HMS Cardigan Bay: From Escorting the Exodus to Recovering a Soviet MiG

A Frigate Constructed at Leith

HMS Cardigan Bay was built by Henry Robb at Leith, her keel laid on 14 April 1944, launched on 28 December that year, and commissioned on 15 June 1945, a Bay-class anti-aircraft frigate, laid down under the intended name HMS Loch Laxford before being redesignated, displacing 1,600 tons standard and up to 2,530 tons at full load, armed with four twin 4-inch guns, four twin 40mm Bofors guns and four twin 20mm Oerlikon guns, alongside a Hedgehog anti-submarine projector and depth charge equipment.

She had originally been intended for the Pacific war zone, but with Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945 that deployment was deferred, and she joined the Mediterranean Fleet instead, just as the war she had been built for was ending.

The following year brought a far more dangerous introduction to peacetime naval diplomacy. After the destroyers HMS Saumarez and HMS Volage struck mines in the Corfu Channel on 22 October 1946, killing 44 of their crew in one of the most serious peacetime losses the postwar Royal Navy suffered, Cardigan Bay was sent to help keep watch over the channel while minesweepers cleared it that November, part of the same tense standoff with Albania that would eventually end up before the newly formed International Court of Justice.

Present at the Exodus

HMS Cardigan Bay's early postwar service placed her at the centre of one of the most emotionally fraught episodes of the British Mandate in Palestine.

Assigned to intercept vessels carrying Jewish immigrants attempting to reach Palestine in defiance of British restrictions, she was part of the escort that brought the refugee ship Exodus 1947 into Haifa on 18 July, after a violent boarding at sea by British destroyers and marines that left three people dead, among them the American volunteer crewman William Bernstein and a fifteen-year-old refugee, Zvi Jakubowitz, and around 150 injured. Cardigan Bay went on to help escort the passengers, transferred onto the prison ships Empire Rival, Ocean Vigour and Runnymede Park, back across the Mediterranean to Port-de-Bouc near Marseille that August, one small part of an episode that became a defining and deeply controversial moment in the final years of the Mandate and in the wider story leading to the founding of Israel the following year.

In early 1948, HMS Cardigan Bay was one of a Royal Navy escort of seventeen warships shepherding two more immigrant ships, the Pan York and Pan Crescent, from the Black Sea to internment at Famagusta in Cyprus; between them the two vessels were carrying more than 15,000 people, further immigration-control duties carried out amid the same fraught circumstances.

Five Tours Off Korea

HMS Cardigan Bay transferred to the Eastern Fleet in 1949, seeing patrol and bombardment duties during the Malayan Emergency and operating in the Yangtze Estuary and the Formosa Strait as the Chinese Civil War entered its final phase, before going on to serve on extensive deployment cycles supporting United Nations operations during the Korean War between 1950 and 1955. Her first tours in 1950 and 1951 involved patrolling Korea's west coast, supporting the aircraft carrier HMS Glory during coastal bombardments, and working to prevent the movement of enemy shipping along the coastline.

In July 1951, she escorted an American landing craft sent to recover wreckage from a Soviet-built MiG-15 fighter that had come down in shallow water south-west of Hanchon, a properly valuable intelligence prize at a moment when the West still knew relatively little about the capabilities of the aircraft that was giving UN pilots such a shock over the skies of Korea; the salvaged wreckage was shipped onward to the US Air Force's technical intelligence centre in Dayton, Ohio, for detailed analysis.

Through 1952 she carried out further patrol duties and naval gunfire support, alongside serving as an air control ship during flying operations, and continued occasional United Nations duties and joint exercises with American, Australian, Thai, Indian and New Zealand forces through 1953 to 1955.

It was during this same stretch of patrol duty, in April 1953, that she collided with the Dutch frigate Johan Maurits van Nassau, sustaining damage to her plating, and then further damage from an American tug called in to help, a chaotic multi-ship mishap that, whatever its inconvenience, caused no lasting harm to her career.

A Voyage Around the World

HMS Cardigan Bay's later career included a particularly notable circumnavigation voyage between 1960 and 1961, sailing from the Far East via Townsville in Queensland, Noumea, Suva and Apia, refuelling at Pearl Harbor on 9 January 1961, and continuing on via the Panama Canal Zone, a fitting final adventure for a ship that had already seen service across the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Eastern Fleet and the Korean peninsula.

The End of Service

HMS Cardigan Bay was decommissioned on 7 April 1961 at Plymouth, placed into reserve on 30 May that year, and added to the disposal list in 1962, being towed to Troon in Scotland for breaking that March and scrapped by early September, bringing to a close a career that had touched some of the most historically significant and emotionally weighty episodes of the immediate postwar world, from the Exodus 1947 affair to the Korean War's tense early years.