HMS Kenya (C14): The Pink Lady Who Lost Her Bow at Malta

Constructed at Alexander Stephen and Sons

HMS Kenya was ordered on 20 December 1937 and built at Alexander Stephen and Sons in Glasgow, with construction beginning that June, launched on 18 August 1939 and commissioned on 27 September 1940, a Fiji-class light cruiser that joined the 2nd Cruiser Squadron of the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow under Captain M. M. Denny, sailing from there on 7 October 1940 to escort the fast convoy WS 3 to Freetown.

The Fiji class is what happens when a good design meets a treaty. The Second London Naval Treaty of 1936 capped new British six-inch cruisers at eight thousand tons, and the Southampton or Town class that the Admiralty actually wanted more of came in a thousand tons over that. So the constructors were told to produce the same ship inside the limit, and very nearly managed it: the same twelve six-inch guns in four triple turrets, much the same speed, in a hull some thirty-five feet shorter with the armour and the machinery pared back to pay for it. They squared off the stern into a flat transom, which turned out to improve the hydrodynamics as well as free up internal volume, and stood the funnels and masts upright instead of raking them, which is the quickest way to tell a Colony from a Town at a distance. Eleven were built and each was named after a Crown colony, which is why a Royal Navy cruiser squadron of the 1940s reads like a page from an atlas of the Empire. What the compromise cost is set out in the article on HMS Fiji (58), and what the class could do when it went well in the article on HMS Gambia (48).

She went on to escort further convoys including SL 65, SL 66, SL 67 and HG 56 through the difficult early war years, and helped recover the damaged troopship Empire Trooper in December 1940.

Hunting the Bismarck and Sinking a Tanker

HMS Kenya took part in the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941, part of the vast Royal Navy effort that eventually brought the German raider to battle and destroyed her.

The following month, on 3 June 1941, HMS Kenya and HMS Aurora together surprised and sank the German supply tanker Belchen, caught refuelling the U-boat U-93 in the Davis Strait; five of the 54 men aboard the tanker were killed, a truly useful strike against the wider German effort to keep its submarine fleet operating far from home.

Belchen was not a lucky encounter, and the story behind it is one of the best pieces of staff work of the war. Bismarck's sortie had depended on a network of tankers and supply ships stationed across the Atlantic, and when she was sunk the Admiralty found itself holding, courtesy of Bletchley Park, the positions of very nearly all of them. Over about a week in June 1941 the Royal Navy went round and collected the lot: Belchen sunk by Kenya and Aurora between Greenland and Labrador on the 3rd, and four more taken or scuttled in the days either side. It was so comprehensively successful that Churchill began to worry the Germans would work out how it had been done, and specific orders went out to leave one ship alone in order to muddy the picture. The whole episode, and the awkward business of having intelligence so good you dare not use it, is described in the article on HMS Dunedin (96). Killing the supply network mattered rather more than sinking any single raider: a commerce raider without tankers is a ship on a one-way trip.

Leading the Guns at Vaagso

On 27 December 1941 HMS Kenya led the naval gunfire support for Operation Archery, the raid on Vaagso in German-occupied Norway, opening the assault with a bombardment of the town alongside the destroyers HMS Onslow, Oribi, Offa and Chiddingfold before commandos of No. 3 Commando went ashore. The raiders destroyed four fish-oil factories, ammunition and fuel stores and the telephone exchange before withdrawing that afternoon, leaving much of the town ablaze in an operation later remembered, rather grandly, as the Perfect Raid.

Vaagso earned its reputation for two reasons that have nothing to do with the fish-oil factories. The first is that Archery was the first operation of the entire war in which the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force planned and fought together as a single force, which is now so obviously the right way to do things that it takes an effort to remember somebody had to do it first. Eight enemy vessels of about fifteen and a half thousand tons were destroyed along with the shore installations. The second reason matters more. Hitler concluded from Vaagso and the Lofoten raids that Britain intended to invade Norway, and sent something like thirty thousand additional troops north to garrison a country nobody had any intention of invading, where they sat out the rest of the war doing nothing while the Eastern Front consumed everything Germany had. A raid of a few hours by a few hundred commandos bought a permanent diversion of an entire division and more. Kenya took damage herself from a shore battery, which her gunners then silenced permanently, and she came home to Scapa Flow on 28 December with three hundred and forty-three Norwegian civilians aboard who had chosen to leave with the raiders rather than stay and answer for the visit.

