HMS Curlew (D42): An Anti-Aircraft Cruiser Sunk From the Air Off Narvik

Built at Vickers

HMS Curlew was built by Vickers Limited, laid down on 21 August 1916, launched on 5 July 1917, and commissioned on 14 December 1917, a Ceres-class light cruiser displacing 4,190 long tons at normal load, measuring 450 feet 6 inches in length, and capable of around 29 knots on twin Parsons steam turbines.

She carried five 6-inch guns on her centreline along with anti-aircraft guns and eight torpedo tubes, entering service just in time to see out the final year of the First World War. Fitted with a gunnery director on commissioning, she joined the 5th Light Cruiser Squadron of the Harwich Force, the unit responsible for North Sea patrols against the German High Seas Fleet, though without any especially notable individual actions recorded during that brief final year of wartime service.

Which makes what she did next a good deal more interesting than the war she nearly missed. The Armistice came eleven months after Curlew commissioned, and instead of going quietly into reserve she was sent to the Baltic in January 1919, into a campaign Britain fought hard, paid for in lives and then almost entirely forgot about. The collapse of the German and Russian empires had left Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declaring themselves independent countries with a Bolshevik army marching west to take the idea back off them, and the only instrument Britain had that could reach the eastern Baltic in a hurry was the Royal Navy. A squadron of C-class cruisers, V and W class destroyers and seaplane carriers was pushed up there under Rear-Admiral Alexander-Sinclair, and in January 1919, the month Curlew went out, Rear-Admiral Walter Cowan took over with Reval, now Tallinn, as his base.

What that amounted to was a small undeclared war run by a rear-admiral with a very free hand. Cowan's ships were parcelled out among Reval, Libau, Helsingfors and Danzig, where Curlew was in the early part of 1919, with orders to keep the sea lanes open and put a British squadron physically in the way of anyone minded to interfere with four brand new countries. They blockaded the Bolshevik fleet into its base at Kronstadt, and in the summer of 1919 coastal motor boats from Cowan's command went into Kronstadt harbour itself at night and torpedoed some of the largest ships in that fleet at their moorings; Augustus Agar won the Victoria Cross in the same campaign. Two hundred and thirty-eight British vessels served in the Baltic over its course, nineteen were lost and sixty-one damaged, and around a hundred and ten men of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force were killed. Their memorials stand in Tallinn, in Riga and in Portsmouth cathedral, which is a good deal more than most people in Britain could tell you about it. Cowan came home a baronet, of the Baltic.

She did not come back from that to a quiet berth either. Curlew went into Devonport reserve in August 1919, recommissioned at Rosyth on 27 April 1920 for the 5th Light Cruiser Squadron, and went out to the China Station, where she spent the first years of the 1920s before the commission that took her to Bermuda. So by the time she anchored in the West Indies just before Christmas 1922 she had already served in the North Sea, in the Baltic and on the far side of the world, and she was five years old.

Interwar Service and Conversion

HMS Curlew departed Devonport for Bermuda in December 1922 under Captain Holbrook, joining the 8th Light Cruiser Squadron on the America and West Indies Station and arriving on 21 December after battling bad weather along the way, the start of a posting that took her considerably further afield than her name might suggest.

Between 1923 and 1925 she ranged across the Pacific and Caribbean, calling at the Panama Canal, Hawaii, Washington Island, Bermuda, Barbados, Haiti, British Guiana, Dominica, Jamaica and Florida, the kind of far-flung, multi-year showing-the-flag cruise that occupied much of the Royal Navy's surface fleet through the 1920s and early 1930s. Captain Holbrook relinquished command in November 1924, having had, by any measure, rather a good run of it.

HMS Curlew and her sister HMS Coventry were, in fact, the prototype anti-aircraft conversions for the entire class, rearmed during 1935 and 1936 with all their original armament stripped out and replaced by ten single 4-inch high-angle guns and two eight-barrelled 2-pounder pom-pom mounts, a modernisation that reflected the Royal Navy's growing recognition, well before the Second World War actually began, that air power would pose an increasingly serious threat to surface warships.

What that conversion involved, why the Admiralty did it to twenty-year-old cruisers rather than building new ships, and what became of all three ships it was done to, is set out in the article on her sister HMS Coventry.

Lost to the Very Threat She Was Built to Fight

HMS Curlew served with the Home Fleet at the outbreak of the Second World War and took part in the Norwegian Campaign of 1940, part of the desperate and ultimately unsuccessful Allied effort to prevent Germany from securing control of Norway and its strategically vital coastline.

