HMS Argonaut (61): Torpedoed Twice in One Night and Sailed Home Anyway

A Cruiser Built for Speed

HMS Argonaut was a Dido-class light cruiser built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, ordered on 4 September 1939, laid down on 21 November 1939 and launched on 6 September 1941, entering active service on 8 August 1942 with a wartime complement of around 530 officers and men.

She displaced 5,600 tons standard, carried ten 5.25-inch dual-purpose guns alongside a substantial anti-aircraft fit, and could make a brisk 32.25 knots, a fast, well-armed ship built for exactly the kind of Mediterranean convoy escort and surface action work that would define her early career.

Those ten 5.25-inch guns are the whole argument about the Dido class, and it is worth having. The idea was elegant: one gun that could shoot at ships and at aircraft, saving the weight and space of carrying two separate armaments. In practice the 5.25-inch fired an eighty-pound shell, which is about the heaviest a man can pick up and load repeatedly, and the gunhouses were cramped. Sustained fire worked out at something like seven and a half rounds a minute, with a brief burst of ten at the start, and the mountings trained and elevated too slowly to follow a fast aircraft across the sky. Against a ship the gun was excellent. Against the thing it had been designed for it was disappointing.

There is a lovely footnote to that. Two ships of the class, Scylla and Charybdis, were completed with four twin 4.5-inch mountings instead, purely because there were not enough 5.25-inch mounts to go round. The fleet immediately christened them the Toothless Terrors. They then turned out to be markedly better anti-aircraft ships than their properly armed sisters, because the lighter gun could actually be worked fast enough to hit something. The Navy had accidentally built the right ship by running out of the wrong equipment.

An Arctic Prelude

Before any of that, Argonaut's war began much further north. In October 1942 she carried reinforcements, several 3.7-inch guns and a detachment of Norwegian soldiers, out to the island of Spitsbergen, before going on to Murmansk as a convoy escort, a brief taste of Arctic convoy work before her transfer south to join the build-up for the invasion of North Africa.

Into the Mediterranean Maelstrom

Under the command of Captain Eric Longley-Cook, Argonaut left Scapa Flow on 30 October 1942 as part of Force H, the powerful covering force built around the battleships HMS Nelson and HMS Duke of York and the battlecruiser HMS Renown, bound for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa.

Her own role in the build-up was an unusual one, acting as a decoy and broadcasting false signals to help confuse the Axis as to the real invasion fleet's whereabouts.

On 1 December, now serving alongside the cruisers HMS Aurora and HMS Sirius as Force Q, she took part in the Battle of Skerki Bank, helping destroy an Italian convoy in a sharp night action that sank the destroyer Folgore and four troopships and damaged another destroyer and a torpedo boat besides, a result that demonstrated exactly what a fast, well-gunned cruiser force could achieve in the right circumstances.

The action is worth setting out, because it was very nearly a perfect one. Force Q was three cruisers and two destroyers, Quentin and the Australian Quiberon, and they came upon an Italian convoy in the dark off Skerki Bank on the night of 1 to 2 December. They sank all four transports and the destroyer Folgore, damaged the remaining escorts, and came away with nothing worse than splinter damage. It is about as clean a night surface action as the Mediterranean produced. The bill arrived the following morning, when German torpedo bombers found the force on its way home and sank Quentin. That is the central war in miniature: win in the dark, pay for it after sunrise.

Two Torpedoes, One Very Bad Night

Her luck turned dramatically less than two weeks later. On 14 December 1942, the Italian submarine Lazzaro Mocenigo fired a spread of four torpedoes at Argonaut; two struck home simultaneously, one blowing off her bow and the other her stern and wrecking her steering in the process.

It was the kind of damage that would sink most ships outright, and the Germans, monitoring the action, believed she had gone down entirely.

Remarkably, only three of her crew were killed, and the ship herself survived.

