HMS Charybdis (88): From Carrying Eisenhower to Salerno to Lost in the Bay of Biscay

A Cruiser Built for the Convoy War

HMS Charybdis was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, her keel laid on 9 November 1939, launched on 17 September 1940, and commissioned in late 1941, a Dido-class light cruiser displacing 5,600 tons standard and up to 6,975 tons at full load.

She was armed with eight 4.5-inch dual-purpose guns across four twin mountings, a 4-inch starshell gun, eight 20mm Oerlikon cannon, two 2-pounder pom-poms and six 21-inch torpedo tubes, a well-rounded and capable cruiser built to defend convoys against the combined threat of enemy aircraft, surface ships and submarines.

That armament is the first odd thing about her, and it earned her a nickname. The Dido class was designed around the twin 5.25-inch dual-purpose mounting, a gun meant to engage aircraft and surface ships equally well, and it is the whole reason the class existed. What the class did not have, after 1939, was enough of them: the 5.25-inch mountings were being swallowed by the battleship programme, where they were the secondary armament of the King George V class, and cruisers came second. So Charybdis and her sister Scylla were completed instead with four twin 4.5-inch Mk III mountings that had originally been earmarked for modernising the elderly Danae-class cruisers.

The fleet, being the fleet, called the pair of them the Toothless Terrors, on the grounds that a Dido with 4.5-inch guns looked like a Dido that had been to the dentist. The joke was unfair. The 4.5-inch was a thoroughly good anti-aircraft weapon with a higher rate of fire than the gun it replaced, and both ships turned out to be excellent air defence cruisers; Charybdis spent 1942 proving it on the Malta convoys, which was about the most demanding air defence work available anywhere in the world at the time.

Fighting Through to Malta

HMS Charybdis took part in the desperate 1942 campaign to keep the besieged island of Malta supplied, participating in Operations Calendar and Bowery and the historically pivotal Operation Pedestal, one of the most fiercely contested convoy battles of the entire war, alongside Operation Harpoon.

Two of those four names are not convoy operations at all, and they are the more remarkable pair. By the spring of 1942 Malta was being bombed towards destruction and the problem was fighters. Spitfires could only reach the island by being flown off a carrier close enough in, and the Royal Navy did not have a carrier to spare for it. Churchill asked Roosevelt directly, and the United States lent him one. USS Wasp sailed from Glasgow on 14 April with two American destroyers and HMS Renown, and when the force passed Gibraltar on the night of 18 and 19 April, HMS Cairo and Charybdis joined as its cruiser escort. On 20 April, with Wasp's own Wildcats flying cover, forty-eight Spitfires took off for Malta.

It was a catastrophe. The Luftwaffe knew they were coming, bombed Ta' Qali within minutes of their arrival, caught most of them on the ground, and inside forty-eight hours every one of the forty-eight had been destroyed. So they did the whole thing again. Wasp sailed from Scapa Flow on 3 May with Renown and Charybdis, collected HMS Eagle and a screen of destroyers at Gibraltar, and at half past six on the morning of 9 May the two carriers began flying off. Sixty-four fighters went, sixty arrived, and this time the island was ready: they were refuelled, rearmed and back in the air within minutes of touching down. Malta held. Charybdis, the cruiser the fleet had been calling toothless, was on the escort for both attempts.

She went on to cover the Operation Torch landings in North Africa that November, part of the wider Allied effort to open a new front against Axis forces in the Mediterranean theatre.

Carrying Eisenhower to Salerno

By 1943, HMS Charybdis was engaged in escorting Mediterranean convoys and took part in Operation Avalanche, the Allied invasion of Italy at Salerno, during which she carried General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, towards the invasion, a truly significant piece of history for a ship whose service had already spanned some of the most consequential Allied operations of the Mediterranean war.

Lost in the Bay of Biscay

HMS Charybdis was sunk on 23 October 1943, struck by two torpedoes fired from the German torpedo boats T23 and T27 during Operation Tunnel, a night action fought while attempting to intercept the German blockade runner Münsterland in the Bay of Biscay. She led a six-ship British force, the fleet destroyers HMS Grenville and Rocket alongside the Hunt-class HMS Limbourne, Wensleydale, Talybont and Stevenstone, against five Elbing-class torpedo boats of the German 4th Torpedo-Boat Flotilla under Lieutenant Commander Franz Kohlauf. Her captain, George Arthur Wallis Voelcker, had served as a submariner in the First World War, a bitter irony given that it was a surface-launched torpedo, not one fired from beneath the waves, that finally killed him.

