HMS Phoebe (43): The Cruiser That Survived Being Torpedoed Twice

An Anti-Aircraft Cruiser for a New Kind of War

HMS Phoebe was one of the Royal Navy's Dido-class light cruisers, a design built around a new idea for the 1930s: a dual-purpose 5.25-inch main armament capable of engaging both enemy ships and enemy aircraft, exactly the sort of flexibility the coming war would demand in enormous quantities.

She was built by Fairfield's yard at Govan on the Clyde, her keel laid on 2 September 1937, launched in March 1939, and commissioned on 30 September 1940, completing with eight of her main guns in four turrets rather than the ten originally planned, alongside six torpedo tubes and a heavy anti-aircraft outfit. She was one of only two cruisers Fairfield turned out during the entire war, against a wartime tally that otherwise ran to a battleship, an aircraft carrier, eighteen destroyers and two sloops, and during Warship Week in 1942 she was formally adopted by the people of Bournemouth. She would need every one of those guns almost immediately.

Rescue Off Greece, and a First Near-Miss

Phoebe joined the Mediterranean Fleet in April 1941, straight into the chaos of Operation Demon, the evacuation of Allied forces from Greece as the German invasion overran the country. On 27 April she was part of the force that took some 2,500 soldiers off the stricken Dutch troopship Costa Rica without losing a man, before going on to support the Syria-Lebanon campaign that June.

On 3 July she survived an attack by the Italian submarine Malachite, whose torpedoes missed their mark, a lucky escape that would not be repeated twice more before the war was through.

The Costa Rica is worth understanding properly, because it was a piece of seamanship rather than a piece of luck. She was carrying about two and a half thousand Australian and British troops out of Kalamata when German aircraft put a bomb close enough alongside to spring her plates, and she took about ninety minutes to go. In that time HMS Defender ran alongside her and took men off as they jumped or swung across on ropes, HMS Hero picked up those already in the water and then came alongside for the soldiers still manning the transport's own guns, and HMS Hereward (H93) replaced Defender and lifted the rest. Everybody got off. Bringing three destroyers alongside a sinking, crowded transport in the open sea under air attack and losing nobody is the sort of thing that never makes a headline, precisely because nothing went wrong.

Torpedoed Off Tobruk

Her luck ran out, partially, on 27 August 1941. While supporting the perilous supply runs into besieged Tobruk, Phoebe was struck by a torpedo dropped from an Italian SM.79 bomber, tearing a hole roughly 28 feet by 18 feet in her hull and causing serious flooding.

She made it to Alexandria for emergency repairs before crossing the Atlantic for a full refit in New York, work that kept her out of action from November 1941 to April 1942.

Carrying the King, and Running the Malta Gauntlet

Back in service by the summer of 1942, Phoebe was given the signal honour of carrying King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Belfast on 24 June, before returning to war work that August as an anti-aircraft escort for Operation Pedestal, the desperate convoy operation to resupply besieged Malta against overwhelming Axis air and submarine attack.

Pedestal remains one of the most fiercely contested convoy battles of the war, and Phoebe's role screening the merchant ships from air attack put her back in the thick of exactly the kind of combat her dual-purpose guns had been designed for.

A Second Torpedo, and Forty-Two Lives Lost

Phoebe's second brush with a torpedo was far more costly than her first. On 23 October 1942, off Pointe Noire in French Equatorial Africa, she was struck by the German submarine U-161, which tore a hole roughly 40 feet by 30 feet in her side.

Forty-two of her crew were killed, a heavy loss that stands as the gravest single day of Phoebe's war, and a grimmer one than the blast alone might suggest: the torpedo had wrecked 'B' turret and its magazine, and most of the dead were killed not by the explosion itself but by the acrid nitric and nitrous fumes it threw off, fumes that could down a man up to sixteen hours after he had first breathed them in and walked away feeling fine. Five Royal Marines were among the lost, including the ship's own bandmaster, Albert Erridge.

She underwent emergency repairs at Pointe Noire before crossing the Atlantic once more, this time to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, for the extensive work needed to return her to full fighting condition, work that occupied her from January to June 1943.

