HMS Achilles (C70): The Cruiser That Helped Corner a Pocket Battleship

Built on the Mersey, Adopted by New Zealand

HMS Achilles was a Leander-class light cruiser, the second of five ships in her class, built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 11 June 1931 and launched a little over a year later on 1 September 1932. She was commissioned on 10 October 1933, a solidly capable cruiser of just over 7,000 tons, armed with eight 6-inch guns and capable of better than 32 knots.

She measured 555 feet long with a 56 foot beam and a draught of just over 19 feet, drove four shafts off Parsons geared turbines and six Yarrow boilers for around 73,000 horsepower, and carried four 4-inch secondary guns and eight 21-inch torpedo tubes in addition to her main armament, with a complement of around 550 in peacetime, rising to roughly 680 once war broke out.

From March 1936 she served with the Royal Navy's New Zealand Division, and by October that year she had been formally loaned to the Royal New Zealand Navy, a relationship that would come to define her entire public identity.

Her passage out gave her a small aviation first. She recommissioned into the New Zealand Division on 31 March 1936, sailed from Sheerness on 22 April, and called at Spithead on the way to embark a Supermarine Walrus, making her the first ship to carry the type. It is a nice detail with a deflating postscript: by the time the war she is famous for actually began, she had no aircraft aboard at all.

Depending on which side of the world you were reading about her in, she was either HMS Achilles or HMNZS Achilles, and by the time she became particularly famous, most of the reading was happening in New Zealand.

She sailed under the motto Fortiter in Re, "bravely in action", and carried battle honours reaching back to Belle Ile in 1761 and Trafalgar in 1805, one of them, Leopard 1917, actually inherited from an earlier HMS Achilles that sank the German raider of that name off Shetland.

The honours board did not stop there either. River Plate 1939 was joined in time by Guadalcanal 1942 to 43 and Okinawa 1945, which is a fair summary of a ship that fought at one end of the world in December 1939 and the other end of it in 1945.

The Battle of the River Plate

She did not stumble into that action. When war broke out she was patrolling the Pacific coast of South America looking for German merchant ships, and by October 1939 she had been assigned to Commodore Harwood's South American Division as part of Force G, alongside HMS Exeter, HMS Cumberland and her own sister HMS Ajax. Hunting one raider across the South Atlantic with four cruisers spread over thousands of miles of ocean was less a plan than an act of faith, and it worked.

That fame arrived on 13 December 1939, off the coast of South America, when Achilles, under Captain William Edward Parry, joined HMS Ajax and the heavier HMS Exeter in one of the most celebrated single actions of the entire war: the hunt for the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee.

Under the overall command of Commodore Henry Harwood, the three British cruisers caught up with the German raider, which had been quietly sinking merchant shipping across the South Atlantic, and forced a fight nobody had been entirely sure they could win.

The pairing with Ajax was more literal than it sounds. The two sisters fought under a combined gunnery control, spotting and correcting as a single unit, which doubled the weight of fire falling on Graf Spee from that side of her but also meant that any confusion in the spotting affected both ships at once.

Achilles and Ajax worked as a pair, closing to around 13,000 yards and manoeuvring in front of Graf Spee to split her attention and her fire away from the more badly damaged Exeter. At one stage, Achilles misjudged the German ship's speed and briefly closed to a range that let Graf Spee land two accurate three-gun salvoes, forcing her to pull back behind a smoke screen.

By the time the action was over, Achilles had suffered moderate damage from a single near miss that killed four men on deck and in the Director Control Tower, ratings named in the ship's own record as Grant, Milburn, Shaw and Stennett, and wounded a further seven, three of them seriously, including Captain Parry himself, but she had done exactly what was asked of her.

Parry took shrapnel in both legs from that near miss and stayed at his post. His war did not end there: he went on to command the battlecruiser HMS Renown, served at the Normandy landings and on the staff of the Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief, and afterwards became Director of Naval Intelligence. Then, in 1948, he was appointed Chief of the Naval Staff of the Royal Indian Navy, which was the same year, and very nearly the same month, that India bought his old ship.

Graf Spee, damaged and low on ammunition, withdrew into the neutral port of Montevideo, and Achilles spent the following days helping to shadow her from a wary distance while a diplomatic and psychological battle played out over what would happen next.

Given 72 hours to leave neutral waters and convinced a much larger British force was waiting for her offshore, Graf Spee's captain chose to scuttle his ship rather than fight his way out.

