HMS Shropshire (73): The Cruiser Given Away as a Gift, and the Battle Honour It Never Fired

Built on the Clyde

HMS Shropshire was built by William Beardmore and Company at Dalmuir on the Clyde, ordered in March 1926, laid down in February 1927, launched on 5 July 1928 by Violet Herbert, Countess of Powis, and commissioned into the Royal Navy on 24 September 1929, a County-class heavy cruiser that would go on to serve two navies across a truly eventful career.

What a Treaty Cruiser Actually Was

The County class exists because of a piece of paper. The Washington agreement of 1922 capped any new cruiser at ten thousand tons and eight-inch guns, and every navy then had to decide what to spend that allowance on. Britain, with the longest trade routes in the world and an empire to police, spent hers on range and seakeeping: a big, dry, high-sided ship with three tall funnels that could cross an ocean and still have a crew fit to fight at the other end. What she could not have, on ten thousand tons, was armour, and that was understood at the time to be the price. Thirteen were built for the Royal Navy and two more for Australia, and a good many of them are here: HMS Kent (54), HMS Suffolk (55), HMS Cornwall (56), HMS Cumberland (57), HMS Norfolk (78) and HMS Dorsetshire (40).

Shropshire belonged to the second batch, the four London ships, and two of her immediate sisters have their own accounts: HMS Devonshire (39) and HMS Sussex (96). The detail that matters most to everything that follows, though, is one the article never states outright: HMAS Canberra was a County too. When Australia lost her, Britain did not hand over a rough substitute from the back of the fleet. It handed over a near-sister, built to the same drawings on the same treaty tonnage, and one that had just been through a refit Canberra never got.

Interwar Duties and the Outbreak of War

Shropshire served with the Mediterranean Fleet from November 1929, responded to the Abyssinia Crisis of 1935 and 1936, and supported refugee evacuations during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. When war broke out she moved to the South Atlantic for trade protection, intercepting the German merchant ship Adolf Leonhardt in December 1939, which was scuttled by her own crew rather than be captured.

After a refit, Shropshire spent 1940 and 1941 on Indian Ocean convoy escort and East African campaign duties, bombarding Mogadishu and Kismayu and sinking the Italian vessel Pensilvania off the Somali coast in February 1941.

The Battle Honour She Never Fired

Shropshire's official battle honours include Atlantic 1941 and Arctic 1941, and the second of those tells a rather good story precisely because nothing dramatic happened in it. In August 1941 she escorted the elderly aircraft carrier HMS Argus to North Russia as part of Operation Strength, delivering the first Hurricane fighters and RAF ground crew sent to help defend Murmansk, then returned that October escorting Convoy QP1, one of the earliest Arctic convoys of the entire war. She never fired a shot in anger throughout the whole deployment, earning a battle honour for a theatre that, for her at least, never actually turned into a battle.

A Gift to Replace a Lost Ship

After the Australian cruiser HMAS Canberra was lost at the Battle of Savo Island in 1942, the British government transferred Shropshire to the Royal Australian Navy as a gift, a gesture personally proposed by Winston Churchill himself rather than a routine administrative decision. She was initially expected to be renamed Canberra in the lost ship's honour, but when it emerged that President Roosevelt had personally arranged for the new American cruiser USS Canberra to carry that name instead, Shropshire kept her own.

The gift only makes sense next to the loss it was answering, and the loss was a bad one. In the small hours of 9 August 1942 a Japanese cruiser force came down on the Allied screen off Savo Island and took it apart in minutes. Canberra was hit by a torpedo and then by something like twenty-eight heavy shells in about two minutes, two salvoes of them into the bridge, which mortally wounded her captain, Frank Getting. She lost power and steering almost at once. Of a ship's company of 819, 193 were casualties and 84 were killed, and by the following morning she could not be saved and was sunk by the Americans where she lay.

Churchill's proposal to the First Sea Lord was that "we gave freely and outright to the Royal Australian Navy one of our similar ships", and the phrase is worth noticing: freely and outright, not lent, not leased, not charged against anything. The renaming was the only part that went wrong, and it went wrong in the politest possible way. President Roosevelt had a new American heavy cruiser named Canberra instead, which remains the only United States warship ever named after a foreign warship. So Australia ended up with a ship carrying the name of an English county, America ended up with a ship carrying the name of an Australian capital, and the ship's company solved the problem themselves with a stencil and a tin of paint.

Following a refit at Chatham, her captain, John Augustine Collins, successfully argued for her to be recognised administratively as a commissioned Australian warship from 17 April 1943, a change made in part simply to sort out the rum ration for her Australian crew, and she arrived in Sydney that October. Survivors from Canberra's own crew joined her ship's company at Chatham, and her gun turret crews stencilled the word CANBERRA inside their own turrets, a private reminder of exactly whose loss they were there to avenge.

