HMS Uganda (66): The Cruiser Whose Crew Voted Not to Fight On

Laid Down at Walker

HMS Uganda was built by Vickers-Armstrong at their Walker yard, launched on 7 August 1941 and commissioned on 3 January 1943, a Fiji-class light cruiser whose early service included escorting the RMS Queen Mary as she carried Winston Churchill to Washington at high speed, before deploying to the Mediterranean with the 15th Cruiser Squadron.

Escorting the Queen Mary was not a ceremonial job. The liner was carrying the Prime Minister and his staff across the Atlantic at close to thirty knots, faster than any escort could hold for long and fast enough that she normally sailed alone on the reasonable theory that no U-boat could get a firing solution on her. Uganda was there for the parts of the passage where speed was not enough, which is to say the approaches at either end. The cruiser was three months old. Her class, and the treaty arithmetic that produced it, is explained in HMS Kenya (C14).

Struck by a Guided Bomb at Salerno

After supporting the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, Uganda suffered catastrophic damage at Salerno that September, when a German Fritz X guided bomb, one of the earliest precision-guided weapons ever used in combat, passed through seven decks and her own keel before exploding underwater directly beneath the ship.

The blast killed sixteen sailors and flooded her with 1,300 tons of water.

Towed to Malta by USS Narragansett for temporary repairs, she was eventually sent all the way to Charleston, South Carolina for full reconstruction.

The weapon that nearly killed her deserves its name in full. The Fritz X was a fourteen-hundred-kilogram armour-piercing bomb with tail fins and a radio receiver, dropped from a Dornier at twenty thousand feet and steered onto the target by an operator in the aircraft watching a flare in its tail. It was the first precision-guided weapon ever used in action, it appeared in the Mediterranean in the summer of 1943 with no warning whatever, and in its first fortnight it sank the Italian battleship Roma, crippled the American cruiser Savannah and put HMS Warspite out of the war for the better part of a year.

What it did to Uganda is a lesson in how those weapons worked. It did not explode on her deck. It went through seven decks and out through the bottom of the ship, still travelling, and detonated in the water underneath her, which is very nearly the worst place a bomb can go off: an underwater explosion transmits its energy through incompressible water directly into the hull, whipping the whole structure. Sixteen men were killed and thirteen hundred tons of water came in. She kept afloat, which says a good deal for the Fiji-class hull, and she never fought as a British ship again.

Transferred to Canada

While under repair in America, Canada negotiated to acquire the ship for the Royal Canadian Navy, and the formal transfer took place on Trafalgar Day, 21 October 1944. Renamed HMCS Uganda under Captain Rollo Mainguy, she was crewed by 907 men drawn from every Canadian province and Newfoundland, the vast majority of them reservists, a remarkably representative slice of wartime Canada.

Why Canada Wanted Her

The transfer, on Trafalgar Day 1944, is worth understanding from the Canadian end. The Royal Canadian Navy had gone into the war in 1939 with thirteen ships and finished it with well over three hundred, mostly corvettes and frigates, and it had spent five years doing the hardest and least glamorous work in the Atlantic. What it had not had was a cruiser. Getting one, even a repaired one, mattered enormously to a service that had grown faster than any navy in history and was still treated in London as a useful auxiliary rather than a navy in its own right.

What it got was a British ship with British fittings, British stores and British habits, manned by nine hundred Canadians and painted with nothing Canadian on her anywhere. That sounds like a small thing. It turned out not to be.

Into the Pacific War

Uganda joined the British Pacific Fleet's Task Force 57 as its flagship, taking part in attacks on Formosa, the Sakishima Gunto islands and Japanese installations at Truk between April and July 1945, earning battle honours for the Battle of Okinawa and coming under repeated kamikaze attack.

A Crew Votes Against the War

In one of the most extraordinary episodes in Commonwealth naval history, a change in Canadian government policy required all personnel already serving in the Pacific to formally re-volunteer for continued action against Japan, many having enlisted only for hostilities against Nazi Germany.

The Ballot, and the Day It Was Held

The word usually attached to what happened next is mutiny, and it is the wrong word. Nobody refused an order. What the crew of Uganda did was fill in a form, because their own government had asked them to.

