Publisher's Synopsis
HMS Emeraid was a 7,500 ton Royal Navy cruiser originally laid down in 1918, but due to conditions prevailing after the end of WW1, was not completed and commissioned until 1925. She was soon nicknamed, for obvious reasons, The Irish Flagship. A great deal of her pre-WW2 service was spent on the East Indies and China Stations, helping to maintain some semblance of law and order in a China then rapidly declining into chaos and civil war. The Second World War saw her on convey duty In the Atlantic Ocean and later, because of her speed, she spent some time terrying gold and other valuables to Canada and the United States, both for salekeeping and in order to pay for arms and equipment being sent from there to the United Kingdom. These highly important but nevertheless rather prosaic duties culminated in her selection to be one of the huge fleet which on 6th June 1944 fired the heaviest bombardment in naval history, in order to neutralise the German defences on the Normandy coast, thus paving the way for the Allied troop landings on that same day.;Sadly, her age and lack of modern armament prevented her from taking any more significant part in the war, and she was laid up at Rosyth on 4th August 1944, never to sail again under her own power. She ended her days usefully but nevertheless rather sadly by being used as a target ship to test modern armaments which she herself could never carry. She was broken up at Troon in 1948, leaving the memory of a great ship which endeared herself to all those who sailed in her.
