HMS Ajax (22): The Cruiser That Cornered a Pocket Battleship and Named a Canadian Town

A Cruiser for the Americas

HMS Ajax was a Leander-class light cruiser built at Vickers' yard in Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 7 February 1933, launched on 1 March 1934, and completed on 12 April 1935.

The name came with a good deal of baggage. Ajax was the Greek hero second only to Achilles at Troy, and the ship's motto, Nec Quisquam Nisi Ajax, is a shortened form of the line that no one can overcome Ajax but Ajax himself. Her badge showed his helmet, and the two devices on it are worth a moment: a snake for Salamis, his birthplace, and a ram's head on the jaw piece, which commemorates the episode in which Ajax, driven mad after Achilles' armour was awarded to Odysseus, went out and slaughtered a flock of sheep in the belief that they were the Greek army. Not every warship carries a reminder of its namesake's nervous breakdown on its crest. The badge was pentagonal, because until 1976 the shape told you the type: circular for capital ships, pentagonal for cruisers, a shield for destroyers and submarines, a diamond for carriers.

Her early career took her about as far from a European war as a Royal Navy cruiser could get, serving with the 8th Cruiser Squadron out of Bermuda and spending her prewar years touring the Americas, from combined exercises in Bermuda in 1937 to responding to labour unrest in Trinidad that same year, and providing earthquake relief at Talcahuano, Chile, in January 1939.

None of it suggested she was about to become one of the most famous cruisers of the entire war.

Flagship at the River Plate

That changed on 13 December 1939, when Ajax, serving as flagship to Commodore Henry Harwood, led Force G into action against the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off the coast of South America, alongside HMS Exeter and HMNZS Achilles, in what became the Battle of the River Plate.

Her captain had been in those waters before. Charles Woodhouse joined the Navy in 1906 and first saw South America as a sub-lieutenant in HMS Bristol, which meant he was present at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914, when a British squadron destroyed von Spee's raiders, and afterwards in the long hunt for the light cruiser Dresden. Twenty-five years later he took his own ship into action in the same ocean against a raider named for the admiral he had helped destroy.

Harwood split his three cruisers into two divisions, sending Exeter in alone from one side while Ajax and Achilles closed from the other, forcing Graf Spee to divide her six 11-inch guns between two targets at once; the Germans briefly did so before concentrating on Exeter, which took the worst of the punishment.

Two details from the morning are worth having. At 06.36 Ajax catapulted her Fairey Seafox, and eight minutes later its pilot, Lieutenant Edgar Lewin, began sending back spotting corrections, which is the whole reason a cruiser carried an aircraft at all and one of the very few occasions in the war when a Seafox earned its keep. Then, at 07.25, a single 11-inch shell wrecked the Commodore's cabin, killed Royal Marines manning X turret directly above it and jammed the barbette of Y turret so that it could not train. One hit took out both after turrets, leaving Ajax fighting the rest of the action with half her main armament.

Ajax was hit seven times during the engagement, including one 11-inch shell that burst in the commodore's own accommodation, and suffered 12 casualties in all, but she and Achilles kept up the pressure and maintained contact as the damaged raider withdrew toward neutral Montevideo.

The other half of that pairing has her own story worth reading: HMNZS Achilles fought the action under combined gunnery control with Ajax, went on to Guadalcanal and Okinawa, was sold to India, and eventually played herself in the film of the battle.

There, persuaded by British deception that a much larger force, reportedly including a battlecruiser and an aircraft carrier, was waiting for her outside the estuary, Graf Spee's captain ultimately chose to scuttle his ship rather than fight his way out.

It was one of the first remarkably decisive British victories of the war, and Ajax, as Harwood's flagship, was right at the centre of it. The Canadian town of Ajax, Ontario grew out of a wartime shell-filling plant, Defence Industries Limited, established on farmland east of Toronto in 1941; by 1945 it employed over 9,000 workers and had filled some 40 million shells.

When the site was redeveloped as a civilian community after the war, planners named it after the already-famous cruiser, and its main street, Harwood Avenue, still carries the commodore's name.

Since 1958 the town has named its streets after officers and men who served aboard Ajax, Exeter and Achilles, turning its road network into a small, permanent memorial to the battle. A later Royal Navy frigate also named Ajax was granted the Freedom of the Town on a visit in 1976, keeping the connection alive well into the ship's next generation (read her story).

