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 at Harland and Wolff's Belfast yard into an armed merchant cruiser, commissioned on 25 November 1939 carrying eight 6-inch guns and two 12-pounders, a formidable armament bolted onto a hull originally built for peacetime passenger comfort. She joined the Northern Patrol that February, working the cold, unglamorous gap between Greenock and the Faroes, stopping and searching merchant shipping rather than chasing headlines.

The Northern Patrol was the blockade, and it is worth knowing how thin it was. It began work on 6 September 1939, three days into the war, with a beat running from the north of Scotland and Ireland up through the Shetlands and the Faroes into the Norwegian Sea, and westward to Iceland, the Denmark Strait and the coast of Greenland. The job was to make sure that nothing carrying anything useful got into Germany, and that no German merchantman got home. There is no clever way to do that. You steam up and down, you stop everything you meet, you put an armed party aboard and you read the manifest.

The Navy did not have the ships. At the start there was an average of two vessels covering the two hundred miles between the Shetlands and the Faroes, and three covering the two hundred and fifty between the Faroes and Iceland, which is a sieve rather than a blockade. That is precisely why twenty-five armed merchant cruisers were earmarked for the patrol, the first arriving in the middle of October 1939. Corfu was one of them, and the fact that she and her sisters were the wrong ships for the job mattered a good deal less than the fact that there were enough of them to close the gaps.

It also meant a full winter in the worst water in the northern hemisphere in a ship built for the Bombay run. A liner has a great deal of freeboard and very little bilge keel; she rolls, she does not sit down into a sea the way a cruiser does, and the accommodation is arranged for passengers who are not expected to be at action stations. Whatever else the Northern Patrol taught the Royal Navy, it taught a generation of reservists that a P and O boat is a lovely thing in the Red Sea and a punishment off Iceland in February.

The armed merchant cruiser deserves explaining, because the whole idea was a bad one that the Royal Navy adopted anyway, knowingly, for the very good reason that it had nothing else. In 1939 the Navy was short of cruisers and had a merchant fleet full of large fast liners, so it took the liners, bolted six-inch guns to their decks, and sent them out to do a cruiser's job. The guns generally came out of store and dated from the Great War or before. There was no director to lay them, so each gun was worked locally by eye. There was no armour anywhere. And a passenger liner is built high-sided, with long open decks and very little of the watertight subdivision a warship takes for granted, which is to say she is built to be comfortable rather than to absorb damage.

What that meant in practice had been demonstrated two days before Corfu commissioned. On 23 November 1939, the armed merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi, another P&O liner with another set of old six-inch guns, met Scharnhorst and Gneisenau between Iceland and the Faroes. Her captain turned towards them. She was destroyed in about forty minutes, and most of her ship's company went down with her. A year later HMS Jervis Bay, alone in front of convoy HX 84, did the same thing to the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and bought the convoy the time to scatter. Fifteen armed merchant cruisers were lost altogether, and the survivors were taken off the job well before the war ended, which is the Admiralty's own quiet verdict on the idea. Corfu spent her first winter on the Northern Patrol, in those waters, knowing all of that.

A Collision With HMS Hermes

On 10 July 1940, while escorting convoy SL39 from Freetown through a sudden, dense tropical storm, HMS Corfu was struck by the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes at around 0302 in the middle watch, a remarkably serious accident between two substantial ships that left HMS Corfu severely damaged. The collision tore a nine-metre hole in Corfu's starboard bow, driving straight into her number two hold, which happened to be full of ammunition, and the two ships remained locked together, close enough for crew to walk between them, until they finally came apart around 0520. Hermes herself lost part of her bow and forward flight deck but was able to steam on to Freetown under her own power; three of her crew were injured in the impact, one of them fatally, though nobody aboard Corfu was hurt.

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.

The carrier did not fare so well in the long run. HMS Hermes (95) was the first ship in the world designed from the keel up as an aircraft carrier, and she was already twenty years old on the night she came out of that squall. She was repaired, went to the Indian Ocean, and on 9 April 1942 was caught off Batticaloa in Ceylon by Japanese dive bombers with no aircraft aboard and no air cover, and sunk in about twenty minutes. The liner she nearly cut in half in 1940 was still running passengers to Sydney twenty years after that.

