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.

The class she belonged to was a treaty ship in the most literal sense, and the compromises show. The Second London Naval Treaty of 1936 capped new light cruisers at 8,000 tons, and British designers were asked to fit twelve 6-inch guns in four triple turrets, a decent secondary and anti-aircraft outfit, aircraft, armour and the endurance for worldwide service into that displacement. It could not be done honestly, and the Fijis came out at something over 8,500 tons standard by the time everything was aboard. What resulted was a tightly packed, rather cramped ship that was nonetheless one of the most useful designs the Royal Navy had: fast enough to work with the fleet, heavily enough armed to fight anything short of a capital ship, and with the range to be sent anywhere. Eleven were built, and they turn up everywhere in the war, from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. One of them, Nigeria, was later sold to India, rebuilt as the cruiser Mysore, and in 1959 ran down and destroyed a British destroyer in an exercise off Ceylon, which is described in the article on HMS Hogue (D74).

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.

What that action did to the German navy is out of all proportion to the shooting, and it is the reason the Barents Sea matters. A powerful German force built round the heavy cruiser Hipper and the pocket battleship Lutzow had been sent to destroy a convoy defended by five destroyers and a couple of corvettes, and it was fought off, in the dark, by ships a fraction of its size, and then chased away by two light cruisers. Hitler was told, initially and wrongly, that a great victory had been won, and then learned the truth from a BBC broadcast. The rage that followed is well documented: he declared the big ships useless, called them a breeding ground for revolution lying idle in harbour, and announced that it was his irrevocable decision to scrap the surface fleet and give its guns to the coastal batteries and its men to the U-boats. Grand Admiral Raeder, who had built that fleet over twenty years, offered his resignation and had it accepted. His replacement was Karl Donitz, the submarine commander, who then quietly talked Hitler out of the scrapping while making it clear where the priorities now lay. Hipper, Emden and Leipzig were laid up anyway, and the rebuilding of Gneisenau was abandoned. A night action off Bear Island in which nobody sank anything larger than a destroyer effectively ended the German surface navy as an instrument of policy.

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 truly central role in it.

North Cape is worth setting out properly, because it was the last time in history that battleships fought each other by gunnery and because the outcome turned on something invisible. Scharnhorst came out of Altenfjord on Christmas Day 1943 to attack JW 55B, and she was blind: her radar had been shot away early in the action by Norfolk, and the weather was appalling, with a full Arctic winter night and a heavy sea. The British were not blind. Belfast, Norfolk and Sheffield tracked her by radar, lost her, found her again, and held on to her long enough for Duke of York to come up from the south-west and open fire at twelve thousand yards on a target she could see only on a screen. The shadowing is described in the article on HMS Belfast (C35) and the gunnery duel in the one on HMS Duke of York (17). Once Scharnhorst had been slowed by a hit in a boiler room the destroyers got in with torpedoes, and Jamaica and Belfast were sent to finish her. Jamaica's first torpedo salvo misfired; she turned and fired again, and reported hits. Scharnhorst went down at about half past seven in the evening with 1,968 men aboard. Thirty-six were pulled out of the water. Her captain was not among them, and no officer of any rank survived.

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.

How a British cruiser came to be shooting at North Koreans a week after the war started is a small piece of Cold War history in itself. Britain had a substantial Far East Fleet based on Hong Kong and Singapore in June 1950, and it was closer to Korea than anything the Americans could bring from the continental United States; the aircraft carrier Triumph, Jamaica and a handful of destroyers and frigates were placed under American operational control within days, before the United Nations resolution authorising the intervention had even been fully worked through. The Royal Navy ended up providing a very large share of the west coast blockade and carrier operations for the next three years, in a war that is remembered in Britain, when it is remembered at all, as an American one. Jamaica was there because she happened to be in the right ocean.

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 remarkably significant strategic outcome from what was, in terms of the size of the vessels involved, a comparatively minor skirmish.

There is one part of that fortnight that rarely gets told, and it is the part her ship’s company remembered. Six days after the action off Chumunjin, on 8 July 1950, Jamaica was lying close inshore bombarding a target on the coast when a North Korean coastal battery, firing a 3-inch gun that nobody had known was there, put a shell into her superstructure. It killed six men, five of them the crew of one of her own guns. They were the first British service fatalities of the Korean War. It is a useful corrective to the story of the ten-minute victory a week earlier: a cruiser can destroy a flotilla of wooden torpedo boats without being touched, and then be hit by a single well-laid field gun on a hillside. Naval gunfire support puts a large ship inside the range of things that can shoot back, and somebody ashore always has a gun.

Later Service and Fate

The refit belongs earlier than it reads here. In 1945 HMS Jamaica was taken in hand 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, made her Korean deployment in 1950, and was eventually 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.

Her whole chronology is worth setting out in one line. She was built and completed in 1942, spent 1942 and 1943 in the Arctic, fought at the Barents Sea and at North Cape, and was then refitted in 1945 for the Pacific, where the war ended before she arrived. Korea came five years after that, when she was already an old ship in a much smaller navy, and she was scrapped in 1960 at eighteen years old. In that time she helped fight off a German squadron on New Year's Eve in a way that cost Raeder his job and very nearly cost Germany her surface fleet; she fired torpedoes into the Scharnhorst in the last big-gun action ever fought between capital ships; and she took part in the only surface engagement of the Korean War, after which the North Korean navy never came out again. Three actions, two wars, eighteen years. Almost nobody outside the Navy has heard of her.