HMAS Canberra

The Vessel

HMAS Canberra (D33) was a Kent-class heavy cruiser of the Royal Australian Navy, commissioned at the John Brown & Company yard at Clydebank, Scotland, on 9 July 1928. She was 192 metres long, 10,000 tons standard displacement, armed with eight 8-inch guns in four twin turrets, and designed for 31.5 knots. She was one of the two Kent-class cruisers transferred to Australia under the 1924 naval cooperation agreement between the British and Australian governments (her sister being HMAS Australia), forming the bulk of the RAN's heavy-cruiser strength through the interwar period.

Her interwar service was predominantly on the Australia station, with periodic deployments to Singapore and the China station. She had participated in the Spanish Civil War observation patrols of 1937. At the outbreak of the Second World War she was under the command of Captain Frank Getting, a 42-year-old RAN officer and graduate of the Royal Australian Naval College.

Her 1942 Pacific war service placed her in Task Force 44 (later Task Force 62), the Allied naval force supporting the American amphibious operations in the Southwest Pacific. She and the heavy cruiser HMAS Australia under Rear-Admiral Victor Crutchley RN formed the core of the Allied heavy-cruiser strength supporting the Guadalcanal invasion of August 1942, the first major Allied ground offensive of the Pacific War.

The Voyage

On 8 August 1942, the day after the American landings at Guadalcanal, HMAS Canberra was assigned to the Southern Force of Task Force 62's screening operation. The Southern Force comprised Canberra, USS Chicago (a heavy cruiser), and the destroyers USS Patterson and USS Bagley. Their assignment was to patrol the southern approaches to the transport anchorage at Tulagi and Guadalcanal, in the waters that would shortly become known as Iron Bottom Sound.

The Northern Force, comprising the heavy cruisers Vincennes, Astoria, and Quincy (of the U.S. Navy) with the destroyers Helm and Wilson, was patrolling the northern approaches. The two forces were operating in alternating zigzag patterns around Savo Island on the night of 8-9 August 1942, in conditions of near-total darkness with occasional rain showers. American radar coverage of the area was provided by the picket destroyers USS Blue and USS Ralph Talbot on the western approach.

The Japanese 8th Fleet under Vice-Admiral Gunichi Mikawa had sortied from Rabaul on 7 August with a striking force of five heavy cruisers (Chōkai, Aoba, Kinugasa, Kako, Furutaka), two light cruisers, and a destroyer. Mikawa intended to attack the Allied transport anchorage at dawn on 9 August. His approach through Savo Island was detected by American reconnaissance aircraft on the afternoon of 8 August but the report was inadequately communicated up the chain of command. The picket destroyers Blue and Ralph Talbot failed to detect Mikawa's force on radar because of difficult radar conditions against the Florida Islands' mountainous backdrop.

At 01:25 on 9 August 1942, Mikawa's cruiser force, having passed west of Savo Island undetected, turned south at 30 knots and opened fire on the Southern Force at 01:42 from a range of 4,500 metres.

The Disaster

HMAS Canberra was the nearest target. Mikawa's flagship Chōkai and the heavy cruiser Aoba concentrated their combined fire on her. Within two minutes, between 01:42 and 01:44, Canberra was struck by an estimated 24 8-inch shells. The hits destroyed her bridge, killed Captain Getting instantly, disabled both her forward turrets, and ignited major fires throughout her superstructure. She also took one or two torpedo hits (the source remains disputed; Japanese records show no torpedoes fired at her by Mikawa's force, suggesting a possible friendly-fire torpedo from USS Bagley, an explanation that has been the subject of considerable post-war controversy).

Canberra was effectively destroyed as a combat ship in 90 seconds. She listed heavily to starboard; her electrical power failed; her engine rooms flooded. Her crew fought fires and tended casualties through the next four hours in an attempt to save the ship. By 06:00 on 9 August, with the ship still listing at 10 degrees and with the American destroyer USS Ellet ordered to stand by, the decision was made to evacuate her and scuttle her. Her surviving crew were transferred to USS Patterson; USS Ellet fired five torpedoes into her at 08:00. Canberra sank at 08:00 on 9 August 1942 in approximately 700 metres of water in Iron Bottom Sound.

The Battle of Savo Island, of which Canberra's loss was the opening act, cost the Allied navies four heavy cruisers (Canberra, Vincennes, Astoria, Quincy) and 1,077 dead in a single 32-minute engagement. It was the worst surface defeat suffered by the U.S. Navy in the twentieth century. Of Canberra's 819 crew, 84 died; the remainder were rescued by Patterson and transferred to Allied ships off Guadalcanal.

The Legacy

Mikawa's strategic failure on 9 August 1942, despite his tactical victory, had significant consequences. He withdrew after destroying the Allied cruiser screen without attacking the transport anchorage, the original objective of his sortie. His decision cost the Japanese Navy the opportunity to destroy the American amphibious shipping and supplies at Guadalcanal; his withdrawal allowed the American landing force to consolidate ashore through the following weeks. The Battle of Savo Island was, despite its tactical result, a strategic Japanese defeat: they had destroyed four Allied cruisers at a cost of 350 Japanese casualties and had failed to exploit the window the destruction had opened.

The American investigation of the surface defeat, the Hepburn Inquiry of 1942-1943, was a comprehensive critique of Allied doctrine, command arrangements, and communications. Its findings, largely suppressed at the time for morale reasons, identified: inadequate radar picket coverage, insufficient illumination fire, inadequate inter-force coordination, and the fundamental Allied failure to train for night surface engagement against the Japanese. The Hepburn findings were the basis for the subsequent U.S. Navy night-action doctrine reforms of 1942-1944 that would produce the American surface-action victories at Cape Esperance and Empress Augusta Bay later in the Guadalcanal campaign.

The question of whether Canberra was hit by a friendly-fire torpedo from USS Bagley was investigated in the 1990s by the retired U.S. Navy engineer Bruce Loxton, whose book The Shame of Savo (1994) makes a detailed case for the friendly-fire hypothesis. The 1994 survey of the wreck, conducted by Robert Ballard's National Geographic-sponsored Lost Ships of Guadalcanal expedition, confirmed a hole in Canberra's starboard hull consistent with a torpedo impact at the location Loxton had predicted; Ballard's expedition declined to adjudicate the historical question but confirmed the physical evidence.

The wreck of HMAS Canberra lies at 700 metres depth in Iron Bottom Sound, upright on the bottom. She is a protected war grave under both United States and Australian law; her position is marked on modern nautical charts but dives on her are prohibited without authorisation.

HMAS Canberra was one of the first two Allied warships awarded battle honours by the government of the United States. The US Navy ordered USS Canberra (CA-70), a Baltimore-class heavy cruiser, to be named after her in direct commemoration of her loss; USS Canberra was commissioned on 14 October 1943 and is the only U.S. Navy ship ever named after a foreign warship. The 84 dead are commemorated at the Plymouth Naval Memorial in the UK (for her British-born crew) and at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The name HMAS Canberra has been carried in Australian service by the carrier HMAS Canberra (R18) (1951-82) and by the current amphibious assault ship HMAS Canberra (L02), the first ship of her class, commissioned 2014.