HMS Delhi (D47): Rebuilt in Brooklyn With Guns Meant for an American Destroyer

Built and Sent Around the Empire

HMS Delhi was laid down in 1917, launched in 1918, and commissioned in 1919, a Danae-class light cruiser displacing 4,850 tons standard, armed with six 6-inch guns and capable of 29 knots, that served with the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet before taking part in Baltic operations supporting the intervention against Bolshevik forces during the Russian Civil War.

In 1923, HMS Delhi was selected for the celebrated Empire Cruise alongside her sister ships HMS Danae, HMS Dauntless, HMS Dragon and HMS Dunedin, returning in December 1924 before joining the 1st Cruiser Squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet in January 1925 and undertaking a further goodwill cruise to Australia and New Zealand that November.

Delhi was not simply one of the ships on that cruise, either; she was the one the admiral was in. The 1st Light Cruiser Squadron sailed under Rear-Admiral Sir Hubert Brand with his flag in Delhi and Danae, Dauntless and Dragon in company, attached to a Special Service Squadron built round the battlecruisers Hood and Repulse. What that ten-month voyage was actually for, and the numbers behind it, are set out in the article on HMS Danae (D44).

Under Fire From a Spanish Cruiser

HMS Delhi deployed to the Caribbean as flagship of the 8th Cruiser Squadron between 1928 and 1932. In 1930, colonial police shot into a crowd of Kalinago people at Salybia, Dominica, during a dispute over alleged smuggling, killing two; Delhi was summoned to the coast and fired star shells and played searchlights along the shore to overawe the community, before landing marines to help search for those involved, a heavy-handed naval response to what had begun as a local policing dispute. She later transferred to the 3rd Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean.

While based at Malta during the Spanish Civil War, HMS Delhi took on the unofficial role of evacuating refugees from Palma de Mallorca, Barcelona and Valencia, and during one such mission was straddled by aerial bombs and came under fire from the Nationalist heavy cruiser Canarias, a dangerous brush with a conflict that Britain was formally neutral in but which frequently drew Royal Navy vessels into tense and occasionally violent encounters regardless.

Rebuilt in Brooklyn

HMS Delhi joined the 11th Cruiser Squadron at Scapa Flow when the Second World War broke out, and in November 1939 was involved in operations connected to the sinking of the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

Those operations are worth describing, because the phrase covers one of the better-known actions of the first winter of the war. Rawalpindi was a P&O liner with eight elderly 6-inch guns bolted to her, working the Northern Patrol in the gap between Iceland and the Faroes, whose job was to stop German ships getting out into the Atlantic. On the afternoon of 23 November 1939 she found Scharnhorst and Gneisenau instead. Her captain, Edward Kennedy, was sixty years old, had been retired since 1921 and had volunteered back into the service on the outbreak of war; he was invited to surrender and refused. Scharnhorst opened fire at half past four and Rawalpindi was a burning wreck inside a quarter of an hour. Two hundred and thirty-eight men died, Kennedy among them; thirty-seven were pulled out of the water by the Germans and eleven more by another armed merchant cruiser.

Delhi's part came after that. She and the cruiser HMS Newcastle went out after the two German ships and picked them up as they turned west, and then shadowed them without closing, because a light cruiser laid down in 1917 with six 6-inch guns has nothing whatever to say to a battleship and the only useful thing she can do is keep her in sight and report where she is going. Then the fog came down over the whole area and both German ships were gone.

That is the recurring shape of the Northern Patrol, and it is worth stating plainly because it is easy to be sentimental about it. A small ship finds something far too big for her, and the choice is between shadowing it and dying to no purpose. Rawalpindi took the second course and her captain has been honoured for it ever since. Delhi and Newcastle took the first, which was the correct one and the one their orders required, and the consequence of it is a line in a service record reading operations connected to the sinking of Rawalpindi. Both decisions were made within a few hours of each other in the same patch of the North Atlantic.

Between May and December 1941, HMS Delhi underwent a particularly remarkable refit at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York, receiving 5-inch/38 calibre guns originally intended for the American destroyer USS Edison, a striking piece of wartime improvisation that transformed her into a dual-purpose anti-aircraft cruiser using American ordnance fitted to a British hull.

