HMS Cleopatra (33): Vian's Flagship in the Smoke at Sirte

Built on the Tyne for a Very Particular Job

HMS Cleopatra was built by Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn on the Tyne. Her keel went down on 5 January 1939, she was launched on 27 March 1940, and she was accepted into the fleet on 5 December 1941 after full-power trials off the Firth of Forth.

Twenty-one months from launch to service is a long time for a cruiser in wartime, and nobody who had worked on her would have been surprised by it.

She was one of the Dido class, light cruisers designed in the late 1930s around a single worry: aircraft. Instead of the usual six-inch guns she carried the new 5.25-inch twin turret, a dual-purpose weapon meant to fire at ships and aeroplanes alike.

Those turrets were awkward to make and the new King George V battleships had first call on them, so several of her sisters went to sea a turret short and two were given smaller guns altogether. Cleopatra got her full five, three forward and two aft, which gave her the stacked, stepped-up profile you can see in the photograph.

She was small for a cruiser, about 5,600 tons standard and 512 feet long, with four shafts and 62,000 horsepower for a little over 32 knots. Her armour was a three-inch belt and not much else.

She was built to keep bombers off a fleet, and she would spend her war doing exactly that, usually within range of more of them than anyone had planned for.

Bombed on Her First Morning in Malta

She worked up at Scapa Flow over the winter of 1941, did a week patrolling the Iceland-Faeroes gap in January, and on 5 February 1942 sailed from the Clyde for the Mediterranean. From Gibraltar she and the destroyer HMS Fortune made a fast run east carrying spares for besieged Malta.

They arrived on 11 February, and German dive-bombers were waiting at the harbour mouth. A bomb went through Cleopatra's forward structure.

Whether it then exploded is one of those things the sources cannot agree on, but the casualty lists leave no doubt about what it did: about twenty men were killed or died of their wounds, among them the ship's Master at Arms. She had been in the Mediterranean for three days and had not yet joined her squadron.

She spent the next fortnight in Malta Dockyard being patched up, under the same air raids that were wrecking the rest of the island.

Vian Moves In

On 11 March 1942 Cleopatra came out of Malta to meet Rear-Admiral Philip Vian's 15th Cruiser Squadron. That same evening U-565 torpedoed Vian's flagship, HMS Naiad, which sank in twenty minutes. Vian shifted his flag briefly to Dido and then, on 16 March, hoisted it in Cleopatra, where it stayed for six months.

With him came Naiad's captain, Guy Grantham, who had been sunk under five days earlier and now found himself Vian's Flag Captain in a ship he had never set foot in. His remarkable war, three cruisers and a fleet carrier in four years, is told in the article on HMS Grafton (F51), a ship his wife later launched.

Within a week of taking over, he was fighting Cleopatra in one of the most celebrated cruiser actions of the war.

The Second Battle of Sirte

Convoy MW10 left Alexandria on 20 March 1942: four merchant ships, Breconshire, Clan Campbell, Pampas and Talabot, carrying fuel, ammunition and food to an island that was running out of all three. Vian's cruisers and destroyers sailed that evening to cover them.

On the afternoon of the 22nd, in a rising gale in the Gulf of Sirte, the Italian fleet came out to meet them: the battleship Littorio, the heavy cruisers Gorizia and Trento, the light cruiser Giovanni delle Bande Nere and their destroyers. Vian had nothing heavier than Cleopatra's 5.25-inch guns.

He sent the convoy away to the south-west, laid a vast smokescreen with the wind blowing it straight at the Italians, and spent the next four hours darting out of the smoke to fire and threaten torpedo attacks before ducking back in. How he did it is told properly in the articles on HMS Dido (37) and HMS Kelvin (F37).

From Cleopatra's bridge it looked rather different, because Cleopatra was the ship giving the orders and the Italians knew it. Gorizia opened fire on her at over twenty kilometres, and at the height of the action a six-inch shell hit her bridge.

British reports credit the Bande Nere; one Italian account gives it to Littorio's secondary battery. Either way it killed fifteen men, and the casualty list tells you exactly where it landed: the Yeoman of Signals, a telegraphist, an ordinary signalman, a lieutenant-commander and a cluster of young seamen.

It wrecked her radar and wireless at the moment the squadron most needed to hear from its admiral.

The Italians never got through the smoke. At dusk Admiral Iachino turned for home, and two of his destroyers foundered in the storm on the way back. Churchill called it a naval episode of the highest distinction, and Vian was knighted for it.

Destroyers took heavy punishment that afternoon too: HMS Kingston (F64) was hit by a fifteen-inch shell from Littorio.

And then the bombers found the convoy the next morning, still short of Malta because of the delay. Clan Campbell was sunk at sea, Breconshire was disabled within sight of the island, and Pampas and Talabot reached Grand Harbour only to be bombed at their berths. Of around 26,000 tons of cargo, about 5,000 were landed.

Sirte was a brilliant action that saved the convoy from the Italian fleet and could not save it from the Luftwaffe, which is the whole Malta story of early 1942 in a single week.

Vigorous, and a Battleship in Disguise

In June 1942 Vian took Cleopatra out again at the head of a much bigger effort, Operation Vigorous: a large convoy from Alexandria, timed to arrive at Malta together with a second convoy from Gibraltar. Among the escort was the old battleship HMS Centurion, a disarmed target ship from before the First World War, dressed up to look like a modern King George V class battleship in the hope of frightening the Italians.

