HMS Colombo (D89): Northern Patrol Prizes, a Vichy Convoy, and the Surrender at Zadar

Built at Govan

HMS Colombo was one of the Carlisle group of the C Class light cruisers, ordered from Fairfield at Govan in July 1917, laid down that December and launched on 18 December 1918, a month after the Armistice. She was completed on 18 June 1919, the first ship of the name, named after the capital of Ceylon.

Her sister Carlisle, which gave the group its name, has her own article.

Every Station

Between the wars she served on almost every foreign station the Navy had: with the 5th Light Cruiser Squadron in China from 1920, visiting Japan, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies; with the 4th Light Cruiser Squadron in the East Indies from 1922, based in the island whose capital she was named after; on the America and West Indies Station from Bermuda in 1926 to 1928; in the Mediterranean in 1931; and in the East Indies again from 1932 to 1934.

From 1936 she was senior officer's ship of the reserve fleet at Chatham, and she was at the Coronation Review of 1937.

Northern Patrol Prizes

When war came she was flagship of the 11th Cruiser Squadron at Gibraltar, patrolling off Casablanca for contraband bound for Germany, and in October 1939 she joined the Northern Patrol. Under Commodore Richard Scott she put an armed guard aboard the merchant ship Mim, which ran aground on North Ronaldsay in Orkney on her way into Kirkwall and was wrecked.

On 17 November, south east of Iceland, she stopped a ship flying Soviet colours and found her to be the German Henning Oldendorff trying to slip home in disguise. She was brought into Kirkwall as a prize, and later served under the British flag as the British Industry.

After the Rawalpindi was sunk on 23 November Colombo searched for Scharnhorst and Gneisenau off North Rona with Caledon and Cardiff, and in January 1940 she escorted another captured German ship, the Bergensfjord, into Kirkwall.

The Indian Ocean

In February 1940 she was sent east with her sister Ceres, and for the next two years served in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, escorting troop convoys, searching for the raiders Atlantis and Pinguin, and in February 1941 blockading Kismayu during the invasion of Italian Somaliland.

In October 1941 she joined Devonshire and two armed merchant cruisers searching for a Vichy French convoy coming from Indo-China, and on 2 November, east of the Cape of Good Hope, they found it. All the merchant ships were captured and sent into South African ports.

The crew of one, the Bangkok, set her on fire, and Colombo picked them up and then escorted another, the Compiègne, into East London.

The Anti-Aircraft Cruiser

In June 1942 she came home to Plymouth to be rebuilt as an anti-aircraft cruiser. Her old 6 inch guns came out, replaced by twin 4 inch high-angle mountings directed by radar, multiple pom-poms with their own radar directors, Oerlikons, and air and surface warning radar.

The photograph at the top of this page shows her in Plymouth Sound on 7 July 1943, a few months after she recommissioned, with sailors lining her forecastle as she lay at her buoy.

That summer she went to the Mediterranean, and on 10 July 1943 she guarded the Sicily landings against air attack with Carlisle and Delhi. On 5 November, escorting a convoy east of Algiers, her group was attacked by thirty five German torpedo bombers, and the American destroyer Beatty and two merchant ships were sunk.

On 1 April 1944, with another convoy off Algiers, she fought off twenty one torpedo bombers, and one freighter was lost.

The South of France, the Aegean and Zadar

In April 1944 she was given a new captain, Captain Christopher Jellicoe, who would take her through the rest of her fighting career. In August 1944 she joined the carrier group of British and American escort carriers, among them Hunter, that supported the landings in the south of France, guarding them against air attack as their aircraft struck at targets ashore.

In the autumn she went to the Aegean for the reoccupation of the islands and Greece, bombarding the Germans at Heraklion on Crete on 3 October. In November she moved to the Adriatic, and on 11 November 1944, at Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, she accepted the surrender of the German forces there.

In December she was back in the Aegean, shelling the Germans on Aegina.

She came home in the spring of 1945, paid off at Dartmouth and was laid up in reserve, and she arrived at Newport to be broken up on 15 May 1948. Her battle honours are Atlantic 1939 to 1944, Sicily 1943, Aegean 1944, South France 1944 and Adriatic 1944. In March 1942 she had been adopted by the people of Salford.