HMS Belfast (C35): From Sinking the Scharnhorst to Mooring by Tower Bridge

Launched on Saint Patrick's Day

HMS Belfast was built by Harland and Wolff, her keel laid on 10 December 1936, and launched, fittingly enough for a ship named after the city that built her, on Saint Patrick's Day, 17 March 1938, christened by Anne Chamberlain, wife of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

She commissioned on 5 August 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of war, a Town-class light cruiser displacing over 10,000 tons, capable of 32.5 knots, and armed with twelve 6-inch guns arranged in four triple turrets, a particularly formidable cruiser for her era.

She was the largest and most significant vessel Harland and Wolff had launched to date, carried on the books simply as Yard Number 1000 until the moment a champagne bottle was broken against her side and she officially became Belfast.

Broken by a Mine Before Firing a Shot in Anger

Belfast's war very nearly ended before it had properly begun. On 21 November 1939, while departing the Firth of Forth, she struck a German magnetic mine, an explosion so severe it broke her keel and wrecked an engine room, killing one sailor.

The weapon that nearly finished her was Germany's great secret of that autumn, and Belfast was one of its earliest important victims. A magnetic mine does not need to be touched. It lies on the bottom and fires when the steel hull passing overhead distorts the earth's magnetic field around it, which meant that every existing minesweeping technique, all of which involved cutting mooring cables, was useless against it. In the last months of 1939 they were sinking merchant shipping in British coastal waters faster than anything else in the German inventory, and nobody knew how to stop them.

The answer arrived a fortnight after Belfast was hit. On the night of 23 November 1939 a magnetic mine was dropped on the mud flats at Shoeburyness and left exposed by the falling tide, and Lieutenant Commander John Ouvry of HMS Vernon went down to it with a set of non-magnetic tools and took it apart by hand, in the dark, on a falling tide, knowing exactly what it was and what it would do if he got it wrong. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. Once the mechanism was understood, Commander Charles Goodeve worked out the counter: run an electric cable round the ship and pass a current through it to cancel her magnetic signature, a process that became known as degaussing and was later simplified to wiping a ship down at the quayside. Every Allied merchant ship afloat ended up being treated.

The damage was catastrophic enough that she required an extraordinary three years of repair and reconstruction, not recommissioning until 3 November 1942, by which point she had emerged with improved firepower, upgraded radar and enhanced armour, essentially a considerably more capable ship than the one that had limped home damaged three years earlier.

Three years is an extraordinary time to spend repairing a ship, and it is worth saying what came out of it. Her back had been broken and her machinery wrecked, and putting that right meant effectively rebuilding the hull, which gave the constructors the opportunity to fix a problem the class already had. Bulges were worked into her sides amidships, adding buoyancy, stability and longitudinal strength, and taking her beam from 63 feet 4 inches to 69 feet. That is why she looks subtly broader than her surviving photographs of 1939, and it is why she could carry the radar, the extra guns and the additional armour she was given at the same time. The mine very nearly killed her and it also made her a considerably better ship.

The Battle of North Cape

That upgrade paid off spectacularly. Belfast spent 1943 escorting the brutal Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union under her wartime captain, Frederick Parham, serving as flagship to Vice-Admiral Robert Burnett, whose Force 1, also comprising HMS Norfolk and HMS Sheffield, was screening a homebound Russian convoy on Boxing Day when word came that the German battleship Scharnhorst had put to sea to hunt it.

At around 8.40am on 26 December 1943, a blip appeared on Belfast's radar screen roughly 30 miles off: Scharnhorst, found in the Arctic gloom before she had any idea Burnett's cruisers were even there.

The North Cape action turned on that radar, and the detail is worth having. Belfast was carrying Type 273, a centimetric set using the cavity magnetron, which was the single most important British technical advantage of the naval war: it could pick a ship out of the sea at twenty miles and more in weather and darkness where nothing else worked at all. In the Arctic on 26 December, four hours either side of an hour or two of grey twilight, that is the difference between finding a battleship and never knowing she was there. Scharnhorst had radar of her own and was keeping it switched off, on the reasoning that transmitting would give her position away. She was found at thirty miles by a cruiser she never saw.

Norfolk's opening salvoes disabled the German ship's fire-control radar, but Scharnhorst turned away to try looping around Force 1 and reaching the convoy from another direction.

