UK – London – Bankside: HMS Belfast

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HMS Belfast, the Royal Navy’s heaviest ever cruiser, was one of the two ships forming the final sub-class of British Town-class cruisers, the other being HMS Edinburgh. Belfast is now a museum ship in London.

The Town class cruisers were constrained to less than 10,000 tons by the Washington Naval Treaty. Originally intended to have quadruple 6 inch gun mountings, problems with building them caused the design to be reverted to using improved versions of the triple mountings fitted to the earlier ships of the class. The improved mountings neverthess were lighter than the original ones, and the weight saved was used to improve the ship’s armour and anti-aircraft defences.

Belfast was launched on St Patrick’s Day in 1938 at Harland and Wolff Shipyard in Belfast by the wife of the then prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. At that time, the budgeted overall cost of the ship was £2,141,514, of which £75,000 was for the guns and £66,500 for aircraft. She was commissioned in August 1939 under the command of Captain G A Scott DSO and assigned to the 18th Cruiser Squadron.

When the Second World War started, the 18th Cruiser Squadron was used as part of the British efforts to impose a naval blockade on Germany. Working as part of the squadron, Belfast intercepted the German liner Cap Norte on October 9, 1939 as the liner was trying to return to Germany disguised as a neutral ship. On November 21, 1939 the ship was seriously damaged by a magnetic mine as she left the Firth of Forth, injuring 21 crew. The damage broke the keel and wrecked the hull and machinery to such an extent that it took nearly three years to repair her, the work being carried out at Devonport. She returned to service in the Home Fleet in November 1942 under the command of Captain Frederick Parham. Improvements had been made to the ship during her repairs, notably bulged amidships to improve her stability and fitting the latest radar and fire control; and increasing her displacement from 11,175 tons to 11,553 tons, making her Britain’s heaviest cruiser.

She was made flagship of the Tenth Cruiser Squadron, under Rear-Admiral Robert Burnett when she provided cover for Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union. On December 26, 1943, in what developed into the Battle of North Cape, the cruiser squadron encountered the German Gneisenau class battlecruiser Scharnhorst, and with the battleship HMS Duke of York subsequently sunk her.

The ship was part of the escort force in Operation Tungsten in March 1944, a large carrier-launched airstrike against the Tirpitz, at that stage the last surviving German heavy warship, which was moored at Altenfjord in northern Norway. Although the attack failed to destroy Tirpitz, the ship was hit by 15 bombs and severely damaged.

Belfast took part in the bombardment of enemy positions at the beginning of the landing phase of the D-Day landings, Operation Neptune, in June 1944 as flagship of bombardment Force E. This was part of the Eastern Eastern Naval Task Force, with responsibility for supporting the British and Canadian assaults on Gold and Juno beaches and, at 5.30 am on 6 June 1944, was one of the first ships to fire on German positions.

For the next five weeks the ship was almost continuously in action, firing thousands of rounds from her 6 inch and 4 inch batteries in support of troops until the battlefront moved so far inland as to be outside of the range of her guns. Her final shoot in the European war was on July 8, during Operation Charnwood, the battle to capture Caen, when she engaged German positions in company with the battleship HMS Rodney and the monitor HMS Roberts.

Two days later she returned to Devonport for a short refit for service in the Far East, and joined Operation Zipper which was intended to expel the Japanese from Malaya but turned into a relief operation following the Japanese surrender.

She also served in the Korean War, in which her guns were used for naval bombardment in support of the United Nations forces. In July 1952 she was hit by a Communist battery, killing one and wounding four others. Between 1959-62 the ship operated in the Far East on exercises and "showing the flag". In December 1961 she provided the British guard of honour at Dar-es-Salaam during the Tanganyika independence ceremony. The ship left Singapore on March 26, 1962 for the UK where she made a final visit to Belfast and after an exercise in Mediterranean was paid off. Following a campaign led by Rear Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles DSO OBE CM, a former captain of the ship, she was brought to London to become a museum ship and was first opened to the public on Trafalgar Day, October 21, 1971.