HMS Black Prince (81): From Sinking German Torpedo Boats to Bombarding Japan

A Cruiser Built for Global War

HMS Black Prince was built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, her keel laid on 2 November 1939, launched on 27 August 1942, and completed on 20 November 1943.

The name is one of the better ones in the fleet list. Edward of Woodstock, eldest son of Edward III, was fighting in the front line at Crecy in 1346 at the age of sixteen and commanding at Poitiers ten years later, where he took the King of France prisoner and then, by contemporary account, waited on him at dinner afterwards. He was for thirty years the most admired soldier in Europe and he never became king: he died in 1376, a year before his father, and the crown passed to his ten-year-old son as Richard II, which went badly for everybody. The nickname is not contemporary either. Nobody appears to have called him the Black Prince in his lifetime; it turns up a couple of centuries later and most probably refers to his armour. A prince who never reigned, known ever since by a name he never heard.

A Dido-class cruiser displacing 7,200 tons at full load, she carried eight 5.25-inch dual-purpose guns alongside anti-aircraft weapons and torpedo tubes, generating 62,000 horsepower from her Admiralty boilers, a well-rounded, versatile cruiser that would go on to serve in virtually every major theatre of the war.

She was actually one of the five-strong Bellona subgroup, a modified Dido design that dropped one twin turret, hence eight 5.25-inch guns rather than the original ten, specifically to cure the class's notorious top-heaviness, trading a little firepower for a ship that didn't roll her guts out in a seaway.

She was commanded for most of the war by Captain Dennis Marescaux Lees, DSO, with Captain Gerald Vaughan Gladstone taking over from April 1945, and carried a wartime complement of around 530 officers and men.

Sinking a German Torpedo Boat off Brittany

After early service on the Arctic convoys, including JW 57 to Russia in February 1944, HMS Black Prince relocated south for European operations. On the night of 25 to 26 April 1944, as part of Operation Tunnel, she swept the Brittany coast off the Ile de Batz alongside the Tribal-class destroyers HMS Ashanti, HMCS Athabaskan, HMCS Haida and HMCS Huron, engaging the German torpedo boats T24, T27 and T29.

Ashanti and Huron battered T29 with gunfire at close range, blowing her forward torpedo mount clean overboard and setting her ablaze. Haida and Athabaskan, unable to run down the fleeing T24, doubled back to help finish her off and put fifteen torpedoes into the water without managing it, so it was gunfire again, at 4.20am, that finally sent her under with the loss of 135 of her crew. T24 and T27 both escaped, damaged.

There is a sequel to that night which belongs in any account of it. Three nights later, on 29 April 1944, Athabaskan and Haida were out again off the French coast when T24, the torpedo boat that had got away from the Ile de Batz action, put a torpedo into Athabaskan. She sank quickly and a hundred and twenty-eight of her people died. Haida stopped in enemy waters, in the dark, within range of German coastal batteries, and picked forty-two men out of the water. When she could stay no longer her captain ordered her motor cutter lowered into the sea unmanned, so that the men still swimming would at least have something to climb into. Three of Haida's sailors jumped into it as it went down, stayed behind after their own ship had gone, filled the boat with survivors and took it away west until they were found. Another eighty-five men were picked up by the Germans and spent the rest of the war as prisoners.

And of every ship that fought off the Ile de Batz that night, British, Canadian and German, exactly one is still afloat. HMCS Haida is preserved at Hamilton in Ontario as a Canadian national historic site, the last Tribal class destroyer left anywhere in the world, and you can walk her decks on a Tuesday afternoon.

On D-Day itself, HMS Black Prince served with Task Force 125 supporting the landings at Utah Beach, engaging the German battery at Morsalines and firing some 1,300 shells before the day was out, before going on to support Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, and subsequent operations in the Aegean, including bombarding the airfield at Maleme in Crete. Off Crete that September she was diverted to hunt down an enemy convoy, only to be sent home to Alexandria a few days later not by enemy action but by a failing refrigeration plant, an unglamorous reminder that even a cruiser mid-campaign answers to its freezers as much as to the enemy.

To the Pacific, and the War's Final Shots

HMS Black Prince transited the Suez Canal in November 1944 and joined the British Pacific Fleet's carrier strikes against Japan's fuel supply: Operation Robson against the Sumatran oil refineries in December, Operation Lentil against Pangkalan Brandan on New Year's Day 1945, and Operation Meridian against the huge Palembang refinery complex later that January, three raids that did more to strangle the Japanese war machine than their modest headlines ever suggested.

Palembang in particular deserves its due, because it is generally reckoned the most effective operation the Fleet Air Arm ever mounted. The two refineries there, Pladjoe, built by Royal Dutch Shell, and Soengei Gerong, built by Standard Oil, were the largest and second largest in the Far East, and between them they supplied something like three quarters of all the aviation spirit Japan had. Two strikes were flown, on 24 and 29 January 1945, across a mountain range, against balloon barrages and heavy anti-aircraft fire, at the extreme end of the aircraft's range. Output was cut by roughly three quarters. An air force that cannot fuel its aircraft is a collection of expensive ornaments, and the effect on Japanese air operations for the rest of the war was permanent.

