HMS Newcastle (C76): 133 Days at Sea, Torpedoed Twice in Two Weeks, and Still Fighting in Korea

Launched in Mourning

HMS Newcastle was laid down at Vickers Armstrong's High Walker shipyard on the Tyne on 4 October 1934, launched on 23 January 1936 by the Duchess of Northumberland and commissioned on 5 March 1937, a Southampton-subclass Town-class light cruiser.

Her launch ceremony was a deliberately subdued affair, coming just three days after the death of King George V, a sombre note for a ship that would go on to see an extraordinarily eventful career.

She took part in the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead in 1937.

Chasing a Blockade Runner and Losing Rawalpindi in a Rain Squall

HMS Newcastle intercepted the German blockade runner Parana in the Denmark Strait on 12 November 1939, scuttling her with gunfire the following day, and on 23 November responded to distress signals from the armed merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi, then under attack by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

Newcastle, under the command of Captain John Figgins, pursued but, lacking radar, lost contact with the enemy in a rain squall, unable to prevent the loss of Rawalpindi herself. Her mere approach was enough to make the German battleships break off and flee rather than finish picking up survivors, though they still recovered 27 men from the water before departing, and HMS Chitral rescued a further 11 the following day, a frustrating reminder of just how much of naval warfare in that era still depended on visual contact and simple luck.

It is worth knowing what Newcastle was too late for. Rawalpindi was a P and O liner with eight elderly 6-inch guns bolted to her, working the northern patrol line between Iceland and the Faroes, which is a job that consists of being the ship that sees the enemy first. When Scharnhorst and Gneisenau found her and signalled her to heave to and abandon ship, her captain turned towards them instead.

Edward Kennedy was sixty and had been brought back out of retirement to command her. The account that has come down is that he told his people they would fight them both, that they would be sunk, and that would be that. Rawalpindi hit Scharnhorst once, for splinter damage. The Germans destroyed her, and Kennedy and well over two hundred of his people went with the ship. Before she went, she got a signal away with the enemy's position, which is the only reason Newcastle was anywhere near that patch of sea.

So the rain squall is a crueller detail than it first appears. Rawalpindi had done precisely the thing she was stationed there to do, at the cost of herself, and the weather then quietly undid it. There is a postscript, too: Kennedy's son Ludovic, later a very well known writer and broadcaster, served in the destroyer HMS Tartar during the pursuit of the Bismarck eighteen months afterwards, and wrote the standard popular account of that chase.

A Destroyer Action Off the French Coast

HMS Newcastle provided illumination with star shells while HMS Revenge bombarded Cherbourg on 10 and 11 October 1940, and on 17 October engaged a group of German destroyers off the French coast, scoring two hits on Hans Lody and damaging Erich Steinbrinck, though the German force ultimately escaped to Brest.

One Hundred and Thirty-Three Days at Sea

HMS Newcastle deployed to the South Atlantic in late 1940, conducting an unsuccessful search for the German auxiliary cruiser Thor, and in the process set a notably remarkable record: she remained continually at sea from 10 December 1940 to 21 April 1941, a total of 133 days, with 109 of those days spent entirely out of sight of land, a record for Royal Navy warships during the entire Second World War.

She went on to capture the Vichy French merchant ship Lieutenant Saint Loubert Bie south of Saint Helena on 18 May 1941, and intercepted the German blockade runner Erlangen off the River Plate estuary on 25 July, though her crew scuttled the vessel rather than allow capture.

Torpedoed Twice Within a Fortnight

HMS Newcastle joined the Eastern Fleet as flagship of the 4th Cruiser Squadron in February 1942, and took part in Operation Vigorous that June, an attempt to run a vital convoy from Egypt to Malta. On 15 June 1942 the German motor torpedo boat S-56 struck her with a single torpedo, blowing a hole measuring 15 by 20 feet in her starboard bow.

