HMS Zodiac (R54): From the Kattegat to Sunk by an Israeli Missile

Built at Southampton

HMS Zodiac was built by Thornycroft in Southampton, laid down on 7 November 1942, launched on 11 March 1944 and commissioned on 23 October that year, a Z-class destroyer that entered service under Lieutenant Commander Henry Richard Rycroft in the final year of the war; her pennant number changed from R54 to D54 in 1945.

Striking Norwegian Targets

Zodiac carried out anti-submarine exercises and escort duties for capital ships and convoys, taking part in Operations Spellbinder and Gratis against Norwegian targets in January 1945, part of the sustained campaign to disrupt German operations along the Norwegian coast.

The Last Convoys

The operation names and the convoy numbers are worth translating, because the last four months of the European war at sea were not the gentle wind-down people imagine.

Spellbinder and Gratis, in January 1945, were minelaying and anti-shipping operations in the Norwegian leads, the sheltered inshore channel the Germans used to move iron ore and troops down the coast out of reach of aircraft. Destroyers went in at night, close to a hostile shore, laid mines or shot up whatever was in the channel, and got out before daylight.

The Last Arctic Convoys

In April and May 1945, Zodiac served on convoy JW 66 and RA 66 to Russia, among the very last of the gruelling Arctic convoys of the war, before supporting Operation Cleaver, the entry into the Skagerrak and Kattegat that May as Allied forces moved to secure the final stretches of German-controlled Scandinavian waters.

JW66 and RA66 were the last Arctic convoys of the war, and they were fought hard. By 1945 the U-boats in northern waters had the schnorkel, which meant they could run on diesels while submerged and were very much harder to find, and they had concentrated in the approaches to the Kola Inlet because there was nowhere else left worth attacking. JW66 got through to Russia without loss in late April. RA66, coming home at the end of the month, had to fight its way out of the Kola approaches through a waiting patrol line, and one U-boat was destroyed in the process.

It is worth stopping on that. Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945. Men were being killed in the Barents Sea, in ice, in the last week of April, on a convoy route that had been running for four years, for a war that everybody involved already knew was over. What that route was like is set out in HMS Zebra (R81).

Operation Cleaver was the sequel, and a strange one. In the first days of May, with Germany collapsing, British forces pushed into the Skagerrak and Kattegat, the water between Denmark, Norway and Sweden, to cut off the German troops still in Norway and stop them getting home. Ships went into a sea that had been an enemy lake for five years, past minefields nobody had charted, to accept surrenders from people who in some cases had not yet been told they had lost.

Sold to Israel

HMS Zodiac was purchased by Israel in 1955 and served in the Israeli Navy as INS Yafo, pennant K-42, going on to give the young Israeli fleet fourteen years of further service until 1969, a substantial second career for a destroyer whose Royal Navy record had already spanned the closing months of the Second World War.

Yafo

Israel bought two of her class, and it matters which two, because the pair of them bracket the single most important thing that happened to warships in the second half of the twentieth century.

Zodiac became INS Yafo. Her sister HMS Zealous became INS Eilat. For a decade they were the two largest ships in the Israeli Navy, a fleet otherwise made up of small craft, and between them they carried a very large part of Israel's naval capability.

On 21 October 1967, Eilat was sunk off Port Said by Soviet-built Styx missiles fired by Egyptian missile boats that never left harbour. Forty-seven of her people were killed. It was the first time in history that a warship had been sunk in action by a guided anti-ship missile, and it removed half of Israel's destroyer force in about four minutes.

Sunk by Her Own Adoptive Navy's Missile

In 1970, the former Zodiac was used as a target ship and sunk after being struck by a Gabriel missile, Israel's own domestically developed anti-ship weapon, a fittingly symmetrical end for a ship that had spent her final active years defending the very nation whose new missile technology ultimately sent her to the bottom.

The Missile That Sank Her Was Built Because of Her Sister

Israel's own domestically developed anti-ship weapon is precisely right and leaves out the reason it existed, which turns her ending from a coincidence into something a great deal more pointed.

Israel had begun work on an anti-ship missile before 1967, but the loss of Eilat changed everything about the programme and about Israeli naval thinking generally. The lesson was brutally clear: a large ship with guns was now a target, and a very small boat with missiles was the thing to be. So Israel abandoned the idea of a conventional navy altogether, put its money into fast attack craft, and finished the Gabriel, a sea-skimming missile designed specifically to be carried by boats of a few hundred tons.

Which is how, in 1970, the old Zodiac came to be expended as a target. She was not sunk by a missile that happened to be Israeli. She was sunk in the trials of the weapon that Israel had built because her own sister had been sunk by one three years earlier. The Royal Navy destroyer went to the bottom to prove the answer to the problem that had killed the other Royal Navy destroyer.

It worked, and the proof came three years after that. On the night of 7 October 1973, off Latakia, Israeli missile boats met Syrian ones in the first battle in history fought between missile-armed fast attack craft. The Syrians fired Styx, the same weapon that had killed Eilat, from longer range. The Israelis turned towards them, put out chaff and jamming, and every Syrian missile went into the sea after a false target. Then they closed to Gabriel range and sank the lot without losing a boat. The lesson of Eilat had been learned so thoroughly that it was handed back with interest.

And there is one more turn of the screw. South Africa, unable to buy weapons under an international embargo, licensed the Gabriel and built it as the Skerpioen. In March 1980 a South African strike craft used one to sink a target ship sixty miles off Cape Point. The target was the former HMS Wessex, by then SAS Jan van Riebeeck.

So: a British destroyer is sunk by a Russian missile, which causes an Israeli missile to be built, which sinks a British destroyer, and is then copied by South Africa, which uses it to sink another British destroyer. Four ships, three navies, thirteen years, and all of it starting on an afternoon off Port Said in 1967.