Operation Tunnel was a standing arrangement rather than a single operation: a series of night sweeps into the Channel and the Bay of Biscay through 1943 and 1944, hunting German coastal convoys and blockade runners, and the same name appears in the record of a good many ships, among them HMS Brissenden. They were nasty, confused, close-range affairs fought in the dark at high speed, and the night that killed Charybdis is the clearest illustration of why: two torpedo hits inside two minutes of being sighted, before a single British gun had fired.

A captured German report, later recovered by Naval Intelligence and preserved in translation, tells the action from the other side. Sighting the British force at barely 2,000 metres, the German flotilla's own commander judged the moment critical, expecting his boats to be blown apart if the British fired first. Instead it was T23 that struck first, hitting Charybdis twice within two minutes of sighting her and before a single British shell had been fired; a third torpedo, credited to T27, is thought to have detonated among her ammunition and broken her in two. The entire action, in which the German flotilla fired 24 torpedoes between them, was over in around seven minutes. Fearing a phantom second British group might fall on them from behind, one that never actually existed, the German boats then withdrew rather than turning their guns on the British destroyers picking survivors out of the water, a stroke of confused luck that almost certainly saved lives that night.

The cruiser sank within half an hour, and between 400 and 500 of her crew were lost in the disaster, with only four officers and 103 ratings surviving, a devastating single loss of life that stands among the costliest individual ship sinkings suffered by the Royal Navy during the entire war. Thirty-eight Royal Marines died that night, and of the ship's own Royal Marine band, only a single bandsman survived. Petty Officer Stan Guy and Acting Petty Officer James Aster Johnson were both Mentioned in Dispatches for remaining in the water on lifelines for extended periods to help pull shipmates to safety.

A Funeral the Occupiers Couldn't Stop

Twenty-one of Charybdis's dead, along with others from Limbourne, washed ashore days later on the coast of German-occupied Guernsey. Remarkably, the occupying authorities agreed to a full military funeral, held at Foulon Cemetery in St Peter Port on 17 November 1943. Around 5,000 of the roughly 20,000 islanders still living under occupation turned out on foot and by bicycle, laying close to a thousand wreaths between them, many carrying defiant messages of support for Britain. The show of feeling was such a plain act of resistance that the Germans banned any further military ceremonies for Allied dead on the island for the rest of the war; the funeral is still commemorated annually at Foulon Cemetery to this day.

That commemoration is not a wreath laid by an official once a decade. Services have been held in Guernsey every year since 1947, and the Charybdis and Limbourne Memorial Weekend still takes place on a weekend in October: a parade through St Peter Port with the Association, the Royal British Legion and the island's emergency services, a service at the graves at Le Foulon, and wreaths laid at sea over the position where the two ships went down. Survivors attended for as long as there were survivors to attend, and their families attend now. A permanent memorial to the men of both ships was raised in the United Kingdom in 2020.

It is worth being clear about what the islanders actually did in November 1943 and what it cost them. Guernsey had been under German occupation for three years. Around five thousand people, roughly a quarter of the population still on the island, walked or cycled up to a cemetery to bury twenty-one British sailors they had never met, in defiance of an occupying army, and laid a thousand wreaths on them. The Germans, who had permitted the funeral in the first place, understood exactly what they had just watched and never allowed another one. Eighty years later the island is still turning out for it every October, which is a rather more durable form of resistance than the one the occupiers were worried about.

The Wreck, and Münsterland's Own Fate

Her wreck was located in 1993, resting at a depth of 83 metres, and her dead are commemorated across an unusually wide scatter of memorials, from the Plymouth Naval Memorial, which alone carries close to 300 of their names, to Chatham and Portsmouth, to Foulon Cemetery in Guernsey, St Helier in Jersey, and the cemeteries of St Brieuc and Dinard on the French mainland, a sobering reminder of just how dangerous night actions against fast, well-handled German torpedo boats could prove, even for a well-armed light cruiser like HMS Charybdis. The blockade runner she died trying to stop, Münsterland, outlived her by barely three months, run aground and destroyed by British coastal artillery near Cap Blanc-Nez on 21 January 1944.