The attack on Trincomalee

On the morning of 9 April 1942 the Japanese carriers of Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo struck Ceylon a second blow. Four days after the attack on Colombo, more than 130 aircraft bombed the Royal Navy base at Trincomalee on the east coast of the island and the nearby airfield at China Bay. The harbour, warned the previous day, was largely empty, but a few hours later Japanese dive-bombers found at sea the ships that had fled from it. Off the coast near Batticaloa the carrier Hermes – the world’s first ship designed from the outset as an aircraft carrier – was sunk, together with the Australian destroyer Vampire, the corvette Hollyhock and several merchant ships. It was the final act of the Japanese raid into the Indian Ocean.

Between Colombo and Trincomalee

After the raid on Colombo on 5 April and the sinking of the cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire, Admiral James Somerville’s British Eastern Fleet spent several days cruising west of Ceylon, avoiding a battle it could not win. On 6 April radio intelligence confirmed that the Japanese had at least four carriers and three battleships – several times as many aircraft as both British carriers put together. On 8 April the fleet returned to the secret base at Addu Atoll in the Maldives to refuel.

In those same days a second Japanese force, the so-called Malaya Force of Vice Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa – the light carrier Ryūjō, six heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and destroyers – sailed on 1 April from Mergui in Burma to attack shipping in the Bay of Bengal. The British had nothing there with which to protect the merchant ships – a few Indian sloops and a Greek destroyer – while the whole Eastern Fleet was far to the south. On 5 and 6 April Ozawa split his forces into three groups, which swept the east coast of India. Within a few days his aircraft and ships’ guns sank, according to various tallies, between 20 and 23 merchant ships totalling more than 100,000 gross register tons, and on 6 April aircraft from Ryūjō bombed the ports of Visakhapatnam and Kakinada. The damage was slight, but the raid caused people to flee the coast, and sailings from Calcutta were suspended. At the same time Japanese submarines sank several ships off the west coast of India. Under cover of this confusion the Japanese brought a convoy with reinforcements for their troops in Burma into Rangoon.

Meanwhile Nagumo had swung in a wide arc south and east of Ceylon. On the afternoon of 8 April a British Catalina detected his force heading towards Trincomalee. Vice Admiral Geoffrey Arbuthnot, Commander-in-Chief East Indies Station, ordered the harbour to be cleared during the night. The carrier Hermes, escorted by the Australian destroyer Vampire, the corvette Hollyhock, a minelayer, tankers and auxiliary vessels were to get at least 40 nautical miles south along the coast by dawn. Hermes sailed without aircraft: her Swordfish squadron, which was preparing for the planned operation against Madagascar, had remained ashore at China Bay.

Both ships had long service behind them. Hermes, designed during the First World War and commissioned in 1924, was the world’s first ship built from the keel up as an aircraft carrier, but with little more than a dozen aircraft she was no longer fit to fight modern carrier forces. In 1940 her Swordfish had attacked the French battleship Richelieu at Dakar, and in 1941 she had supported British forces in the East African campaign and during the Anglo-Iraqi War, and had then patrolled the Indian Ocean. Vampire, a destroyer built in 1917 for the Royal Navy and transferred to the Australian navy, had in 1940–1941 carried supplies to besieged Tobruk as part of the so-called “Scrap Iron Flotilla” in the Mediterranean, and in January 1942 she had come through unscathed an engagement with the Japanese escort of a convoy off Endau in Malaya.

The raid on the base

At dawn on 9 April a Canadian Catalina from the Koggala lagoon managed to sight the Japanese ships some 200 nautical miles east of Trincomalee before fighters shot it down – the third flying boat lost since 4 April. This time the radar at Trincomalee did its job: at about 7 a.m. it detected the incoming strike – 91 Nakajima B5N aircraft armed with bombs and 41 Zero fighters under the command of Mitsuo Fuchida. The defenders managed to scramble 17 Hurricanes of No. 261 Squadron RAF and six Fleet Air Arm Fulmars.

Even so, the Japanese, with superior numbers and better aircraft, bombed China Bay airfield, the workshops and quays of the naval dockyard, and the fuel stores. According to accounts, the fire in one of the oil tanks burned for several days. The monitor Erebus, which had come to Trincomalee as additional anti-aircraft protection, was damaged, and the merchant ship Sagaing, with aircraft and ammunition on board, caught fire and was abandoned. The British lost eight Hurricanes and a Fulmar in the air, and several unserviceable aircraft burned on the ground; the Japanese, according to their records, lost three Zeros and one B5N. As at Colombo, both sides greatly exaggerated the number of aircraft they had shot down.