On 17 April, she escorted the Polish troopship Chrobry and five destroyers into the fjord at Namsos to land French troops, then returned to the UK before sailing again on 4 May from Scapa Flow as part of the escort for the carrier HMS Ark Royal, providing anti-aircraft cover during a fortnight of strike sorties against German positions and refuelling periodically at Harstad, exactly the kind of demanding, near-constant escort work her class had been converted to perform.

That fortnight was not her first with a carrier, either. Between 23 and 28 April she had already been at sea off Narvik with both Glorious and Ark Royal on Operation DX, under what the record dryly calls heavy and sustained air attacks, and Namsos itself had been Operation Maurice, the northern arm of a pincer meant to retake Trondheim. Namsos was a wooden town with one small quay, no anti-aircraft guns worth the name and no fighter cover, and the Luftwaffe burned most of it to the ground within days of the troops going ashore. The whole campaign has a quality of ships being asked to hold up an operation that the air situation had already decided.

The Chrobry is the name in all this that stays with you. She was almost new, a Polish motor liner completed at Nakskov in Denmark in July 1939 and the last ship the Polish merchant fleet ever took delivery of before the war took the country, and she had got out and been turned into a British troopship. On the night of 14 May 1940, a month after Curlew shepherded her into Namsos, she was carrying the 1st Battalion Irish Guards north to Bodo when German bombers found her in the middle of Vestfjord. The fire set off the ammunition in her holds, and in a few minutes the battalion lost its commanding officer, its second-in-command, its adjutant and three of its five company commanders. HMS Wolverine took seven hundred men off her while HMS Stork stood off and fought the aircraft. Two days later, aircraft from Ark Royal, the carrier Curlew had been screening, sank what was left of her. Ten days after that the Ju 88s found Curlew.

On 26 May 1940, while operating in Lavangsfjord near Narvik under the command of Captain Basil Brooke, HMS Curlew came under attack from German Junkers Ju 88 bombers of Kampfgeschwader 30 and was sunk at position 67°32'N 16°37'E, with nine of her sailors killed in the attack. One survivor later recalled that the fatal bomb struck the rear of the ship directly above the tea room.

There is a genuine and bitter irony in HMS Curlew's loss: a ship specifically converted years earlier into an anti-aircraft cruiser, one of the prototype conversions for her entire class and, at the time she was lost, one of only three Royal Navy ships fitted with the new Type 79Z early-warning radar, was ultimately sunk by the very threat she had been modified, and equipped, to counter. It stands as a sobering illustration of just how quickly air power was overtaking even the fleet's most purpose-adapted, best-equipped anti-aircraft defences in the opening years of the war.

The radar deserves more than a clause, because for a few months Curlew was the best-informed ship in the Royal Navy. Type 79 was the Navy's first air warning set, fitted to Sheffield and Rodney in the autumn of 1938, and it could pick up an aircraft at ten thousand feet from about fifty-three miles away, which in 1938 was an astonishing thing for a ship to be able to do. The improved version, Type 79Z, used newly developed thoriated valves to push seventy kilowatts out of the transmitter, and the first ship in the fleet to get one was Curlew, in August 1939. When the Luftwaffe began attacking Scapa Flow early in 1940 she was giving the anchorage warning of incoming raids at over sixty miles.

Which makes the manner of her death worse rather than better, and points at the real problem. Seeing and shooting were two entirely different sets of equipment, and only one of them had been invented. Type 79 could tell you that aircraft were coming and roughly from where. It could not tell you how high they were, it lost them as they came in low, and it could not put a single figure into the gunnery table. Her ten 4-inch guns were still worked through the High Angle Control System, a mechanical predictor fed by optical rangefinders and human estimates, and against a Ju 88 in a dive it was not fast enough. The radar that could feed a gun directly, Type 279, arrived after she was gone. Curlew could see the raid coming for the best part of an hour and still could not hit it.

Legacy

HMS Curlew's loss at Narvik came amid a brutal campaign that ultimately saw the Allies withdraw from Norway entirely by early June 1940, part of the broader collapse of Allied fortunes in Western Europe that spring. Her sinking, and the deaths of the nine men lost with her, stand as a small but genuine part of that much larger and, for Britain, deeply painful chapter of the war's early years.

The timing of it is the part that stays with you. Curlew was sunk on 26 May 1940. Two days later the Allies took Narvik, the objective the whole campaign had been fought for, in the only clear ground victory of the spring. And within a week they abandoned it and left, because France was collapsing and every man and ship was needed at home. The evacuation itself then cost the carrier HMS Glorious, caught by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau on 8 June with over fifteen hundred men lost. Nine men died in Curlew for a town that was captured, held for six days, and given back.