HMS Fiji (58): Lost Off Crete After Running Out of Anti-Aircraft Shells

Lead Ship of Her Class

HMS Fiji was laid down by John Brown and Company at Clydebank on 30 March 1938, launched on 31 May 1939, and completed on 5 May 1940, the lead ship of an eleven-strong class of light cruisers named after territories across the British Empire. She displaced 8,530 tons standard, measured 555 feet 6 inches in length, and her Parsons turbines produced 80,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 32.25 knots.

Her main armament comprised twelve 6-inch guns in four triple turrets, backed by 4-inch anti-aircraft guns, pom-poms and torpedo tubes, carrying a wartime crew of around 900 officers and ratings. She entered service under Captain William Gordon Benn, initially assigned to the Home Fleet.

The shape of that ship is the result of an argument in a conference room. The Second London Naval Treaty of 1936 capped individual light cruisers at 8,000 tons, well below what the preceding Town class had been built to, and the Admiralty's response was to try to get a Town's fighting power into the smaller hull anyway. Fiji carries the same twelve 6-inch guns in the same four triple turrets as HMS Edinburgh, on about two-thirds of the displacement. Something had to give, and what gave was space: the Colonies were cramped to live in and, far more seriously, had almost no margin left for the radar sets, the action information spaces and above all the close-range anti-aircraft guns that the war turned out to require. A ship designed to a tonnage limit in 1936 met the Luftwaffe over Crete in 1941 with no room left to be improved.

Torpedoed Off Dakar

HMS Fiji sailed on 31 August 1940 for Operation Menace, the failed Allied attempt to seize Dakar from Vichy French forces, and on 1 September was torpedoed by the German submarine U-32, struck abreast her forward boiler room.

The force of the detonation vented up her forward funnel, and the flooding that followed reduced her speed to just 11 knots and left her with a dangerous port list, corrected only by jettisoning ammunition and torpedoes overboard.

HMS Fiji returned to Britain for six months of repairs, during which she received a Type 284 gunnery radar and additional anti-aircraft machine guns, upgrades that would prove important for the battle that awaited her.

U-32 did not trouble anyone else for long. Barely two months later, on 30 October 1940 and just two days after sinking the liner Empress of Britain, she was hunted down and sent to the bottom north west of Ireland by the destroyers HMS Harvester and HMS Highlander, a swift reckoning for the boat that had so nearly finished Fiji off first.

Back to the Mediterranean

HMS Fiji returned to service in March 1941, patrolling the Denmark Strait for German commerce raiders before transferring to Force H at Gibraltar in early April to help blockade German heavy ships based at Brest.

She sailed to the Mediterranean in late April in support of Malta relief operations, and on 5 May joined the convoy escort for Operation Tiger, transferring to the Mediterranean Fleet partway through the voyage to Egypt.

The Battle of Crete

British intelligence had anticipated German operations against Crete by mid-May 1941, and Admiral Andrew Cunningham ordered ships to sea on 15 May in preparation. HMS Fiji and HMS Gloucester were tasked to patrol west of the island alongside Force B as German paratroopers began landing on 20 May, an audacious and enormously costly airborne invasion.

Sustained air attacks began the following day, and though they achieved limited direct effect at first, they steadily ate away at the British cruisers' anti-aircraft ammunition reserves.

By the morning of 22 May, the strain was becoming critical: HMS Ajax reported 40 percent of her anti-aircraft ammunition remaining, HMS Orion 38 percent, HMS Fiji 30 percent, HMS Dido 25 percent, and HMS Gloucester just 18 percent.

The three best-supplied cruisers were ordered back to Alexandria to rearm, while HMS Gloucester and HMS Fiji remained on station with Force A1, a decision that would prove fateful for both ships.

The real problem those percentages describe is not marksmanship, and it is worth being clear about it. A cruiser could not be resupplied with anti-aircraft ammunition at sea; there was no mechanism for it. To replenish, she had to break off and steam to Alexandria, which was some four hundred miles away, spend a day or more storing, and steam back. The Luftwaffe, meanwhile, was operating from captured airfields in southern Greece, twenty minutes' flying time from the ships, and could keep coming all day, every day, for as long as it had aircraft. That is the whole shape of the naval battle for Crete in one paragraph. The British could win every individual engagement, shoot down aircraft and stop every seaborne landing, and still lose, because their magazines emptied on a timetable and the enemy's airfields did not.

