HMS Corfu (F86): The Liner That Collided With an Aircraft Carrier and Survived

A P&O Liner Built for the India Run

HMS Corfu began life as the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company's passenger liner Corfu, built by Alexander Stephen and Sons at Glasgow and launched on 20 May 1931, a 14,170 gross register ton ship designed for P&O's prestigious India and Far East passenger service, a world away from the naval role that would eventually give her a place in Royal Navy history.

HMS Corfu was requisitioned by the Admiralty on 14 September 1939, within days of the outbreak of the Second World War, and converted into an armed merchant cruiser, commissioned on 25 November 1939 carrying nine 6-inch guns and four 4-inch anti-aircraft guns, later supplemented by 40mm and 20mm Oerlikon guns and an aircraft catapult, a formidable armament bolted onto a hull originally built for peacetime passenger comfort.

A Collision With HMS Hermes

On 10 July 1940, while engaged in escort duties in the Atlantic, HMS Corfu collided with the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, a genuinely serious accident between two substantial ships that left HMS Corfu severely damaged. In the immediate aftermath she was abandoned by her crew, only to be reboarded that same day once it became clear she remained salvageable, a dramatic reversal that speaks to the chaos and quick reassessment such incidents demanded of her crew.

HMS Corfu was towed to Freetown in Sierra Leone by HMS Milford and the Dutch tug Donau, arriving on 13 July 1940, and was beached on 19 August for repairs to her bow, work that kept her out of front-line service until early 1941, when she finally returned to duty considerably the worse for wear but very much still afloat.

Convoy Escort and a Long Wartime Career

HMS Corfu served under five different commanding officers across her wartime career, from Captain Sir William Gladstone Agnew at her commissioning through to Captain Charles Courtenay Bell, who commanded her into early 1944, a run of officers reflecting more than four years of continuous armed merchant cruiser service, escorting convoys through waters where German raiders and submarines posed a constant threat to the merchant shipping she was built to protect.

HMS Corfu was decommissioned from her armed merchant cruiser role on 17 February 1944 and converted instead into a troop transport, a shift that reflected the changing shape of the naval war as the threat from surface raiders diminished and the demand for troop-carrying capacity, ahead of the eventual campaigns to liberate occupied Europe and defeat Japan, grew correspondingly.

Bringing the Prisoners Home

HMS Corfu's most poignant moment came after the war had already ended: on 7 October 1945, she docked at Southampton carrying the first 1,500 British prisoners of war to return home from Japanese captivity in the Far East, a homecoming that must have felt a very long way removed from the routine convoy escort duty that had filled most of her wartime service, and a moment far more significant to the men aboard than any of the naval engagements she never quite had to fight.

Return to P&O and a Japanese Scrapyard

HMS Corfu was returned to P&O ownership on 31 July 1947 and resumed civilian service as the liner Corfu, running the Tilbury to Sydney route throughout the 1950s much as she had been originally intended to before the war intervened. She and her sister ship Carthage were eventually scrapped in Japan in 1961, closing out a three-decade career that had taken her from peacetime passenger liner to wartime armed merchant cruiser, collision survivor, and finally the ship that carried home some of the first British former prisoners of the Pacific war.