HMS Dido (37): From Rescuing Greek Gold to Firing the War's Last Naval Shot in Europe

Constructed at Birkenhead

HMS Dido was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, her keel laid on 26 October 1937, launched on 18 July 1939, and commissioned on 30 September 1940, the lead ship of her class of anti-aircraft light cruisers, designed specifically to provide dedicated air defence for the fleet at a time when the threat from aircraft was rapidly becoming as significant as that from surface ships or submarines.

Rescuing Greek Gold From Crete

After completing her working-up in November 1940, HMS Dido joined the 15th Cruiser Squadron on blockade duty in the Bay of Biscay, then escorted the aircraft carrier HMS Furious to West Africa that same month, before spending four months on Atlantic convoy duty and joining the Eastern Mediterranean Fleet in April 1941 after resupplying besieged Malta.

In May 1941, she took part in the evacuation of British forces from Crete, and in the process carried out one of her more unusual missions of the entire war: transporting some £7,000,000 in Greek bullion to safety amid the chaos of the German invasion.

The gold is worth following, because it did not stop in Egypt. What Dido was carrying was the reserve of the Bank of Greece: something in the order of six hundred and eleven thousand ounces, about seventeen and a half tonnes, partly in bars and partly in British gold sovereigns. In the first days of April 1941, with the Germans coming down through Macedonia, it had been loaded in secrecy aboard two Greek warships at Piraeus and sent to Crete, on the reasoning that the island would hold.

The bombers found them on the way. The plan was changed at sea, the destination became Egypt instead of Heraklion, and the gold was passed across to the corvette HMS Salvia and to Dido while the ships were still under air attack, which is not a straightforward evolution with seventeen tonnes of metal in boxes. From Alexandria it went on, following King George II of the Hellenes into exile: down to South Africa, where at Germiston in the Transvaal the sovereigns were melted down and recast as bars, and eventually on to London.

The end of the story is the awkward part, and Greek accounts of it are unanimous. When Greece asked for the reserve back after the war, the answer was that it had already been spent, on the upkeep of the Greek armed forces in the Middle East, the ships and squadrons and brigades that had fought alongside the British from Egypt for four years. It is not an outrageous position and it is not a generous one either. A cruiser took a country's entire gold reserve out of a burning port under dive bomber attack, and the country did not get it back.

At around 8.15am on 29 May 1941, while she and HMS Orion were embarking troops from Sphakia and Heraklion for the run back to Alexandria, a bomb from a Junkers Ju 87 struck Dido's B turret dead on. "A great sphere of black smoke burst out ahead of her bridge," one witness recalled. "One of the guns curled up into the air and dropped smoking into the sea." All twelve men of the gun's crew were killed instantly, along with a further fifteen sailors and nineteen soldiers below decks, forty six dead in a single detonation and a brutal illustration of just how dangerous the entire Crete evacuation had become under sustained Luftwaffe attack.

In June 1941, Royal Marines from HMS Dido accepted the surrender of Assab in Eritrea, after which the damaged cruiser sailed round the Cape to South Africa for repairs at Simonstown, before continuing on to the United States in August 1941 for a major refit at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda. It was during this refit that she finally received her fifth twin 5.25 inch turret, the mounting her class had been designed to carry from the outset but which a wartime shortage of the guns had left several of her sister ships without; Dido returned to the Mediterranean in December 1941 now carrying her full intended outfit of ten guns.

That shortage has a specific and rather galling cause. The 5.25-inch twin mounting was not only the Dido class's entire reason for existing; it was also the secondary armament of the King George V-class battleships, and the battleships had absolute priority for every one that came off the line. The mountings were difficult to make, British industry in 1939 could not produce turrets, fire control gear, turbines and reduction gearing fast enough for the cruiser programme, and so a class of ships designed around ten guns went to war with eight. Dido had to cross the Atlantic and spend four months in an American dockyard before she got the armament she had been drawn with. What the gun itself was good and bad at is set out in the article on HMS Diadem.

The Second Battle of Sirte and Malta Convoys

HMS Dido spent much of 1942 on convoy escort duty between Alexandria and Malta, and in March that year took part in the Second Battle of Sirte under Rear Admiral Philip Vian, escorting convoy MW10 through to Malta: the tanker Breconshire, carrying 5,000 tons of desperately needed fuel, the ammunition ship Talabot, and the merchantmen Clan Campbell and Pampas. Vian's cruiser squadron of Cleopatra, Euryalus and Dido, together with the anti-aircraft cruiser Carlisle and a force of destroyers, spent five hours darting out from behind their own smoke screen to drive off a considerably stronger Italian battle fleet before falling back into cover again, a significant action in which a heavily outnumbered British force successfully protected the convoy against the odds. That same month, Dido also joined HMS Euryalus and a force of destroyers in shelling Rhodes.