The Refit That Made Her

The Chatham refit ran from December 1942 to the following June and is the reason the rest of her career reads the way it does. Her aircraft and catapult were landed and she carried no aircraft at all in Australian service. Her 4-inch anti-aircraft guns went into twin mountings. Eighteen 20mm Oerlikons were added, in seven twin and four single mountings, along with two eight-barrelled pom-poms. Most importantly of all she was given radar, and a great deal of it: Type 281 for air warning, Type 273 for surface search, Type 277 for tracking aircraft, Type 285 on the anti-aircraft directors and Type 282 on the pom-poms.

That is a serious outfit for 1943, and it turned a cruiser designed in the 1920s into one of the better-equipped ships in the Pacific, which is not something that could have been said of her in 1939. The Canberra survivors who had come to England to collect her spent the waiting months in a dockyard town under air attack, manning guns against Luftwaffe night raids on Chatham. They had crossed half the world to be given a ship and were put straight back on watch before they had one.

A Hard-Fought Pacific War

As part of Task Force 74, Shropshire supported amphibious landings at Arawe and Cape Gloucester in December 1943, the Admiralty Islands campaign in March 1944, and the Hollandia landing that April.

She survived a near-miss from an accidentally dropped American bomb in May 1944, and after repairs went on to provide naval gunfire support at Aitape, Cape Sansapore, Morotai and Leyte Gulf, taking part in the decisive Battle of Surigao Strait on 25 October 1944, one of the last great battleship-versus-battleship actions in naval history.

In just fourteen minutes and forty seconds that night, her gunners fired thirty-two broadsides at the Japanese battleship Yamashiro, scoring nineteen straddles and sixteen direct hits, superb shooting by the standards of the day and, for men with CANBERRA stencilled inside their own turrets, a score properly settled.

The Last Time Battleships Fought Battleships

Surigao Strait deserves its billing, because there has never been another one. On the night of 24 October 1944 a Japanese force under Vice Admiral Nishimura tried to push north through the strait into Leyte Gulf, and found the American Seventh Fleet's battle line waiting across the far end of it, in the classic position every admiral since Nelson had wanted and almost none had ever been handed. It was the last occasion in history on which battleships fought other battleships, and the last time one fleet crossed another's T. Shropshire was in the cruiser line on the eastern side, and she was one of very few ships present that had been afloat when the Washington treaty that shaped her was still new.

She opened fire at about ten to four in the morning at a range of some 12,700 yards, shooting on radar in the dark at a battleship she could not see. Her captain, C A G Nichols, described the moment it came together: after the ranging salvoes, he wrote, "the fall of shot bell coincided exactly with a big and seemingly red flash on the radar, for every salvo, but one, until we ceased fire". Yamashiro capsized at nineteen minutes past four. Shropshire remains the only Australian warship ever to have hit an enemy battleship with her main armament, which is a distinction no ship can now take from her, since there are no longer any battleships to hit.

During the Battle of Luzon in January 1945 she was attacked by two kamikaze aircraft, one missing narrowly and the other shot down by HMAS Gascoyne so close that debris struck Shropshire's own decks, a sharp reminder of just how perilous these Pacific operations had become. Across her whole Pacific campaign her own gunners were credited with downing at least eleven enemy aircraft, a tally that says as much about how often she was attacked as it does about her crew's marksmanship.

Present at the Surrender

Shropshire fired in anger for the last time during the Corregidor landings before returning briefly to Australia, and was present in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945 for the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, a fitting final chapter for a ship that had fought almost continuously across the Pacific theatre.

Remarkably, only five of her crew died during her entire RAN service, none of them to enemy action, a fortunate record given how much combat she saw.

Her people called her the Lucky Ship, and they meant it literally rather than fondly. Fifteen actions in eighteen months, at least two torpedoes that ran past her, kamikazes that missed, and not one man killed by the enemy in the whole of it. The right comparison is her own sister. Sussex was bombed, torpedoed and struck by a kamikaze and carried on regardless, which is the more usual County-class experience of the same war. Luck is not a war-winning quality and no navy plans around it, but a ship that has it acquires a reputation very quickly, and every man aboard Shropshire knew exactly what he was standing on.

Decommissioning and Scrapping

After further service ferrying Australian forces home and further duty in Japanese waters, Shropshire decommissioned at Sydney on 10 November 1949. She was sold to Thos. W. Ward of Sheffield in July 1954 for £82,500, and broken up at Dalmuir and Troon through 1955, ending her days within sight of the very Clyde shipyard where she had been built nearly three decades earlier.

Even her ending took some organising. She did not steam home to be scrapped, she was towed, the Dutch tug Oostzee taking her out of Sydney on 9 October 1954 for a passage halfway round the world. Breaking up began at Dalmuir on 20 January 1955 and the hull was later shifted round to Troon, where the work resumed on 19 September. She was cut apart on the same stretch of water she had been launched into twenty-six years before, which is either a neat piece of symmetry or a rather bleak one. One thing outlived her: a silver bugle presented to the ship by the King's Shropshire Light Infantry, kept by the Royal Australian Navy after she paid off and put on display in Canberra for decades afterwards. An English county's infantry regiment, an Australian cruiser and a Scottish shipyard, all in one object, which is about right for a ship that spent her life belonging to two navies at once.