HMS Cumberland (57): Racing to the River Plate at Nearly 30 Knots

Barrow-Built

HMS Cumberland was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, completing in 1926, a County-class heavy cruiser displacing 10,000 long tons, measuring 630 feet in length, and capable of 32.25 knots on 80,000 horsepower, a notably fast and powerful cruiser built to protect Britain's imperial trade routes across some of the widest oceans on earth.

Ten thousand tons was not a coincidence but a legal limit, and what the Royal Navy gave up to stay inside it is set out in the article on her sister HMS Cornwall. The short version is armour: the Counties bought length, speed and above all the endurance to police an empire, and paid for all of it with protection. Cumberland was the fastest of them on trial, and in December 1939 that turned out to matter a great deal.

HMS Cumberland served on the China Station with the 5th Cruiser Squadron from 1928 until 1938, returning briefly to the United Kingdom for refit in March 1935, before joining the 2nd Cruiser Squadron on the South American station in 1938, a posting that would put her in exactly the right place at exactly the right time only a year later.

The Race to the River Plate

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, HMS Cumberland was assigned to Force G of the 2nd Cruiser Squadron in South American waters. On 5 December, working alongside HMS Ajax, she intercepted the German merchant ship Ussukuma, whose crew scuttled her rather than let the two cruisers take her as a prize, a small foretaste of the far bigger drama about to unfold.

HMS Cumberland was undergoing refit at the Falkland Islands in early December when the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee finally revealed herself.

On 13 December 1939, HMS Exeter, HMS Ajax and HMS Achilles engaged Graf Spee in the Battle of the River Plate, and HMS Cumberland, receiving only a garbled indication that contact had been made, immediately steamed north at speed.

She covered an extraordinary 1,014 nautical miles in just 34 hours, averaging 29.8 knots, arriving off the River Plate at 22:00 on 14 December, in time to reinforce the British squadron as Admiral Graf Spee sat trapped in Montevideo harbour.

The German raider was scuttled by her own crew on 17 December rather than face the reinforced British force, a famous early victory for the Royal Navy and one in which HMS Cumberland's remarkable dash north played a particularly important part, even without firing a shot herself.

The dash deserves a little unpacking, because averaging 29.8 knots for thirty-four hours is not the same thing as being able to do thirty-two. A trials speed is achieved briefly, with clean boilers, a scrubbed bottom, picked coal or oil and everything perfect. Cumberland was thirteen years old, had been on the China Station for a decade, and was in the middle of a refit at Port Stanley with her machinery opened up when the signal came. Her engine room raised steam, closed her up and then held her at within a couple of knots of her designed maximum for a day and a half without a break. It is one of the more impressive engineering performances of the war and nobody got a medal for it, because all she did at the end of it was arrive.

Arriving was the point, though. HMS Exeter had been very badly knocked about in the action, with two of her three turrets out and a hundred and more casualties, and she was in no state to hold a blockade line. Cumberland took her place off the estuary. Which means the force Langsdorff was looking at from Montevideo, and correctly assessing as too strong to fight, only looked that way because a cruiser had come a thousand miles in a day and a half to stand in the gap. Graf Spee blew herself up on 17 December rather than come out to it.

Raiders, Dakar and the Arctic

HMS Cumberland refitted at Simonstown, South Africa, in January and February 1940, before escorting convoys along the African coast to the Middle East that summer. In July 1940, she joined HMS Cornwall in hunting the German commerce raider Thor, and intercepted the French merchant ship Poitiers during the same period.

Thor is worth more than a clause, because she is the reason the Royal Navy stopped pretending that a liner with guns on it was a cruiser. She had sailed from Germany on 6 June 1940 under Otto Kähler, a converted banana boat with six 5.9-inch guns hidden behind hinged plating, and in the space of nine months she fought three British armed merchant cruisers and beat all three of them.

On 28 July 1940, the same month Cumberland and Cornwall were sent looking for her, she traded fire with HMS Alcantara for thirty-five minutes, hurt her, and disengaged. On 5 December she fought HMS Carnarvon Castle for the best part of an hour and damaged her badly enough to send her limping into Montevideo, coming away with very little herself. On 4 April 1941 she met HMS Voltaire, and this time she did not break off: she pressed the action until Voltaire sank. Three armed merchant cruisers, three defeats, no German losses.

That is the whole case against the armed merchant cruiser in three engagements, and it is set out at greater length in the article on HMS Corfu (F86), which was one of them. A raider had proper naval guns, a director to lay them, torpedo tubes and a crew trained to fight the ship; an AMC had old guns worked by eye and no armour at all. Sending real cruisers after Thor, which is what Cumberland and Cornwall were doing that July, was the correct answer, and the reason it took a while to arrive at is that there were never enough real cruisers to go round.

