HMS Zebra (R81): The Destroyer That Swapped Names With Her Sister Ship

A Curious Name Swap

HMS Zebra was built by William Denny and Brothers in Dumbarton, and in a curious quirk of wartime shipbuilding administration, was originally planned to be named HMS Wakeful before being renamed Zebra in January 1943, in what appears to have been a straightforward swap of names with her sister ship, which took on the Wakeful name instead. She was launched on 18 March 1944 and commissioned on 13 October that year.

Why the Names Were Moved

What appears to have been a straightforward swap is exactly right as far as it goes, and there is a reason behind it that makes the whole thing considerably less arbitrary.

The Royal Navy does not retire names. A ship lost in action gives her name back to the list, and the Admiralty puts it on a new hull as soon as one is available, which is why so many British warships are the fourth or the ninth or the fourteenth of their name. What happened in January 1943 was a tidying of the emergency-programme flotillas, and the names being shuffled around were not chosen at random. They had all just become available.

Wakeful is the clearest case. HMS Wakeful, a V and W class destroyer of 1917, was off Dunkirk on the night of 28 and 29 May 1940 with something in the region of six hundred and forty soldiers packed aboard, having lifted them from the beaches. At twenty minutes to one in the morning, just after clearing the Kwinte Whistle Buoy off Ostend, she was hit amidships by two torpedoes fired by the German motor torpedo boat S-30. She broke in half and went down in fifteen seconds. Almost every soldier aboard was below decks and asleep. Twenty-five of her own crew survived, and a bare handful of the troops. Ships that stopped to pick up the survivors were themselves attacked, and HMS Grafton was torpedoed doing it.

So in January 1943, with a destroyer building at Dumbarton, the Admiralty put that name back to sea. It went onto the ship that is now HMS Wakeful (F159), and this ship, who had been going to carry it, became Zebra instead.

The same round of renaming did the same thing with another lost name in the same week. HMS Wessex had been bombed and sunk off Calais on 24 May 1940, four days before Wakeful went down, and in January 1943 that name came back too. It went onto a hull at Govan, which is now HMS Wessex (R78), and the Dumbarton ship that had been going to carry Wessex became HMS Zenith (R95). Four ships, two names, one piece of paper, and behind it two destroyers lost in the same week of May 1940.

Which is why Zebra and Zenith are Zebra and Zenith. Not a quirk of administration, but the Admiralty getting two names back into commission and rearranging the alphabet round them.

A Rocky Start

After working up, Zebra joined the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla of the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, though her early operations were hampered by a collision in October 1944 that kept her under repair through December, a bumpy beginning for a ship soon to face far more demanding waters.

Arctic Convoys and Minelaying

Zebra went on to carry out screening operations and Arctic convoy escort duty, including convoys JW63 and RA63 in January 1945, followed by minelaying operations off Norway that February, before turning to occupation support duties as the war in Europe drew to its close.

JW63, RA63, and the January Dark

The convoy numbers deserve unpacking, because by 1945 the Arctic run had changed in character without becoming any safer.

JW63 sailed from the Clyde on 30 December 1944 and RA63 came back from the Kola Inlet in January. By that stage of the war the escorts had the measure of the U-boats; the convoys were heavily escorted, air cover was better, and JW63 in fact got through without loss. What had not changed at all was the weather and the dark.

In January, at the latitude of the Kola Inlet, the sun does not come up. Not briefly: at all. The convoy runs for a fortnight in permanent night, in a sea where the spray freezes as it lands, where topweight builds up as ice until the ship becomes unstable and the whole company turns out with steam hoses and mallets to chip it off, and where a man in the water has about two minutes. The Arctic convoys killed more people through cold and weather than most campaigns kill through fire.

The minelaying off Norway that February is the other half of the same job. Destroyers laid mines in the leads, the sheltered channel inside the offshore islands that the Germans used to move iron ore south out of reach of British aircraft. A destroyer minelaying is doing so at night, close inshore, on a hostile coast, at speed, with her own deck stacked with mines, in water she cannot see the bottom of. There is no glory in it and it closed the route.

A Transfer That Never Happened

After the war, Zebra transferred to the 4th Destroyer Flotilla until 1947, before entering reserve status and moving between the Plymouth and Harwich Reserve Fleets through the early 1950s.

Plans to convert her into an anti-submarine frigate were cancelled in 1955, and a proposed transfer to West Germany was subsequently rejected after an inspection revealed her poor condition, leaving her with no further useful role.

Worn Out at Eleven

The two cancelled futures at the end of her life are the same story told twice, and it is worth stating plainly, because it explains what happened to a great many of these ships.

The War Emergency Programme destroyers were built to win a war, not to last. Corners were cut everywhere: simplified structure, lighter scantlings, a single design repeated as fast as the yards could turn it out, and an assumed working life measured in a handful of years, on the reasonable grounds that most of them would be sunk. They were not sunk. Not one of the eight Z-class ships was lost, and the Royal Navy found itself in 1946 with a large fleet of destroyers that had been built to be expendable and had refused to be expended.

Left in reserve, salt in the frames, with the maintenance those years allowed, they aged fast. When the Admiralty came to pick candidates for the Type 15 conversion, which meant cutting a ship down to the upper deck and building a new one on it and was therefore only worth doing to a sound hull, some were fit for it and some were not. Zebra was not; the conversion was cancelled in 1955. When West Germany, rebuilding a navy from nothing, came looking for cheap destroyers three years later, their inspectors went over her and said no.

Being turned down twice is a hard verdict on a ship, and it is worth saying what it does not mean. She was not a bad ship. She was a good ship that had been built quickly for a specific war, had done that war, and had then spent a decade tied up in an estuary waiting for a use that never came. Her sister HMS Zest (R02) passed the same survey, was rebuilt, and served for another decade. That is the whole difference between them.

Broken Up at Newport

HMS Zebra was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation in 1958 and broken up at Newport, Monmouth by Cashmore, arriving in tow at the breakers' yard on 12 February 1959, bringing to a close the career of a destroyer whose very identity had begun with an administrative swap of names.