The Easter Sunday raid on Colombo

On Easter Sunday, 5 April 1942, shortly before eight in the morning, more than 120 Japanese aircraft appeared over Colombo, the main port of British Ceylon. They had taken off from the five carriers of Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo, the same force that four months earlier had attacked Pearl Harbor. The Japanese hoped that this time too they would find the enemy fleet at anchor. But the harbour was largely empty, and Vice Admiral James Somerville’s British Eastern Fleet was hundreds of miles to the south-west. The raid cost the defenders several dozen aircraft, an auxiliary warship and a destroyer, but the heaviest blow fell in the afternoon on the open sea: within a quarter of an hour or so Japanese dive-bombers sank two heavy cruisers, Cornwall and Dorsetshire. 424 men of their crews were killed.

Ceylon after the fall of Singapore

After the surrender of Singapore in February 1942 and the loss of the Dutch East Indies, Ceylon became the forward bastion of the British Empire in the Indian Ocean. It lay at the crossroads of the routes from India, Australia and the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, and its two ports – Colombo on the west coast and the naval base at Trincomalee on the east – took the place of the bases lost in the Far East. Colombo, built to handle a few dozen ships, was in the spring of 1942 receiving more than a hundred at a time. Had the island fallen or been blockaded, the Japanese would have threatened shipping to India and the supply of the British forces in the Middle East.

In March London sent Admiral Geoffrey Layton to Ceylon as Commander-in-Chief of the island, with authority over the armed forces and over the civil administration of the Governor, Andrew Caldecott. The defences were hastily strengthened. The carrier Indomitable brought several dozen Hurricane fighters originally intended for Java, Fleet Air Arm squadrons with Fulmar fighters arrived from the Middle East, and a second airfield was laid out near Colombo on the racecourse, because Ratmalana airfield could not hold all the aircraft. At the beginning of April there were 37–38 Hurricanes ready for action around the city, and the island as a whole had more than a hundred fighters, 144 anti-aircraft guns and two radar stations. Catalina flying boats – British, Dutch and Canadian – patrolled the sea from the Koggala lagoon in the south of the island.

On paper the Eastern Fleet, which Somerville had taken over at the end of March, looked impressive: three carriers, five battleships and several cruisers. Somerville divided it into two forces. The fast Force A consisted of the new carriers Indomitable and Formidable and the modernised battleship Warspite, the flagship. The slower Force B was built around the old, small carrier Hermes and four unmodernised Revenge-class battleships from the First World War. The ships had never exercised together, and their air groups had only a few dozen obsolete or mediocre aircraft – against some three hundred aircraft flown by experienced Japanese airmen.

The warning

The Japanese plan, called Operation C, provided for a carrier strike on Colombo on “C-day”, 5 April, and at the same time a raid by a smaller force under Vice Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa on shipping in the Bay of Bengal. Overall command of the forces in the south lay with Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondō. Nagumo had five carriers – Akagi, Sōryū, Hiryū, Shōkaku and Zuikaku – escorted by four fast battleships and two heavy cruisers. The force sailed on 26 March from Staring Bay in Celebes. On 31 March another Japanese force bombarded and occupied Australia’s Christmas Island, south of Java.

The British knew of the enemy’s intentions. The codebreakers of the Far East Combined Bureau, an outstation of Bletchley Park moved from Singapore, had since March again been reading some Japanese naval signals and had established that the carrier force would strike at Ceylon. But they wrongly estimated its strength at two carriers and the date of the attack as 1 or 2 April. Somerville put to sea on 30 March, intending to avoid the Japanese by day and attack them at night with radar-equipped torpedo aircraft. For three days he cruised south of the island without meeting anyone. On the evening of 2 April, with fuel and water running low in the old battleships, he withdrew to the secret base at Addu Atoll in the Maldives, some 600 nautical miles south-west of Ceylon. He sent some of his ships back to their normal duties: the cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire sailed for Colombo, and Hermes for Trincomalee.

At about 4 p.m. on 4 April a Canadian Catalina of No. 413 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force, piloted by Squadron Leader Leonard Birchall, sighted Japanese warships on the horizon some 360 nautical miles south-east of Ceylon. The crew managed to transmit an enemy report before fighters shot the flying boat down, but not to give the enemy’s strength. Three airmen were killed, two of them machine-gunned in the water; six, including Birchall, were picked up by the Japanese destroyer Isokaze and spent the rest of the war as prisoners. The Canadian press later called Birchall “the saviour of Ceylon” – a phrase sometimes attributed to Churchill, though according to Canadian biographers it did not come from him. The report robbed the Japanese of surprise. Layton ordered the ships to leave the harbour, and Somerville, caught refuelling at Addu, set out east with Force A; Force B could not sail until the following day.

The raid

The dispersal of shipping was only partly successful: for various reasons, mainly defects, several dozen merchant ships and warships remained in Colombo. The cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire, which had only just arrived, were sent back out on the evening of 4 April to rejoin the fleet. At dawn on 5 April, some 200 km from the coast, Nagumo launched 53 Nakajima B5N torpedo bombers armed with bombs, 38 Aichi D3A dive-bombers and 36 Zero fighters. They were led by Mitsuo Fuchida, who had also led the first wave over Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese came in from the sea, from a direction watched neither by the coastal posts nor by the Fulmar patrol, and the radar near Colombo failed to detect them. The first warning was the sight of fighters over the racecourse airfield at 7.30–7.45 a.m. The British pilots, who had been waiting for the order to take off, had to climb under the bombs, without the height or speed needed to fight the Zeros. Six Swordfish torpedo bombers of No. 788 Squadron, which happened to be flying in from Trincomalee to prepare for an attack on the Japanese fleet, ran into the fighters and were shot down – their crews had taken the Zeros for friendly Hurricanes. The dive-bombers struck Ratmalana airfield just as the Hurricanes of No. 30 Squadron were taking off; over the harbour No. 258 Squadron RAF attacked the Aichis but lost most of its aircraft to the escort.

