The ‘Crippled’ British Cruiser That Killed A Full Speed Destroyer With Her Second Salvo

May 1942, Barren Sea, 250 nautical miles from Mmansk, HMS Edinburgh drifts at two knots, covered in ice, her shattered stern folded back over Y turret.

She has no rudder, no centralized fire control.

Only one turret still works.

2 days earlier, a German submarine put two torpedoes into her, and now she can only sail in circles.

Hidden in her bomb room are 465 gold bars.

Soviet payment for American lendley supplies.

Three German destroyers are closing at 36 knots.

Every officer in the criggs marine expects an easy kill.

They are wrong.

Lieutenant RM How head and shoulders thrust through B turrets hatch is about to fire the most remarkable salvo of the naval war.

Edinburgh was the most powerful light cruiser the Royal Navy ever built.

Penant number C16.

She was the lead ship of the third and final townclass subclass laid down in 1936 and commissioned July 1939.

She carried 12 6-in Mark 23 guns in four triple turrets, two forward superfiring and two after superfiring.

Each gun fired a 112lb shell at 2758 ft pers with a practical rate of 5 to six rounds per gun per minute.

A full broadside put 1344 lb of steel into the air.

At peak rate of fire, Edinburgh could hurl 96 shells per minute at a target.

A heavy cruiser armed with 8-in guns managed roughly 28.

Displacement was 10,550 long tons standard and 13,175 full load.

Four Parsons geared steam turbines produced 82,500 shaft horsepower across four shafts, driving her to 32 and 1/4 knots.

Her armor was the heaviest fitted to any British light cruiser.

The main belt was 4 1/2 in thick.

Turret faces carried 4 in.

Deck armor ran 3 in over magazines and 2 in over machinery.

That belt was actually thicker than the German Admiral Hippoclass heavy cruisers protection, which measured only 70 to 80 mm.

Despite Hipper displacing 5,000 tons more at full load, Edinburgh was a light cruiser on paper.

In protection, she outclassed Germany’s heavies.

The secondary battery comprised 12 4-in dualpurpose guns in six twin mountings, 162 pounder pom poms in two octapal mounts, and by early 1942, six single 20 mm Erlicon cannons.

She also carried six 21-in torpedo tubes in two triple mountings of midshipips.

Fire control centered on type 284 gunnery radar for the main battery.

Type 285 for secondary control and type 273 surface search radar.

The Admiral T chose 12 guns in four triple turrets as a deliberate compromise.

The American Brooklyn class packed 15 guns in five turrets.

The Japanese Magami class matched that number.

Both achieved firepower by sacrificing something.

Brooklyn’s three turret forward arrangement caused blast interference between mountings.

She carried no torpedoes.

Her belt armor was 5 in against Edinburgh’s 4 and a half and she was marginally faster.

But without torpedo tubes and with that blast problem, Brooklyn was a less versatile warship.

Magami was structurally compromised from the start, notorious for instability that required major hull bulges after her original construction proved dangerously topheavy.

Her turret armor was a paper thin 25 mm against Edinburgh’s 102.

One wellplaced splinter could disable a Magami turret.

The British director of naval construction reportedly remarked that the Japanese must be building their ships out of cardboard.

Against Germany’s Admiral Hipper class, Edinburgh held surprising advantages despite being classed a weight division below.

Hipper carried eight 8-in guns, firing 256 lb shells, but at only 3 to four rounds per minute per gun.

Edinburgh’s 12 6-in guns delivered three times as many shells per minute.

At close range and in poor visibility, where rate of fire mattered more than individual shell weight, Edinburgh’s design philosophy held the advantage.

The townclass layout bet everything on volume of fire, and the Barren Sea was about to prove the bet correct.

Convoy QP11 departed Merman on April 28, 1942.

13 merchant ships bound for Iceland with Edinburgh as flagship of Rear Admiral Stuart Bonham Carter’s 18th cruiser squadron.

The escort included six destroyers, four corvettes, and an armed twer.

Deep inside Edinburgh’s bomb room, accessible only through a narrow twoft square vertical shaft, sat 465 gold ingots packed in 93 wooden boxes.

4 and 1/2 long tons of gold valued at approximately 1.5 million in 1942.

