HMS Bermuda (52): From Operation Torch to Nigerian Independence

A Cruiser Built for Every Ocean

HMS Bermuda was ordered from John Brown and Company at Clydebank in September 1939, laid down that November, and launched on 11 September 1941 by Viscountess Weir, the eighth Royal Navy ship to carry the name.

She completed on 21 August 1942 and was adopted by the town of West Bromwich in Staffordshire that same day, the result of a Warship Week National Savings campaign under which towns across wartime Britain effectively sponsored a ship of their own.

Warship Week is worth a moment, because it was a genuinely odd and rather brilliant piece of wartime machinery. Between late 1941 and early 1942 towns across Britain were each given a savings target and a week in which to hit it, with a class of warship attached to the figure: a corvette for a small town, a destroyer for a larger one, a cruiser for somewhere the size of West Bromwich. The money went into National Savings rather than literally buying the ship, but the adoption that followed was real enough. Crests and plaques were exchanged, the town sent comforts and knitted goods out to the ship's company, and the ship's people wrote back. Thousands of British towns spent the rest of the war following the fortunes of one particular ship in the newspapers, which was very largely the point.

A Fiji-class light cruiser generating 80,000 horsepower from her Admiralty boilers, she carried twelve 6-inch guns in four triple turrets alongside a substantial secondary and anti-aircraft armament, a particularly well-rounded cruiser built for the demands of a truly global war.

The Fijis were a clever answer to an awkward problem. The naval treaties of the 1930s capped new cruisers at eight thousand tons, and the previous Town class had come in at a good deal more than that, so the constructors had to fit essentially the same ship, twelve 6-inch guns in four triple turrets and all, into a smaller and lighter hull. They managed it with a transom stern, a shorter armour belt worked harder, and weight-saving in every direction, and the result was one of the best-balanced cruiser designs Britain ever produced. The removal of X turret in 1944, traded for a mass of close-range anti-aircraft guns, is the whole war in one sentence: by then the thing most likely to kill her was not another cruiser.

North Africa, the Atlantic, and the Arctic

Bermuda took part in the North Africa campaign through 1942, joining the battleships HMS Duke of York and HMS Nelson and the carrier HMS Victorious in support of Operation Torch with the 10th Cruiser Squadron. Off Algiers that November she was attacked by German He111 bombers alongside HMS Sheffield, fought the raid off unscathed, and briefly flew the flag of Rear-Admiral Cecil Harcourt as flagship of Force Q.

Through 1943 she covered Russian convoys RA51, JW52 and RA52 in the depths of the Arctic winter, escorted the liner RMS Queen Mary across the Atlantic that May while she carried Winston Churchill to the Trident Conference in Washington, and was in the Bay of Biscay that August when the Luftwaffe first used its new Hs293 radio-guided glide bomb against Allied escort forces.

Escorting the Queen Mary was a rather more delicate business than it sounds. She was carrying Churchill and his entire staff to Washington, and in her trooping role she could take fifteen thousand men and steam at nearly thirty knots, which was faster than any U-boat and faster than most of her escorts. Her standing order was never to stop and never to slow, for anybody, because a stationary liner with fifteen thousand men aboard would have been the greatest single prize of the war. Seven months before Bermuda took station on her, that order had produced a catastrophe: while zigzagging off the Irish coast on 2 October 1942 the Queen Mary ran straight over her escorting cruiser HMS Curacoa, cut her in two, and steamed on as she was required to, leaving the survivors to the destroyers astern. Three hundred and thirty-seven men were lost. Bermuda's people will have kept a very close eye on their station-keeping.

Churchill, on these crossings, is said to have insisted on a machine gun being fitted in the lifeboat allotted to him, on the grounds that he had no intention of being taken alive. Whether anybody seriously expected to use it or not, it is a fair indication of what the Atlantic still felt like in the spring of 1943, with a Prime Minister crossing it in the fastest ship afloat and a cruiser keeping her company.

The Biscay attack of August 1943 deserves a good deal more than a passing mention, because it opened a new era in naval warfare and did so at British expense. On 27 August, Dornier 217s came out over the Bay against an anti-submarine group and launched the Henschel Hs 293, a small rocket-boosted glider carrying a warhead, flown onto its target by an operator in the parent aircraft watching a flare in its tail. One of them hit the sloop HMS Egret, which blew up and sank with the loss of almost two hundred men. She was the first warship in history destroyed by a guided missile. The Canadian destroyer Athabaskan was badly damaged in the same attack. Anti-submarine patrols in the Bay were suspended while the Admiralty worked out what on earth to do about an enemy who could now hit a manoeuvring ship from well beyond gun range.

More Arctic convoy work followed that winter, covering JW54A, JW54B and RA54B through heavy weather that battered her almost as thoroughly as any enemy action, before a refit at Tyne in early 1944 stripped out her aircraft-handling gear and her X turret in favour of extra Oerlikon guns.

