HMS Birmingham (C19): Torpedoed Through the Keel, Then Sent Back to War in Korea

Built at Devonport, Deployed to China

HMS Birmingham was built at HMNB Devonport, launched on 1 September 1936, and commissioned on 18 November 1937, a Town-class light cruiser displacing over 9,000 tons standard and armed with twelve 6-inch guns in triple mounts alongside a substantial secondary and torpedo armament.

The Towns exist because of an arms race in cruisers that Britain did not start and could not ignore. Japan had built the Mogami class with fifteen 6-inch guns, and the Americans had answered with the Brooklyns carrying the same number, both on hulls that were nominally inside treaty limits and in practice were not. A British cruiser of the previous generation carried eight. So the Admiralty produced the Towns: twelve 6-inch guns in four triple turrets on a hull of over nine thousand tons, with a hangar and catapult amidships, and Birmingham was one of the second group with rather better protection on her turrets. When the treaty limit came down again a few years later the same design had to be squeezed into eight thousand tons, and the result was the Fiji class. Birmingham is what the idea looked like before anybody made it fit.

HMS Birmingham joined the 5th Cruiser Squadron on the China Station in January 1938, and when war broke out in 1939 was soon patrolling off Norway, sinking the German trawler Schleswig on 26 May 1940 in an engagement chaotic enough that she also managed to ram her own side's HMS Arrow in the process.

That posting was a great deal tenser than the phrase China Station suggests, and in January 1939 it very nearly went off. Word came through on the 10th that a British merchant ship, the St Vincent de Paul, had been stopped at sea by the Japanese and taken into their naval base at Tsingtao. British warships were sent to get her back, and when they arrived on 29 January they found a squadron of Japanese eight-inch heavy cruisers led by Ashigara sitting in the harbour waiting for them.

The diplomacy went nowhere, so Birmingham's captain, Eric Brind, ended it. He announced that the British ships would be sailing at eight the following morning, and they did. The passage out was made at full action stations, with Birmingham's guns trained on the Japanese squadron and the Japanese guns trained back, and Brind had allocated one of his turrets to each Japanese ship so that everybody knew exactly what would happen if anyone opened fire. Nobody did.

That was thirty-four months before Pearl Harbor, between two navies that were not at war and were both entirely aware of what the other was for. Brind, who had her from January 1938 to February 1940, went on to become a vice-admiral, and in 1945 he was commanding the cruisers of the British Pacific Fleet, including the force that shelled the steelworks at Kamaishi, an operation described in the article on HMS Gambia (48). The officer who stared down a Japanese squadron at Tsingtao in 1939 was still there at the end of it.

She went on to escort a Swedish supply convoy home under Operation Rubble in January 1941, before joining the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck that May, one of the most intensive naval search operations of the entire war.

Operation Rubble deserves a great deal more than the half sentence it usually gets, because it is one of the most enjoyable episodes of the whole war. Five Norwegian merchant ships had been sitting in Gothenburg since the fall of Norway, loaded with something in the order of twenty-five thousand tons of ball bearings, machine tools, special steels and engineering equipment, none of which Britain could get anywhere else and all of which the aircraft industry desperately needed. Getting them home meant running the Skagerrak, which was German-controlled water and heavily patrolled. George Binney, a former Arctic explorer working for the Ministry of Supply and holding a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve commission, put together volunteer crews, slipped the ships out of Gothenburg one at a time so as not to advertise anything, and on 23 January 1941 took the lot of them through the gap in thick fog. All five reached Kirkwall two days later. Binney was knighted for it, and the Royal Navy covering force, Birmingham included, had the rare pleasure of escorting home a cargo that was worth more than most convoys.

Torpedoed Off Cyrenaica

After further convoy escort work to the Middle East and South Africa, including a near-miss from air attack while escorting the Malta relief convoy of Operation Vigorous in June 1942, HMS Birmingham joined the 4th Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean that same month.

It was over a year later, on 28 November 1943, that she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-407 off the coast of Cyrenaica, the torpedo striking her keel in line with B turret, flooding her forward magazine and putting her over eight degrees off the vertical. Twenty-seven of her crew were killed, a notably severe blow for a cruiser to absorb and survive.

The boat that did it is worth naming properly. U-407 was a Type VIIC working out of the German Mediterranean flotilla, and a year earlier she had torpedoed the liner Viceroy of India off Algiers. A torpedo taking a cruiser under the keel forward is close to the worst place to be hit: the forward magazine flooded, which is what saved her from the alternative, and an eight-degree list on a ship of that size means an enormous quantity of water inside her. Twenty-seven men were killed. U-407 herself was hunted down in the Aegean on 19 September 1944 and destroyed by depth charges from the destroyers Troubridge, Terpsichore and the Polish Garland, ten months after she hit Birmingham and a fortnight before her crew would have had any realistic prospect of getting home.

