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. 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. Ajax was hit seven times during the engagement, suffering 12 casualties, but she and her consorts kept up the pressure and maintained contact as the damaged German raider withdrew toward Montevideo, where her captain ultimately chose to scuttle rather than fight his way out. It was one of the first genuinely 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 was later named in the ship's honour, its streets named after members of her ship's company, a lasting piece of geography born out of a single South American naval action.

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 October 1940 she fought Italian torpedo boats in the night engagement known as the Battle of Cape Passero, taking 35 casualties. The following month she supported the Malta convoys and the famous carrier strike on the Italian fleet at Taranto, and in May 1941 she took part in the Battle of Cape Matapan, a major British victory over the Italian navy, before helping evacuate exhausted troops from Crete under sustained Stuka attack later that month. From November 1941 into 1942 she served with the famous Force K operating out of Malta, one of the most aggressive and effective surface strike forces of the entire Mediterranean campaign.

Her charmed run finally caught up with her in January 1943, when she was damaged by a bomb at Bône in North Africa, an injury serious enough to require 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, when she bombarded German positions on Gold Beach during the D-Day landings, her 6-inch guns helping silence enemy battery positions in support of the invasion. 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 transporting German sailors, survivors of Admiral Graf Spee's own crew, back to Germany, the ship that had helped hunt their vessel down now serving as their transport home. She then joined the Palestine Patrol, intercepting ships carrying illegal Jewish immigration to British Mandate Palestine, including involvement in the highly charged Exodus 1947 incident.

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.