HMS Royalist (C89): From the Tirpitz Raid to a New Zealand Flag

Constructed at Greenock, Delayed Into a Different War

HMS Royalist was laid down by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering at Greenock on 21 March 1940, but her construction stretched on for years, not launching until May 1942 and not commissioning until September 1943, a Dido-class light cruiser that joined the fleet just as the war's momentum was beginning to turn decisively in the Allies' favour.

She belonged specifically to the Bellona sub-group, five improved Dido-class ships built with only four twin 5.25-inch turrets instead of five. The lighter armament wasn't really a compromise so much as a deliberate trade: dropping a turret and lowering the bridge by a full deck freed up enough weight and stability to fit proper radar fire control to every remaining gun, plus a considerably heavier close-range anti-aircraft battery, a sensible swap given how much of her wartime career would end up being spent fending off aircraft rather than trading broadsides with enemy cruisers.

Three of the five Bellonas are here, and they make the case for the design better than any specification does. HMS Bellona (63) gave the sub-group its name; HMS Black Prince (81) went from sinking German torpedo boats in the Channel to shelling the Japanese home islands; and HMS Diadem (84) was covering the same Tirpitz operations as Royalist and finished her career as the flagship of the Pakistan Navy. Every one of them spent far more time defending a fleet against aircraft than fighting other cruisers, which is exactly what the fourth turret had been given up for.

Flagship for the Strike on Tirpitz

Royalist joined the Home Fleet in March 1944 and immediately found herself at the centre of one of the war's more dramatic operations, leading a group of escort carriers out to their launch position as flagship for Operation Tungsten, the carrier-launched air raid of 3 April against the German battleship Tirpitz, sheltering in Kaafjord, deep in a Norwegian fjord. The strike failed to sink Tirpitz outright but battered her superstructure badly enough to keep her out of action for months, and Royalist went on to escort further carrier strikes against Norwegian coastal shipping that spring.

Tungsten deserves the detail, because it is one of the most successful carrier strikes anybody flew in the entire war. The force rendezvoused about a hundred and twenty miles off the Norwegian coast: the fleet carriers HMS Furious (47) and Victorious with the strike aircraft, and four escort carriers with the fighters, and it was that second group Royalist was leading. The attack went in on the morning of 3 April 1944 in two waves, each of twenty-one Fairey Barracuda dive bombers with about forty fighters over them.

They put fourteen bombs into Tirpitz in roughly a minute. The bombs were too light to get through her main armour and the ship did not sink, but her upper works were wrecked, a hundred and twenty-two of her people were killed and more than three hundred wounded, and she was out of action for over two months. Three aircraft were lost, two Barracudas and a fighter, with a fourth Barracuda going into the sea on take-off. That is a battleship removed from the war for a quarter of a year at the cost of three aeroplanes, and it is the sort of exchange rate that explains why nobody built battleships afterwards.

Southern France and a Sinking Off Crete

After a refit that summer, Royalist deployed to the Mediterranean for Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France in August 1944, serving as flagship of Task Force 88 under Rear Admiral Thomas Hope Troubridge and taking responsibility for maintaining air superiority over the invasion beaches.

She subsequently joined the Aegean Force and, on 15 September 1944, sank the transport vessels KT4 and KT26 off Cape Spatha, a direct combat success in a theatre that saw plenty of hard, less-heralded fighting against German shipping.

Flagship for the Assault on Rangoon

By April 1945, Royalist had moved on to the Far East, serving as flagship of the 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron supporting the Rangoon landings of Operation Dracula, before continuing on to Operation Mitre and further carrier raids against targets in the East Indies and Sumatra right up until the war's end, an extraordinary geographic spread of major operations for a single cruiser within just eighteen months of active service.

The Hunt for the Haguro

Barely three weeks after Rangoon, Royalist was back in action as flagship of the 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron under Commodore G. N. Oliver for Operation Dukedom, the hunt for a Japanese naval force attempting to evacuate the Andaman Islands. On 15 May 1945, her aircraft located the heavy cruiser Haguro, and that night the destroyers of the 26th Destroyer Flotilla ran her down and sank her in a close-range torpedo action in the Malacca Strait, one of the last classic cruiser-hunting destroyer actions of the Second World War, with Royalist's own part in it a matter of coordinating the search rather than firing a shot in anger.

