HMS Coventry (D43): From Great War Cruiser to Anti-Aircraft Veteran

Built in the First World War

HMS Coventry was laid down on 4 August 1916 and launched on 6 July 1917, one of the Ceres group of C-class light cruisers, originally intended to be named HMS Corsair before the change.

She was completed in February 1918, entering service armed with five 6-inch guns, two 3-inch guns, two 2-pounder guns and eight 21-inch torpedo tubes, a fairly conventional light cruiser for her era, arriving just in time to see the closing months of the Great War.

The seventeen years between that and the conversion are worth filling in, because she spent almost all of them as somebody's flagship. She joined the Harwich Force straight from acceptance, having first been given a flying-off platform, a short ramp mounted over a gun from which a single aeroplane could be launched and, since there was no way of getting it back aboard, could not be recovered; the pilot ditched alongside afterwards and hoped somebody was watching. From there she went to the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet, and on 1 May 1920 recommissioned at Chatham as flagship of the Rear-Admiral commanding the Atlantic Fleet's destroyer flotillas. In 1924 she took the same job on in the Mediterranean and stayed at it for the best part of a decade. It was not all ceremonial: a torpedo exploded aboard her at Malta in March 1923 and killed two of her crew.

One of the admirals whose flag she wore is the reason this matters. In December 1933 the new Rear-Admiral commanding destroyers in the Mediterranean hoisted his flag in Coventry, and he was Andrew Cunningham. He held the appointment until July 1936 and used it, by his own account, to practise handling ships in company, which is precisely the skill that produced Taranto and Matapan a few years later. Four years after he hauled his flag down she was fighting in the Mediterranean Fleet, and he was commanding it. Coventry is one of very few ships to have carried a future commander-in-chief's flag in peacetime and then been sunk under his command in war.

Reborn as an Anti-Aircraft Cruiser

As the interwar years gave way to the growing threat of air power, Coventry was substantially converted in 1935, stripped of her original 6-inch guns and torpedo tubes and re-armed with ten 4-inch guns on high-angle mountings alongside two octuple 2-pounder pom-pom mounts, a purpose-built anti-aircraft cruiser for an age in which the aeroplane, not the enemy warship, had become the greater threat to the fleet.

Further quadruple machine gun mounts were added in 1936 and 1937, keeping her firepower current as the decade wore on.

Coventry was a prototype, and the experiment did not end well for any of the ships involved in it. By the mid-1930s the Admiralty had worked out that the fleet had almost no defence against air attack and no money to build new ships to provide it, so it looked at the fifteen-year-old C-class cruisers sitting in reserve and asked what would happen if the guns came out and high-angle mountings went in. Coventry and Curlew were the two ships used to find out. The intention was to do the same to all thirteen of the later C-class hulls. Only one more, Curacoa, was ever done, in the summer of 1939, and the conversions planned for Cardiff and Ceres were overtaken by the war.

All three were lost. Curlew was bombed and sunk in Ofotfjord in Norway on 26 May 1940. Curacoa was cut clean in half by the liner Queen Mary north of Ireland on 2 October 1942, while escorting her; the Queen Mary had ten thousand American soldiers aboard and standing orders never to stop for anything, and she did not stop. Coventry went twelve days later, off Tobruk. Two of the Royal Navy's three purpose-converted anti-aircraft cruisers were sunk by aircraft, which is a hard sentence to write about a good idea.

Two of them were in the same fjord that May, which the record tends not to make obvious. Coventry was in Norway through April and May 1940 under Captain D. Gilmour, wearing the flag of Rear-Admiral J. G. P. Vivian, and she and HMS Curlew (D42) were doing the identical job in the identical water when Curlew was hit on 26 May. Coventry survived it by twenty-eight months.

The Norwegian campaign was also where the whole idea was tested to destruction, and where its limits showed. During the assault on Narvik, Coventry was one of two anti-aircraft ships obliged to bombard shore installations using high-angle guns, which is to say guns designed to shoot upwards being asked to shoot along, because there was nothing else available. She was an obvious target and everybody knew it: a ship whose entire purpose is to sit in the middle of things throwing shells at aircraft is, by definition, the ship the aircraft go for. She was near-missed on 28 May and lost a rating to bomb splinters, left Harstad at the end of the month with HMS Cairo and two Tribals, and then helped escort the evacuation out. The Allies went home in June having captured Narvik and given it straight back, and the anti-aircraft cruisers went south to the Mediterranean, where the air was thicker still.

