HMS Belfast

HMS Belfast was one of the two ships of the Edinburgh sub-class, the largest and most powerful of Britain’s inter-war Town-class light cruisers. Built by Harland & Wolff in the city whose name she bore and commissioned on 5 August 1939, she was an answer to the big new cruisers of Japan and the United States, and to the problem of protecting the trade routes Britain lived on.

Her main battery was twelve 6-inch (152 mm) guns in four triple turrets — heavy for a light cruiser — with a dozen 4-inch anti-aircraft guns and a modern fire-control outfit. On a hull about 187 m long she could make some 32 knots. She had been in service for three months when the war nearly ended her.

On 21 November 1939 Belfast was steaming out of the Firth of Forth when she detonated a German magnetic mine. The explosion lifted the ship bodily, broke her keel and wrecked one of her engine and boiler rooms. One sailor died, twenty went to hospital and twenty-six suffered minor injuries. She was decommissioned on 4 January 1940, and the damage was severe enough that writing her off was a live option.

She was rebuilt instead, and the work kept her out of the war for nearly three years. Anti-torpedo bulges took her beam from 63 ft 4 in to 69 ft, the armour belt was extended and thickened, the anti-aircraft outfit went up to eighteen 20 mm Oerlikons, and new fire-control radar was fitted. The added weight cost her a little speed. She returned to service in late 1942 better armed, better protected and better equipped to see in the dark than the ship the mine had almost destroyed.

Belfast came back to the worst waters of the war. As flagship of the 10th Cruiser Squadron she covered the Arctic convoys — the runs carrying supplies to the Soviet Union around the North Cape of Norway, through storms, pack ice and the long polar night, within reach of German U-boats, aircraft and the heavy warships lying in the fjords.

The route itself was the first enemy. Ships ran north of the Arctic Circle within range of airfields in occupied Norway, in temperatures that iced up guns and superstructure heavily enough to threaten stability, and through a winter darkness that lasted almost the whole passage. In summer the darkness lifted and the convoys were visible for twenty-four hours a day instead.

The cruiser squadrons were the layer between the merchant ships and the German surface raiders: close enough to intervene, light enough to be outgunned by what they might meet. In December 1943 that arrangement was tested against the fastest capital ship Germany had left in northern waters.

On 26 December 1943 the battleship Scharnhorst sortied against a Russia-bound convoy and found the covering forces instead. Just before 09:00, in complete polar darkness, it was Belfast — flagship of Force 1, with the cruisers Norfolk and Sheffield under Robert Burnett — that picked her up by radar at about 30 miles. Belfast fired the star shell that lit her, and at about 09:21 the three cruisers opened fire at roughly 13,000 yards.

The opening salvos did the decisive damage: a hit wrecked Scharnhorst’s forward fire-control radar, leaving her effectively blind in the dark while the British could still see. She broke off, was headed away from the convoy and shadowed onto the guns of the battleship HMS Duke of York, and sank that evening. Of a crew of roughly 1,900, 36 were pulled out of the Arctic water.

Six months later Belfast was headquarters ship of Bombardment Force E under Rear-Admiral Frederick Dalrymple-Hamilton, supporting the British and Canadian landings on Gold and Juno. At 05:30 on 6 June 1944 she opened fire on the German artillery battery at Ver-sur-Mer, among the first shots of the invasion.

She did not fire once and withdraw. Belfast stayed off the Normandy coast until 10 July, firing on targets inland as the armies fought their way off the beaches, and expended 1,996 rounds of 6-inch ammunition in those five weeks.

With Germany beaten, Belfast was refitted with improved radar and a heavier anti-aircraft outfit and sailed for the Far East on 17 June 1945 to join the British Pacific Fleet for the war against Japan. She reached Sydney in August, by which time the atomic bombs had been dropped and Japan had surrendered. She had missed the fighting she was sent for.

What she did instead occupied two years. Belfast carried thousands of Allied prisoners out of Japanese camps, her ship’s company paraded in Shanghai in September 1945, and she spent the following period on patrol off a China sliding into civil war. She came home in the autumn of 1947 for refit, and was back in the Far East by December 1948.

Her fighting career outlasted the war by seven years. Belfast was on station in the Far East when the Korean War began on 25 June 1950, and she worked the coast until 27 September 1952, shelling shore targets in support of United Nations forces and firing more than 8,000 rounds from her 6-inch guns — four times what she had fired off Normandy.

The shore batteries fired back. On 29 July 1952 a 75 mm shell struck a forward compartment, killing one British sailor and wounding four Chinese ratings of her crew. She paid off in 1963, after twenty-four years in commission.

Almost every ship of her generation went to the scrapyard, and Belfast was meant to follow them. She did not: she was preserved instead, opened to the public at Tower Bridge on 21 October 1971 — Trafalgar Day — and transferred to the Imperial War Museum on 1 March 1978.

She is the last big-gun armoured warship the Royal Navy has left from the Second World War, and her guns are the ones she fought with; the other British warship of the war open to visitors, the destroyer HMS Cavalier at Chatham, worked the same Arctic run. Belfast’s two forward turrets are trained and elevated on the London Gateway service station on the M1, about 12.5 miles away — a bearing set deliberately to show what a 6-inch battery could reach, and well inside the roughly 23 km those guns could manage at full stretch.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• Alan Raven & John Roberts, British Cruisers of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).
• Ian Buxton & Ian Johnston, The Battleship Builders (Seaforth Publishing).