That action is told at length elsewhere in these pages, from the small end. HMS Rapid (F138) carries the account of what the 26th Destroyer Flotilla actually did in the Malacca Strait that night, and HMS Roebuck (F195) was one of the ships out of Trincomalee in the covering force. Coordinating the search rather than firing a shot is not a small contribution: five destroyers found a heavy cruiser in the dark in a strait a hundred and eighty miles long because somebody had put an aircraft over her first and told them where to go.

Sold Half-Rebuilt to New Zealand

Royalist was decommissioned in 1946, and the Royal Navy began planning a modernisation in 1953, only for defence budget cuts under Winston Churchill's post-war government to force a change of plan.

The half-renovated cruiser was instead transferred to the Royal New Zealand Navy in 1956, with New Zealand covering the substantial £4.5 million cost of completing her reconstruction, and she recommissioned as HMNZS Royalist for an entirely new chapter of service on the other side of the world.

A Second Career in the Pacific

Royalist's very first outing under the New Zealand flag came with a diplomatic sting in the tail. Freshly handed over and still working up with the Mediterranean Fleet, she was placed at full war readiness on 30 October 1956 as the Suez Crisis broke, only for the New Zealand Government to order her withdrawn from any involvement, to the reported frustration of her own ship's company. She then had to complete her delivery voyage to New Zealand the long way round, via South Africa, since the Suez Canal she had just been kept out of fighting for was itself closed by the very crisis.

The Suez business is worth a moment, because it says something about what had changed. New Zealand had spent two world wars sending men and ships wherever Britain asked, and in 1956 she declined. Royalist had been paid for by New Zealand, manned largely by New Zealanders and commissioned into the Royal New Zealand Navy, and when the crisis came the decision about what she did was made in Wellington rather than London, and the answer was no. Her ship's company, who had been closed up at war readiness, are recorded as having taken it badly. It is one of the moments where the old arrangement quietly stopped working, and it happened to a ship that had been in the Royal Navy nine months earlier.

She went on to serve for a decade in Far East and Pacific waters, bombarding suspected terrorist positions during the Malayan Emergency in February 1958, showing the flag on a 1962 cruise up the North American Pacific coast that called at Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco among other ports, and finally serving through the Indonesia-Malaysia Confrontation between 1963 and 1965.

By 1965 her age was catching up with her. On 1 November that year, sailing home through the Coral Sea, she suffered a serious breakdown when salt water contaminated her condenser feed-water, a chronic affliction of ageing steam warships that crews rather bleakly nicknamed "condenseritis". Taken under tow to Auckland, she spent her final months alongside as a stationary training ship before being formally decommissioned on 4 July 1966.

A Long Tow to a Japanese Scrapyard

Reverting to Royal Navy ownership in 1967, Royalist had her guns cut into sections for scrap on the spot before the empty hulk was sold to Japan's Nissho Company and towed from Auckland all the way to Osaka, arriving on 31 December 1967 to be broken up early the following year, an unglamorous final voyage for a cruiser whose wartime career had taken her from a raid on Germany's most feared battleship to the beaches of southern France, the assault on Rangoon and the sinking of the Haguro, and whose peacetime service had carried the flag of two different nations across two very different oceans.

The tow to Osaka is a fitting last detail. She had spent her war fighting the Japanese in the Bay of Bengal and the Malacca Strait, and in December 1967 she was pulled seven thousand miles across the Pacific by a tug to be cut up in a Japanese yard, having first had her guns sawn into pieces in Auckland so that nobody could argue about what was being sold. Twenty-two years after the war she was still, in a very literal sense, being disarmed. She was twenty-four years old, she had served two navies, and she had been in more major operations in eighteen months of 1944 and 1945 than most cruisers manage in a decade.