HMS Cornwall (56): Hunter of the Pinguin, Lost in the Easter Sunday Raid

Devonport-Built

HMS Cornwall was built at Devonport Dockyard, her keel laid on 9 October 1924, launched on 11 March 1926, and completed on 6 December 1927, a County-class heavy cruiser displacing 9,850 long tons standard and up to 13,520 long tons at deep load, measuring 630 feet in length and capable of 31.5 knots.

She carried a formidable main armament of eight 8-inch guns in four twin turrets, backed up by 4-inch anti-aircraft guns, 2-pounder guns and two quadruple torpedo tube mounts, a powerful ship built to project British naval power across the Empire's furthest reaches.

The word worth weighing in all that is heavy, because she was not, particularly. The County class were treaty cruisers, designed to the ten thousand ton limit the Washington conference imposed in 1922, and since the treaty capped displacement rather than guns, every navy built the same ship: eight-inch guns, high speed, enormous range, and armour cut down to almost nothing to pay for it. Cornwall was 630 feet long with three tall funnels and a freeboard designed for months at sea policing an empire. Her own service nickname was the tinclad. The 1936 refit put a proper belt over her machinery spaces, which was a real improvement against gunfire and no help at all against what eventually killed her.

HMS Cornwall spent much of the 1930s serving with the 5th Cruiser Squadron on the China Station, and underwent a major refit between 1936 and 1937 that improved her armour protection and anti-aircraft armament, work that would prove valuable, if ultimately not quite sufficient, when she finally faced determined air attack in 1942.

Hunting Commerce Raiders in the Indian Ocean

From October 1939, HMS Cornwall searched the Indian Ocean for German commerce raiders, the disguised merchant ships and warships that preyed on Allied shipping far from the concentrated naval strength available in home waters.

That sentence covers the largest naval manhunt of the century. On 5 October 1939 the British and the French between them organised twenty-three warships into eight hunting groups, nine by some counts, and spread them across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean with one object: to find the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. The force committed to the search came to three battleships, two battlecruisers, four aircraft carriers and sixteen cruisers, which is a fair-sized navy in its own right, deployed against a single ship.

Cornwall was Force I, working out of Ceylon and covering the Indian Ocean end of it, which is a very great deal of empty water for one hunting group to cover. She never found anything. The group that did was Force G, HMS Exeter with HMS Ajax and HMS Achilles, off the River Plate on 13 December. That is the shape of commerce raider hunting: twenty-two ships steam a very long way and see nothing, and the twenty-third walks into it.

She also had one of the odder afternoons of the war off West Africa. On 13 September 1940 she met the convoy carrying the troops for Operation Menace, the attempt to take Dakar out of Vichy hands and hand it to de Gaulle, and was almost immediately detached again on a separate errand. The Vichy light cruiser Primauguet was at sea with the tanker Tarn, heading south for Libreville in Gabon. Chad had just declared for the Free French and French Equatorial Africa was tipping; Vichy was sending a warship down to stop it tipping any further.

Cornwall and the cruiser HMS Delhi found them, and turned them round without a shot. Primauguet and her tanker went back to Casablanca. It is a small thing that reads oddly now: a British heavy cruiser stopping a French one in the middle of the Atlantic in order to influence a political argument between Frenchmen about who was running Gabon. Dakar itself was a fiasco a fortnight later, and the French squadron already sitting there is a fair part of the reason why. As for Primauguet, she was destroyed by American gunfire off Casablanca on 8 November 1942, on the first morning of Operation Torch, which is another argument between allies that ended in shellfire.

On 8 May 1941, north of the Seychelles, HMS Cornwall located and sank the German auxiliary cruiser Pinguin, one of the most successful commerce raiders of the entire war, having sunk or captured more than thirty Allied and neutral ships in under a year at sea. The victory came at a genuinely tragic cost of its own: Pinguin was carrying 222 British and Indian Merchant Navy prisoners taken from her own victims, locked below decks, and around 200 of them died in the very action meant to free them, alongside 323 of the raider's own crew of 401. HMS Cornwall rescued three officers, fifty-seven ratings and just twenty-two of the prisoners, and lost only one man of her own, a lopsided reckoning that says as much about the brutal arithmetic of naval gunfire as it does about the scale of Pinguin's own campaign.

Pinguin's record is worth setting out because it explains why the Royal Navy had spent eighteen months looking for her. She had been the Hansa Line freighter Kandelfels, and in her one cruise she sank or captured twenty-eight ships of 136,642 tons and mined four more totalling another 18,068, which made her the most successful German commerce raider of the entire war. Her single greatest coup did not involve firing at anybody: on 14 January 1941 she found the Norwegian Antarctic whaling fleet at work in the ice and took the lot, three factory ships and eleven whale catchers, in one night.

It also explains the manner of her end. She was still carrying a hold full of unlaid mines, and by the usual account it was a shell from Cornwall reaching them that turned the action into an explosion rather than a sinking. That is why almost nobody came out of her at all, and why the merchant seamen locked in her holds, men she had taken off the ships she had sunk, had no chance whatever. Cornwall had found the raider the Admiralty most wanted found, and killed her, and killed nearly all the people she was carrying, in the same few seconds.