She spent the following winter on the brutal Arctic convoy run to Russia, joining Convoy PQ 12 on 6 March 1942 as part of a heavy covering force sent out from Scapa Flow and Reykjavik in the hope of drawing out the German battleship Tirpitz, enduring the storms, fog and near-permanent darkness that made the Arctic route one of the most dreaded of the entire war.

A word about what a cruiser was actually for on the Russian run, because escorting is not quite what she was doing. The convoy itself had a close escort of destroyers and smaller craft to deal with submarines and aircraft. The cruisers formed a covering force, sailing separately and placing themselves between the convoy and the Norwegian coast, to meet the German heavy ships if they came out; PQ 12 in March 1942 was exactly that, a covering force cruising in the hope of drawing Tirpitz into the open. She did come out, and the two forces missed each other in the weather by a margin that would have looked implausible in fiction. That role, and what it was like to spend a fortnight doing it in the dark, is set out in the article on HMS Kent (54).

The Pink Lady

HMS Kenya earned herself a memorable nickname during this period: The Pink Lady, on account of the distinctive Mountbatten Pink camouflage scheme she carried, a shade of paint that, somewhat counterintuitively, was believed to make a ship melt into the colour of the sky at dawn and dusk.

Mountbatten Pink deserves its own paragraph, because it is one of the odder ideas the Royal Navy ever adopted and it was never actually tested. In the autumn of 1940 Mountbatten, escorting a convoy, noticed that one merchant ship kept disappearing from view at twilight while the others stayed visible, and worked out that she was still wearing a greyish pink from before the war. He concluded that the shade matched the colour of the sky in the half hour before sunrise and after sunset, when a ship is most likely to be seen and least able to see, and had his whole destroyer flotilla painted in it: standard medium grey with a little Venetian red stirred in. Other captains copied him, Kenya among them, and by 1941 several cruisers and a good many destroyers were pink. No formal trials were ever conducted. The colour does blend into the horizon at dawn and dusk and it stands out conspicuously against the sea at midday, and camouflage specialists have argued since that the Purkinje effect, which shifts the eye's sensitivity towards blue in poor light, may well have made a pink ship easier to see rather than harder. It was quietly dropped for large ships during 1942.

The story usually told in the paint's defence is Kenya's own, and it belongs at Vaagso rather than in the Arctic. German shore batteries engaged her for some minutes at close range and hit almost nothing, and the explanation offered afterwards was that the marker dye the Germans put in their shells to identify their own fall of shot happened to be pink, so that the spotters could not tell the splashes from the ship. It is a wonderful story. It is also entirely anecdotal, quite possibly apocryphal, and rests on a coincidence of pigment that nobody has ever documented. What is certain is that a cruiser painted the colour of a Home Counties bathroom suite went into a Norwegian fjord, traded fire with a coastal battery, and came out again, and that her people were pleased enough about it to keep the nickname for the rest of her life.

In March 1942 she took on a rather different and more unusual cargo, carrying ten tons of Soviet gold bullion home to Britain, part of the Soviet Union's payment for Allied war material, a striking illustration of just how varied a cruiser's wartime duties could become.

The gold is worth being precise about, because a nearly identical cargo two months later produced one of the most famous salvage stories in the world. The Soviet Union was paying for Allied war material in bullion, and the only route out was the same one the convoys came in by. Kenya detached from the PQ 12 covering force on 12 March 1942 and ran home alone with ten tons of it. In late April the cruiser HMS Edinburgh sailed from Murmansk on the same errand with four and a half tons aboard, was torpedoed by a U-boat, was torpedoed again by German destroyers and had to be sunk by her own side. The gold went down with her in eight hundred feet of the Barents Sea and stayed there until a British salvage operation recovered the great bulk of it in 1981 and 1986, in what remains one of the deepest commercial salvage jobs ever attempted. Kenya's ten tons arrived quietly and nobody has made a film about it, which is the usual reward for getting the job done.

Operation Pedestal

HMS Kenya's most dramatic action came during Operation Pedestal in August 1942, the desperate operation to resupply besieged Malta with a convoy of fourteen merchant ships escorted by two battleships, three aircraft carriers, seven light cruisers including HMS Kenya, and 26 destroyers, one of the largest and most heavily contested convoy escort operations of the entire war. Rear Admiral Harold Burrough commanded the close escort, Force X, from HMS Nigeria, with Kenya as one of his cruisers.

