HMS Cardiff (D58): The Cruiser That Led the German Fleet Into Captivity

A Cruiser for the Grand Fleet

HMS Cardiff was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, her keel laid on 22 July 1916, launched on 12 April 1917, and commissioned on 25 June that year, a Ceres sub-class C-class light cruiser displacing 4,190 tons normal and up to 5,020 tons at deep load.

She carried five BL 6-inch guns, two 3-inch anti-aircraft guns and eight 21-inch torpedo tubes across four twin mounts, joining the Grand Fleet in time to see genuine wartime action before the First World War's end.

Action at Heligoland Bight

HMS Cardiff took part in the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight on 17 November 1917, a sharp engagement between British and German light forces in which she fired extensively, though poor visibility limited the damage inflicted on either side, a frustratingly inconclusive action typical of much of the naval fighting in the North Sea during the war's final years.

That action deserves more than a sentence, and it has a detail in it that turns the rest of her story into something close to a circle. Beatty had ordered it in reply to a German raid on a Scandinavian convoy the month before: the idea was to catch the German minesweepers who spent their lives clearing lanes through the British minefields in the Bight, and to draw out heavier ships behind them. The striking force left Rosyth at half past four on the afternoon of 16 November 1917 under Vice Admiral Napier, and Cardiff was in Rear Admiral Alexander-Sinclair's 6th Light Cruiser Squadron. Contact came at half past seven the next morning. What followed was two hours of long-range firing through smoke and haze at ships that kept disappearing, with the Germans straddling repeatedly but landing only seven hits and the British five. At ten to ten the shells of two German battleships began arriving among the British light cruisers, which was the signal to leave. Fog closed the whole thing down at twenty to eleven. Twenty-two British sailors were killed and one German cruiser was seriously damaged, and both sides claimed it.

The detail is who was commanding the German light cruisers that morning. It was Konteradmiral Ludwig von Reuter, and Cardiff spent two hours of 17 November 1917 shooting at him through the haze. A year and four days later she was leading his fleet into internment. Seven months after that he was the admiral who gave the order to open the seacocks and put fifty-two German warships on the bottom of Scapa Flow, which is the one thing about the whole surrender that anybody now remembers. So the modest little light cruiser at the head of that column had already met the man at the head of the ships behind her, in action, in the North Sea, and neither of them had been able to see the other properly at the time. Naval history very rarely arranges itself that neatly.

Leading the German Fleet Into Surrender

HMS Cardiff earned a particularly unique place in naval history in November 1918, when she led the German High Seas Fleet to internment at Scapa Flow following Germany's surrender, the officially designated lead ship guiding what had been one of the most powerful battle fleets in the world into the humiliating captivity that would end, less than a year later, in the German fleet's own dramatic mass scuttling.

It was an extraordinary role for a relatively modest light cruiser, chosen precisely because her light armament posed no direct threat and made her a fitting, almost ceremonial escort for such a historically loaded moment.

The day itself has a name, Operation ZZ, and it is generally reckoned the greatest gathering of warships in one place on one day in the history of the world. The Grand Fleet went out from the Firth of Forth in two enormous columns, some 370 Allied warships, and steamed to meet seventy-odd German ships coming the other way. In the middle of it, alone and out in front, was Cardiff, then flagship of the 6th Light Cruiser Squadron, leading the German line in. She was towing a kite balloon, which is the practical reason she was where she was: the weather was foggy, and a balloon on a wire is something a column of ships can follow when it cannot see the ship ahead.

She led them into the Firth of Forth for the formal surrender, and the internment at Scapa Flow followed afterwards. At about eleven o'clock Beatty made the signal that everybody remembers: the German flag would be hauled down at sunset that day, Thursday, and would not be hoisted again without permission. Seven months later the Germans hoisted it once more anyway, briefly, as they opened the seacocks and scuttled fifty-two of their own ships on the bottom of Scapa Flow, an episode covered in the article on HMS Caesar, whose own former captain was the admiral left trying to stop them.

The Baltic, an Emperor in Exile, and a City in Flames

HMS Cardiff went on to support Baltic independence efforts between December 1918 and January 1919, part of the wider British naval intervention that helped the newly independent Baltic states resist Bolshevik forces in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War.

The Baltic deployment was a great deal more than support, and Cardiff was at the centre of it. On 22 November 1918, eleven days after the Armistice, Alexander-Sinclair was ordered to take his 6th Light Cruiser Squadron into the Baltic, and Cardiff went as his flagship with Cassandra, Caradoc, Ceres and Calypso. What they were being sent to do had no precedent: the war was over, Germany had collapsed, Russia was in revolution, and Estonia and Latvia had declared independence and were about to be overrun by the Red Army. There were no instructions worth the name. Sinclair went into Estonian and Latvian ports handing out troops, weapons and supplies and telling the new governments that he would attack the Bolsheviks, in his own phrase, as far as his guns could reach. He then did. It is the only occasion in the twentieth century on which the Royal Navy fought the Russian government directly, and it is almost entirely forgotten in Britain.

