HMS Nigeria (60): Enigma off Jan Mayen, the Bremse off Norway and the Pedestal Torpedo

Built on the Tyne

HMS Nigeria was laid down by Vickers-Armstrongs at Newcastle upon Tyne on 8 February 1938, one of the first group of the Fiji Class light cruisers, each named after a colony of the Empire. She was launched on 18 July 1939, six weeks before the war, and completed on 30 September 1940.

As built she carried twelve 6 inch guns in four triple turrets, eight 4 inch anti-aircraft guns, torpedo tubes and a seaplane, on a hull of some 8,500 tons; the story of the design is told in the article on her sister HMS Fiji, with whom she patrolled the Denmark Strait in the spring of 1941.

The Home Fleet, 1940 and 1941

She joined the 10th Cruiser Squadron of the Home Fleet in October 1940, and her first months were the usual round of the northern waters: patrols in the approaches, cover for the minelayers laying the Northern Barrage, and searches for the German raiders breaking out into the Atlantic.

At Christmas 1940 she sailed with Repulse to cover the Atlantic convoys after the cruiser Admiral Hipper attacked a troop convoy, and in March 1941 she escorted the landing ships for the commando raid on the Lofoten Islands.

On 28 June 1941, north east of Iceland near Jan Mayen, Nigeria led a force of cruisers and destroyers that intercepted the German weather ship Lauenburg. The boarding party from Tartar got aboard before the Germans could destroy everything, and recovered the Enigma settings for the following month, which helped Bletchley Park to read the German naval cipher through the summer.

Operations like this one, aimed at the trawlers and weather ships that carried the cipher material, were among the most closely kept secrets of the war.

Spitsbergen and the Bremse

In late July she went north with the cruiser Aurora to look at Bear Island as a refuelling point for the escorts of the Russian convoys that were about to begin, and on 1 August took off the Norwegians there and destroyed the weather station. In August came Operation Gauntlet.

Nigeria and Aurora escorted the liner Empress of Australia, carrying Canadian troops, to Spitsbergen, where the coal mines were wrecked to deny them to the Germans, the Russian miners at Barentsburg were taken off to Archangel and the Norwegians were brought home to Britain.

On the way back, on 7 September 1941, in bad visibility off Porsangerfjord in the far north of Norway, Nigeria and Aurora came on two German troopships and their escort, the gunnery training ship Bremse. The troopships escaped in the murk, but the Bremse was sunk.

Nigeria's bow was damaged in the action, probably, as was later thought, by a mine, and she spent the autumn under repair on the Tyne, where she was given her first gunnery radar.

The Arctic Convoys

From January 1942 she was on the Russian run, escorting or covering the PQ convoys to Murmansk and the QP convoys home through the depths of the Arctic winter. In January she stayed on at Murmansk for some weeks, in the dark and the cold of the Kola Inlet, and in February she escorted PQ 9 and PQ 10 with the destroyers Faulknor and Intrepid and brought PQ 11 in with Russian destroyers alongside.

At the beginning of May she joined the escort of QP 11 after the loss of Edinburgh, and a fortnight later was in the covering force for the damaged Trinidad on her attempt to get home, when the cruiser was bombed and lost. At the end of June she was in the distant covering force for PQ 17 with Duke of York and the American battleship Washington, and so was far away when the convoy was ordered to scatter.

Pedestal

In August 1942 she was sent south to join Operation Pedestal, the convoy fought through to Malta, as flagship of Rear Admiral Harold Burrough's Force X, the cruisers and destroyers that were to see the merchant ships through the Sicilian Narrows after the battleships and carriers turned back.

On the evening of 12 August, as the convoy entered the Skerki Channel and the heavy ships left it, the Italian submarine Axum fired a salvo of four torpedoes that hit three ships in a few seconds: Nigeria, the anti-aircraft cruiser Cairo and the tanker Ohio, on whose cargo of fuel the whole operation turned.

Cairo had to be sunk. Nigeria was badly damaged and listing, with fifty two of her men killed, and Burrough shifted his flag to the destroyer Ashanti and went on with the convoy. Nigeria was sent back to Gibraltar with three destroyers as escort, and got there.

That night and the next day the convoy lost Manchester and most of its merchant ships, while Kenya was hit too, and the destroyers' part in it is told in the article on HMS Foresight. Five merchant ships, Ohio among them, reached Malta.

Charleston

After temporary repairs at Gibraltar she crossed the Atlantic, and from 23 October 1942 she was in the hands of the United States Navy Yard at Charleston, South Carolina, for repairs and a refit that lasted until the summer of 1943. Her aircraft and catapult were removed and new radar was fitted.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken at the yard in June 1943, as the work drew to a close, with her ship's company fallen in along her rails and her new camouflage fresh. She came home that September and finished her refit at Chatham.

The Eastern Fleet

Early in 1944 she was with the Home Fleet for a carrier strike on German shipping off the Norwegian coast, alongside Belfast, in which Barracuda bombers from Furious hit a merchant ship and a repair ship for the loss of one Seafire, and then went east to join the Eastern Fleet in Ceylon at the end of March.

With her sister Ceylon she escorted the battleships covering the carrier raids on Sabang and Surabaya, and in July took part in the bombardment of Sabang. In the autumn she escorted the submarine depot ship Maidstone to Fremantle in Western Australia.

From December 1944 she supported the army's advance down the coast of Burma. In January 1945 she covered the commando landing on the Akyab peninsula, landed Royal Marines on Cheduba Island and bombarded the west coast of Ramree Island, and in July she covered minesweeping off the Malayan coast and shelled Car Nicobar.

On 9 September she was off Port Dickson, with Ceylon and the battleship Nelson, for the landings that reoccupied Malaya.

The South Atlantic and India

After the war she served as flagship of the South Atlantic Station from Simonstown, visiting Lagos in the colony whose name she bore and exercising with the new South African Navy.

Her cruises took her as far south as the Antarctic, where in those years Argentina was pressing its claim to the Falkland Islands Dependencies, and her captain delivered a formal protest to Argentine naval tugs found at Melchior in the Palmer Archipelago. She paid off into reserve in 1951 and in 1954 was sold to India for some three hundred thousand pounds.

Cammell Laird at Birkenhead rebuilt her with a new bridge, lattice masts and modern radar, and on 29 August 1957 she was commissioned into the Indian Navy as INS Mysore, its flagship. In 1959, during an exercise in the Indian Ocean, she collided with the British destroyer Hogue, which was so badly damaged that she was never repaired. Mysore served on into the 1980s.