Burnett chose to break contact and stand by the merchant ships rather than give chase, a decision his own captain later called, in his own recorded words, absolutely the right one, and it was vindicated shortly after noon when Scharnhorst reappeared on radar and was brought back under fire.

As she turned south for home, Belfast shadowed her using superior radar through the encircling dark until the battleship Duke of York, under Admiral Bruce Fraser, could close in, Belfast firing star shells to illuminate the target for Fraser's heavy guns.

Scharnhorst finally sank just after half past seven that evening; of a crew of nearly 2,000 men, only 36 survived, a brutal conclusion to one of the most significant naval actions of the entire war in northern waters and a fitting vindication of the years spent rebuilding Belfast after the mine strike.

It is worth registering what the day meant beyond the ship. North Cape was the last action ever fought between battleships in European waters, and the last time the Royal Navy engaged an enemy capital ship at sea. Everything after it was carriers, submarines and aircraft. Scharnhorst went down with all but thirty-six of nearly two thousand men, in water a few degrees above freezing, in the dark, and the ships that had hunted her spent the rest of the night looking for people. Belfast is the only surviving ship from that action anywhere in the world.

Normandy and the Pacific

On D-Day itself, 6 June 1944, Belfast led Bombardment Force E, under Rear-Admiral Frederick Dalrymple-Hamilton, supporting the British and Canadian assaults on Gold and Juno beaches.

Moments before the guns opened up, Dalrymple-Hamilton signalled the force a very British send-off from Belfast's own bridge: best of luck to all, keep a good length, keep your eye on the middle stump, and soon we'll have the enemy all out.

Belfast fired on the German gun battery at La Marefontaine at 5.27am, just three minutes behind the actual first shots of the invasion, fired by another cruiser further along the coast, a detail she is still sometimes wrongly credited with beating.

Over the 33 days that followed, Belfast fired more than 4,000 6-inch and 1,000 4-inch shells in support of the landings, gunfire so sustained and violent that the vibration reportedly cracked the crew's own toilets.

She was, and remains, one of only three surviving vessels from the entire D-Day bombardment fleet, alongside the American destroyer USS Laffey and battleship USS Texas, both now preserved on the other side of the Atlantic. Her fully equipped sick bay also took on wounded soldiers from early afternoon on D-Day itself, a reminder that a bombardment cruiser's work was not confined to her own guns.

She was redeployed to the British Pacific Fleet in 1945 as the war against Japan entered its final stages.

Back Into Combat Over Korea

Belfast's fighting career was not yet finished. She saw further sustained combat during the Korean War between 1950 and 1952, conducting coastal patrols and firing more than 8,000 rounds from her 6-inch guns in support of United Nations forces, a remarkable second act for a cruiser that had already survived being nearly broken in half by a single mine over a decade earlier.

Saved From the Scrapyard

Belfast entered reserve in 1963 and spent some years afterwards moored in Portsmouth Harbour as an accommodation ship before, as so often happened to ageing warships of her generation, facing the very real prospect of being scrapped.

The preservation campaign deserves more than a sentence, because it very nearly failed. The government of the day had no intention of keeping her: the reasonable view in Whitehall was that Britain already had Victory at Portsmouth, that a 1938 cruiser was not obviously historic, and that the cost of maintaining a ten-thousand-ton steel ship in a tidal river forever was somebody else's problem. What changed it was a private trust, chaired by a man who had commanded her, arguing the case in public and in Parliament until the answer changed. She is the first British warship saved for the nation since Victory herself, and she got there by about a hair.

Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles, who had commanded the ship himself, headed a trust that launched a determined campaign for her preservation, and succeeded: the government transferred ownership of the ship to the trust in July 1971, and she opened to the public on Trafalgar Day, 21 October 1971.

She became a branch of the Imperial War Museum in 1978, remains the largest object in the museum's entire collection, and stays moored on the River Thames near Tower Bridge to this day, receiving over 204,000 visitors a year, a remarkably rare survivor among her generation of cruisers and one of London's most recognisable and best-loved historic warships, still telling the story of a ship whose career took her from a near-catastrophic mine strike to sinking a German battleship and fighting two entirely separate wars a world apart.