At about 10.25 a.m. nine British Blenheim bombers of No. 11 Squadron RAF appeared over the Japanese force without fighter escort. No one detected them in time – the Japanese had no radar, and the crew of Hiryū, who spotted the aircraft, did not warn the other ships. The bombs, dropped from about 3,400 metres, fell close to the carrier Akagi, Nagumo’s flagship, but missed her. Five Blenheims were shot down by fighters. It was the first attack of the war by land-based aircraft on Nagumo’s carrier force – and a foretaste of the weakness of Japanese air defence that two months later would prove fatal at Midway.

The sinking of Hermes and Vampire

At the time of the raid on the base Hermes and Vampire were some 65 nautical miles south of Trincomalee. At about 9 a.m. they turned back towards the harbour, and shortly afterwards they were spotted by a floatplane from the battleship Haruna. Nagumo had kept in reserve dive-bombers intended for attacks on ships; some 80 Aichi D3A aircraft from four carriers took off at once. The British intercepted the Japanese scout’s report and tried to send fighter cover to the ships, but to no effect.

At about 10.35 a.m. the dive-bombers attacked Hermes not far from Batticaloa. The small old carrier, with no aircraft of her own and a few anti-aircraft guns, stood no chance. She took some forty hits and near misses and within a quarter of an hour or so – at about 10.55 a.m. according to most accounts – capsized and sank. 307 men were killed, among them her commanding officer, Captain Richard Onslow. A dozen or so bombers attacked the Royal Australian Navy destroyer Vampire sailing nearby, a veteran of a quarter of a century earlier which in December had escorted the battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse and rescued their survivors. The destroyer broke in two and sank a few minutes after Hermes. Her commanding officer, Commander William Moran, and – according to various sources – seven or eight sailors were killed; the rest of the crew survived. The hospital ship Vita was nearby, and the Japanese did not attack her; after the aircraft had gone she picked up some 600 survivors, while others swam ashore.

Other groups of dive-bombers, including some from the carrier Sōryū, caught the remaining vessels fleeing from Trincomalee. The corvette Hollyhock was sunk with 53 dead, together with the fleet tanker Athelstane she was escorting, as were the tanker British Sergeant and the Norwegian freighter Norviken. British Fulmars, which arrived from shore too late to defend Hermes, shot down four dive-bombers for the loss of two aircraft.

The Japanese withdraw

At 1.25 p.m. the last aircraft landed back on the carriers, and Nagumo turned his force east and, in the evening, north-east towards the Andaman Islands and the Strait of Malacca. The balance of the whole raid seemed excellent for the Japanese: they had sunk a carrier, two heavy cruisers, two destroyers, an armed merchant cruiser, a corvette and – including the operations of Ozawa and the submarines – several dozen merchant ships. They themselves had lost, according to their own records, 17 aircraft: ten dive-bombers, six fighters and one B5N. Japanese airmen compared sinking the British ships to bombing a target ship in an exercise. Yet they had failed to achieve the main aim of the operation: the Eastern Fleet had survived.

The loss of trained aircrew, though small, was not without significance, and Nagumo’s ships and men, continuously at sea since December, needed rest and refits. After passing through the Strait of Malacca the carriers Shōkaku and Zuikaku detached and sailed for the South Pacific, while the rest of the force returned to Japan at the end of April.

Significance

The raid on Ceylon was the last great success of the Japanese carriers. In four months Nagumo’s force had gone from Pearl Harbor by way of Darwin to Ceylon without losing a single ship. The British drew their conclusions from the attacks on Colombo and Trincomalee: Somerville moved the base of the old battleships to Kilindini near Mombasa in East Africa, and the fast carrier force to Bombay, ceding the eastern part of the Indian Ocean to the enemy for several months. Ceylon received more fighters, torpedo aircraft and radar, as well as Australian brigades for its defence.

Fear of a further Japanese offensive – and of the Japanese using Madagascar, which belonged to Vichy France, as a base – speeded up preparations for occupying that island. The British landing at Diego Suarez Bay took place at the beginning of May. The Japanese, however, had no intention of returning to the Indian Ocean in strength: the army would not provide troops for an invasion of Ceylon, and the navy was preparing for operations in the Pacific. A few weeks later Shōkaku and Zuikaku fought in the Coral Sea, and in June three of the carriers that had attacked Ceylon – Akagi, Sōryū and Hiryū – were sunk at Midway together with Kaga. Until the end of the war the Indian Ocean remained an arena chiefly for Japanese submarines, and the Eastern Fleet, reinforced in 1944–1945, went over to the offensive there.