HMS Cairo: Lost Defending the Convoy That Saved Malta

A Cruiser Built for One War, Fought in Another

HMS Cairo was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, her keel laid on 28 November 1917 and launched on 19 November 1918, just eight days after the armistice that ended the First World War, and commissioned on 24 September 1919.

A C-class light cruiser of the Carlisle group, she carried five 6-inch guns as originally built, along with anti-aircraft guns and eight 21-inch torpedo tubes, driven by Parsons geared turbines producing 40,000 shaft horsepower.

She served on the China Station in 1920, the East Indies Station between 1921 and 1925, and as a Mediterranean flagship between 1928 and 1930, a solid if unremarkable interwar career.

She returned to Chatham for a refit in 1931 and then spent five years as flagship to the Commodore (Destroyers) of the Home Fleet, before finally going into reserve at Devonport, a career that had, by the mid-1930s, already taken her right around the interwar Empire without a shot fired in anger.

Converted for the Air War

On 4 November 1937, as the growing threat of air power reshaped naval priorities, she was selected for conversion to an anti-aircraft cruiser, work originally earmarked for Chatham but eventually carried out at Portsmouth Dockyard. She re-commissioned in her new role in 1939, her armament rebalanced and fitted with aircraft-direction equipment to give her the dedicated capability to defend convoys and fleets against increasingly dangerous air attack, a role that would go on to earn her the battle honours Norway 1940, Atlantic 1940-41 and Malta Convoys 1942.

War found her on Channel Force duties out of Portland that September, before a shift to Nore Command and then Humber Force took her to Dover and Grimsby, providing anti-aircraft cover for East Coast convoys and the minelaying of the Dover Barrage through the winter of 1939 into 1940.

When Germany invaded Norway that April she was soon in the thick of it, escorting troopships into Namsos under air attack, during which the French cruiser Emile Bertin was hit and had to turn back, and later helping rescue troops and ship's company after the cruiser HMS Effingham ran aground near Bodo. On 28 May 1940, she was damaged by German aircraft off Narvik during the Norwegian campaign, an attack that killed ten of her sailors, a sobering early demonstration of exactly the kind of threat her conversion had been designed to counter. She was repaired by Palmers of Hebburn, coming out of the yard fitted with one of the Navy's first sets of aircraft-warning radar.

The Effingham business is worth a paragraph, because it was entirely self-inflicted and it cost the Navy a nine-thousand-ton cruiser without a shot being fired. She had left Harstad at four in the morning of 17 May 1940 with one thousand and twenty men of the South Wales Borderers aboard, along with ten Bren gun carriers and a hundred and thirty tons of stores, bound for Bodø. On the evening of the 18th, running fast through the inshore channels to stay clear of the Luftwaffe, she went onto the Faksen shoal off Bliksvær and tore her bottom open. The destroyer HMS Matabele, following her in, touched the same ground and managed to get herself off, though she needed a dockyard afterwards.

Everyone aboard was taken off and eventually got back to Harstad, and Cairo was one of the ships that did the taking off. Effingham herself was stuck fast and could not be salvaged, so Matabele put torpedoes into her to stop the Germans having her. It is a bleak little episode: a fast run through badly charted water to avoid one danger, straight into another, and one of the Navy's larger cruisers written off on a rock in a fjord in the third week of a campaign that was already lost.

The following eighteen months were spent on less dramatic but no less vital work, escorting troop convoys through the Western Approaches and North Atlantic as part of the Irish Sea Force, work that carried on even as she herself was detached for extra protection when news broke of the German battleship Bismarck's breakout in May 1941.

In February 1942 she made an unusual passage to the Kola Inlet, carrying a British trade delegation to Murmansk for talks with Soviet officials, before returning home for repairs that fitted her with early surface-warning radar. That March, after a successful Warship Week National Savings campaign, she was formally adopted by the civil community of Wandsworth in south London, a wartime bond that would last barely five months before her loss.

In April 1942 she escorted the American aircraft carrier USS Wasp from Gibraltar, alongside the battlecruiser HMS Renown and the cruiser HMS Charybdis, while Wasp flew off a fresh batch of Spitfires bound for Malta's hard-pressed defenders, one of several such reinforcement runs she took part in that spring and summer.

Fighting Through to Malta

HMS Cairo went on to lead Force X, the close escort for Operation Harpoon, a convoy fighting its way through to the besieged island of Malta, during which she was struck by two 6-inch rounds fired from the Italian cruiser Eugenio di Savoia, an engagement that killed two of her crew, a costly reminder of just how fiercely contested the Malta convoy route had become by 1942, as Axis forces sought to starve the island into surrender. Only two of the six merchant ships that had set out with Harpoon actually reached Malta; the Polish-crewed destroyer ORP Kujawiak was mined and sunk entering the Grand Harbour, and two more of Cairo's own escorting destroyers limped in too badly damaged to leave again.