Roughly 100 to 73 million at modern prices.

Only a handful of men aboard knew the cargo existed.

Edinburgh patrolled 20 mi ahead of the convoy, zigzagging as an anti-ubmarine screen.

The Arctic route ran 1,400 to 2,000 nautical miles through the Barren Sea, threading between the polar ice pack to the north and German bases in occupied Norway to the south.

April 1942 was a period of escalating danger.

Turpitz had moved to Norway in January.

German codereers were reading up to 80% of British naval cipher traffic.

Lengthening daylight was stripping convoys of their darkness cover.

On April 29, a Junker’s 88 spotted QP11.

The Creeks Marine formed Yubot Group Strait, seven type 7 seabot including U456 commanded by Capitan Loit Max Martin Tykert.

He had only two torpedoes remaining.

At approximately 1618 on April 30, Taikert found Edinburgh operating alone 20 mi ahead of the convoy.

He watched her zigzag and waited.

Edinburgh’s Aztec operator reported a firm contact almost dead ahead.

The officer of the watch ordered disregard.

False echoes were common in Arctic waters.

Minutes later, the pipe sounded fallout from action stations and non-duty hands to teaert fired a spread from tubes 1, 2, and four.

After roughly 80 seconds, two detonations hit.

The first torpedo struck the starboard side, plowing into the forward boiler room near the bomb room.

The second destroyed the rudder, wrecked two of four propeller shafts, and ripped the quarter deck open.

Speed dropped from 32 knots to five or six.

Centralized fire control was knocked out.

Only B turret, the forward superfiring triple mount, remained operational.

A, X, and Y turrets were all out of action.

Edinburgh could only sail in circles.

She separated from the convoy and turned back toward Mammansk under escort from destroyers foresight and forester with four mind sweepers sortying from port as reinforcement.

Two Soviet destroyers joined briefly but turned back due to fuel shortage.

Edinburgh undertoe and barely making way was a sitting target.

Taikert had no torpedoes left but he continued shadowing and reporting her position.

His reports brought something worse.

The Creeks Marines Arctic Destroyer Group sorted from Kirkinus with three ships.

Z7 Herman Showman was the flotilla flagship, a type 1934A destroyer, displacing 2171 long tons standard, armed with five 12.7 cm guns and eight torpedo tubes capable of 36 knots.

Alongside came Z24 and Z25, both larger type 1936 A destroyers carrying four 15 cm guns each.

weapons approaching light cruiser caliber.

Combined, the three destroyers brought 13 guns of 5 to nearly 6-in caliber and 24 torpedo tubes.

At 0617 on May 2nd, they found Edinburgh 250 nautical miles from Roman, making two knots under toe.

Edinburgh was covered in ice, listing her stern shattered.

The toe was cast off.

Edinburgh began her uncontrollable circular drift.

Her battleen went up.

If you are finding this deep dive into Royal Navy gunnery interesting, subscribing takes a moment and helps the channel.

Herman Showman separated from the other two destroyers and closed to launch torpedoes.

A snow shower initially hit Edinburgh.

When Herman Showman emerged from the squall at close range, her torpedo crews found themselves closer than expected and had to reset their torpedo settings.

Edinburgh’s uncontrolled circular motion was slowly bringing B Turret’s firing arc onto the target.

Lieutenant RM How had positioned himself with his head and shoulders thrust out through the hatch at the top of B turret.

No centralized fire control, no electrical power to train the turret, no way to aim the ship.

He was visually spotting and directing fire and local control, giving orders directly to the turret crew below him, waiting for the ship’s random rotation to bring the guns to bear.

B Turret’s three 6-in guns fired.

The first salvo fell within yards of Herman Showman.

An extraordinary shot given the circumstances.

The German destroyer healed over in a desperate turn toward her own smoke screen.

Before she could escape, B turret fired again.

The second salvo struck Herman Showman in both engine rooms simultaneously.

The explosion lifted the deck structure.

All electrical systems failed.

The main steam line was severed.

Herman Showman lurched to a dead stop, drifting and burning.

Eight men killed, 45 wounded.

Edinburgh had disabled the destroyer before it could fire a single torpedo.