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. Beaching was only ever meant to make her seaworthy enough to travel; the real repair work was carried out afterwards at Calcutta, and it was from there that she finally rejoined the fleet in early 1941, 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: Captain Sir William Gladstone Agnew, RN, at her commissioning and through the Hermes collision until July 1940; Acting Commander Noel Charles Mansfeldt Findlay, RN, that summer and autumn; Captain John Palmer Landon, RN, from December 1940 for almost two years; Acting Commander Arthur Kenneth Baxendell, RAN, briefly at the end of 1942; and finally Captain Charles Courtenay Bell, DSO, RN, who commanded her into early 1944.

The first of those names is worth pausing on. William Agnew had joined the Navy in 1911 and was still at Dartmouth when the First World War began; he was a gunnery specialist, and he had made captain in 1937. He commissioned Corfu at Belfast, took her to the Northern Patrol, and still had her when Hermes came out of the dark at three in the morning. Most of Corfu's crew were sent home from Freetown that July. Agnew was given the cruiser HMS Aurora in October 1940 and took her to Malta as the flagship of Force K, and in November 1941 alone Force K found and destroyed three separate Axis convoys carrying supplies to Rommel in North Africa. It was one of the most effective striking forces the Royal Navy put to sea in the whole war, and it was commanded by a man whose previous ship had been rammed by an aircraft carrier.

Force K did not end well, and the ending is part of the story. On the night of 19 December 1941 the squadron ran into an uncharted Italian minefield off Tripoli in the dark: the cruiser Neptune hit four mines and went down with all but one of her company, the destroyer Kandahar was mined trying to reach her and had to be sunk, and Aurora and Penelope were both damaged. That night is described in the article on HMS Hardy (R08). Agnew was in Aurora and got her home.

What happened to him afterwards is a rather better career than the Corfu collision would have predicted. He was appointed to the DSO in April 1943 and got a bar to it the following year, and in June 1943 Aurora was the ship chosen to carry King George VI from Tripoli to Malta for the royal visit to the island, for which the King made him a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order personally. In March 1946 he was given HMS Vanguard, the largest and last battleship the Royal Navy ever built, and held her until he went to the Admiralty as Director of Personal Services in August 1947.

He retired at his own request in January 1950, at fifty-one, and was made a vice-admiral on the retired list. He then spent three years as general secretary of the National Playing Fields Association and, by all accounts, put a charity that had almost died during the war back on its feet. He died at Alverstoke, just across the water from Portsmouth, on 12 July 1960. A gunnery officer who had been a midshipman at the end of one war, was rammed by an aircraft carrier at the start of another, sank three Axis convoys in a month, carried a king, commanded the last British battleship, and finished up building playing fields for children.

Once repaired, she moved into the Indian Ocean, escorting the troop convoy WS14 over the turn of 1941 into 1942 and shepherding individual liners turned trooper, among them Dilwara, Reina del Pacifico, Dohna and Ascanius, through waters newly threatened by Japan's entry into the war. Across 1942 alone she added convoys DM3, C3, AJ4, BA20, WS17, CM28, CM29, BA29, WS21 and CF5 to her tally, a punishing schedule for a converted liner never designed for sustained naval service. That October she was rearmed again, gaining a ninth 6-inch gun and three Vought Kingfisher seaplanes for reconnaissance, evidence that the Admiralty still saw plenty of life left in her yet.

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 some 1,534 British prisoners of war, drawn from around fifty different regiments, the first of an eventual armada of some fifteen ships that would bring almost 40,000 former Far East prisoners home over the months that followed. Their official welcome was famously muted, the establishment still uneasy over what Churchill himself had called the greatest capitulation in British military history, but ordinary kindness filled the gap: tea, cake and fruit in decorated huts on the quayside, then army transport to a reception camp on Southampton Common for their first night back on British soil, a homecoming 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 kept at it almost to the very end, switching to short pleasure cruises in her final months before finally being withdrawn on 24 March 1961.

She and her sister ship Carthage were eventually scrapped in Japan in 1961, sold for demolition through the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha trading house, renamed Corfu Maru for her final delivery voyage, and handed over in London that April; breaking up began at the Miyachi Salvage Company's yard in Osaka on 17 October 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.