It cost, and it worked. On the night of 4 December 1918 the cruiser Cassandra, one of Cardiff's own squadron, struck a German-laid mine north of Liepaja and sank with eleven of her men. Three weeks later, on 26 December, British warships caught two Bolshevik destroyers, Avtroil and Spartak, in the act of shelling Tallinn, and took them both. Rather than keep them, the Royal Navy handed them over to the Estonian provisional government, which commissioned them as Lennuk and Vambola. Those two ships were the Estonian Navy: it began, quite literally, as a British present. Estonia and Latvia both survived, and both remember the campaign a great deal better than Britain does. Alexander-Sinclair handed over to Rear-Admiral Walter Cowan in January 1919, and Cardiff went south to the Mediterranean, which is how she came to be carrying a deposed emperor into exile three years later.

She served with the Mediterranean Fleet from 1919 to 1929, and in November 1921 carried out a truly remarkable diplomatic mission, transporting the deposed Emperor Charles I of Austria and his wife, Empress Zita, into exile at Madeira, following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

The mission is worth spelling out, because it was less a diplomatic courtesy than a deportation. Charles had made two attempts in 1921 to reclaim the Hungarian throne, and after the second the Allies decided he had to go somewhere he could not easily get back from. On 1 November he and Zita, who was pregnant, were put aboard the river monitor HMS Glowworm at Baja on the Danube, taken downriver to the Black Sea, and transferred there to Cardiff. They reached Madeira on 19 November. The choice of island was deliberate: isolated, in the Atlantic, and easy to watch.

It did not end well. The family lived first at the Villa Vittoria in Funchal and later at the Quinta do Monte, up the hill and a good deal colder and damper. Charles caught a chill in town in March 1922, it turned to pneumonia, and he died on 1 April, aged thirty-four, less than five months after Cardiff had landed him. Zita was twenty-nine and expecting their eighth child. She wore mourning for the rest of her life, and she lived until 1989.

In September 1922, HMS Cardiff witnessed the Great Fire of Smyrna, one of the great human tragedies of the interwar period, as the ancient city burned amid the chaotic final stages of the Greco-Turkish War, a devastating scene that Royal Navy ships present, including HMS Cardiff, could do relatively little to prevent, though they assisted with the evacuation of refugees fleeing the flames.

Smyrna is the hardest thing on her record and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than softened. When the fire started on 13 September 1922 there were something like twenty-one Allied warships lying in the harbour, eleven of them British, and they were under orders not to intervene. Britain, France, Italy and the United States had all declared themselves neutral in the Greco-Turkish war and the instruction was to protect their own nationals and property and nothing else. Ashore, in a city into which perhaps three hundred thousand refugees had crowded in a fortnight, people were being driven onto the quay by fire behind them and killed or drowned in front of it, in full view and within earshot of the ships. The orders did not hold. Boats went in, and very large numbers of people were taken off the waterfront and carried to Greece over the following days. It was not enough and it was not early enough; the death toll is generally put at around a hundred thousand. Cardiff was one of the ships in that harbour, and her people watched the whole of it from her upper deck.

A Second World War as a Training Ship

HMS Cardiff served on Northern Patrol duty between September 1939 and June 1940 at the outset of the Second World War, before being converted to a gunnery training ship in October 1940, a role she held for the remainder of the conflict, equipped with modern radar systems by 1943 that kept her useful even in a purely training capacity.

Her second war was fought entirely in home waters and mostly at anchor, and both halves of it were more useful than they sound. The Northern Patrol between September 1939 and June 1940 was the blockade: a line of cruisers and armed merchant cruisers stretched between Scotland, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, stopping neutral shipping and searching it for contraband bound for Germany, in the worst water in the northern hemisphere, in winter, in ships mostly built before 1920. It was cold, dangerous and continuous, and several of the ships doing it were sunk. Then in October 1940 she became a gunnery training ship, which meant that for the next five years the men who would man the guns of the ships that fought the Atlantic, the Arctic and the Mediterranean learned to do it aboard her. She was given modern radar in 1943 so that she could teach that too. A twenty-three-year-old cruiser turning out trained gunnery ratings by the thousand is worth rather more to a navy at war than the same cruiser at sea, and the Admiralty knew it.

She was finally decommissioned on 3 September 1945, sold for scrap to Arnott Young on 23 January 1946 and broken up at Dalmuir in Scotland, arriving there on 18 March 1946, closing out the career of a ship whose most famous moment, leading an entire defeated navy into captivity, remains one of the more historically resonant single episodes in the whole of the Royal Navy's twentieth-century history.