The victory came at a cruel remove: having survived the battle itself, Breconshire, Clan Campbell, Pampas and Talabot were all sunk by renewed Axis air attack within days, along with the destroyer Southwold, a reminder that winning a fleet action and actually getting a convoy through safely were not always quite the same thing.

The method Vian used at Sirte is worth describing, because it is one of the finest pieces of ship handling in Royal Navy history and it involved almost no hitting. He had four light cruisers, an anti-aircraft cruiser and a screen of destroyers against an Italian force built around the battleship Littorio, whose fifteen-inch guns outranged everything he possessed by a very wide margin. So he did not try to fight her. He laid smoke across the sea between the Italians and the convoy, sent the convoy away to the south, and then spent more than four hours diving in and out of his own smoke with his destroyers, threatening torpedo attacks he mostly did not make, forcing Littorio to turn away each time rather than risk it. A rising gale helped him. By nightfall the Italians had had enough and went home, and Vian had shepherded a convoy past a battleship without losing a ship. He was knighted for it.

She shelled Mersa Matruh in July, then underwent major stern repairs at Massawa in August 1942, bombarded the Daba area of Egypt in September, and continued supporting the North African campaigns through the rest of that year, providing anti-aircraft cover at Bone and Algiers between December 1942 and March 1943.

Supporting Four Allied Invasions

Reassigned to the 12th Cruiser Squadron, HMS Dido carried out diversionary bombardments in North Sicily during Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, in July 1943, providing gunnery support ashore before also protecting the invasion bases at Palermo and Bizerte from the air.

On 12 September 1943, she escorted 600 troops to Taranto during the surrender of the Italian Fleet, and went on to support the Anzio landings and Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, in August 1944, a truly remarkable run of direct participation in four major Allied amphibious operations across the Mediterranean theatre.

The Last Naval Shot of the War in Europe

HMS Dido escorted a convoy to Russia in October 1944 and supported carrier strikes off Norway, and in April 1945 escorted minesweepers to the Kola Inlet in the far north of the Soviet Union.

She is credited with firing the last naval shot of the war in Europe on 8 May 1945, VE Day itself, when a single lone German aircraft approached her en route to Copenhagen; one shot from Dido's guns was enough to send it away again, a remarkably quiet full stop to nearly five years of war. German naval officers came aboard on 14 May to receive instructions for de-ammunitioning their own ships, and on 22 May 1945 Vice-Admiral Vesey-Holt, Flag Officer Denmark, formally received the surrender of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen on her own fantail, facing Dido's commander and officers, with HMS Devonshire also standing by. Dido then escorted the surrendered Prinz Eugen and Nürnberg to Wilhelmshaven, direct participation in the formal end of German naval power.

Prinz Eugen has a postscript worth adding, because it closes a circle. She was the only major German surface ship to come through the whole war intact, and the Americans took her as a war prize; having survived the Royal Navy for five years, she was sailed to Bikini Atoll in July 1946 and moored in the target array for Operation Crossroads, to find out what atomic bombs did to warships. She survived both of them. Contaminated beyond any possibility of repair, she was towed to Kwajalein and left there, and in December 1946 she quietly turned over. Her hull is still above water today with her propellers in the air. Ten years later the Royal Navy would be sending its own ships to sit off nuclear tests to answer the same question, as set out in the article on HMS Diana. Dido escorted the ship that gave the first answer.

A Royal Voyage and Retirement

HMS Dido transported King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the Isle of Man in July 1945, underwent a further refit in 1946, and rejoined the fleet with the 2nd Cruiser Squadron that September.

She was placed in reserve at Gareloch in October 1947, moved to the Portsmouth Reserve Fleet in 1951, and served as its flagship, including during the 1953 Coronation Fleet Review celebrating Queen Elizabeth II's accession, until HMS Vanguard took over flagship duties from her and HMS Cleopatra in November 1956.

She was subsequently decommissioned and sold to Thos. W. Ward in 1957, who broke her up at Barrow-in-Furness, the work finally completed in July 1958, closing out a career that had carried her through nearly every major Mediterranean campaign of the entire war, and given her the notably rare distinction of having quite plausibly fired the final naval shot of the European conflict.