Canada had spent the war tearing itself apart over conscription, an argument that ran along the fault line between English and French Canada and had twice come close to breaking the government. Mackenzie King's answer, announced on 4 April 1945, was that nobody would be sent to the Pacific who had not volunteered for it. That was a promise made to an electorate. It also meant that every man already out there, in a ship on operations off Okinawa, had to be asked again, in writing.

The Canadian Navy's own museum at Esquimalt records the ballot as being taken on 2 June 1945, and records something else with it: the same day, the ship's company voted in the advance poll for the Canadian general election. The men marked two papers that day. One decided who would govern them. The other decided whether they would go on being shot at. The museum gives the count as 344 re-volunteering and 556 declining; other published accounts give 7 May and 605 of 907. The tallies differ, and every version agrees on the essential figure, which is that about two thirds said no.

The reasons were not abstract. Uganda had no air conditioning and no distilling plant, which in the tropics meant heat that did not let up and water that was rationed; the food was British issue and unloved; the ship had been under kamikaze attack for weeks; most of the men had been at sea for years; and there was a persistent, corrosive sense that the government at home had already decided this was not Canada's war. Mainguy addressed the ship's company before the ballot and, by the account of at least one man who was there, called them four-flushers and quitters, which pushed the undecided firmly in one direction. He was a good officer having a very bad day.

On 7 May 1945, 605 of Uganda's 907 crew refused to re-volunteer, a genuine act of collective conscience amid poor living conditions, sustained kamikaze attacks and deep uncertainty about fighting a war many felt was not truly theirs.

Captain Mainguy later reflected it seemed pretty stupid to have asked in the first place. Uganda nonetheless continued her deployment until relieved by HMS Argonaut on 27 July, her crew learning of the atomic bombings on the voyage home, and arriving at Esquimalt on 10 August 1945, the very day Japan announced its surrender.

There is a footnote to the passage home that nobody uses and everybody should. Somewhere on the way back a boiler liner collapsed, which put her out of action on her own account. Whatever the ballot had decided, Uganda was not going to be fighting anybody that August.

What Happened to Captain Mainguy

Rollo Mainguy's remark that it seemed pretty stupid to have asked in the first place is the sanest thing anybody said about the episode, and his career afterwards is the reason the story matters beyond one ship.

In the early months of 1949 the Royal Canadian Navy had three mass refusals of duty in four weeks. On 26 February ninety leading seamen shut themselves in their messdeck aboard HMCS Athabaskan. On 15 March eighty-three junior ratings did the same in HMCS Crescent. On 20 March thirty-two aircraft handlers in the carrier HMCS Magnificent refused an order. In a navy of that size, in that year, with the Cold War beginning, the first assumption in the newspapers was Communist infiltration.

The Defence Minister appointed Rear-Admiral Rollo Mainguy to find out what had actually happened. His commission concluded that there had been no Communist influence and no collusion between the three ships, and that the cause was much simpler and much more damning: an officer corps that had inherited the Royal Navy's social distance without the centuries of custom that made it work, no functioning way for a rating to raise a grievance and be heard, and a service in which Canadian sailors served under British ranks, British customs and British names with almost nothing of their own country in it.

The Mainguy Report of 1949 is the document that changed that. It got Canada its own naval identity, a workable divisional system for grievances, and a lasting principle that men who cannot complain will eventually stop obeying. The man who wrote it had learned the lesson four years earlier, in a hot ship off Okinawa, from nine hundred of his own countrymen who filled in a form and went home.

A Second Career as HMCS Quebec

Paid off in 1947, Uganda was reactivated for Canada's Korean War commitment, recommissioning as HMCS Quebec in January 1952. She led Royal Canadian Navy ships to Spithead for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953, and in 1954 and 1955 became the first Canadian naval ship to circumnavigate Africa during a seven-week Caribbean and South American cruise, before finally being paid off in June 1956.

Her second life as HMCS Quebec had one distinction worth naming properly. The seven-week cruise of 1954 and 1955 took her round Africa, and she is the first ship of the Royal Canadian Navy ever to circumnavigate the continent: a flag-showing voyage of the kind Britain had been making for two hundred years, made by a navy that had not existed within living memory, in a hull the Royal Navy had given up on after a German guided bomb went through the bottom of it.

Scrapped in Japan

The ship was sold to Mitsui and Company in 1960 and broken up in Japan the following year, a quietly fitting final chapter for a cruiser whose most consequential moment had come not in combat but in her crew's remarkable, deeply human act of collective protest at the very edge of victory.