HMS Birmingham limped to Alexandria for temporary repairs, and full permanent repairs were not carried out until she reached Norfolk, Virginia in June 1944, where her X turret was removed entirely and replaced with additional Bofors and Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns, reflecting the changing priorities of naval warfare by that stage of the conflict.

The arithmetic of that repair is the part that matters. She was hit on 28 November 1943 and she did not return to service until November 1944: twelve months, most of it spent either patched up at Alexandria or crossing the Atlantic to a yard that could do the job properly. A single torpedo, well placed, took a twelve-gun cruiser out of the war for a year at the point where the Mediterranean and then the invasion of Europe needed every hull available. That is what a submarine was for, and it is worth setting against the fact that she survived at all: the forward magazine flooding is the only reason there was anything left to repair.

The Baltic, and a Return to War Over Korea

HMS Birmingham returned to home waters in November 1944, joining the 10th Cruiser Squadron at Scapa Flow, and on 6 May 1945 helped accept the surrender of the German cruisers Prinz Eugen and Nurnberg at Copenhagen as the war in Europe came to its close.

The two German cruisers she took the surrender of went on to strikingly different fates, and both are worth knowing. Nurnberg was handed to the Soviet Union, renamed Admiral Makarov and served in the Baltic for another decade, which made her the only major German warship to go on doing an ordinary job for a former enemy. Prinz Eugen went to the Americans, who took her to Bikini Atoll in 1946 and moored her as a target for the atomic bomb tests. She survived both of them. Too radioactive to be repaired and slowly leaking, she was towed to Kwajalein, where she capsized in the shallows that December. She is there now, upside down, with her propellers above the water. Of all the ships that surrendered at Copenhagen in May 1945, the one that proved hardest to sink was the one nobody was trying to save.

Her postwar career included a deployment with the East Indies Fleet between 1949 and 1950 and a modernisation between 1950 and 1952, before she returned to genuine combat service with the Far East Fleet during the Korean War, where she expended 1,051 six-inch shells in support of United Nations forces, a remarkable return to front-line action for a cruiser already well into her second decade of service.

A thousand and fifty-one 6-inch shells is a useful figure to sit with, because it describes exactly what naval power meant in Korea. The United Nations had complete command of the sea from the first weeks, so there was nothing afloat to fight, and the entire contribution of the fleet was made against the land: coastal railways, bridges, tunnels, supply dumps, troop concentrations and the guns that fired back. A cruiser could lie a few miles offshore and put a twelve-gun broadside onto a railway cutting more or less indefinitely, and be gone before anybody could reach her. It was unglamorous, enormously effective and it went on for three years, and it is the reason ships built in the 1930s to fight the Japanese found themselves shelling North Korean marshalling yards twenty years later.

A Late Career on Screen

HMS Birmingham served with the Mediterranean Fleet between 1955 and 1957, spending part of that time as flagship of the 1st Cruiser Squadron, and in a rather unexpected final flourish lent her decks and silhouette to two films: The Baby and the Battleship in 1956, and, more fittingly, The Battle of the River Plate the same year, filming having begun on 13 December 1955, the sixteenth anniversary of the real battle the film depicted.

The casting of that film is a small delight in itself. The Royal Navy lent it most of a fleet: HMS Sheffield played Ajax, HMS Jamaica played Exeter, and HMS Cumberland, who had actually been at the River Plate, played herself. Achilles was played by Achilles, in a manner of speaking, since the ship had been transferred to India in 1948 and steamed to the location as INS Delhi. The Graf Spee, the Germans having conspicuously failed to leave any pocket battleships lying about, was played by the American heavy cruiser USS Salem. Filming a battle in which one participant is playing herself under a new flag while her opponent is being impersonated by the United States Navy is a fairly good summary of what had happened to the world in the intervening sixteen years.

Her very last piece of drama came in May 1959, when a collision with the destroyer HMS Delight off Malta cost two of Delight's crew their lives to fumes while they were below inspecting the damage, a sobering note to end on.

She was paid off at HMNB Devonport on 3 December 1959, by then the last of her class still in active service, and broken up at Inverkeithing in September 1960, closing out a career that had survived a devastating torpedo strike, fought in two entirely separate wars two decades apart, and finished, rather charmingly, as an unlikely movie star.