In the harbour bombs hit the armed merchant cruiser Hector, lying in dock before being paid off; the ship burned out and settled on the bottom. B5Ns sank the old destroyer Tenedos, which was under repair and could not leave harbour – 33 sailors were killed. The submarine depot ship Lucia, several merchant ships, workshops, quays and railway buildings were damaged. Several bombs fell on a mental hospital in the suburbs of Colombo. After less than two hours the Japanese flew off. Ten British Blenheim bombers were also sent to attack the fleet, but, given a wrong position for the enemy, they found no target.

The outcome of the air fighting was painful for the defenders. The British lost some twenty Hurricanes, four Fulmars and six Swordfish. Their pilots and gunners claimed twenty-odd Japanese aircraft shot down; according to Japanese records seven were lost – six dive-bombers and one Zero. The Japanese for their part claimed several dozen victories, also greatly exaggerated. According to British figures, several dozen sailors and dock workers and 37 patients of the mental hospital were killed on land; the port was not put out of action. The raid did, however, cause panic: over the following days a large part of the population fled Colombo, and for some time the dock workers did not return to work.

The sinking of Cornwall and Dorsetshire

Nagumo had kept the aircraft of the carriers Shōkaku and Zuikaku in reserve, armed in case the British fleet appeared. At around 10–11 a.m. floatplanes from the cruisers Tone and Abukuma sighted two warships heading south-west – they were Cornwall and Dorsetshire, County-class heavy cruisers hurrying to rejoin Force A. Rearming the reserve with torpedoes was taking too long, so 53 dive-bombers from Akagi, Sōryū and Hiryū took off to attack, led by Takashige Egusa (PL), one of the finest Japanese dive-bomber pilots.

The cruisers, without fighter cover, were attacked at around 1.40–2 p.m. some 320 km south-west of Ceylon. The Japanese dived out of the sun, in successive flights, and bombed with exceptional accuracy. Dorsetshire, the ship that less than a year before had finished off the German battleship Bismarck, received at least ten hits; one bomb caused an explosion in a magazine and the cruiser went down within minutes. Cornwall, hit several times – or, according to some sources, more than a dozen times – sank a few minutes later. Of the roughly 1,550–1,650 men on the two ships, 424 were killed. The survivors, many of them wounded, spent nearly 30 hours in the water and on rafts, in the heat and among sharks, before they were picked up the next day by the cruiser Enterprise and the destroyers Paladin and Panther. Among those saved was Dorsetshire’s commanding officer, Captain Augustus Agar, holder of the Victoria Cross for the raid on Kronstadt in 1919.

Somerville avoids battle

The strength of the raid on Colombo was the first proof for Somerville that he faced more than two carriers. Even so, he closed the enemy, hoping for a night attack. In the afternoon one of his Albacore reconnaissance aircraft detected part of the Japanese force about 125 nautical miles away, but the reports were incomplete and contradictory. Somerville turned south-west, not knowing that had he held his course, the Japanese carriers would have passed during the night only a few dozen kilometres ahead of his ships. No engagement took place – which, in the light of the following days, proved fortunate for the British, since their carrier aircraft would have stood no chance against Nagumo’s five carriers. On 6 April, when radio intelligence indicated that the Japanese had at least four carriers and three battleships, Somerville, true to the Admiralty’s instructions not to put the fleet at risk, gave up seeking battle and on 8 April returned to Addu.

Nagumo, too, failed to seize his chance. He did not search for the British carriers, although their aircraft had appeared over his ships, and he did not connect the course of the sunken cruisers with the presence of the fleet they were sailing to join. The Japanese force swung round in an arc to the east, to strike a few days later at Ceylon’s second base, Trincomalee.

Significance

The Easter raid on Colombo did not give the Japanese what they wanted: the Eastern Fleet survived, and within a few days the port was working again. It did, however, show how weak the British position in the Indian Ocean was. Ceylon’s airfields and radar had been unable to provide either warning or defence, and two heavy cruisers had been lost within a quarter of an hour to bombs from aircraft against which they had no means of defending themselves – four months after the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse, this was a further lesson that a ship without fighter cover is defenceless against air power. The attack was also part of a wider operation supporting the Japanese campaign in Burma, where after taking Rangoon the Japanese needed a secure sea route across the Bay of Bengal.

Four days later Nagumo’s carriers struck Trincomalee and sank the carrier Hermes. After these blows Somerville moved the base of the old battleships to Kilindini near Mombasa in East Africa, and the fast force to Bombay, ceding the eastern part of the ocean to the enemy for several months. London, fearing that the Japanese might make use of Vichy France’s Madagascar, speeded up preparations for occupying the island, which was carried out in May. There was, however, no invasion of Ceylon – the Japanese army had no troops for it, and Nagumo’s force returned to the Pacific, where in May and June its carriers took part in the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. Colombo remained the largest Allied base in the region until the end of the war, and in 1944 Lord Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command moved to Ceylon.