War in the Mediterranean

Coventry was damaged on 1 January 1940 during a German air raid on the Shetland Islands, before joining the Mediterranean Fleet later that year. On 27 November she took part in the action off Cape Spartivento, escorting the merchant ships Clan Forbes, Clan Fraser and New Zealand Star towards Malta as part of Operation Collar, alongside the cruiser Despatch and four destroyers. On 13 December 1940, some 80 miles off Mersa Matruh, she was torpedoed by the Italian submarine Neghelli, losing part of her stern but suffering no casualties, and made it back to Alexandria under escort the following afternoon. Neghelli herself vanished on her next patrol the following month, her own fate still disputed today between a Greek submarine and a British destroyer, depending on whose record is trusted.

Her most celebrated moment came on 18 May 1941, when she came under heavy attack from German Stuka dive-bombers off Crete while escorting the hospital ship Aba.

During that action, Petty Officer Alfred Edward Sephton, a director layer born in Warrington in 1911, was raked by machine-gun fire that passed clean through his body and wounded the seaman beside him, yet stayed at his instruments, in the words of his eventual citation, "in great pain and faint from loss of blood", until the attack had been driven off. He died of his wounds the following day and was buried at sea; having no grave of his own, he is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial, and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, one of the defining acts of heroism associated with any of the anti-aircraft cruisers of her class.

What Sephton was doing at the moment he was hit is worth explaining, because it is what makes the citation make sense. A director layer sits in the director control tower, the small armoured box high above the bridge, and his job is to hold the sight on the target in elevation. Every gun in the ship follows the director. He does not fire anything himself; he is the reason the guns are pointing at the right piece of sky. If he lets go, or slumps, the whole main armament of the ship stops being aimed at the aircraft attacking her. Sephton had been shot through the body by a burst from a Stuka that also wounded the man next to him, and he stayed on his sight and kept laying until the attack was over. He was thirty years old.

There is an unhappy footnote to the Victoria Cross itself. It was gazetted on 2 December 1941 and presented to Sephton's parents by King George VI at Buckingham Palace on 23 June 1942, twelve weeks before the ship he had earned it in was sunk off Tobruk. In 1971 his sister gave the medal to Coventry Cathedral, which seemed the right place for it: a cathedral rebuilt from its own ruins, holding the cross of a man who had died in a ship named for the city. On 25 September 1990 it was stolen from the display. It has never been recovered, and it has never turned up at auction, which usually means it was melted or is sitting in a drawer somewhere. The Portsmouth Naval Memorial still carries his name, and that, for the moment, is all there is.

Lost During the Tobruk Raid

HMS Coventry met her end on 14 September 1942, while serving with Force D, alongside the Hunt-class destroyers Belvoir, Dulverton, Hursley and Croome, providing escort north of Marsa Matruh during Operation Agreement, the ambitious and costly commando raid on Tobruk harbour. At 1140 that morning, she became the principal target of at least sixteen German Junkers Ju 88s of I./Lehrgeschwader 1, reinforced by a dozen Stukas of III./Sturzkampfgeschwader 3; RAF fighters intervened and brought down seven of the attackers, but Coventry still sustained four direct hits, three of which detonated in her engineering spaces while the fourth wrecked her bow.

The attack killed 63 of her crew and left the cruiser dead in the water and burning badly. With no hope of saving her, she was scuttled with torpedoes from HMS Zulu at 1515 hours.

In a grim postscript to the same action, Zulu herself was sunk by enemy aircraft only about an hour later, a stark reminder of just how costly Operation Agreement proved for the ships that took part in it.

The scale of that failure has largely been forgotten, and it deserves setting out. Operation Agreement was an attempt to take Tobruk harbour from the sea and from the desert at once, on the night of 13 and 14 September 1942, and almost nothing about it worked. The destroyer Sikh was hit by Italian shore batteries leading the landing and sank, losing 122 men, and the survivors who reached the beach were taken prisoner. Coventry lost 63. Zulu lost 39. Four motor torpedo boats and two motor launches went with them. Altogether the British lost around three hundred Royal Marines, a hundred and sixty-six soldiers and two hundred and eighty sailors, of whom 576 were taken prisoner rather than killed. German casualties for the whole affair were sixty-two dead and a hundred and nineteen wounded. Tobruk stayed exactly where it was until Montgomery walked into it two months later.