HMS Liverpool (C11): Torpedoed Twice, Rebuilt Across an Ocean

Govan-Built

HMS Liverpool was laid down at Fairfield's Govan shipyard on 17 February 1936 and launched on 24 March 1937 by Priscilla Norman, wife of the Governor of the Bank of England, the first cruiser launched at Fairfield since the County-class HMS Norfolk. She commissioned on 2 November 1938 under Captain A. D. Read, and before deploying to the East Indies paid a visit to her namesake city in January 1939, where civic organisations presented her with flags, candlesticks, a silver cup and bugles, a warm send-off for a cruiser that would go on to have one of the more punishing wartime careers of her class.

A Diplomatic Incident and Early Combat

HMS Liverpool caused a genuine diplomatic stir in January 1940 when she intercepted the Japanese passenger liner Asama Maru off Niijima to detain suspected German nationals aboard, an action that sparked real tension between Britain and Japan before a negotiated resolution was reached.

That incident is worth the detail, because it is still taught in law schools. On 21 January 1940 Liverpool stopped the Asama Maru in international waters off the Japanese coast and took twenty-one German seamen out of her, thirteen officers and eight technical ratings, all of them believed to be on their way home to join the German forces. Japan was neutral. The liner was Japanese, in Japanese home waters in every sense but the legal one, and full of Japanese passengers watching a British cruiser put an armed boarding party aboard.

Tokyo's protest was immediate and about as blunt as diplomatic language allows: it could not but regard the action as a serious, unfriendly act against Japan. The legal argument was that a belligerent could only take enemy nationals off a neutral ship if they were actually serving in the armed forces, and these men were merchant seamen. The British argument was that they would be in uniform soon enough.

The way out was a piece of face-saving on both sides. Britain announced that on investigation some of the twenty-one were "relatively unsuitable for military service" and released nine of them, while reserving all its legal rights, and Japan undertook not to give passage to Germans of military age in future. Nobody conceded the principle. Everybody stopped shouting. It was two years before Pearl Harbor and both governments could see how badly it might have gone.

She went on to take part in the destruction of an Italian destroyer at the Battle of the Espero Convoy in June 1940, and engaged Italian warships at ranges exceeding 23,000 yards at the Battle of Calabria that July, before Italian aircraft inflicted bomb damage on 12 July, killing crew members and wounding her commanding officer.

A Torpedo Blows Off Her Bow

HMS Liverpool suffered catastrophic damage on 14 October 1940, when Italian torpedo bombers attacked her, and a torpedo dropped by pilot Capitano Massimiliano Erasi struck her forward section. The resulting explosion tore her bow clean off the rest of the hull, killing 30 of her crew and wounding 35 more, a devastating blow that left her barely afloat. Captain Read handed over command just 13 days later to Commander Roger Stanley Wellby DSO, inheriting a cruiser with no bow to speak of.

She was towed to Alexandria for emergency stabilisation, before making the extraordinary journey across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to the United States, where she underwent a complete bow reconstruction at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California, a remarkable feat of wartime salvage and international cooperation that brought a badly maimed British cruiser halfway around the world to be made whole again.

The American repair deserves its dates. The torpedo hit her south-east of Crete and the explosion was violent enough to blow the roof off A turret; she was into Alexandria by noon on the 16th. A false bow was built on to her there and she stayed in the Mediterranean, patched, until May 1941. Then she went the long way round: across the Atlantic, through Panama, up the west coast to the Mare Island Navy Yard near San Francisco, where she lay from 16 June to 15 November 1941.

That is five months of a United States naval dockyard rebuilding the bow of a British warship while the United States was formally neutral, which tells you rather more about where American policy actually stood in 1941 than any speech does. She came out with a new bow and a good deal of extra 20mm added, sailed on 20 November, and was back in British waters by way of the canal on 5 December 1941.

Two days later the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and the yard that had rebuilt her was at war. Liverpool got out of a neutral America with about forty-eight hours to spare.

Torpedoed a Second Time

HMS Liverpool returned to active service and supported the brutal Arctic convoy route in 1942, escorting convoys QP 10 and PQ 16, before taking part in Operation Harpoon, the effort to resupply besieged Malta, on 14 June 1942.

There, under the command of Captain William Rudolph Slayter DSC, in an almost eerie repeat of her earlier ordeal, another Italian torpedo bomber struck her, this time on the starboard side, disabling her machinery and steering and killing 15 of her crew while wounding a further 22.

Entirely without power of her own, she did not so much limp as get towed to Gibraltar for repairs, the destroyer HMS Antelope hauling her the whole way under continued air attack, escorted by HMS Westcott, before finally reaching harbour on 17 June. She had now survived two separate torpedo strikes within the space of less than two years, an extraordinary record of resilience even by the demanding standards of the wartime Mediterranean cruiser fleet.

Flagship Duty and a Long Retirement

HMS Liverpool underwent an extensive refit at Rosyth that ran until late 1945, before returning to active service that October with the Mediterranean Fleet, serving primarily as a flagship.

She responded to the Corfu Channel incident in 1946, transported Olympic torch materials in 1948, and hosted King Farouk of Egypt in 1950, a suitably varied set of postwar duties for a cruiser whose wartime service had been so dramatic.

The Corfu Channel business she was sent to was a good deal more serious than the sentence suggests. On 22 October 1946 the destroyers HMS Saumarez and HMS Volage struck mines in the channel and forty-four men were killed, and the case that followed became the very first heard by the new International Court of Justice. It is set out in the article on HMS Cardigan Bay.

She was decommissioned in 1952 and converted to an accommodation ship at Portsmouth, and despite early plans for a comprehensive modernisation, defence budget constraints under the 1957 Defence White Paper saw those plans abandoned. She was sold in 1958 for breaking up at Bo'ness in Scotland, a process that took a full twelve months to complete.

Her ship's bell is preserved today in Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, a lasting link between the city that gave her a warm welcome in 1939 and the cruiser that went on to survive two of the war's more remarkable torpedo strikes.