooden torpedo boat hull with two missile launchers bolted to it, crewed by about twenty men, and it cost a rounding error compared with a destroyer. The Styx it fired carried a thousand-pound warhead more than sixteen miles. So an object that a destroyer's gunnery officer would not previously have considered a threat at all, that could be built in dozens, that could sit alongside a wall in harbour, had just destroyed a fleet destroyer without ever being seen.

Of her crew of 199, 47 were killed or went missing and between 90 and 100 more were wounded, which is roughly three quarters of everybody aboard, marking a tragic and historically consequential end for a ship that had once carried hundreds of Norwegian civilians to safety.

And then the second wave. About an hour after the first attack, with Eilat sinking and her people in the water and her boats trying to pick them up, two more missiles were fired. One hit the ship. The other went into the water among the survivors. That second salvo is why the casualty list reads as it does, and why so many of the missing were never found.

Every navy on earth read the report. Within a decade the results were visible everywhere: anti-ship missiles of their own, because if a hundred-ton boat could do that then everybody wanted one; close-in weapon systems designed to shoot a missile down in the last few seconds; chaff launchers to seduce the seeker away; radar warning receivers; and a wholesale rethink of how a warship survives at all. The Exocet, the Harpoon, the Sea Wolf and the Phalanx all descend, directly, from what happened to this ship on a Saturday afternoon in 1967.

Fifteen years later the Royal Navy found out what that meant in the South Atlantic, when an Exocet fired from an aircraft did to HMS Sheffield more or less what the Styx had done to Eilat. The lesson had been on the table since 1967 and it still had to be learned again.

There is a last thing worth saying about her. She was built at Birkenhead in 1944, she took five hundred Norwegians off an Arctic island in 1945, and she was sunk in 1967 in a way that had not existed when she was designed, by a weapon fired from a boat smaller than her own motor cutter. Very few ships get to mark both ends of an era quite that precisely.