It was not achieved cheaply and the worst of the cost came afterwards. Some forty aircraft were lost over the two days. Nine aircrew, British and New Zealanders, came down over Japanese-held territory, were captured and were taken to Changi in Singapore. They survived the rest of the war there. They were then murdered by their guards after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, and their bodies were put into a small boat and sunk off the coast. They are remembered as the Palembang Nine, and there is a memorial to them in the Fleet Air Arm church at Yeovilton.

She then joined Task Force 57 for Operation Iceberg off Okinawa that spring, helping suppress the airfields of the Sakishima Gunto and taking part in a coordinated bombardment of Miyako on 4 May 1945, before ending her fighting war with a shore bombardment near Tokyo itself that July, a fitting close at the very heart of the conflict's endgame.

The Sakishima work needs explaining, because on paper it looks like the dullest job of the campaign. The islands between Formosa and Okinawa held airfields that the Japanese were using to stage kamikaze aircraft down to the invasion beaches, and the British fleet's task was simply to keep those runways unusable. So the carriers flew day after day, cratering strips that the Japanese filled in overnight, and cratered them again the next morning, for weeks on end. It was monotonous, it was flown into serious anti-aircraft fire, and it worked. It is also where the British armoured flight deck earned its reputation: British carriers were hit by kamikazes repeatedly and were flying again within hours, and the line that went round the fleet was that when one hit an American carrier it meant six months at Pearl Harbor, and when one hit a British carrier it meant sweepers man your brooms.

She helped reoccupy Hong Kong in September 1945, restoring British administration to the colony after years of Japanese occupation.

A New Flag, and a Mutiny

HMS Black Prince was transferred to the Royal New Zealand Navy on 25 May 1946, becoming HMNZS Black Prince. A planned modernisation in 1947 was cancelled following a wave of mutinies that April at the Devonport shore base HMNZS Philomel and aboard the corvette HMNZS Arbutus and cruiser HMNZS Bellona, sparked by broken pay promises and, on Philomel at least, a dysentery outbreak that saw the ship's heads closed and sailors needing signed permission just to go ashore to use a toilet, one man drawing seven days' punishment for doing so without it.

The mutineers won backdated pay within three days, but most chose discharge over returning to duty, and the manpower shortage that left across the fleet meant there weren't enough hands to see Black Prince's own refit through, so she went into reserve instead. It was a remarkably serious disciplinary crisis within the postwar New Zealand naval service, one that disrupted plans well beyond the ships directly involved.

The same wave of protest reached her sister HMNZS Bellona, and the grievances behind it were the same in every ship: men who had spent six years at war, had been promised a pay code that would be backdated, and found on being kept on into a peacetime navy that the backdating had quietly evaporated. Reading the ten complaints the men actually submitted, the striking thing is how reasonable they are.

She was eventually reactivated between 1952 and 1953 with a modified armament and took part in Elizabeth II's Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead in June 1953, a considerably calmer chapter after the earlier upheaval, before putting in at Malta's Grand Harbour that August.

From December 1953 to January 1954 she took on rather grander duties still, escorting the liner Gothic on the Queen's Commonwealth tour, before handing over escort duties to the Royal Australian Navy in the Tasman Sea on 1 February 1954 with a 21-gun salute, and steaming into Hobart a few days later alongside HMCS Ontario and HMS Ceylon as the royal party's progress continued.

A Long Wait for the Scrapyard

HMS Black Prince was decommissioned in August 1955, and following the 1957 Defence White Paper's decision to retire the Dido-class cruisers altogether, she served out her final years as an accommodation vessel and a source of spare parts for her sister ships.

The 1957 white paper that finished her off was Duncan Sandys', and it was the most drastic single document in modern British defence policy. Its central assumption was that the next war would be nuclear and would be fought with missiles, from which it followed that manned aircraft, large surface fleets and most of the conventional forces built up since 1945 were an expensive irrelevance. National Service was ended, whole aircraft programmes were cancelled, and the cruiser, a type that had policed the empire for a century, was effectively written out of the fleet. Black Prince, sitting in Auckland as a source of spare parts for ships that were themselves on their way out, was one very small consequence of it.

She was sold for scrap in March 1962 and towed from Auckland on 5 April that year, arriving at Mitsui & Co's Osaka yard on 2 May, where she was broken up alongside another former Second World War light cruiser already reduced to a bare, bowless hull, the former HMAS Hobart, closing out a career that had taken her from sinking German torpedo boats off Brittany to the final bombardments of Japan and finally into New Zealand's own turbulent postwar naval history.