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 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.

Under Fire From a Spanish Cruiser

HMS Delhi deployed to the Caribbean with the 8th Cruiser Squadron during the 1930s, taking part in the Carib War on Dominica, before transferring to the 3rd Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean. While based at Malta during the Spanish Civil War, HMS Delhi was engaged by the Nationalist heavy cruiser Canarias and came under heavy fire, a genuinely 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. Between May and December 1941, HMS Delhi underwent a genuinely 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.

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 by enemy action in Algiers Bay when her stern was blown open by a bomb, killing two of her crew. 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

HMS Delhi's 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 genuinely important contribution to Anglo-American technical cooperation during the war.

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 genuinely improvised transatlantic rebuild and some of the hardest-fought amphibious campaigns of the entire war.