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

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.

She was one of the Colony class, and the compromise that shaped her is worth knowing: twelve 6-inch guns squeezed onto a hull limited by treaty to 8,000 tons, with almost no margin left over for the radar, the command spaces and the close-range anti-aircraft guns the war turned out to demand. What that cost one of her sisters off Crete is set out in the article on HMS Fiji (58). Gambia, completed a year later and rearmed repeatedly through the war, got the benefit of everything that loss taught.

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 notably 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 N.J.W. William-Powlett DSC, RN, 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 close working arrangement between the two navies at a moment when every available cruiser counted.

The arrangement is worth understanding, because it was not a transfer of ownership. She remained a Royal Navy ship, on loan, with a New Zealand ship's company: a few of the officers and something like three-quarters of the ratings were New Zealanders, and she flew as HMNZS Gambia for two and a half years before reverting. New Zealand had lost the use of both its cruisers within months, Achilles bombed off Guadalcanal in January 1943 and Leander torpedoed at Kolombangara that July, and a Dominion that had put a very large proportion of its manpower into the war was in danger of having no navy to put it in. Britain filled the gap with a hull. New Zealand filled it with people. It is the same relationship that later saw two Leander-class frigates sold south in 1981, described in the article on HMS Dido (F104).

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.

Blockade running is worth explaining, because it sounds like smuggling and was in fact one of the more important economic problems of the war. Germany had no rubber, no tin and no tungsten of her own. Japan and the territories she had overrun had all three, in quantity. Between them lay half the world and every Allied navy in it, and the connection was maintained by a handful of fast merchant ships making the run alone, at speed, on carefully chosen dates, from the Far East up into the Bay of Biscay and the occupied French ports. Stop those ships and German industry loses the hard metals it needs for machine tools, armour-piercing shot and tyres.

Two of them came that season. Osorno was carrying rubber, tin and tungsten; Alsterufer had tungsten and rubber. Gambia was ordered to join the cruisers Glasgow and Enterprise under the Commander-in-Chief Plymouth to catch them. On 27 December a Liberator of 311 Squadron, the Czechoslovak squadron in RAF Coastal Command, found Alsterufer far out in the Atlantic and went in at low level with rockets and bombs; she burned and sank the following day, and seventy-four of her people were picked up by Canadian corvettes two days after that.

Osorno got through, but the running fight her escorts had on the way in cost the Germans a good deal more than her cargo was worth. On 28 December, Glasgow and Enterprise ran into the destroyer and torpedo boat force sent out to bring her home and sank three of them, the destroyer Z27 and the torpedo boats T25 and T26. It is the sort of operation that never gets a name in the popular histories and it is exactly what a cruiser squadron in home waters existed to do: not to fight a fleet, but to make one particular kind of voyage impossible.

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 began on 9 August 1945, the same day the second atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, when she joined the final Allied naval bombardment of Japan, shelling the steelworks at Kamaishi on Honshu under the command of Rear Admiral Eric Brind. Her own gunners added a footnote on the return journey, shooting down a Japanese aircraft that came out to challenge the retiring force.

The bombardment campaign she joined is one of the strangest episodes of the war, and it needs explaining. By the summer of 1945 the Japanese had effectively stopped contesting their own coast: aircraft, fuel and pilots were being hoarded for the invasion everybody expected, and the navy had almost nothing left afloat. So Allied battleships and cruisers simply steamed up to the coast of Honshu in daylight and shelled industrial towns at leisure, unopposed. Kamaishi was the first, hit on 14 July by three American battleships, and Gambia was there when the same force came back on 9 August. There was no return fire of any consequence. The whole campaign produced exactly thirty-two Allied fatalities.

And all thirty-two of them were on the receiving end. Allied prisoners of war were held in two camps at Kamaishi and made to work in the steelworks that were the target; five of them were killed on 14 July, and when the fleet returned on 9 August one of the camps was destroyed and twenty-seven more died. Nobody in the bombarding force knew they were there. It is the sort of thing that does not fit comfortably into an account of a ship's final actions, and it belongs in one anyway: the only people killed on the Allied side by the naval bombardment of Japan were Allied prisoners, shelled by their own side in the last month of the war.

The truly historic moment came six days later, on 15 August, the very day the ceasefire was announced. As word of Japan's surrender was still being passed around the fleet, a lone Japanese dive bomber pressed home an attack; Gambia's anti-aircraft guns joined in as Spitfires overhead shot it down, wreckage from the stricken aircraft clattering onto her own decks, among the very last shots fired anywhere in the entire Second World War.

The claim in that sentence is a serious one and it stands up rather well. Japan's surrender was announced on the morning of 15 August, and the order that went out to the Allied fleet was to cease offensive operations while retaining the right to defend itself; Admiral Halsey's version of it, that any aircraft approaching should be shot down in a friendly sort of way, is the line everybody remembers. Individual Japanese pilots, some of whom did not believe the broadcast and some of whom did not care, kept coming for several hours. Gambia's guns were firing at one of them, with Seafires and Spitfires overhead doing the same, when the aircraft came apart and scattered itself across her upper deck. It is difficult to be certain who fired the last shot of the Second World War. It is not difficult to say that hers were among them.

Her part in the war's final act did not end there. On 20 August, a landing party under Lieutenant Commander G.R. Davis-Goff DSC, RNZN, went ashore to formally accept the surrender of the Japanese naval base at Yokosuka, and the following month her ship's company helped evacuate around 10,000 Allied prisoners of war from Wakayama. 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.

That relief mission is better remembered in Greece than it is here. The earthquake of 12 August 1953 is described in the article on HMS Bermuda (52), the sister ship that took over from Gambia on the 15th after her people had already been ashore for two days. The shock was strong enough to lift the whole island of Kefalonia about two feet, and it flattened every settlement on it except Fiskardo, right up in the north.

What the islands did afterwards is the part worth recording. There is a street in Argostoli named after one of the British warships that came in, and on Kefalonia, Zakynthos and Ithaca the twelfth of August is still marked every year, more than seventy years on. Gambia's ship's company spent two days carrying stretchers and digging in rubble in August heat, and it is probably the most gratefully remembered thing she ever did.

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 truly 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.