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, laid down on 21 November 1939 and launched on 6 September 1941, entering active service on 8 August 1942. She displaced 5,600 tons standard, carried ten 5.25-inch dual-purpose guns alongside a substantial anti-aircraft fit, and could make a genuinely 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.

Into the Mediterranean Maelstrom

Argonaut joined Force H for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, in October and November 1942, and on 1 December that year took part in the Battle of Skerki Bank, helping destroy an Italian convoy in a sharp night action that demonstrated exactly what a fast, well-gunned cruiser could achieve in the right circumstances.

Two Torpedoes, One Very Bad Night

Her luck turned dramatically less than two weeks later. On 14 December 1942, the Italian submarine Lazzaro Mocenigo struck Argonaut with two torpedoes simultaneously, one devastating her bow and the other her stern. 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, limping to temporary repairs at Algiers before being sent to the United States for a full seven-month reconstruction, 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.

Back in the Fight for D-Day

Argonaut returned to Britain with upgraded radar and went straight back to work, providing naval gunfire support during the D-Day landings in June 1944 and later supporting Operation Dragoon, the invasion of Southern France, that August. She subsequently served as flagship for escort carrier operations and took part in sweeps of the Aegean, closing out her war in a role every bit as active as the one that had so nearly ended her off North Africa.

A Quiet End

Argonaut was laid up in 1946 and saw no further active service after the war, eventually being scrapped 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.