During the fierce fighting of 12 and 13 August, HMS Kenya's bow was blown off by a torpedo fired from the Italian submarine Alagi, one of four aimed at her that day, and separate near misses from bombs close to her stern wrecked part of her port outer propeller, a devastating one-two punch that forced emergency repairs at sea and reduced her to a maximum speed of 25 knots.

Despite the damage, HMS Kenya went on to lead Force X safely back to Gibraltar after delivering the surviving convoy ships through to Malta, among them the battered tanker Ohio, whose cargo of fuel proved decisive to the island's survival. Only five of the fourteen merchant ships that had set out reached Malta, a measure of just how costly the operation had been, and a remarkable feat of seamanship and endurance for a ship missing a substantial portion of her own hull.

What actually happened to her bow is worth setting out, because it is a good illustration of why warships are built the way they are. Alagi fired four torpedoes at her: two missed altogether, one ran underneath the ship without exploding, and the fourth hit her on the port side right forward. Everything ahead of the collision bulkhead went, the anchors, the cable lockers and the forward stores compartments simply blown away, and the reason nobody was killed is that those are precisely the compartments a ship's company is not in at action stations. Damage control shored the bulkhead behind the hole, and a cruiser with no bow and a wrecked port outer screw was still the most powerful ship left in Force X and still capable of twenty-five knots, which is faster than most destroyers can manage in a seaway. She led the surviving merchantmen up to the edge of Malta's fighter cover, turned round and led Force X back to Gibraltar through more air attacks. What the convoy as a whole cost and what it bought is set out in the article on HMS Cairo.

Between the Tyne and Korea there is a gap of three years that the record above skips, and it was busy. Repaired by December 1942, Kenya went out to the Eastern Fleet in April 1943 and spent the rest of the war in the Indian Ocean, which was the least reported theatre the Royal Navy fought in and among the largest. She screened the carrier strikes on the Japanese-held oil installations at Sourabaya in May 1944 and on Sabang in July, and supported the landings on the Burma coast between January and March 1945 as the Fourteenth Army pushed south towards Rangoon. It was a war of enormous distances, very few bases, appalling heat below decks in a ship designed for the North Atlantic, and almost no newspaper coverage whatever, which is why the Eastern Fleet's veterans spent the rest of their lives explaining that they had not, in fact, missed the war.

Korea, the West Indies, and a Quiet End

HMS Kenya underwent extensive refits in 1945 and 1946, and again in 1949, before going on to see further action during the Korean War, carrying out shore bombardment duties in support of United Nations forces. She later served on the West Indian Station from 1955 to 1958, a considerably more relaxed posting after the ferocity of her wartime service.

Her Korean numbers are the best single answer to anybody who imagines a 1950s cruiser had a quiet time. Between July 1950 and August 1951 Kenya carried out nineteen patrols, steamed sixty-three thousand one hundred and eighteen miles and fired three thousand three hundred and eighty-six rounds of six-inch and two thousand two hundred and forty-two rounds of four-inch ammunition. That is more ammunition than most Second World War cruisers expended in their entire careers, fired at coastal roads, railway lines, bridges, supply dumps and troop concentrations along a peninsula where almost everything the enemy moved had to move within reach of the sea. Naval gunfire support was one of the few things the United Nations force had in unlimited supply, and Korea is the last war in which the Royal Navy did it on that scale.

HMS Kenya was declared for disposal in February 1959 and was eventually sold for scrap on 29 October 1962, broken up at the Faslane yards of Ship-breaking Industries, closing out the career of a cruiser whose wartime record, from sinking a U-boat tanker to surviving the loss of her own bow at Malta, made her one of the more eventful ships of her class.

Twenty-two years from launch to the breakers is a full life for a wartime cruiser, and hers is a fair sample of what the type was actually asked to do. She hunted a battleship, sank a tanker in the Davis Strait, shelled a Norwegian town, covered Arctic convoys, carried the Soviet Union's gold home, lost her bow in the western Mediterranean and brought a convoy through anyway, spent two years in the Indian Ocean nobody wrote about, bombarded Korea for a year, and finished with three sunlit seasons in the West Indies. Not one of those jobs is the one she was designed for, which was trade protection against surface raiders in a war of cruiser against cruiser that never really happened. She arrived at Faslane to be broken up on 27 October 1962, by which time the Royal Navy had no six-inch cruisers left to speak of and the whole idea of the colonial cruiser had gone the way of the colonies she and her sisters were named after.