HMS Superb (25): Under Fire in the Corfu Channel

Built on the Tyne, Too Late for the War

HMS Superb was built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson at Wallsend, her keel laid on 23 June 1942 and launched on 31 August 1943, but she did not enter active service until 16 November 1945, a Minotaur-class light cruiser that arrived just as the conflict she had been built for was ending.

Fired On in the Corfu Channel

Superb's most dramatic moment came remarkably early in her career. On 15 May 1946, under the command of Captain W. Geoffrey A. Robson, she and HMS Orion, the only two Royal Navy ships present, came under fire from Albanian coastal artillery while passing through the Corfu Channel, an early and unsettling confrontation of the emerging Cold War. Eighteen rounds came down over roughly seven minutes, the closest splashes landing barely a hundred metres away, yet no alarm was even sounded aboard Superb, one crewman later recalling hearing the distant gunfire and simply assuming it was somebody else's problem.

Superb had arrived in the Mediterranean back in January 1946 to join the 15th Cruiser Squadron, and the weeks either side of the Corfu Channel drama were otherwise spent showing the flag around a string of Mediterranean ports, Malta in February, Venice in April, Trieste in May and Haifa in June among them, putting into Valletta again on 25 May, just ten days after the shelling, and once more a month later. She left the Mediterranean for the Home Fleet's 10th Cruiser Squadron that September, some weeks before Saumarez and Volage struck their mines.

No damage or casualties resulted from the shelling, but Britain's demand for an apology went unanswered, setting the stage for a far more serious incident that October, when the destroyers HMS Saumarez and HMS Volage struck mines in the same waters, an attack that killed forty-four men and injured forty-two more, though Superb herself had left the station before that second and deadlier encounter.

A Case That Reached the World Court

The Corfu Channel incidents eventually became a landmark case before the International Court of Justice, which in December 1949 awarded Britain substantial compensation while also finding that Operation Retail, a British minesweeping operation carried out in Albanian waters without permission on 12 and 13 November 1946 that recovered 22 German-made moored mines, had itself violated Albanian sovereignty, a truly significant early precedent in international maritime law that grew directly out of the confrontation Superb had first been caught up in.

Case Number One, and Forty-Three Years to Pay

It is worth knowing quite how foundational that judgment is. The International Court of Justice had been created in 1945 and had never heard a contested case; Corfu Channel is literally case number one on its own list, the first argument two states ever put in front of it. What it decided has been quoted ever since: that a state has the right of innocent passage through an international strait without needing anybody's permission, and that a state which knows of a danger in its own waters and says nothing is responsible for what happens. Both halves are still doing work. The first is the principle a British warship is relying on every time she goes through the Taiwan Strait or the Strait of Hormuz.

The money is the part nobody tells you. The court assessed the damages at £843,947, a very large sum in 1949, and Albania simply did not pay. It went on not paying for forty-three years. What made it possible to settle in the end was an entirely separate quarrel: Britain was holding more than two tons of gold looted by the Germans from the Albanian national bank, which both Albania and Italy claimed, and which had generated a second case in the same court. The two disputes were eventually traded against one another. A memorandum signed in Rome on 8 May 1992 had Albania pay two million dollars and Britain release 1,674 kilogrammes of gold, neither side charging the other for four decades of interest or custody, and the Tripartite Gold Commission handed the bullion over in 1996. Fifty years after two destroyers were mined, the account was closed with a consignment of Nazi gold.

The mining itself, and what it was like aboard the ships that struck the mines, is set out in HMS St Austell Bay (K634), who was on the station at the time, and the same waters turn up again in HMS Mauritius (80).

Flagship Duties and the Coronation Review

Superb went on to serve as flagship for Rear Admiral Sir Herbert Packer and took her place in the Fleet Review celebrating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, a proud and much calmer occasion than her introduction to active service had been.

The Review That Emptied the Fleet

A twelve-year-old cruiser being scrapped needs explaining, and the explanation is one document. The Defence White Paper of April 1957, produced by Duncan Sandys, is the most consequential thing that happened to the British armed forces in the second half of the twentieth century. Its argument was that the nuclear deterrent had made large conventional forces largely pointless, that guided missiles would replace both manned fighters and gun-armed warships within a decade, and that Britain could not in any case afford the fleet it had. National Service was to end, the fighter programme was cut to almost nothing, and the Navy was told to plan around a much smaller number of much more modern ships.

The effect on ships like Superb was immediate and total. A gun cruiser was, by the logic of the paper, an expensive anachronism, and the modernisations that had been sketched for her were cancelled outright. Dozens of cruisers, destroyers and escorts that had been kept in reserve against a future that no longer existed went to the breakers over the following few years, many of them younger than she was and several of them never having fired a shot. The missile ships the paper promised did arrive eventually, and one of them, HMS Devonshire (D02), carried the name of one of the cruisers the review helped kill. Whether the trade was a good one was argued about for the next thirty years and is still not settled.

There is a small postscript in the manner of her going. Superb went to Dalmuir in August 1960 and was still being cut up at Troon two years later, which for a light cruiser is a remarkably long time. Ship-breaking in Britain in the early 1960s was overwhelmed: the yards had more warships arriving than they could process, because the entire wartime and immediate postwar fleet was being disposed of at once. She spent longer being taken apart than she had spent in the Mediterranean.

Scrapped as Priorities Shifted

Following a refit between 1955 and 1956, Superb was decommissioned in December 1957 as the Royal Navy's 1957 Defence Review shifted its priorities decisively towards guided-missile vessels, abandoning plans for her further modernisation. She was approved for disposal two years later and arrived at the Dalmuir yards of Arnott Young on 8 August 1960, though breaking her up proved a slower business than sinking her ever would have been: the part-dismantled hull was towed on to Troon's West of Scotland Shipbreaking Company in May 1961, and the job was not finally finished until August 1962, the best part of two years after scrapping began.