Those particular guns had a story of their own. USS Edison's new commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander A. C. Murdaugh, had personally hand-picked the individual barrels for his own ship, only for President Roosevelt to order them diverted to the British cruiser instead, much to Murdaugh's evident distress.

It is worth sitting with the dates for a moment, because they are the remarkable part. Delhi went into the Brooklyn Navy Yard in May 1941 and came out in December. For all but the last few weeks of that, the United States was a neutral power. A British warship was lying in an American naval dockyard being rebuilt by American workmen, and the President of the United States personally intervened to take a set of gun barrels away from one of his own destroyers and give them to her. Lend-Lease had been signed in March, and this is what it looked like in practice five months later: not crates of rifles, but a foreign cruiser in a US Navy yard being handed US Navy weapons off the top of the queue.

Bombed at Algiers and Rammed in the Straits

Following her refit, HMS Delhi provided shore bombardment and anti-aircraft support for the Allied landings at Algiers, Sicily, Salerno and Anzio, direct participation in some of the most significant Mediterranean amphibious operations of the entire war. On 20 November 1942, HMS Delhi was damaged in Algiers Bay when her stern was blown open by a bomb dropped by Italian aircraft, killing two of her crew; she returned to Britain for repairs that kept her out of action until April 1943.

She suffered further damage on 3 September 1943 when she collided with HMS Uganda while laying a smokescreen in the Straits of Messina, though she was repaired at sea and remained operational.

HMS Delhi went on to take part in Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France, in 1944, and survived an attack by German explosive motorboats in the harbour at Split on 12 February 1945, an attack that struck a nearby vessel, LCF-8, but still damaged HMS Delhi's rudder and propeller shaft bracket in the process.

A Test Bed for American Fire Control

Her Brooklyn refit gave her a further significant role beyond her own combat service: she served as a test bed for the United States Navy's Mark 37 gun fire control system, trials that proved successful enough to prompt the Royal Navy to request 42 further units for installation across a range of other British warships, a notably important contribution to Anglo-American technical cooperation during the war.

The fire control system is the part of this that mattered most, and it needs setting against what the Royal Navy had. British ships put up their anti-aircraft fire using the High Angle Control System, a mechanical predictor that computed a solution and threw a barrage into the sky where the aircraft was calculated to be going: one calculation, one barrage, and if the aeroplane was not there any more, too bad. The Mark 37 kept solving continuously and walked the fire along after the target as it moved. Assessments made afterwards put HACS at somewhere between a third and a half as effective as the Mark 37 at longer ranges. It is the same gap that killed HMS Curlew off Narvik in 1940, when the ship with the best air warning radar in the fleet could see the raid coming for an hour and still could not hit it.

Two British technical officers, Hugh Clausen and a Warrant Officer named Porteous, went aboard Delhi on 24 and 25 February 1942 to look at what she had. Porteous' verdict was not about any single component: what impressed him was that the whole thing had been designed from the top down against a firm specification, director, computer, radar and guns conceived together as one system rather than assembled from whatever was available. That is a polite way of describing exactly what was wrong with the British approach, and he said it in 1942.

And then nothing happened. The Admiralty was convinced, placed an order for a substantial number of further Mark 37 sets, and never received a single one. The expansion of the United States Navy through 1942, 1943 and 1944 swallowed the entire output of the factories that built them, and no other British warship was fitted with the system during the war. Delhi remained the only Royal Navy ship carrying the best naval anti-aircraft fire control of the Second World War, and she was a twenty-four-year-old light cruiser with five American guns bolted to her.

The End of Service

HMS Delhi was decommissioned in mid-1945 owing to the accumulated battle damage of her extensive Mediterranean service, and was sold for scrapping on 22 January 1948, arriving at Cashmore's yard in Newport, Wales, that April, closing out a career that had carried her from an Empire-wide showing of the flag in the 1920s through a properly improvised transatlantic rebuild and some of the hardest-fought amphibious campaigns of the entire war.