It is worth pausing on what losing both ends of a ship in one moment actually does. A hull is a beam, and what keeps it afloat is buoyancy concentrated amidships, so a cruiser without a bow or a stern can, in principle, still swim. What she cannot do is steer, because the rudder and the propeller shafts were in the part that had gone, so Argonaut had to be handled on her remaining engines alone. The Germans listening in concluded she had sunk, which was a perfectly reasonable conclusion. Three men died out of a company of around 530. On the evidence of what the same two torpedoes did to other ships, that is not far short of miraculous.

She spent a fortnight on emergency repairs at Algiers, moved on to the Royal Navy dockyard at Gibraltar for more extensive work, and finally, with nearly a third of her hull judged beyond local repair, crossed the Atlantic by way of Bermuda, escorted by HMS Hero, to Philadelphia, where American dockworkers rebuilt 182 feet of her 512-foot hull, 59 feet at the bow and 123 feet at the stern.

The reconstruction was finally completed in November 1943, a genuinely extraordinary feat of damage control and shipbuilding to bring a ship back from having been torpedoed at both ends on the same night.

The repair is a story about industrial capacity rather than seamanship. A hundred and eighty-two feet of a five-hundred-and-twelve-foot ship is more than a third of her length, and rebuilding that in a British yard would have meant a berth and a workforce that were needed for new construction. So she crossed the Atlantic on temporary repairs and was put right in Philadelphia instead, which is a small illustration of what the alliance actually meant day to day: not just American ships and aircraft, but American dockyard capacity absorbing British damage so that British yards could keep building.

Back in the Fight for D-Day

Argonaut returned to Britain with upgraded radar and went straight back to work, once again under Longley-Cook, who had brought her through Torch and Skerki Bank two years before.

She sailed from Greenock on 3 June 1944 with the cruisers HMS Emerald, HMS Ajax and HMS Orion as Bombarding Force K, providing naval gunfire support against the German battery at Vaux-sur-Aure during the D-Day landings and firing more than 4,000 shells in the weeks that followed.

During the fighting around Caen a German shell struck her quarterdeck and passed clean through and out of her starboard side without exploding and without a single casualty, a second remarkably lucky escape in as many years.

That August she supported Operation Dragoon, the invasion of Southern France, before serving as flagship for escort carrier operations and taking part in sweeps of the Aegean that September, sinking enemy troop transports and joining shore bombardments along the Greek coast, still a very long way from finished with the war.

Kamikazes and the Far East

Under a new captain, William McCarthy, Argonaut was ordered out to Trincomalee in Ceylon that November, and from there took part in the bombardment of the Palembang oil refineries in Sumatra, a target the Japanese depended on heavily for aviation fuel. She came under kamikaze attack more than once during this period but escaped each time with only minor damage.

The Palembang operation deserves describing accurately, because the guns had nothing to do with it. Operation Meridian was a pair of carrier air strikes flown on 24 and 29 January 1945 against the refineries at Pladjoe and Soengei Gerong, by more than two hundred and forty aircraft from Indomitable, Illustrious, Victorious and Indefatigable. Argonaut was one of the cruisers escorting Task Force 63 while all this went on, which is what a cruiser in a carrier force is for: to be the thing that shoots at whatever comes back looking for the carriers. Palembang supplied up to three quarters of Japan's aviation spirit, and the strikes cut output from Sumatra to about a third of normal, with real consequences for how much fuel was available for kamikaze operations in the months that followed.

In January 1945 she joined the British Pacific Fleet at Sydney, and that February took part in the shelling of the Sakishima Islands, a diversionary operation intended to draw Japanese attention away from the landings at Okinawa.

When the war ended in August 1945 she sailed to Formosa to help evacuate British prisoners of war before moving on to Hong Kong, a fitting final chapter for a ship whose war had, by then, taken her from the Arctic Circle to the Pacific.

A Quiet End

Argonaut returned to Portsmouth on 6 July 1946 and was laid up, seeing no further active service, before eventually being scrapped at Cashmore's yard in Newport, South Wales, on 19 November 1955, bringing a fittingly undramatic close to a career whose single most dramatic night, surviving two torpedo hits at once, had already secured her a permanent place in the story of Royal Navy damage control and resilience.