HMS Carlisle (D67): From the China Station to the Aegean, the Navy's Anti-Aircraft Cruiser

Commissioned on Armistice Day

HMS Carlisle was one of the last group of the C Class light cruisers, the Carlisle group, which differed from the ships before them in having a raised forecastle, the so-called trawler bow, to keep them drier in a head sea.

She was ordered from Fairfield at Govan in April 1916, laid down in October 1917 and launched on 9 July 1918, and she was completed in November 1918, by tradition on Armistice Day itself, too late for the war she had been built to fight. Her sisters of the group included Capetown and Colombo, both in this series.

China

In March 1919 she commissioned at Chatham for the 5th Light Cruiser Squadron on the China Station, and she would spend most of the next nine years in the Far East. The photograph at the top of this page shows her in Vladivostok harbour in 1919, where Allied warships supported the White Russian forces and the Czech Legion in the Russian Civil War.

In March 1921 the passenger steamer Hong Moh, carrying more than a thousand Chinese passengers, was wrecked on a reef off the coast of China, and broke up in heavy seas. Carlisle's captain was Edward Evans, who had been second in command of Scott's last Antarctic expedition and won fame in 1917 as Evans of the Broke for a destroyer action in the Channel.

He took his cruiser in close, and when the boats could not get near the wreck he swam across himself with a line. Carlisle's men saved 221 people. Evans was awarded the Board of Trade's medal for gallantry in saving life at sea.

She came home in 1928, and from 1929 to 1937 served on the Africa Station from Simonstown, before paying off at Devonport.

The Anti-Aircraft Cruiser

By the late 1930s the old C Class cruisers were too slow and lightly armed for the fleet, but the Admiralty saw another use for them. Air attack was the new danger, and several were rebuilt as anti-aircraft cruisers, with their old 6 inch guns replaced by high-angle 4 inch guns and multiple pom-poms, to escort convoys and guard harbours.

Carlisle was approved for conversion in November 1937 and taken in hand at Devonport in January 1939. She emerged in January 1940 with eight 4 inch guns in twin mountings, and with something new: an Army gun-laying radar set, known in the Navy as Type 280, which in trials at Malta proved very good at finding aircraft at long range.

She is often said to have been the first warship with radar for directing anti-aircraft fire. Her sisters Cairo, Calcutta and Coventry went the same way.

Norway and the Red Sea

She was quickly in action. In April 1940 she escorted the troops of Maurice Force to Åndalsnes, and for the next fortnight served as anti-aircraft guardship in the Norwegian fjords at Åndalsnes, Namsos and Molde under almost constant bombing.

At the beginning of May she was flagship for the evacuation of Namsos, and came home under heavy air attack in which the French destroyer Bison was sunk.

That summer she went east as flagship of the Red Sea Force, guarding the convoys to Egypt against the Italians in Eritrea. On 11 June 1940, the day after Italy declared war, Italian bombers raided Aden, and the ship and the shore defences between them claimed nine.

In August she helped take the British garrison away from Berbera when the Italians overran British Somaliland, with the cruisers Hobart, Caledon and Ceres.

Greece and Crete

In 1941 she joined the Mediterranean Fleet, though a defective propeller shaft kept her from the Battle of Cape Matapan; she was serving as anti-aircraft guardship in Suda Bay instead. In April she took part in the evacuation of Greece, and from the beach at Raphtis carried 1,410 soldiers to Crete, where 500 had been expected.

When the Germans invaded Crete in May she was hurried out of dock before her repairs were finished to join the cruisers trying to stop the seaborne invasion. On 22 May she was dive-bombed, and her captain, Captain Thomas Hampton, was killed on his bridge.

She came back to Alexandria with hardly any anti-aircraft ammunition left.

1941 and the Malta Convoys

In July she bombarded the Vichy French positions at Damour in the Syrian campaign, and in the autumn she was anti-aircraft guardship in the anchorages at Suez, where German bombers were attacking the ships that brought supplies round the Cape. In October 1941 one of those raids sank the munitions ship Thistlegorm at anchor off Ras Muhammad, and Carlisle picked up her survivors.

In November she took the torpedoed landing ship Glenroy in tow.

Through the first months of 1942 she was on the Malta convoys from Alexandria, in which the merchant ships Thermopylae and Clan Chattan were lost to bombing. On 22 March, in the Second Battle of Sirte, she was detached with seven Hunt Class destroyers to protect the convoy while the cruisers and fleet destroyers, among them Hasty, held off the Italian battleship Littorio.

Entering Valletta the next day she collided with the destroyer Avon Vale and had a man killed by a German fighter.

Refit and Return, 1942

In the summer of 1942 she came home round the Cape for a long refit at Devonport, where she was given a full modern outfit of air warning, surface search and fire-control radar. The photograph above shows her in 1942, after her conversion, in a dazzle scheme of pale curving bands with twin 4 inch mountings forward and radar aerials on both masts.

By one count she was credited with eleven enemy aircraft shot down, the highest score of any anti-aircraft ship in the Navy.

In May 1943 she escorted the first convoy to pass right through the Mediterranean to Alexandria since 1941, and in July she was with the support force for the invasion of Sicily, where she helped rescue survivors of the bombed hospital ship Talamba and tried to tow the burning ammunition ship Baarn, which had to be sunk by Tartar.

The Aegean

After the Italian surrender in September 1943 she was sent to the Aegean, where the British were trying to hold the Dodecanese islands. On the night of 7 October she swept the Scarpanto Strait with the destroyers Panther, Petard, Aldenham and Rockwood looking for German invasion convoys.

On 9 October, in daylight and without fighter cover, German Ju 87 dive bombers caught her and Panther in the strait. Carlisle was hit by four bombs and several near misses.

Her starboard propeller and shaft were blown off and her port shaft buckled, twenty of her men were killed and seventeen wounded, and she lay helpless until the destroyer Rockwood took her in tow back to Alexandria. Panther was sunk.

She was judged not worth repairing and spent the rest of the war as a base ship for the escorts at Alexandria, where she was broken up in 1949. The other prints of her class are in the C Class cruisers collection, among them Carlisle herself in her 1942 camouflage.