HMS Jamaica (44): The Cruiser That Helped Sink the Scharnhorst

Built on the Furness Coast

HMS Jamaica was laid down on 28 April 1939 by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, launched on 16 November 1940 and completed on 29 June 1942, a Fiji-class light cruiser named, in keeping with the class's Crown colony naming convention, after the Caribbean island rather than any previous warship tradition. She entered service in the middle of the Second World War's most dangerous years for the Royal Navy's cruiser force, and would go on to earn a reputation as one of the more consistently useful ships of her class.

HMS Jamaica's early war service included covering Arctic convoys and providing distant support for strikes against the German battleship Tirpitz, unglamorous but essential work in some of the coldest and most hazardous waters any Royal Navy ship was asked to operate in.

The Battle of the Barents Sea

HMS Jamaica took part in the Battle of the Barents Sea on 31 December 1942, part of Force R under Rear-Admiral Robert Burnett, sent to cover convoy JW 51B against a German surface attack. In the ensuing action she engaged the German destroyer Z4 Richard Beitzen and struck the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper with fire from her own guns, a sharp, confused engagement fought in near-total Arctic darkness that nonetheless ended in a clear tactical success for the escorting British force, driving off a German squadron that had gone to considerable lengths to intercept the convoy.

Finishing the Scharnhorst at North Cape

HMS Jamaica's most famous action came a year almost to the day later, at the Battle of North Cape on 26 December 1943, when the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst sortied to attack convoy JW 55B and was instead brought to battle and destroyed by a British force built around the battleship HMS Duke of York. HMS Jamaica fired her first salvo against Scharnhorst a mere minute after Duke of York opened fire, and later in the action was ordered in to finish the crippled German ship with torpedoes; her initial torpedo volley misfired, a frustrating moment in the middle of an otherwise decisive engagement, though the action was completed regardless as Scharnhorst finally went down with the loss of nearly her entire crew. It was one of the last conventional gunnery duels between capital ships in naval history, and HMS Jamaica had a genuinely central role in it.

The Only Naval Battle of the Korean War

HMS Jamaica went on, after the war, to earn a rather different and less well remembered distinction. Following North Korea's invasion of the south on 25 June 1950, Britain offered naval support that quickly expanded from humanitarian assistance into full combat operations, and HMS Jamaica was deployed to Korean waters as part of the United Nations naval effort. On 2 July 1950, HMS Jamaica, together with the frigate HMS Black Swan and the American cruiser USS Juneau, encountered a North Korean flotilla of torpedo boats and motor gunboats escorting a group of ammunition-laden trawlers. The two cruisers brought the range of the smaller North Korean craft and sank four of them within about ten minutes, without the UN ships suffering a single hit in return, and HMS Jamaica subsequently rescued and interrogated captured North Korean sailors pulled from the water.

Three Royal New Zealand Navy midshipmen training aboard HMS Jamaica at the time, John Burgess, Michael Muschamp and Tom Riddell, witnessed the action firsthand, and it went on to be recorded as the only surface engagement of the entire Korean War between United Nations naval forces and the North Korean navy. The North Korean Navy never again attempted a comparable surface action, leaving UN forces with uncontested command of the sea for the remainder of the conflict, a genuinely significant strategic outcome from what was, in terms of the size of the vessels involved, a comparatively minor skirmish.

Later Service and Fate

HMS Jamaica was subsequently refitted with a view to Pacific service against Japan, though the war ended before she could be deployed there. She continued in Royal Navy service through the postwar years and her Korean War deployment before eventually being placed in reserve. She was sold for scrap on 14 November 1960, arriving at Arnott Young's breaking yard at Dalmuir on 20 December 1960, closing out the career of a cruiser that had, remarkably, played a central role in sinking one of Nazi Germany's most formidable capital ships and then gone on to fight the only ship-to-ship naval battle of an entirely different war on the other side of the world.