It should be said that the attempt failed. Vigorous was one half of a pincer, sailing west from Alexandria with eleven merchant ships while Operation Harpoon came east from Gibraltar with six, in the hope that the Axis could not concentrate against both at once. They could. Vigorous turned back without delivering anything to Malta at all, and the full arithmetic of that fortnight is set out in the article on HMS Inconstant (H49). Newcastle took her torpedo in the bow for a convoy that never arrived.

Despite the damage, effective damage control brought her back up to a respectable 12 knots and eventually 20 knots, allowing her to maintain her place in the convoy and even claim a share in shooting down four enemy aircraft before returning to Alexandria.

In an extraordinary piece of bad luck, while crossing the Indian Ocean towards repairs on 27 June, only twelve days after the torpedo strike, heavy weather tore an almost identically sized hole in her port bow, severely damaging her internal structure a second time in under a fortnight.

Getting there was its own small odyssey: a temporary wooden bulkhead reinforced with concrete had to be rebuilt again and again as she limped onward through Bombay, Mauritius, Cape Town, Pernambuco in Brazil and Bermuda, before finally reaching the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York on 11 October 1942, where proper new bows were fitted that autumn, with further work following at Devonport into the spring of 1943.

Hunting U-boat Supply Ships

HMS Newcastle returned to the Eastern Fleet in 1943, resuming flagship duties at Kilindini Harbour in Kenya, and took part in Operation Player searching for U-boat supply ships that June, without success.

She had better luck the following year, taking part in the interception and forced scuttling of the supply ship Charlotte Schliemann in February 1944, and the similar interception of the supply ship Brake that March, truly valuable work disrupting the German submarine campaign's logistical support network far from home waters.

Carrier Strikes and the Burma Campaign

HMS Newcastle took part in a series of carrier strike operations against Japanese targets in 1944, including Operation Cockpit against Sabang in April, Operation Transom against Surabaya in May, and Operation Robson against Sumatra that December.

From early 1945 she supported the British Fourteenth Army's campaign in Burma, taking part in landings on Akyab Island in January and Cheduba Island later that month alongside HMS Nigeria and HMS Kenya, and conducted shore bombardment during the Battle of Ramree Island, before returning to Britain for a refit that was still underway when the war ended.

Palestine, Korea and Malaya

HMS Newcastle served as a troopship on routes to South Africa and Ceylon after the war, before entering reserve in early 1946. She recommissioned to join the Mediterranean Fleet in late 1947, serving as flagship and supporting the interception of ships carrying Jewish refugees attempting illegal entry to Palestine, one of the more politically fraught duties any Royal Navy ship undertook in that turbulent period.

Fraught is exact. What the Mediterranean Fleet was doing in 1947 and 1948 was intercepting ships carrying Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who were trying to reach Palestine, and turning them round, and it fell to Royal Navy officers and ratings to board them and do it. What that was actually like, and what happened when the most famous of those ships was stopped, is described in the article on HMS Cardigan Bay. Very few of the men who did it enjoyed it.

Following an extensive modernisation at Devonport between 1950 and 1952, she deployed to Korea in May 1952, relieving HMS Ceylon on station that July and undertaking patrols, carrier escort and naval gunfire support for United Nations forces. She later took part in the Malayan Emergency, shelling Communist targets in June and August 1955, and again in further bombardment operations in December 1957.

Broken Up at Faslane

HMS Newcastle was finally decommissioned and sold for scrap in 1959, subsequently broken up at Faslane, closing out the career of a cruiser whose service spanned virtually the entire span of Britain's mid-twentieth-century naval history, from the opening weeks of the Second World War through Palestine, Korea and Malaya, surviving two near-fatal hull breaches within the same fortnight along the way. Across the Second World War alone she had steamed some 309,289 nautical miles, an average of 143 miles for every single day of the conflict, a genuinely staggering tally for a ship that spent a fair stretch of it patched together with wood and concrete.