A Very Busy Mediterranean War

After a refit at Chatham, Ajax joined the 7th Cruiser Squadron in August 1940 and spent the next two and a half years in some of the hardest fighting the Mediterranean Fleet saw.

In the early hours of 12 October 1940 she ran into a flotilla of four Italian destroyers and three torpedo boats south east of Sicily, in what became known as the Battle of Cape Passero.

Ajax sank the torpedo boats Airone and Ariel outright and left the destroyer Artigliere so badly damaged that HMS York finished her off the next morning, but the cruiser took seven hits of her own, including blows that wrecked a storeroom, knocked out a 4-inch gun mounting, and disabled her radar and degaussing gear. Thirteen of her crew were killed and more than twenty wounded.

The following month she formed part of Force X, a diversionary sweep into the Strait of Otranto under Vice Admiral Pridham-Wippell, timed to draw Italian attention away from the main event: the night of 11 November 1940, when Swordfish biplanes flying from HMS Illustrious struck the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto harbour and crippled half of Italy's battle fleet in a single stroke.

In May 1941 she took part in the Battle of Cape Matapan, sailing as one of seven Allied light cruisers under Admiral Cunningham; radar, a technology the Italian navy still lacked, let the British force close on three Italian heavy cruisers in the dark and helped turn the action into one of the most one-sided night engagements of the war.

Days later she was thrown into the desperate evacuation of Crete, sailing with Rear Admiral Rawlings' Force B alongside the cruisers Orion and Dido.

Near misses from Junkers 87 dive-bombers damaged her on the run out to Heraklion on 21 May, forcing a return to Alexandria, but with the damage judged less serious than first feared she went straight back to lift exhausted troops off the island, taking further damage from Italian bombers on 28 May before the operation was done.

She joined Malta's famous Force K in November 1941, arriving as reinforcement, alongside the cruiser Neptune, only days after its original pairing of Aurora and Penelope had annihilated an entire Italian supply convoy bound for Libya in the Battle of the Duisburg Convoy, sinking every merchant ship and an escorting destroyer for no loss of their own.

Ajax spent the following months helping Force K keep up the pressure on Rommel's supply line before being withdrawn to Britain for refit in February 1942.

Her charmed run finally caught up with her on 1 January 1943, when a 1,000-pound bomb struck her at Bône in North Africa, an injury serious enough to need an immediate tow to Gibraltar before she was sailed across the Atlantic for major repairs at the Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia, keeping her out of action until September 1943.

D-Day and Beyond

Recommissioned in December 1943, Ajax was back in the Mediterranean by February 1944, but her most famous later action came that June, on D-Day itself.

Opening fire on the German battery at Longues-sur-Mer at 5.30am on 6 June 1944, her 6-inch guns scored two direct hits straight through the gun embrasures by 8.45am, one shell passing clean into the casement of the battery's number four gun; the covering cruisers put some 179 shells into the position that morning between them, and what remained of it was silenced for good when British troops captured the site the next day.

She went on to support the Allied landings in southern France later that summer and took part in operations in the Aegean during the reoccupation of Greece, closing out a war that had taken her from the South Atlantic to the beaches of Normandy.

A Strange Postwar Errand

In one of the more pointed ironies of naval history, Ajax spent part of the immediate postwar period escorting German sailors home.

In February 1946 she shepherded the liner Highland Monarch, carrying 845 interned survivors of Admiral Graf Spee's own crew collected from Argentina and Uruguay, as far as The Needles off the Isle of Wight, the ship that had helped hunt their vessel down now seeing them safely on their way back to Germany.

She then joined the Palestine Patrol, intercepting ships carrying illegal Jewish immigration to British Mandate Palestine. That included the Royal Navy's boarding of Exodus 1947 on 18 July that year, a confrontation in which a crew member and two passengers were killed and dozens more injured before the ship was escorted on to Germany.

An Undignified Final Voyage

Ajax was decommissioned in February 1948, and even her final journey to the scrapyard did not go entirely smoothly: she ran aground while under tow before finally arriving at Cashmore's yard in Newport, South Wales, for breaking up on 18 November 1949.

It was an oddly clumsy end for a ship whose wartime career had been defined by precision and daring, from the River Plate to Gold Beach, but it did nothing to dent the reputation she had already secured as one of the most storied light cruisers the Royal Navy ever sent to sea.