HMS Bellona (63): One of Snow White's Seven Dwarfs

A Cruiser Built Across Four Years

HMS Bellona was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, her keel laid on 30 November 1939, though she was not launched until 29 September 1942 and did not commission until 29 October 1943, a long build reflecting the pressures on British shipyards during the war's middle years.

The four years have a precise cause, and it is not shipyard capacity. It was the guns. The 5.25-inch twin mounting the Didos were built around was the same design as the secondary armament of the King George V-class battleships, it turned out to be extremely awkward to manufacture, and the battleships had first call on everything the factories produced. An Admiralty assessment in November 1938 reckoned that British armament capacity could arm about four cruisers a year with 5.25-inch or 4.5-inch guns. Four. That is the whole cruiser programme, held up not by hulls but by turrets.

The consequences run right through the class. HMS Bonaventure was held up by more than a year waiting for mountings. Several Didos were completed with four turrets rather than five simply because the fifth did not exist, which is a rather less high-minded explanation for Bellona's eight guns than the design reasoning above, and both are true at once. And two ships of the class, HMS Charybdis and HMS Scylla, were given eight 4.5-inch guns instead, because there were no 5.25s to be had at all. Bellona was launched three years after her keel went down and spent another year fitting out, and the reason was a bottleneck in a gun factory.

Her builder is worth a line too. Fairfield of Govan laid her down in November 1939, and the yard's own extraordinary later history, from bankruptcy in 1965 through the Fairfield Experiment and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders to its survival today as the last warship yard on the river, is set out in the article on HMS Fife (D20).

A Dido-class light cruiser displacing 7,200 tons at full load, she carried eight 5.25-inch guns alongside anti-aircraft weapons and torpedo tubes, and entered service in time to take part in Arctic convoys supplying the Soviet Union that winter.

Eight guns rather than ten marks her out as one of the second group of Didos, sometimes called the Bellona sub-class: five ships completed late in the war with four turrets instead of five, vertical funnels and masts rather than raked ones, and the space and weight saved given over to more light anti-aircraft guns and better radar. The change was a straightforward reading of what the war had turned out to be about. A fifth turret of a gun that struggled to track aircraft was worth less than a good radar picture and more Bofors, and the ships that came out of that reasoning were better air defence cruisers than their elder sisters.

One of the Seven Dwarfs

In January 1944, Bellona took over Channel patrol duties as part of a task force nicknamed, with typical wartime humour, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a job with real weight behind the joke: she was directly replacing the cruiser HMS Charybdis, sunk with heavy loss of life by German torpedo boats in the same stretch of water only months earlier.

The ship she replaced is worth the detour, because what happened afterwards is one of the most remarkable episodes of the occupation of the Channel Islands. HMS Charybdis was torpedoed off the Brittany coast in the small hours of 23 October 1943 by German torpedo boats and sank inside half an hour, taking 426 of her company with her, including her captain. The destroyer Limbourne was lost in the same action. Bodies came ashore over the following days on the French coast, on Jersey, and twenty-one of them on Guernsey, which was then in its fourth year of German occupation.

The Germans permitted a funeral. What they got was a demonstration. More than five thousand islanders, out of the twenty thousand still on Guernsey, walked or cycled to the cemetery at Le Foulon and brought upwards of nine hundred wreaths with them, a great many carrying messages of support for the British forces. It was the largest public gathering of the occupation and everybody present understood exactly what it was. The Germans did not permit anything like it again. Bellona took over the patrol line those men had died on, four months later.

Bellona and seven destroyers, among them HMS Tartar, spent their days anchored in Plymouth Sound helping defend the port, then slipped out at dusk under radio and radar silence to race for the French coast, keeping German destroyers based at Brest bottled up ahead of the coming invasion, an unglamorous but notably important piece of naval blockade work.

The work itself was as unglamorous as the nickname suggests and mattered a great deal. German destroyers and torpedo boats based at Brest could, if left alone, come out at night and get among the enormous concentration of shipping gathering in the south of England for the invasion. So a cruiser and seven destroyers lay at Plymouth by day, sailed at dusk in radio and radar silence so that nothing they emitted could be detected and homed on, ran across to the French coast, patrolled it, and came home before light. Night after night, for months, mostly finding nothing. Finding nothing was the object.

Supporting the Americans at Omaha Beach

On D-Day itself, 6 June 1944, Bellona supported American forces landing at Omaha Beach as part of Rear Admiral Carleton F. Bryant's bombardment force, a genuinely international line-up alongside the US battleships Texas and Arkansas, the British cruiser HMS Glasgow, the Free French cruisers Georges Leygues and Montcalm, and a screen of American and British destroyers.

