HMS Newfoundland (59): Sicily, Tokyo Bay and a Night Action at Suez

A Colony's Cruiser

HMS Newfoundland was laid down by Swan Hunter at Wallsend on the Tyne on 9 November 1939, two months into the war, as one of the Fiji Class light cruisers, the Colony Class as they were often called, every one named after a British colony.

She was one of the later group with a fourth turret aft omitted in favour of more anti-aircraft guns, giving her nine 6 inch guns in three triple turrets and eight 4 inch guns, on a hull of some 8,800 tons. The design and the story of the first ship of the class are told in the article on HMS Fiji.

The people of Newfoundland, then a self-governing dominion run by a commission from London, raised money by public subscription towards her cost, and she was the first ship of the Royal Navy to carry the island's name. She was launched on 19 December 1941 by Mrs Ernest Bevin, wife of the Minister of Labour, and commissioned on the last day of 1942.

In Britain she was adopted by the people of Wolverhampton, in place of the cruiser Curacoa, which had been cut in two by the liner Queen Mary that October.

The Mediterranean

After working up at Scapa she spent the spring of 1943 hunting blockade runners in the Bay of Biscay, and in April went out to Algiers to join the cruisers attacking the Axis supply routes to Tunisia. In May she became flagship of the 15th Cruiser Squadron, and on 22 May carried Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the Allied naval commander, to Malta.

In June she shelled the island fortress of Pantelleria before its surrender, and on 13 June, with the destroyer Nubian, received the surrender of the little island of Linosa. On 5 and 6 July General Montgomery and Admiral Ramsay were aboard her as the final plans for the invasion of Sicily were made.

When the landings went in on 10 July she supported the British 1st Parachute Brigade and the troops coming ashore near Pozzallo, and over the next ten days she bombarded Syracuse, Augusta, Catania and the roads inland at Lentini. On 23 July, on passage from Augusta to Malta, she was torpedoed by the Italian submarine Ascianghi.

The explosion wrecked her steering gear and blew away her rudder, and one of her men was blown overboard and lost. Her escorting destroyers, with Eclipse, hunted down and sank the submarine.

Boston

At Malta she was patched up well enough to steer with her engines alone, on two shafts, and in August she sailed for the United States. From 22 August 1943 until February 1944 she was in the hands of the Boston Navy Yard, one of a number of British cruisers repaired in American yards at a time when British dockyards were full.

On the way home she called at St John's at the end of April 1944, the only visit she ever made to the island whose name she bore. The photograph at the top of this page was taken off Greenock on 10 May 1944, a few days after she reached the Clyde, with the wear of her long voyage showing through her camouflage.

A further refit fitted her with British radar sets that had not been available in America.

The British Pacific Fleet

She sailed for the Mediterranean in December 1944, and on 2 February 1945, at Alexandria, she was damaged by an explosion in her port torpedo tubes. Repaired, she went on to Sydney, where the British Pacific Fleet was gathering for the final campaign against Japan.

In May 1945 she bombarded Japanese positions in New Guinea in support of the Australian 6th Division at Wewak, and in June she screened the carriers attacking the Japanese base at Truk, shelling the shore batteries on the island of Uman.

In July she joined the fleet off Japan itself. On 17 July, with the battleship King George V, she bombarded the industrial area of Hitachi north of Tokyo, and on 9 August she joined American ships in shelling the steelworks at Kamaishi on Honshu.

She was screening Indefatigable during the last air strikes on Tokyo when the war ended. On 31 August she entered Tokyo Bay, and on 2 September she was there when the Japanese signed the instrument of surrender aboard the USS Missouri.

The next day her men were helping to carry Allied prisoners of war from the camps to the hospital ships, and she then served as guardship at Yokosuka while Royal Marines took over the Japanese naval base.

After the War

After a goodwill tour of New Zealand she stayed in the Far East into 1946. In March, in heavy weather in the Malacca Straits, her executive officer, Commander Liddell, was killed on deck.

That year she also ran aground in the Yangtze carrying Admiral Fraser to visit Chiang Kai-shek at Nanking, and on 28 October she sank the wrecked Japanese heavy cruiser Takao off Singapore, the ship that midget submarine XE3 had attacked in 1945. She then came home to pay off at Devonport, and spent some years as a training tender in reserve.

In 1951 she was taken in hand at Devonport for modernisation, one of the few of the class to be so treated. She was given a new enclosed bridge, lattice masts and a full set of post-war radars, with an operations room, and her torpedo tubes were taken out.

She recommissioned on 14 November 1952 for the East Indies Station.

The Far East

For the next six years she served east of Suez, from the Persian Gulf and East Africa to Ceylon, Singapore and Japan. She took part in the SEATO exercises, showed the flag at Basra and Dubai, and in April 1954 escorted the liner Gothic carrying the Queen on her Commonwealth tour.

Two of the young officers who served in her, Edward Ashmore, who had been a flag lieutenant aboard in 1945, and Julian Oswald, in 1956 to 1958, later became First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff.

During the Malayan Emergency she was called on several times to shell the jungle camps of the communist insurgents, and the photograph above shows her firing on positions ashore in June 1955, her forward turrets wreathed in smoke. In August 1956 she fired a hundred and one 6 inch rounds into the jungle near Kota Tinggi in Johore.

Suez

When Britain and France moved against Egypt in the autumn of 1956, Newfoundland was sent to the Red Sea as senior naval officer for Operation Musketeer. On the night of 31 October, patrolling the Gulf of Suez with the destroyer Diana, she sighted a darkened ship and challenged her.

She was the Egyptian frigate Domiat, a former British River Class frigate, the Nith, sold to Egypt after the war. Domiat replied with her guns, and Newfoundland opened fire with her 6 inch and 4 inch guns. The frigate was hit again and again and sank.

Return fire killed one of the cruiser's men and wounded five, and sixty nine of the Egyptian crew were picked up from the water. It was one of the last surface actions ever fought by a British cruiser.

Peru

In 1958 she was sent to the Persian Gulf after the revolution in Iraq, under Captain Arthur Hezlet, a submariner famous for his wartime patrols, and in June 1959 she came home to Portsmouth for the last time. That November she was sold to Peru, and on 30 December 1959 she was handed over at Portsmouth and renamed Almirante Grau.

She served the Peruvian Navy for twenty years, the last of them as the Capitán Quiñones after Peru bought a Dutch cruiser and gave her old name to it, and was taken out of service in 1979. Her sisters Ceylon and Nigeria, both in this series, also ended their days under foreign flags.