A crippled cruiser circling helplessly with one turret under manual control hit a 36N destroyer in both engine rooms with her second salvo.

The battle spiraled.

Foresight and Forester charged the remaining German destroyers at 31 knots.

Z25 hit Forester three times, disabling two guns and knocking out her forward boiler room.

Z24 and Z25 then hit Foresight four times, leaving her with only one gun operational.

At approximately 0652, a torpedo salvo aimed at the British destroyers missed its intended targets.

One torpedo kept running and struck Edinburgh midship on the port side almost exactly opposite the original starboard hit.

The ship was now open from side to side, held together only by deck plating and keel.

The explosion ejected Lieutenant Hal through the turret hatch onto the roof.

He survived by clinging to a finger width ledge.

Z24 and Z25 then spotted the four approaching British mind sweepers and overestimated their strength, possibly mistaking them for destroyers.

Rather than finishing off the disabled British ships, the Germans withdrew to rescue Herman Shomman’s crew.

Z24 came alongside and took off approximately 223 survivors before scuttling the destroyer at 0815.

Rear Admiral Bonum Carter ordered abandoned ship.

Mind sweeper Gossamer took roughly 440 men.

Harrier took approximately 400.

Harrier attempted to scuttle Edinburgh with 20 rounds of 4-in gunfire.

Edinburgh would not sink.

Depth charges alongside also failed.

Finally, HMS Foresight fired her last torpedo.

Edinburgh sank at 0900 on May 2nd, 1942 in approximately 245 m of water.

She took 58 men and 465 gold bars to the bottom.

The gold lay undisturbed for nearly four decades.

In 1981, Keith Jessup, a former Royal Marine turned professional diver from Keley in Yorkshire, led a consortium to the wreck site.

Saturation divers working at 800 feet depth in twoman teams cut through 4-in armored hole plating to reach the bomb room.

On September 15th, 1981, diver John Rossier recovered the first gold bar, serial number KP0620.

By the time Weather forced a halt, 431 bars had been recovered.

A return expedition in 1986 brought up 29 more.

460 of 465 bars recovered.

Five remain in the wreck.

The recovered gold was worth approximately 45 million pounds at 1981 prices.

The controversy over disturbing a war grave directly contributed to the Protection of Military Remains Act of 1986.

Arctic Convoy veterans waited even longer for recognition.

For decades, they received only the Atlantic Star, a generic award grouping all Atlantic service together.

A 16-year campaign led by Commander Eddie Grenfell, Lieutenant Commander Dick Dykes, and Merchant Navy veteran Jock Dempster finally resulted in the Arctic Star, instituted on December 19th, 2012, 67 years after the war ended.

By 2018, over 18,600 medals had been issued.

Edinburgh’s final battle is not simply a story of courage.

It is a case study in why naval architecture matters.

The townclass design philosophy of 12 rapid fire 6-in guns proved its worth in the worst possible conditions.

A crippled ship circling without steering with one turret under manual local control still generated enough volume of fire to destroy a fastmoving destroyer in two salvos.

7 months later at the Battle of the Barren Sea, light cruisers Sheffield and Jamaica armed with the same 6-in guns drove off the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and damaged her.

The rapid fire concept was validated again.

The skeptics who questioned whether 12 6-in guns could match 8-in heavy cruiser batteries received their answer in the barren sea.

Not once, but twice.

Edinburgh’s answer came from a man standing in a hatch, spotting by eye, directing three guns by voice, and hitting a 36 knot target with his second salvo.

Herman Shomman’s captain reportedly called it the worst luck that could possibly have overtaken them.

It was not luck.

It was rate of fire.

It was the volume of fire philosophy that British naval architects had built into every Townass hull.

Even crippled, even with 90% of her fighting capability destroyed, Edinburgh’s remaining three guns delivered enough shells fast enough to end a destroyer before that destroyer could launch a single torpedo.

The specifications proved the design.

The combat record confirmed the philosophy, and a crippled cruiser circling in the Arctic with 4 and a half tons of gold in her bomb room proved it beyond all doubt.

Edinburgh lies where she fell.

800 ft down in the barren sea.

A war grave holding 58 men and five gold bars.

A monument to a crew who fought their dying ship to the last salvo and