She fired inshore at targets spotted from the air or called in by observers ashore, expending so much ammunition that she had to make repeated return trips to Plymouth to reload and replace worn gun barrels, continuing to fire after dark until the beachhead had grown too large to keep shelling safely so close to Allied troops.

The Omaha bombardment is worth putting in its context as well. Of the five landing beaches, Omaha was the one that very nearly failed: the assault troops were pinned on the shingle for hours under fire from bluffs that the preliminary air bombardment had barely touched. What eventually broke the deadlock was, in large part, ships. Destroyers ran in until they were almost aground to fire directly into the German positions, and the heavier ships offshore, Texas, Arkansas, Glasgow, the two French cruisers and Bellona, worked over targets called in from the beach and from spotting aircraft. Firing so hard that gun barrels wore out and had to be replaced is what that looked like from her end of it.

She subsequently covered carrier air raids against the German battleship Tirpitz and attacked German convoys, before returning to northern waters for the remainder of the war and reaching Copenhagen in time for the German surrender in May 1945.

Copenhagen was not a courtesy call, and it deserves more than a clause. The last intact remnant of the German fleet was lying in the Baltic ports when the war ended, and somebody had to go and take possession of it. The force sailed under Captain H. W. Williams in the cruiser HMS Birmingham, with the cruiser HMS Dido and destroyers in company, and the passage took two days because the way in ran through the German minefields laid across the Skagerrak and the Kattegat. Birmingham caught a mine in her paravane wire two hours before Churchill broadcast the end of the war in Europe.

They reached Copenhagen on 9 May 1945, and what was waiting alongside there included the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, which had gone out with the Bismarck four years earlier and had spent the whole war being hunted, and the light cruiser Nürnberg. Both came under British guns without a shot. It is an odd, quiet ending to a very long story: a British squadron feeling its way through a minefield to accept the surrender of ships that had been the object of enormous effort and considerable loss, and finding them tied up and waiting.

For Bellona it closed a circuit of her own. She had been commissioned eighteen months earlier to replace a cruiser sunk in the Channel, taken over the patrol line where those men died, shelled the bluffs above Omaha, covered the carrier strikes against Tirpitz, and now lay in a Danish harbour looking at the last of the fleet all of it had been about. She was not yet two years old.

A Rocky Start in New Zealand

Bellona was loaned to the Royal New Zealand Navy in 1946, but her early service there was marked by genuine unrest. When a new naval pay code was announced in April 1947 without the backdating sailors had been promised, her captain, F. J. Laing, tried to head off trouble by circulating the new rates and hearing grievances directly, but on ANZAC Day, 25 April, around 40 of her crew marched from the Devonport ferry landing into the naval base in protest, dispersing only after officers blocked others from joining them and orders to halt were ignored.

A strike committee submitted ten formal grievances three days later, covering pay anomalies, service conditions and a demand for a proper welfare committee, and when Bellona finally sailed for the Bay of Islands that June, twenty of her sailors were still refusing to return.

Punishments ranged from 14 to 92 days' detention, many of them suspended, a serious industrial dispute for a navy still adjusting to peacetime conditions and pay scales.

The 1947 trouble in New Zealand deserves to be understood rather than tutted at. These were men who had spent six years at war, had been promised a pay code that would be backdated, and found on being demobilised into a peacetime navy that the backdating had quietly gone. The captain's response, circulating the actual rates and hearing complaints in person rather than reaching for the regulations, was a good deal more sensible than what a lot of officers would have done. The protests that followed spread across several ships of the Royal New Zealand Navy that year, not just this one, and the ten grievances submitted read as an entirely reasonable list. The punishments, mostly suspended, suggest that somebody in authority thought so too.

In 1951, during multinational exercises, she suffered the indignity of being accidentally struck by rockets fired from the Australian carrier HMAS Sydney, a friendly-fire mishap that thankfully caused no serious harm. A modernisation programme begun in 1952 saw her twin Oerlikon guns replaced with Bofors mounts, keeping her reasonably current for continued service.

Back to Britain, and the Scrapyard

Bellona reverted to Royal Navy control in 1956, following the transfer of the cruiser HMS Royalist to take her place with New Zealand, and was finally sent for scrapping, arriving at the Briton Ferry yard on 5 February 1959, closing out a career that had run from D-Day gunfire support to a genuine pay dispute on the other side of the world.