It did not. Under day after day of air attack, E-boats at night and the Italian battle fleet at sea, with conflicting orders arriving from ashore and ammunition running low, the convoy was turned back. The cruiser Hermione was torpedoed and sunk on the way home. Not a single ship from Alexandria got through.

Mason's service history calls it an ill-fated and poorly organised operation, and Cleopatra was at the head of it.

That August she bombarded Rhodes as a diversion for the Pedestal convoy, and in September, after a self-refit at Massawa in the Red Sea that ended with a floating dock misbehaving underneath her, Vian struck his flag and went home. Rear-Admiral Arthur Power replaced him. Cleopatra would see a good deal more of Power.

Force K and the End of the Siege

In November 1942, with the desert war turned at El Alamein, she sailed with Operation Stoneage, the convoy that finally broke the siege of Malta. HMS Arethusa was torpedoed by aircraft on the way, but the four merchant ships arrived.

A week later Cleopatra, Dido and Euryalus went back to Malta with HMS Jervis, Javelin, Kelvin and Nubian to form a new Force K, operating out of the island against the Axis supply route to North Africa. In January 1943 she helped shell Zuara on the Libyan coast as the Eighth Army pushed towards Tripoli.

Torpedoed off Sicily

When the Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943 Cleopatra was part of the heavy covering force with Nelson, Rodney and Indomitable, waiting in the Ionian Sea in case the Italian fleet came out (it is listed in full in the article on HMS Tyrian (F67)). Indomitable's captain was Guy Grantham, her own former captain.

A few days into the landings she moved closer in, patrolling off the east coast of Sicily with Euryalus and two destroyers.

At about a quarter past six on the morning of 16 July a torpedo hit her on the port side, between the forward engine room and the boiler room. For decades the official Italian history credited the submarine Dandolo.

Later research gives the hit to the submarine Alagi, which fired three torpedoes at that moment from about a kilometre away, and finds that Dandolo's attack that morning missed. Mason's service history on naval-history.net still says "possibly Dandolo or Alagi", and that is a fair place to leave it.

Twenty-three men were killed, almost all of them stokers and engine room artificers, which is exactly where the torpedo struck. One of them was a twenty-two-year-old Royal Marine bandsman, Musician Richard Lovick.

Only one of the dead has a grave, in the naval cemetery at Malta; the others are remembered on the naval memorials at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth.

She did not sink, and she did not need towing. With her machinery spaces flooding and her guns reduced to local control, Cleopatra made about ten knots back to Malta under her own power, screened by destroyers, and was in harbour by that evening.

A Year in Philadelphia

Malta Dockyard could patch her, but it could not rebuild her. In November 1943 she crossed the Atlantic in company with the damaged cruiser HMS Uganda and went up the Delaware to the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she spent most of the next year.

Why British cruisers were being rebuilt in American yards is explained in the article on HMS Argonaut (61), which went through the same yard. Her ship's company left behind rather more than a repaired cruiser: according to their families, several of them married Philadelphia girls they had met there.

She sailed in November 1944, worked up at Bermuda, and came home to the Clyde for British radar and equipment the Americans could not supply. Somewhere in that period her 'Q' turret, the highest of the three forward, came out to make room for more close-range anti-aircraft guns.

The work was finished at the start of March 1945, and on 3 April she was lying at anchor in the Clyde when the photograph at the top of this page was taken, with snow still on the hills and her disruptive camouflage plain against the water.

Singapore

She left Britain on 3 May 1945, was at Gibraltar on VE Day, and went on through Suez in company with HMS Nelson (28) and HMS Sussex (96) to join the East Indies Fleet at Colombo. The war with Japan ended before she fired a shot in it.

Her old admiral had not forgotten her. Arthur Power, by now Admiral Sir Arthur Power and Commander-in-Chief East Indies, chose Cleopatra as his flagship for the return to Malaya.

He sailed from Colombo in her on 27 August 1945, went on to Sabang and Penang, and in early September she carried him into Singapore, three and a half years after its fall. On 12 September she was there for the formal Japanese surrender, and sailed when it was done.

The reoccupation force itself was led by Sussex, whose article tells that part.

The Long Quiet Years

She came home to Portsmouth in February 1946 and spent the next five years with the 2nd Cruiser Squadron of the Home Fleet, then went back to the Mediterranean with the 1st Cruiser Squadron from 1951. In 1953 she was at Spithead for the Coronation Fleet Review, and the same year she had a small part in the film Sailor of the King, as one of the British cruisers hunting a German raider played by HMS Manxman (M70).

From 1954 she was flagship of the Reserve Fleet at Portsmouth, a role she shared with her sister Dido until the battleship Vanguard took it over in November 1956. Her first captain, Matthew Slattery, had by then left the Navy and gone on to run Short Brothers and later BOAC.

Her Sirte captain, Guy Grantham, became Governor of Malta, the island she had bled for.

She left Portsmouth for the last time on 9 December 1958 and arrived at Newport on the 15th to be broken up by Cashmore's.

The Name

She was not the first Cleopatra. A 32-gun frigate of that name fought at the Dogger Bank in 1781, and a light cruiser of the Harwich Force carried it through the First World War. The name went on after her, too, to the Leander class frigate HMS Cleopatra (F28), which spent the Cold War being converted twice over.

Her battle honours, Malta Convoys 1942, Sirte 1942 and Sicily 1943, are a fair summary of the sort of war a Dido had: no great fleet action, no famous sinking, just a long run of convoys under the bombers and an afternoon in the smoke when a handful of light cruisers held off a battleship. For a sister that took a remarkably similar beating, see HMS Phoebe (43).