HMS Orion (85): Thirteen Battle Honours, From Calabria to the Corfu Channel

Built at Devonport

HMS Orion was one of the five ships of the Leander Class, the Navy's first modern 6 inch gun cruisers, with eight 6 inch guns in four twin turrets, a single broad funnel and a speed of 32 knots. She was ordered from Devonport Dockyard on 24 March 1931, laid down that September, launched on 24 November 1932 and completed on 18 January 1934. In November 1941 the City of Nottingham adopted her.

The West Indies

When war came she was with the 8th Cruiser Squadron on the America and West Indies Station, based at Kingston in Jamaica, hunting the German merchant ships trying to slip home from Caribbean and American ports. On 23 October 1939 she sighted the German tanker Emmy Friedrich in the Yucatan Channel; when the cruiser Caradoc closed her, her crew scuttled her.

In December, with the help of American aircraft, Orion intercepted the freighter Arauca off Florida, which ran into Port Everglades and was interned. By the end of the year she had spent 102 of the war's first 116 days at sea.

In February 1940 she carried home to Britain the ashes of Lord Tweedsmuir, the novelist John Buchan, who had died as Governor General of Canada.

The Mediterranean, 1940

In May 1940 she joined the 7th Cruiser Squadron at Alexandria. Within a fortnight of Italy's declaration of war she was bombarding Bardia, and on 9 July she was at the Battle of Calabria with Warspite, Malaya and Eagle, the first meeting of the British and Italian battle fleets.

In October, when her sister cruiser Liverpool was torpedoed by Italian aircraft off Crete and lost her bow, Orion took her in tow, and when the tow parted after a hundred miles she got it across again and brought her into Alexandria.

In November she led a night raid into the Strait of Otranto that sank all four ships of an Italian convoy, on the same night that the Swordfish from Illustrious struck at Taranto, and in January 1941 she sank the burning wreck of the cruiser Southampton with torpedoes after German dive bombers had crippled her.

Matapan

At the end of March 1941 Orion was flagship of Vice Admiral Henry Pridham-Wippell's cruiser force south of Crete when, on the morning of 28 March, the cruisers sighted the Italian fleet. Outgunned, they fell back towards Admiral Cunningham's battleships, drawing the Italians after them, and the aircraft from Formidable went in to the attack.

The night action that followed, in which three Italian heavy cruisers and two destroyers were sunk, is told in the article on HMS Greyhound.

Crete

In April she helped take the army off Greece, and on the night of 21 May she was with the cruisers and destroyers that destroyed a German troop convoy of caiques off Canea. A week later the island had to be given up.

On 28 May Orion sailed from Alexandria with Ajax, Dido and destroyers, the flagship of Vice Admiral Bernard Rawlings, to take off the garrison of Heraklion, and that night they embarked some four thousand men, well over a thousand of them in Orion alone, crammed into every space on her decks and below.

At dawn on 29 May, off the eastern end of Crete, the dive bombers came. Through the morning the squadron was attacked again and again. Hereward was hit and lost, and Orion was struck on A turret and then on her bridge, where her captain, Captain Geoffrey Back, was mortally wounded and Rawlings himself wounded.

A bomb burst on her crowded mess decks, among the soldiers. Fires broke out, her steering and communications were damaged, and she was down to twelve knots, but she reached Alexandria that evening with her guns almost out of ammunition.

More than a hundred of her own men and some hundreds of the soldiers she was carrying had been killed, and hundreds more wounded, one of the heaviest losses suffered by any British warship that was not sunk.

California

She was patched up at Alexandria and went round the Cape to Simonstown, where her catapult was removed, and then across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to the United States Navy Yard at Mare Island in California, which she reached on 5 September 1941. Her permanent repairs took five months.

The photograph at the top of this page was taken on 20 February 1942, as she ran her trials off California with her ship's company lining the rails. She came home by way of Devonport, where she was given a full set of British radar.

Sicily, Salerno and Anzio

By the end of 1942 she was back in the Mediterranean with the 15th Cruiser Squadron, escorting the convoys that relieved Malta. In 1943 she bombarded Pantelleria and Lampedusa before their surrender, supported the landings in Sicily, shelled Augusta and the Straits of Messina, and on 11 September gave gunfire support at Salerno during the German counter-attack that nearly drove the Allies back into the sea.

At the turn of the year she was shelling Gaeta in support of the army on the Garigliano, and from January to March 1944 she took her turn on the gun line off Anzio.

Gold Beach and the South of France

For the invasion of Normandy she joined Bombardment Force K for Gold Beach, with Argonaut, Ajax, Emerald and the Dutch gunboat Flores. On the morning of 6 June 1944 she opened fire on the German battery at Mont Fleury, and she has long been credited with firing the first shell of the D-Day bombardment.

Within a few days she had worn out her gun barrels and had to go back to Portsmouth for new ones. In August she was flagship of the gunfire support group for the landings in the south of France, and King George VI visited her at Naples.

Greece, Yalta and the Corfu Channel

That autumn she covered the liberation of the Aegean islands and Greece, and in December 1944 her Royal Marines were landed in Athens to deal with snipers during the fighting between the Greek factions. In February 1945, at Malta, Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt met aboard her before flying on to the Yalta conference with Stalin.

In May she was at Trieste, and on 15 May she was fired on by Albanian shore batteries in the Corfu Channel, a foretaste of the incident the following year in which Albanian mines badly damaged two British destroyers and killed forty four men.

Thirteen Battle Honours

She came home to Devonport and paid off on 5 July 1946, and was never recommissioned. In 1948 she was used in Loch Striven for trials of the effect of underwater explosions on a ship's hull, and in 1949 she was sold and broken up at Troon.

Her thirteen battle honours for the Second World War were a total bettered by only one ship in the Navy, Warspite. The other prints of her class are in the Leander Class cruisers collection.