HMS Ceylon (30): The Cruiser That Went Home to Trincomalee

A Long Time Building

HMS Ceylon was ordered from Alexander Stephen and Sons at Govan under the 1938 programme, one of the Fiji Class light cruisers named after the colonies of the Empire, and was laid down on 27 April 1939. War came before she was far advanced, and the shipyards were soon full of work that mattered more urgently, so she was not launched until 30 July 1942.

She was the third ship of the name. Her completion, planned for the end of 1942, was put back again because the men and materials were needed for the convoy escorts on which the Atlantic depended, and she was finally accepted into service on 13 July 1943.

She was one of the three later ships of the class, with Uganda and Newfoundland, completed with nine 6 inch guns in three turrets instead of twelve in four, the space saved going to anti-aircraft guns and radar. In February 1942, while she was still on the stocks, she was adopted by the people of Dundee after the town's Warship Week.

The photograph at the top of this page shows her in the Clyde in August 1943, only weeks old, in the bold disruptive camouflage of the time and with radar aerials on both masts.

To the East

She worked up with the Home Fleet at Scapa, where she was present for King George VI's visit to the fleet on 12 August 1943, and after more close-range guns were fitted at Devonport she was ordered to the East. When she sailed on 30 October she carried the personal baggage of Lord Louis Mountbatten, newly appointed Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia.

By December she had joined the 4th Cruiser Squadron of the Eastern Fleet at Trincomalee, the great natural harbour on the north east coast of the island whose name she bore, and Trincomalee would be her home for most of the next two years.

The Eastern Fleet, 1944

In 1944 the Eastern Fleet, reinforced at last after the disasters of 1942, went over to the attack.

In March Ceylon sailed with the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant to meet the American carrier Saratoga south west of the Cocos Islands, lent to the Eastern Fleet for a few months, and in April and May she escorted Saratoga and Illustrious on the first two big carrier strikes of the campaign, Operation Cockpit against the harbour and oil tanks at Sabang, at the northern tip of Sumatra, and Operation Transom against the naval base and refinery at Surabaya in Java.

In June she covered the air attacks on Port Blair in the Andaman Islands.

On 25 July she was one of the ships that bombarded Sabang itself in Operation Crimson, with the battleships and the French battleship Richelieu, while destroyers went into the harbour to shoot up the shipping. She was back off Sumatra in August, first on air-sea rescue duty for an American bombing raid and then on the 24th bombarding Sabang again.

After convoy work she went to Durban for a refit, and rejoined the squadron in December.

1945

In January 1945 she covered the carrier strike on the oil refinery at Pangkalan Brandan in Sumatra, and later that month sailed with stores and mail for the new British Pacific Fleet as it passed through the Indian Ocean on its way to Australia, serving with its replenishment group during the great strikes on the refineries at Palembang.

She then went back to the Eastern Fleet, which was now supporting the army's advance through Burma.

At the end of April she was in the covering force for the landings at Rangoon, and on 30 April she escorted the carriers and battleships attacking Car Nicobar and Port Blair and shelled the Japanese installations ashore.

In May she was hunting the small convoys the Japanese were using to evacuate troops along the coast of Burma, and in June she patrolled the Burmese coast with the cruiser Phoebe and six frigates of the Royal Indian Navy.

She was preparing for the invasion of Malaya when the war ended. On 28 August she sailed for Penang with the battleship Nelson and two escort carriers, and on 2 September, the same day as the ceremony in Tokyo Bay, she was at Penang when the Japanese Vice Admiral Hirose surrendered the island.

A week later she covered the landings on the Malayan coast that reoccupied the country, alongside Nelson, Richelieu, her sister Nigeria and Royalist.

Korea

She came home to Portsmouth in October 1945 and joined the Reserve Fleet, but in 1950 she was recommissioned for the 4th Cruiser Squadron and sent back to Trincomalee. Within weeks of her arrival the Korean War broke out, and on 7 July 1950 she left Trincomalee for Korean waters with Belfast.

She spent the next two years there, in endless patrols and bombardments in support of the United Nations armies, before she was relieved in July 1952 and refitted at Singapore.

At first she was the cruiser of the blockade and covering force on the west coast, with the carrier Triumph, eight destroyers and fifteen small ships of the South Korean navy. Between 30 September and 2 October 1950, with the destroyer Cockade, she bombarded the North Korean garrison on the island of Baengnyeongdo, off the coast near the 38th parallel.

When the Chinese armies entered the war that winter and drove the United Nations forces back past Seoul, she was off Inchon in January 1951 with the American heavy cruiser Rochester and the Australian destroyers Warramunga and Bataan, covering the troops as they withdrew.

With the cruiser Saint Paul, other destroyers and aircraft from Theseus, she silenced the shore batteries that opened fire on the American ship, and with Rochester and Kenya she bombarded the advancing Chinese on the west coast. In May 1951 her Royal Marine detachment was one of those making regular raids ashore on the coast north of the 38th parallel.

In January 1953 she was present for the inauguration of the Maldives as a republic, and on 15 October 1957 she was at Trincomalee for the ceremony at which the Royal Navy handed the base over to Ceylon, by then an independent dominion. It was a fitting duty for the ship that had made her name there.

Suez

From March 1955 to July 1956 she was refitted in Britain, with new long-range air warning and height-finding radar, radar control for her 4 inch guns and eighteen 40 mm anti-aircraft guns. She was ready in time for Suez.

In November 1956 she was sent to the Mediterranean and gave long-range gunfire support to suppress the Egyptian batteries at Port Said ahead of the British landings. One of her officers remembered the bombardment as relatively brief, because the Egyptian batteries did not fire back.

Afterwards she served as an air direction picket for the carriers.

Peru

In 1959 she sailed east once more as flagship of Rear Admiral V. C. Begg, cruising to New Zealand and then to Colombo for the Exercise JET, her last visit to the island.

She came home to Portsmouth on 18 December 1959, and that month was sold to Peru, to the surprise of her last captain, Frank Twiss, who would later become Second Sea Lord. In February 1960 she was handed over and renamed Coronel Bolognesi.

She served the Peruvian Navy for more than twenty years, was deleted from its list in 1982, and in August 1985 was towed to Taiwan to be broken up, forty two years after she was commissioned.