HMS Zenith (R95): The Destroyer Who Missed Her War, Then Found a Longer One

Nearly Named Wessex

HMS Zenith was built by William Denny and Brothers in Dumbarton and originally intended to be named HMS Wessex before the change to Zenith, commissioning on 21 December 1944 as a Z-class destroyer and joining the Home Fleet just as the war entered its final months.

The name change is worth a footnote of its own, because it was not a whim. The name Wessex had been on a V and W class destroyer bombed and sunk off Calais on 24 May 1940, and in January 1943 the Admiralty put it back to sea on a hull building at Govan, which became HMS Wessex (R78). This ship, who had been going to carry it, took Zenith instead. Her Dumbarton sister HMS Zebra (R81) went through exactly the same exchange on the same day with the name Wakeful, and the two lost destroyers behind it went down five days apart in May 1940. What a Z-class destroyer was, and why the class was the best of the emergency programme, is in HMS Zambesi (R66).

A War That Ended Too Soon

Despite needing repairs, Zenith was allocated for service in the Far East and transited via the Mediterranean, but the war ended before she saw any operational service at all, a notably unusual fate for a fighting ship built at the height of the conflict, arriving just too late to take part in the war she had been designed and built to fight.

The Arithmetic of Missing a War

A notably unusual fate for a fighting ship built at the height of the conflict is worth examining, because it is less unusual than it sounds and the reasons are entirely mundane.

She commissioned on 21 December 1944. From that date a new destroyer needs six to ten weeks of working up, which is not a formality: the ship's company have mostly never been to sea together, the guns and the sonar have to be proved, and every drill from damage control to abandon ship has to be run until it is automatic. Add the repairs she needed, and it is February or March 1945 before she is any use to anybody.

By then the war in Europe had about ten weeks to run and the Home Fleet had more destroyers than it required. So she was allocated to the Far East, which was the war that still needed ships, and set off through the Mediterranean and the Canal, which is a passage of some five weeks with fuelling stops. And while she was doing it, the Japanese war ended too.

It happened to a great many ships. The emergency programme had been laid out in 1941 and 1942 on the assumption that the war would run into 1946 or later, and the last flotillas came out of the yards into a world that had stopped needing them. Some of them, like her, never fired a gun in anger at all, and that is not a reflection on the ship or her company. It is what happens when you win.

A Quiet Postwar Career

Zenith served with the 4th Destroyer Flotilla in 1946 before entering reserve at Chatham in 1947, receiving a refit at Palmers shipyard in 1950 and remaining in the Harwich Reserve Fleet through 1954, while a proposed conversion into a Type 15 frigate was ultimately abandoned.

Sold to Egypt

In May 1955, Zenith was transferred to Egypt alongside her sister ship Myngs, and the Egyptian Navy commissioned her as El Fateh in 1956 after refitting, going on to receive further modernisation between 1963 and 1964, giving this once-idle destroyer a remarkably substantial second career under a new flag.

The Twenty-Eighth of August 1956

The Egyptian transfer is a genuinely remarkable piece of history, and it turns on a date rather than a year.

Zenith and her flotilla leader HMS Myngs were sold to Egypt in 1955 and refitted in British yards before delivery, Myngs by White at Cowes and Zenith by Thornycroft at Woolston. The two of them sailed for Egypt on 28 August 1956.

Look at that date. On 26 July 1956, a month earlier, President Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal Company. By the middle of August, British and French planning for a military operation against Egypt was well advanced; the Prime Minister had already told the Cabinet that Nasser had to go. On 28 August two British-built destroyers, refitted at British expense in British yards, left for Alexandria to join the Egyptian Navy. On 31 October the Royal Air Force began bombing Egyptian airfields, and on 5 November British paratroopers landed at Port Said.

So Britain delivered two warships to a country she attacked nine weeks later. It is not quite the absurdity it looks, because contracts signed are contracts signed and the government of August 1956 was still officially pursuing a negotiated settlement, but it is a long way from tidy. Whether anybody in Whitehall raised the matter is not recorded, and one rather hopes somebody did.

An Uncertain but Long-Lived Fate

El Fateh was relegated to the role of a training vessel and, remarkably, appears to have remained extant for decades afterward, with the name El Fateh eventually transferred to a new corvette in 2017.

Reports have suggested the possibility of the original ship being scrapped around 2016, though her exact final disposition remains properly unclear, a fittingly mysterious end for a destroyer whose career had begun with a war that ended before she could fight in it.

The Ship That Would Not Finish

Remained extant for decades afterward is doing a great deal of quiet work in that sentence, and it deserves the emphasis.

Consider what happened to the rest of her class. Zambesi and Zebra went to the breakers in 1959. Zealous was sunk off Port Said in 1967 by a missile that had not been invented when she was built. Zodiac was expended as a target in 1970. Myngs, her companion on that passage to Alexandria, was caught at Berenice on the Red Sea coast by Israeli aircraft on 16 May 1970 and sunk. Zest, the only one of them rebuilt as a frigate, lasted longest in British service and was gone by the 1970s.

Zenith outlived every one of them, by decades, alongside a wall in Egypt as a training ship, a hull built on the Clyde in 1944 still floating in the twenty-first century. If the reports of her going for scrap around 2016 are right, she was among the very last surviving destroyers of the Second World War anywhere in the world, and she went without anybody much noticing. The name El Fateh, which means the conqueror, went onto a new corvette in 2017.

A destroyer that arrived too late for one war, sat in an estuary for eight years, was sold to a country Britain then bombed, and outlasted every ship she was built alongside. It is not the career anybody at Denny's in 1944 would have predicted, and it is a considerably better one than most of her sisters got.