The Easter Sunday Raid

HMS Cornwall met her end on 5 April 1942, during what became known as the Easter Sunday Raid. A floatplane launched from the Japanese cruiser Tone spotted her and her sister ship HMS Dorsetshire around 320 kilometres south-west of Ceylon shortly before midday, and dive bombers launched from three Japanese aircraft carriers, Akagi, Soryu and Hiryu, were overhead within the hour, part of a wider Japanese carrier strike into the Indian Ocean intended to cripple British naval power in the region in the same way the attack on Pearl Harbor had crippled American power in the Pacific four months earlier.

The men who did it were the same men. The second wave that morning was fifty-three Aichi dive bombers led by Lieutenant Commander Takashige Egusa, the finest dive-bomber leader in the Imperial Japanese Navy, under Nagumo with Fuchida running the air groups, which is to say the identical command team and largely the identical aircrew that had flown into Pearl Harbor. What they did to the two cruisers is still cited as the most accurate dive bombing of the war. Dorsetshire took ten bombs and eight near misses in about eight minutes. The hit rates usually quoted, somewhere between eighty and ninety per cent, come from wartime estimates and are worth treating with a little caution, but no allowance changes the shape of it: two heavy cruisers in open water, no air cover, and about a quarter of an hour.

Both cruisers were sunk in the attack, a devastating loss inflicted with remarkable speed and precision by pilots who had, only months earlier, delivered the same treatment to the American battleships at Pearl Harbor. Nine bombs found Cornwall in barely twelve minutes; Dorsetshire followed her under some six minutes later. Sub-Lieutenant R. Ellis Brown, in Cornwall's gun control room when the attack began, later recalled a "terrific explosion" that "lifted the ship out of the water", and a bomb that fell directly on the sick bay, "killing most of the men there".

Between the two ships, 424 men were killed in the attack and its aftermath; 192 of them from Cornwall alone, including 23 of her South African contingent and 22 of her own Royal Marines detachment, among them its commanding officer, Lieutenant David Reid. The 1,122 survivors spent approximately thirty hours in the water before being rescued by the light cruiser HMS Enterprise and two destroyers, sharing those waters with sharks that, Brown remembered, backed off readily enough whenever the men kicked and shouted at them. One survivor, Walter Palmer, died of his wounds aboard Enterprise having made it through the rescue itself, a particularly harrowing ordeal for men who had escaped the sinking itself only to face many more hours adrift before rescue finally arrived.

The South Africans need a word, because the figure is not incidental. Twenty-three of the hundred and ninety-two men Cornwall lost were South African, and the roll of South African Naval Forces personnel lost with the ship, Walter Palmer included, runs to twenty-five names. That is better than one in eight of her dead, from a country that had almost no navy of its own.

They came aboard at Simonstown. The Cape was a Royal Navy base, the Selborne dry dock there took British ships all through the war, and Cornwall was in it twice, in February 1940 and again in January 1941, taking South African ratings aboard on both visits. The arrangement that sent thousands of South African volunteers into British ships is described in the article on HMS Holmes (K581). Ellis Brown, whose account of the sinking is the one everybody quotes, was one of them: he was the son of the mayor of Durban.

The Easter Sunday Raid, and the loss of HMS Cornwall and HMS Dorsetshire within it, remains one of the Royal Navy's grimmest single days of the entire Second World War, a stark demonstration of just how dangerous naval air power had become by 1942, for any fleet that found itself without adequate air cover of its own.

The wider raid is the part that has faded. Nagumo took five carriers into the Indian Ocean to do to the British Eastern Fleet what he had done to the Americans at Pearl Harbor, and he very nearly managed it. Admiral Somerville, who knew perfectly well what his ships could and could not survive, took the rest of the fleet away west to Addu Atoll in the Maldives and refused to give Nagumo a target. It was the right decision and it looked like nothing at all, which is generally the way with the right decision. For a few weeks in April 1942 the Royal Navy did not control the Indian Ocean and could not have contested it, and Cornwall and Dorsetshire are the reason everybody understood that.

There is an ending to it that the two ships never got to see. Nagumo took Akagi, Soryu and Hiryu out of the Indian Ocean, back to the Pacific, and into the Battle of Midway. All three were sunk there on 4 June 1942, together with Kaga, in the space of a single morning, sixty days after they killed Cornwall. Every carrier that put an aircraft over her was on the bottom of the Pacific before the summer.

Egusa outlived his aircraft. He was badly burned at Midway in the wreck of Soryu, recovered, went back to flying, and was shot down and killed in June 1944 over the Marianas. He had led the dive bombers at Pearl Harbor in a scarlet-painted aeroplane so that his squadrons could find him in the air, and he put a bomb into USS Nevada; between that morning and this one he had also been over Wake, Ambon, Java and Darwin. He was, by the general agreement of both sides, the best there was at it, and Cornwall and Dorsetshire were the clearest demonstration he ever gave.

Four days after the cruisers went down the same aircraft found the carrier HMS Hermes (95) off Batticaloa, without aircraft aboard and without air cover, and did the same thing to her.

Legacy

HMS Cornwall's career, from patient interwar service on the China Station through to her truly significant role in hunting down the German raider Pinguin, and finally her loss alongside HMS Dorsetshire in the Easter Sunday Raid, traces a broader arc common to many of the Royal Navy's interwar cruisers: ships designed and built for an earlier age of naval warfare, thrust into a new and far more dangerous era defined by carrier-based air power, in which even a well-armed and well-protected heavy cruiser could be sunk within minutes by aircraft she had no realistic way of shooting down in sufficient numbers.