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.

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. 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 genuinely famous, most of the reading was happening in New Zealand.

The Battle of the River Plate

That fame arrived on 13 December 1939, off the coast of South America, when Achilles, under Captain 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.

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, with four of her crew killed and her captain wounded, but she had done exactly what was asked of her. 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. It was, among other things, the first time the flag of New Zealand had ever been flown in battle, from the deck of Achilles.

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 genuinely 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 a refit at Auckland in early 1940, 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. 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.

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.

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