At 12:25, HMS Fiji rendezvoused with other vessels to support the already-damaged HMS Naiad and Force C, and was detached at 14:02, alongside HMS Gloucester shortly after, to provide anti-aircraft cover for destroyers rescuing survivors from HMS Greyhound, sunk at 13:50 that day.

By 15:30, HMS Fiji had exhausted her proper 4-inch anti-aircraft ammunition entirely and was reduced to firing practice rounds, a desperate measure against a relentless air threat.

At 15:50, as HMS Gloucester was struck by four bombs and began to sink, HMS Fiji dropped life rafts for her stricken consort's survivors and withdrew.

That sentence covers one of the hardest decisions any captain made in the war. Gloucester was sinking with something over seven hundred of her people going into the water, and Fiji, herself out of ammunition and under attack, could not stop to pick them up without joining them. So she threw over every raft and float she had and left. Fewer than a hundred of Gloucester's company survived, most of them taken prisoner after reaching the shore. Four hours later Fiji was on the bottom too, and it was destroyers that came back in the dark for her people. Nobody involved in that afternoon got to make a choice that was not terrible.

Sunk by Her Own Depleted Defences

HMS Fiji's own end came that evening. At 19:00, a German Messerschmitt Bf 109 scored a direct bomb hit amidships, flooding her forward boiler and engine rooms and causing a severe list.

A second Bf 109 struck moments later, increasing the list to 30 degrees, and the order to abandon ship came at around 19:30 as she began to capsize.

What actually killed her is worth noticing too, because it is not what people expect. Fiji was not sunk by dive bombers or by torpedo aircraft. She was sunk by two Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters, each carrying a single bomb, arriving separately in the early evening. An 8,500-ton cruiser with twelve six-inch guns and a full anti-aircraft battery was destroyed by two single-engined fighters, because by seven o'clock that evening she had nothing left to shoot at them with but practice rounds. It is the cheapest kill of the whole campaign and the most eloquent.

She took 241 of her crew down with her, though the escorting destroyers HMS Kingston and HMS Kandahar recovered an impressive 523 survivors after dark, a notably large-scale rescue carried out under continued threat of further air attack.

Among those 241 was 22 year old Steward Arthur Rogers from Kidderminster, married barely two years before and lost with the ship, his body never recovered and his name now carried on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial. Also in the water that night was Bandsman Norman Lewis, for whom it was a grim repeat performance, having already survived Fiji's torpedoing off Dakar nine months earlier. This time he spent some four hours in the sea alongside a shipmate before a destroyer's light gave them something to swim towards, the pair eventually hauled aboard on a rope noose since the ladder proved too slippery to climb.

The wider account of those days belongs alongside this one. The Mediterranean Fleet lost three cruisers and six destroyers off Crete and had fifteen more warships damaged, and it took something like sixteen and a half thousand soldiers off the island under continuous air attack. When commanders in Egypt urged Admiral Cunningham to stop, on the entirely reasonable grounds that the fleet was being destroyed, he gave the answer that has followed him ever since: it takes the Navy three years to build a ship and three hundred years to build a tradition, and the evacuation will continue. What that decision looked like from another cruiser's deck a week later is described in the article on HMS Dido (37).

The ship's chaplain, Kit Tanner, was posthumously awarded the Albert Medal for repeatedly entering the water himself to rescue men during the desperate hours that followed the sinking, a quietly extraordinary act of courage amid the chaos.

Legacy

The combined loss of HMS Fiji and HMS Gloucester on the same day, both ships effectively disarmed by exhausted ammunition before enemy bombers finished them off, prompted a direct change in Royal Navy doctrine: every British cruiser was subsequently instructed to maintain anti-aircraft ammunition reserves at no less than 40 percent, a hard lesson learned at particularly heavy cost during one of the most punishing naval campaigns the Royal Navy fought in the entire Mediterranean theatre. Her survivors later funded a memorial plaque for Our Holy Redeemer's School in Clydebank, a fitting way for her story to find its way back to the very stretch of the Clyde where John Brown and Company had built her three years before.