Operation Pedestal, and a Final Loss

HMS Cairo's war ended during Operation Pedestal in August 1942, one of the most desperate and historically significant convoy operations of the entire war, mounted specifically to get vital fuel and supplies through to Malta at a moment when the island's survival hung in the balance.

The proportions of Pedestal tell you what Malta was worth by August 1942. Fourteen merchant ships sailed, and to get them through the Admiralty committed two battleships, three aircraft carriers, seven cruisers and twenty-three destroyers, which is a fleet action's worth of warships escorting what was, in tonnage terms, a modest convoy. It went wrong almost immediately: the carrier HMS Eagle was torpedoed on 11 August and sank in four minutes. Of the fourteen merchant ships, five reached Malta.

On 12 August 1942, HMS Cairo was hit aft by two torpedoes from a single four-torpedo salvo fired by the Italian submarine Axum north of Bizerta in Tunisia, the same devastating spread that also struck the cruiser HMS Nigeria and the tanker Ohio; twenty-four of Cairo's seamen were killed in the attack, and her surviving crew were taken off by HMS Wilton.

With the ship totally disabled and beyond saving, HMS Pathfinder first tried to finish her off with torpedoes, but her aim went astray; it finally fell to the destroyer HMS Derwent to send HMS Cairo to the bottom with gunfire. Fitted as she was for aircraft direction, her loss stripped the rest of the convoy of a capability nothing else in the escort could replace, at exactly the moment its surviving ships needed it most.

The salvo that killed her deserves to be understood on its own terms, because it is probably the single most effective torpedo attack of the naval war. The Italian submarine Axum fired four torpedoes. Three of them hit, and they hit three different ships: the cruiser Nigeria, which was the flagship and had to turn back for Gibraltar, the cruiser Cairo, which was finished, and the tanker Ohio, which was carrying the fuel the entire operation existed to deliver. Nigeria and Cairo were the two ships in the convoy equipped to direct fighter aircraft. One submarine, one salvo, one minute, and the convoy lost its flagship, its fighter direction and very nearly its cargo, some sixty miles short of the narrowest and most dangerous part of the passage.

The boat that did it is worth following, because her subsequent history is stranger than the attack. Axum was an Adua-class submarine, six hundred and eighty tons on the surface and about sixty metres long, which is to say small, commanded by Capitano Renato Ferrini. She had sailed from Cagliari the day before to take up a position some twenty-five miles north-west of Cape Blanc, on the Tunisian coast, and she fired at five to eight in the evening on 12 August, when a change of formation in the convoy briefly lined a great many targets up in front of her. She heard three explosions and then had to survive what came next; the counterattack damaged her badly enough that she could no longer dive below forty metres.

She stayed on patrol anyway for two more days, unable to go deep, in a sea full of destroyers with every reason to want her, and got into Trapani at half past seven on the evening of the 15th. Whatever one thinks of the cause, that is a piece of submarining.

Thirteen months later Italy signed the armistice, on 8 September 1943, and Axum was still in commission. She sailed for Malta the following day and surrendered, and then went on serving, on the other side. On 29 December 1943, on a mission off the Morea in southern Greece, she ran aground and was scuttled. Her wreck is still there, off Kaiafa beach on the Ionian coast, in shallow enough water that people swim over it. The submarine that fired the single most effective salvo of the naval war spent the last four months of her life working for the navy she had fired it at, and ended up on a Greek holiday beach.

Her loss, alongside those of several other ships during Operation Pedestal, was a heavy price, but the convoy's ultimate, narrow success in getting critically needed supplies through to Malta is widely credited with keeping the island in the war at one of the most precarious moments of the entire Mediterranean campaign, a consequential sacrifice for a ship whose own career had begun in the final days of an entirely different war a quarter of a century earlier.

The Ohio did get in, which is the part Malta has never forgotten. Bombed, burning, broken-backed and settling, she was lashed between two destroyers and dragged into the Grand Harbour on 15 August 1942, the feast of St Mary, and to this day the operation is remembered on the island not as Pedestal but as Il-Konvoj ta' Santa Marija, the Santa Marija Convoy. The fuel she carried kept the aircraft flying and the island fighting. HMS Cairo, who had spent the previous three years learning how to defend ships from aircraft and had been sunk doing it, was one of the reasons that cargo arrived at all.