HMS Capetown (D88): A Hurricane Rescue, Nanking Under Fire, and a Torpedo in the Red Sea

Four Years Building

HMS Capetown was one of the Carlisle group of the C Class light cruisers, the last of the class, with the raised trawler bow that made them drier ships than their sisters; the group's name ship, Carlisle, has her own article.

She was ordered from Cammell Laird at Birkenhead in July 1917, laid down in February 1918 and launched on 28 June 1918, but with the end of the war the work slowed, and her completion was transferred to the dockyard at Pembroke Dock. She was completed on 28 February 1922, the first and so far only ship of the name, named after the South African city.

The photograph at the top of this page shows her around that time, at her moorings in light grey paint.

The Valerian

She went first to the 8th Light Cruiser Squadron on the America and West Indies Station, based at Bermuda. In October 1926 a hurricane swept over the island, and the sloop Valerian, caught at sea on her way back into harbour, was overwhelmed and capsized south of Bermuda. Most of her ship's company were lost.

Capetown searched the wreckage-strewn sea and picked up twenty nine survivors.

China

After some years in reserve she went out to the China Station in 1934, and in August 1937 she relieved the cruiser Danae as guardship at Nanking, the Chinese capital, to protect the British community and keep open the embassy's wireless link.

War between China and Japan had broken out that summer, and as the Japanese prepared to bomb the city in September Capetown took the embassy staff aboard and moved them away up river. The Chinese had sunk merchant ships to block the Yangtze against the Japanese, and it was December before she was given permission to come down, reaching Hong Kong on 27 December 1937, days after the fall of Nanking.

The Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean

She came home in 1938 to be converted to an anti-aircraft cruiser, but the work was put off as war approached, and in 1939, under Captain Terence Back, she went to Gibraltar and then the Mediterranean Fleet.

In November 1939 she escorted the submarine depot ship Maidstone towards Freetown, and in June 1940, as senior officer of the escort of a convoy from the Aegean to Port Said, she brought it through two air attacks without loss.

On 6 July 1940 she bombarded Bardia in support of the army, and three days later she was with the 3rd Cruiser Squadron in the Battle of Calabria, but the old C Class cruisers had shown themselves too slow and too poorly armed against aircraft for the Mediterranean, and that summer she was sent to the Indian Ocean.

In September 1940 she searched for the German raider Atlantis with Hermes and Durban, and in February 1941 she joined Force T for the invasion of Italian Somaliland, bombarding Mogadishu on 14 February.

Massawa

In April 1941 the British were closing in on the Italian base at Massawa in Eritrea, and Capetown was patrolling the Red Sea to the north with the Australian sloop Parramatta. Early on 8 April, under Captain Percival James, off Mersa Kuba, the Italian motor torpedo boat MAS 213 slipped in and fired two torpedoes.

At a quarter past one in the morning one hit Capetown on the starboard side in a boiler room. Between four and seven of her men were killed, the records differ, and others were wounded. Her bulkheads held only because they had already been shored up, and with her steering gone she had to be steered by hand.

Parramatta took her in tow, escorted by the Indian sloop Indus, and at five and a half knots brought her into Port Sudan on the morning of 10 April. Massawa fell on the day she was hit.

In May the tug Taikoo towed her down the Red Sea to Aden and on across the Arabian Sea to Bombay, where she docked on 22 May for repairs that lasted a year.

She came back into service in June 1942 and spent the next year as base ship at Hormuz and on convoy work between the Persian Gulf, East Africa and India, before she was relieved by Caradoc. In March 1943 she escorted a single troopship, the Rohna, from Bombay to Aden; eight months later the Rohna was sunk by a German glider bomb in the Mediterranean with the loss of more than a thousand American soldiers. That summer Capetown was sent home.

Normandy

Her last service was off the Normandy beaches. In the spring of 1944 she housed the crews of landing craft at Plymouth, and in April she was recommissioned for the invasion.

On 7 June she passed through the swept channel to the American Mulberry harbour off Omaha Beach, and from 9 June, under American command, she was the control ship for all sailings southbound to the American beaches, while her sister Ceres controlled the ships going north. When the great gale of 19 June wrecked the American Mulberry, she came through without serious damage.

She was released in September, and spent the rest of the war as an accommodation ship for the reserve fleet at Falmouth. She was sold in 1946 and arrived at Preston to be broken up on 2 June 1946.