She trained that May for a possible role supporting the Normandy landings under Operation Neptune, but in the end stayed at Scapa Flow rather than joining the Channel fleet, and was earmarked instead for the British Pacific Fleet. After a lengthy refit on the Clyde she sailed in May 1945, reaching Sydney on 7 July to join the Pacific war alongside HMS Belfast.

Bringing Prisoners Home

Japan's formal surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945, though not every Japanese unit got the message straight away: on 6 September, Bermuda came under attack from Japanese aircraft apparently unaware, or unwilling to accept, that the war was over, and fought them off without loss.

Three days later, on 9 September, she was present at the formal surrender of Japanese forces on Formosa, present-day Taiwan. In the weeks that followed, Bermuda took part in prisoner-of-war recovery operations at Shanghai and Hong Kong, helping bring liberated Allied prisoners home from Japanese captivity, properly important humanitarian work in the war's immediate aftermath.

She served as flagship of the 5th Cruiser Squadron until 1947, returning to Plymouth via Suez on 19 June that year, a fitting homecoming for a ship that had already proven herself across three oceans.

A Postwar Career as Roving Diplomat

Bermuda's postwar service reads almost like a diplomatic itinerary. Recommissioned in October 1950, she served as flagship on the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean stations before a March 1953 move to the Mediterranean Fleet.

That August she sailed for Zakynthos in Greece loaded with jeeps, two helicopters, medical supplies, food, tents and field kitchens, taking over earthquake relief work on 15 August 1953 from her sister ship HMS Gambia, whose own crew had already spent two exhausting days ashore since the Ionian earthquake struck.

The Ionian earthquake was one of the worst natural disasters in modern Greek history. A magnitude 7 shock on 12 August 1953, the last and largest of a sequence, levelled very nearly every building on Zakynthos and Cephalonia, killed several hundred people and left tens of thousands with nowhere to live at the height of summer. There was no meaningful road network and the harbours were wrecked, which meant that in practice the only organisations capable of delivering food, shelter, clean water and surgery within days were navies. British, Israeli, Greek and American ships all went, and Bermuda and Gambia between them ran what amounted to a field hospital, a bakery, a water supply and a construction unit off the back of a light cruiser.

One of Bermuda's helicopters crashed during a reconnaissance flight over Cephalonia; the wreck was recovered and no lives were lost.

The goodwill was long remembered: sixty years on, in 2013, a former Bermuda rating returned to Zakynthos for the earthquake's anniversary commemorations and was presented with the island's highest civilian honour on the ship's behalf, a genuine act of practical, and evidently memorable, goodwill from a warship more usually associated with combat than disaster relief.

She went on to serve as flagship to the Flag Officer Flotillas, Home Fleet, from 1954, before a major modernisation refit in 1956.

She made naval history of a different kind on 16 June 1958, becoming the first Royal Navy cruiser ever used to carry a Royal Marine Commando group complete with its own four helicopters, rotor blades folded flat on her boat deck, from Malta to Cyprus for security duties during the EOKA emergency, earning herself the nickname "Commando Cruiser" in the press of the day.

That Cyprus lift matters rather more than the nickname suggests. What Bermuda did in 1958, carrying commandos and their own helicopters in one hull so that troops could be put ashore over the beach without landing craft, was the entire idea of the commando carrier being tried out with improvised means. Within a year the Admiralty was converting HMS Bulwark to do the job properly, with HMS Albion following her, and the capability has been in the Royal Navy's hands ever since. A cruiser with folded rotor blades on her boat deck was the prototype.

Two years later she anchored off Lagos on 28 September 1960 and joined the harbour's water regatta celebrations ahead of Nigeria's independence, remaining for the formal ceremony on 1 October when Princess Alexandra of Kent, representing the Queen, presented the country's constitutional instruments of independence, a symbolically significant appearance marking the end of British colonial rule in one of Britain's largest African territories.

Lagos in 1960 was not a routine flag-showing visit either. Nigeria was by a distance the largest of Britain's African territories, with something like forty-five million people in it, and 1960 was the year Harold Macmillan stood up in the South African parliament and told it that a wind of change was blowing through the continent. Seventeen African countries became independent in that single year. Sending a cruiser to lie off Lagos and join in the regatta was the courteous end of an enormous and largely irreversible retreat, and Bermuda, who had begun her career escorting an invasion fleet to North Africa, finished it as ceremonial furniture at the closing of an empire.

A Fitting Farewell

Bermuda paid off for the last time at Portsmouth on 30 July 1962 and was formally decommissioned the following year, her three wartime battle honours, North Africa 1942, Arctic 1943 and Atlantic 1943, a fair summary of just how much ocean she had covered. Sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation in 1965, she was scrapped by Thos W. Ward at Briton Ferry in Wales, arriving under tow on 26 August that year, closing out the career of a cruiser whose service had carried her from wartime convoy battles and a wartime Prime Minister's Atlantic crossing to some of the defining diplomatic and humanitarian moments of Britain's postwar and post-colonial transition.