They did not find her. Her first cruise lasted three hundred and twenty-nine days and accounted for twelve ships of ninety-six and a half thousand tons; over her whole career she took twenty-two ships of around a hundred and fifty thousand, which makes her one of the most successful raiders Germany sent to sea, and Kähler got the Knight's Cross for it. She was eventually destroyed in Yokohama in November 1942, not by anybody hunting her, but by a fire and explosion aboard the supply ship moored alongside her.

On 23 September 1940, while providing naval gunfire support during the Battle of Dakar, HMS Cumberland was struck by a 9.4-inch shell fired from a French shore battery. The hit fractured a steam pipe, knocked out her electrical power and forced her withdrawal from the action, a reminder of just how awkward, and occasionally violent, the naval standoffs between Britain and Vichy French forces could turn in the war's earlier years.

From October 1941 through to January 1944, HMS Cumberland served with the 1st Cruiser Squadron escorting the famously dangerous Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union, earning the battle honour "Arctic 1942-1943" for her service through some of the harshest and most hazardous waters of the entire war.

In 1944, she transferred to the Far East as part of the 4th Cruiser Squadron, conducting raids on Northern Sumatra and earning further battle honours for "Sabang 1944" and "Burma 1945", before returning to Simonstown on 7 February 1945 for rudder repairs.

A Cold War Gunnery Trials Ship

HMS Cumberland returned to the United Kingdom on 12 November 1945 and spent the following months transporting troops home, before being placed in reserve until 1949.

She then underwent a substantial refit at Devonport between 1949 and 1951, converted into a gunnery trials ship, losing her original 8-inch turrets in favour of prototype dual-purpose 6-inch and 3-inch automatic turrets, valuable experimental work for the Royal Navy's next generation of warship armament.

Those turrets have a story of their own, and it is a rather sad one. The 6-inch Mark 26 in her B position and the 3-inch/70 in X were prototypes of the armament for the Tiger-class cruisers: three hulls laid down during the war, left unfinished at the end of it, and then redesigned around a pair of fully automatic gun mountings that were supposed to make a cruiser useful against jet aircraft. Cumberland spent most of the 1950s proving them, and proving is the right word. The mountings were fiendishly complicated, one of the significant breakthroughs was working out what oil to use in the servos and how to filter it, and as late as April 1957 she fired six hundred and forty-five 6-inch rounds through the thing in a single trial series and turned up serious faults.

HMS Tiger was finally completed in 1959, some eighteen years after she was laid down, followed by Blake and Lion. By then the guided missile had arrived and a gun cruiser, however clever her turrets, was already an answer to a question nobody was asking; Tiger and Blake were cut about into helicopter cruisers within a decade, the after turrets that had taken Cumberland ten years to debug being lifted out and thrown away, and Lion was never converted at all: she was stripped for spares to keep the other two going and broken up. Cumberland went to the breakers in the same year Tiger commissioned.

On 5 August 1955, still serving as trials ship, HMS Cumberland accompanied the carrier HMS Eagle on a NATO operational visit to Naples, and seven weeks later, on 28 September, she took part in genuine atomic trials in the Mediterranean, testing a technique called pre-wetting: continuously washing down every exposed weather surface of the ship with sea water so that radioactive fallout would have nothing to stick to.

Pre-wetting did not stay an experiment for long, and the Type 12 frigates then on the drawing board were designed around the same thinking, along with a sealed citadel held at slightly higher pressure than the outside air and an enclosed bridge, so that a frigate could fight with every hatch shut and nobody on the upper deck at all. That whole way of thinking is described in the article on HMS Blackpool (F77). That a ship laid down in 1924 was the one steaming through a simulated fallout cloud to prove it is the sort of thing that only happens in a navy short of hulls.

Between 1955 and 1956, HMS Cumberland was also fitted with trial anti-A-bomb and anti-H-bomb defences, reflecting the properly urgent nuclear anxieties of the mid-1950s Royal Navy. Her first voyage in that new configuration was delayed by unexplained defects in her engine room, and in April 1956, having put to sea again on another secret test mission, she was back in port within 36 hours after a further unexplained defect in her main gearbox. Sabotage was suspected both times, though no conclusive explanation appears to have ever been confirmed.

The End of a Long Career

HMS Cumberland was placed in reserve in May 1959 and sold for breaking up, arriving under tow at Cashmore's yard in Newport on 3 November that year, closing out more than three decades of service that had carried her from patient interwar duty on the China Station to a properly famous dash to the River Plate, Arctic convoy escort, Far Eastern raids, and finally a strange and unresolved final chapter as an experimental Cold War trials ship.