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.

That standoff produced a piece of legal history as well as a naval one. The United Kingdom took Albania to the International Court of Justice, and Corfu Channel is case number one on the Court's own list: the first case of any kind it heard after it was established in 1945. The Court found in April 1949 that Albania had known the mines were there and had said nothing, and in December it assessed the damages at about 844,000 pounds. The principle it established, that a state is responsible for not warning of dangers it knows about in its own waters, is still taught in every international law course going.

Albania did not pay. The judgment sat unsatisfied for more than forty years, tangled up with a separate argument about Albanian gold held in London by the Tripartite Gold Commission, and it was only settled by a memorandum signed in Rome on 8 May 1992, under which Britain released 1,674 kilograms of gold and Albania paid two million dollars. Forty-four men had died in the channel in October 1946. It took forty-six years to close the file, and Cardigan Bay had been scrapped for thirty of them.

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.

The story did not end at Port-de-Bouc. The passengers refused to land, stayed in the holds through a heatwave for twenty-four days, and were eventually taken on to Hamburg and put ashore by force in the British zone of occupied Germany, in front of the world's press. That last leg was escorted by her sister ship, and it is set out in the article on HMS Burghead Bay. Between the two of them, these two Bay-class frigates escorted the whole of one of the most damaging episodes in the history of the Mandate, from the boarding off Palestine to the pier at Hamburg.

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.

Malaya is not a war anybody associates with warships, and the Royal Navy's part in it was stranger than the phrase patrol and bombardment duties makes it sound. The insurgency was fought inland, in jungle so thick that a company could pass within fifty yards of a camp and never know, but Malaya is a peninsula, and the coast was where weapons, money, food and people came in and went out. So ships spent a great deal of their time on anti-smuggling and anti-piracy work, and putting landing parties ashore in places that could not be reached any other way. And when the Army asked, they shelled the jungle.

That last part deserves an honest assessment rather than a cheerful one. A frigate lying offshore would be given a map reference and would put 4-inch shells into it, in country where the fall of shot could not be seen from the ship and the effect could very rarely be assessed by anybody afterwards. Whether it achieved anything is still argued about; the standard academic treatment of the question is titled, quite fairly, "A Sledgehammer to Crack a Nut?". The conclusion most people reach is that naval gunfire in Malaya was of limited value most of the time and genuinely useful in particular cases, chiefly where the target was close to the coast and the alternative was sending men in after it. A great many ships took a turn at it across twelve years, and HMS Comus (R43) did the same work from a destroyer's deck.

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.

It is worth standing back and looking at the whole of it, because very few ships have been asked to be quite so many things. She was ordered as an anti-submarine frigate for the Atlantic under the name Loch Laxford. She was redesigned on the slipway into an anti-aircraft frigate for the Pacific. She commissioned eight weeks before the Pacific war ended, and then spent sixteen years doing none of the three jobs she had been designed for: watching a minefield in the Corfu Channel, escorting refugee ships into Haifa, shepherding fifteen thousand people into internment at Famagusta, shelling jungle in Malaya, patrolling off Korea and fishing a Soviet fighter out of shallow water.

Her sister HMS Cawsand Bay was built to the same drawings in the same programme and had an active career of about four months. That is the thing about a class of ships completed just too late for the war they were meant for: what happens to them afterwards has almost nothing to do with the ships themselves, and everything to do with where the world happens to catch fire next.

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.