HMS Gambia (48): A New Zealand Cruiser Firing the War's Last Shots at Kamaishi

HMS Gambia (48)

Built on the Tyne

HMS Gambia was ordered under the 1938 Naval Estimates and built by Swan Hunter at their Wallsend yard, construction beginning on 24 July 1939 and the ship launched on 30 November 1940, sponsored by Lady Hilbery. A Fiji-class light cruiser, she commissioned on 21 February 1942, armed with four triple 6-inch gun turrets, dual-purpose 4-inch guns, a substantial anti-aircraft fit and torpedo tubes, her four Admiralty boilers producing 80,000 shaft horsepower.

Early War Service and a Visit to Her Namesake

HMS Gambia served with the British Eastern Fleet in the East Indies, taking part in the Battle of Madagascar in September 1942, before returning to home waters and, in a genuinely charming episode, visiting the West African territory of the Gambia itself, where local chiefs in full ceremonial regalia led thousands of their subjects to visit the ship that bore their homeland's name, a rare moment of genuine popular celebration connecting a warship directly to the place she was named after.

Loaned to New Zealand

Following damage sustained by the Royal New Zealand Navy's own cruisers HMNZS Leander and HMNZS Achilles, HMS Gambia was recommissioned as HMNZS Gambia on 22 September 1943 at Liverpool under Captain William-Powlett, effectively loaned to New Zealand to fill the gap left by her damaged sister ships. According to the New Zealand official history, a few of her officers and fully three-quarters of her ratings were New Zealanders by this point, a genuinely close working arrangement between the two navies at a moment when every available cruiser counted.

HMNZS Gambia joined the 1st Cruiser Squadron at Scapa Flow, arriving at Plymouth on 5 December 1943, and took part in Operation Stonewall, anti-blockade-runner patrols in the Bay of Biscay alongside HMS Glasgow and HMS Enterprise, hunting German vessels attempting to run the Allied blockade.

Into the Pacific War

By 1944, HMNZS Gambia had joined the British Pacific Fleet, searching for blockade runners near the Cocos Islands in February that year and supporting carrier raids against Japanese oil installations and airfields across the theatre. She saw action off Okinawa, Formosa and Japan itself as the Pacific war entered its final, brutal phase.

HMNZS Gambia's most historically striking moment came on 9 August 1945, during the bombardment of the Japanese city of Kamaishi. As the ceasefire was being announced, she came under attack from a Japanese kamikaze aircraft and fired some of the very last shots of the entire Second World War, a genuinely remarkable coincidence of timing for a ship whose war had begun years earlier on the far side of the world in the Indian Ocean.

HMNZS Gambia was present in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 for the formal signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender aboard USS Missouri, a fitting close to a war she had, quite literally, fought right up to its final moments.

Return to the Royal Navy

HMS Gambia returned to Royal Navy service at Portsmouth on 27 March 1946, recommissioning that July for the 5th Cruiser Squadron in the Far East Fleet, before returning to the United Kingdom in January 1948. She joined the 2nd Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean in January 1950, and in 1953 took part in a relief mission to Zakynthos following the devastating Ionian earthquake, working alongside her sister ship HMS Bermuda, before taking her place in the Coronation Fleet Review of 1953 marking Queen Elizabeth II's crowning.

HMS Gambia served as flagship of the 4th Cruiser Squadron on the East Indies Station between 1955 and 1957, undergoing a life-extension refit with enhanced anti-aircraft armament during this period, before a final deployment to the Persian Gulf in May 1957 as flagship for Vice Admiral Hilary Biggs. She returned to Rosyth in September 1958, and made a further Far East deployment between December 1959 and July 1960, relieving HMS Ceylon.

The End

HMS Gambia was paid off to reserve at Portsmouth in December 1960, and was eventually sold to Thos. W. Ward for scrapping, departing Portsmouth under tow on 2 December 1968 and arriving at Inverkeithing on 5 December that year to be broken up, closing out a genuinely remarkable career that had taken her from an Indian Ocean battle, through a wartime loan to the Royal New Zealand Navy, right up to firing among the very last shots of the Second World War itself.