The weeks that followed were stranger than the battle. Achilles spent Christmas 1939 in the Falkland Islands and then went up to Buenos Aires, where accounts from her own people describe her sailors meeting and drinking with survivors from Graf Spee, the crew they had been shooting at a fortnight earlier. When Ajax left for Britain, Harwood, by then a rear admiral, shifted his flag into Achilles and kept it there until February 1940, when she was released for New Zealand and he stayed on in the South Atlantic in HMS Hawkins.

It was, among other things, the first time the flag of New Zealand had ever been flown in battle, from the deck of Achilles, whose company of 567 officers and ratings included 321 New Zealanders, more than any other warship had carried up to that point.

The relationship was formalised in September 1941, when she was transferred into the newly created Royal New Zealand Navy and recommissioned as HMNZS Achilles. By then roughly sixty per cent of her ship's company were New Zealanders, which made the loan arrangement look increasingly like a polite fiction.

A Ship of Firsts

Achilles quietly picked up a couple of technological distinctions along the way. In June 1940, fitted with New Zealand-made SS1 radar, she became the first Royal Navy cruiser equipped with fire control radar, a significant step at a time when most ships were still relying on optical rangefinders and a great deal of practised guesswork.

She had already made her mark as the first ship to carry a Supermarine Walrus amphibious aircraft, extending her reach well beyond what her guns alone could see.

War in the Pacific

After returning to Auckland on 23 February 1940 to a heroes' welcome from a crowd of around 100,000 people, one of the largest gatherings New Zealand had seen, and the refit that followed, Achilles spent the following years on escort duty for commercial convoys and troopships, and once Japan entered the war she joined the ANZAC Squadron working alongside the United States Navy's Task Force 67 in the grinding, dangerous campaign around Guadalcanal.

It was there, on 5 January 1943, that her luck ran out briefly but violently: a Japanese bomb struck her X turret and blew its top clean off, killing 13 of her sailors.

The attack came from four Japanese aircraft, and the bomb that found her did the sort of damage that ends most cruisers' wars. It did not end hers, but the repair bill sent her eleven thousand miles home to do it.

It was a heavy price for a ship that had made her name surviving a far more famous engagement three years earlier.

Rebuilt for One Last War

Rather than being written off, Achilles was sent home to Portsmouth for extensive repair and modernisation between April 1943 and May 1944. Her damaged turret was replaced with a quadruple 2-pounder anti-aircraft mount, her remaining anti-aircraft armament was upgraded to dual-purpose weapons, and her radar fit was brought up to date.

Rebuilt and rearmed, she rejoined the New Zealand fleet before joining the British Pacific Fleet in May 1945, in time to take part in the final push against Japan.

She finished the war off Okinawa, which is a long way in every sense from a summer afternoon off Montevideo in 1939.

An Unlikely Second Career

Achilles returned to the Royal Navy at Sheerness on 17 September 1946, her New Zealand loan finally at an end, but her working life was far from over.

On 5 July 1948 she was sold to the newly independent Indian Navy and recommissioned as INS Delhi, serving as a training and flagship vessel for another three decades before finally being decommissioned for scrap on 30 June 1978 in Bombay, a full 45 years after she had first been commissioned as a Royal Navy cruiser on the Mersey.

She went into Indian service first as RINS Delhi, the R standing for Royal, and lost it to become simply INS Delhi once India became a republic.

She also got a second career in the cinema. When Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger came to film The Battle of the River Plate in 1956, two of the ships that had actually been there were still afloat and available, and Achilles, by then INS Delhi, was borrowed back to play herself. Few warships get to re-enact their own finest hour with the original cast.

New Zealand never quite let her go, either. Her Y turret, together with its Director Control Tower, was presented back to the country and now stands on display at the Devonport Naval Base in Auckland.

Her original ship's bell is on loan to the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and the battle ensign she flew at the River Plate hangs today in Christ Church Cathedral in Port Stanley, in the Falkland Islands, while in 1979 the Indian Navy returned her builder's plaque, steering wheel and engine room telegraph to the Royal Navy as a parting gesture.

There was one last reunion. On 4 September 1975, at Madras, the ageing INS Delhi fell in with the frigate HMS Ajax, on a world cruise and carrying the name of the sister she had fought beside off the River Plate thirty-six years earlier. Three years later the old cruiser was gone.

All of it amounts to a solid, unmistakable reminder of the cruiser that helped run a pocket battleship to ground in her very first taste of war, and then kept sailing for another four decades under two more flags before her story was finally, properly over.