The boat that did it had a reputation. U-161 was commanded by Albrecht Achilles, who had made his name earlier that year by taking her inside defended harbours rather than waiting outside them: into Port of Spain in Trinidad in February 1942 and into Castries in St Lucia in March, torpedoing ships at their moorings on both occasions and getting out again. She did not last much longer than Phoebe's repairs. On 27 September 1943 an American Mariner flying boat caught her off Bahia and sank her with all fifty-three hands.

Back to the Mediterranean, Then On to the Indian Ocean

Phoebe returned to service that July and rejoined the Mediterranean Fleet for the Dodecanese campaign that autumn, shelling Kalymnos and supplying the garrison at Kastellorizo, before providing gunfire support for the Anzio landings between February and August 1944, one of the war's more gruelling and drawn-out amphibious campaigns.

Her war then took her a very long way from home: transferred to the Eastern Fleet in March 1944, she arrived at Trincomalee in Ceylon that June and went on to take part in Operation Crimson against Sabang in northern Sumatra, Operation Millet against the Nicobar Islands, and finally a string of Burma operations in early 1945 covering the landings at Akyab, Ramree Island and the amphibious assault on Rangoon.

A Quiet Postwar Coda

After Japan's surrender, Phoebe came home for a refit and spent a further five years with the peacetime Mediterranean Fleet.

In early 1948 she was given one last significant task, carrying Royal Marines of 40 Commando to Haifa during the final, fraught British withdrawal from Palestine, and on 30 June 1948 she embarked the last General Officer Commanding Palestine and the rearguard troops as British rule there came to its end.

She spent her final years in reserve before being sold for scrap in 1956, closing the book on a career that had seen her torpedoed twice, decorated for action across three theatres, and present at both the beginning and the end of some of the twentieth century's defining imperial moments.

The Phoebe That Took the Essex

The name had form. In 1814 an earlier HMS Phoebe, a thirty-six-gun frigate under Captain James Hillyar, fought the most argued-about single-ship action of the War of 1812. Captain David Porter had taken the American frigate USS Essex round the Horn and spent a year destroying the British whaling fleet in the Pacific, capturing a dozen ships and arming one of them as Essex Junior. In February 1814 Hillyar arrived off Valparaiso with Phoebe and the sloop Cherub and simply sat there. For six weeks Porter could not get out.

The armament is the whole story. Essex carried forty 32-pounder carronades and only six long twelve-pounders: devastating at close range and almost useless beyond it. Phoebe carried twenty-six long eighteen-pounders. Hillyar knew exactly what he had, and he had no intention whatever of coming inside carronade range to give the Americans a fair fight, which was professional of him and did not make him popular.

On 28 March a squall parted one of Essex's cables. Porter decided to run for it, and a second squall took away his main topmast before he was clear. Phoebe and Cherub took up station where their long guns could reach him and his carronades could not, and spent the next two hours and more knocking his ship to pieces from a distance. Essex caught fire twice, failed to get herself ashore and struck at about twenty past six. Fifty-eight of her people were dead and sixty-six wounded, and perhaps a hundred more had gone over the side and swum for the beach. Phoebe and Cherub between them had five dead and ten wounded.

All of it happened inside Chilean territorial waters, which were neutral, and the Americans have been complaining about it for two centuries. Hillyar's answer was that Essex had given up the protection of neutrality the moment she tried to leave under sail. The ship herself ended as a British prison hulk and was sold off in 1837. It is not a chivalrous story, but it is a very efficient one, and a cruiser built to shoot down aeroplanes from a long way off with dual-purpose guns was arguably carrying on the family tradition.

One of the War's Great Survivors

Very few Royal Navy cruisers absorbed as much punishment as HMS Phoebe and lived to keep fighting. Two separate torpedo strikes, either of which might reasonably have sunk a lesser-built or less fortunate ship, could not stop her serving in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal in turn.

She stands as a genuine testament to both the resilience of the Dido-class design and the sheer determination of the crews who kept ships like her fighting through some of the worst the war had to offer.