HMS Despatch (D30): From Hunting Raiders in the Atlantic to Headquarters Ship for the Mulberry Harbours

Built at Fairfield, Completed at Chatham

HMS Despatch was built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, her keel laid on 8 July 1918 and launched on 24 September 1919, before being towed to Chatham Dockyard for completion on 15 June 1922, a Delhi sub-class variant of the Danae-class light cruisers, displacing 4,970 long tons at normal load, capable of around 29 knots, and carrying six 6-inch guns alongside anti-aircraft armament and four triple torpedo tube mounts.

That build is worth pausing on, because the dates tell their own story. She was ordered in March 1918, laid down at Fairfield's Govan yard as number 589 in July, and launched in September 1919, by which time the war she had been ordered for had been over for ten months. The Admiralty had no urgent use for her and no money, so she was towed round to Chatham and finished there at the dockyard's own pace, coming into service in June 1922: four years and three months from order to commission for a ship that could have been built in eighteen months in 1917. Underneath she was a thoroughly conventional piece of late-war engineering, four hundred and seventy-one feet of her, six Yarrow boilers driving Parsons geared turbines on two shafts for forty thousand horsepower and twenty-nine knots. She was, in other words, born into a peace that had no particular use for her, which is exactly why she was still in service twenty-two years later doing something nobody had imagined.

Between the Wars

On commissioning, HMS Despatch went straight out to the China Station with the 5th Light Cruiser Squadron, where she remained until 1927, before transferring to the America and West Indies Station with the 8th Cruiser Squadron until 1931, when she was reduced to reserve. A refit kept her out of service until February 1933, when she recommissioned for the 3rd Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean, a posting that lasted until November 1937, seventeen years of fairly ordinary peacetime cruiser soldiering across three different corners of the Empire before the war changed everything.

Five years on the China Station is not ordinary peacetime soldiering by any reasonable definition, and the timing of hers was as bad as it gets. The Royal Navy had kept a China Station since 1865 to police the treaty ports and the Yangtze, and the 1920s took the lid off the whole arrangement: the central government in Peking had effectively collapsed, regional warlords held most of the country, and from 1926 Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition was fighting its way up from the south. On 24 March 1927, during the capture of Nanking, foreign residents were attacked and British and American warships bombarded part of the city to cover their escape; the British force included the cruisers Vindictive, Carlisle and Emerald. By the end of May there were a hundred and two warships of seven nations on the Yangtze, half of them lying off Shanghai. Despatch was on the station for the whole of that build-up and left in the year it came to a head.

The next two postings were quieter and just as characteristic of what a light cruiser was for between the wars. The America and West Indies Station, where she spent four years to 1931, covered the whole of the western Atlantic from Newfoundland to the River Plate: hurricane relief, showing the flag in a dozen small colonies, carrying governors about, and being the only British authority within a thousand miles when something went wrong. The 3rd Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean from February 1933 to November 1937 was a different proposition again, because those particular years contained the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the British fleet reinforcement that followed it, and then the Spanish Civil War from July 1936, with British warships evacuating civilians from Spanish ports and patrolling under a non-intervention agreement that nobody was much observing. She left Malta for home on 24 November 1937, sixteen months before the next war started, having spent her entire career so far in places where British policy was made by whichever captain happened to be closest.

Hunting Raiders in the South Atlantic

HMS Despatch operated initially in the South Atlantic during the Second World War, transiting the Panama Canal that October on her way to a war station off the Pacific coast of South America. That December, off Punta Caldera in Chile, she captured the German freighter SS Düsseldorf and took her as a prize, later carrying the ship's German prisoners back home through the very same neutral canal.

In March 1940, she intercepted the merchant vessel Troja off Aruba, which was scuttled by her own crew rather than be taken as a prize, and on 15 August 1941, working alongside the armed merchant cruiser HMS Pretoria Castle off the Amazon estuary, she cornered the blockade-runner Norderney, likewise scuttled rather than surrendered, with thirty-five crew and two passengers pulled from the water; exactly the kind of commerce protection and interdiction work that occupied a substantial portion of the Royal Navy's cruiser force in the war's opening years, hunting for German merchant shipping and disguised raiders across the world's oceans.

The pattern of those interceptions says a good deal about how the blockade actually worked. German merchant captains were under standing orders from Berlin: a ship caught at sea was to be sunk by her own crew, seacocks opened, charges fired and papers burned, so that neither the hull nor the cargo nor the codebooks fell into British hands. It was rigorously obeyed. A successful interception therefore produced, most of the time, not a prize but a burning ship, a boatload of prisoners and nothing else, which is why the capture of the Dusseldorf intact off Chile stands out on her record. Her own sister showed how much difference the exception made: on 8 March 1940 HMS Dunedin caught the German merchantman Hannover off Santo Domingo, the scuttling fire was got under control before it took hold, and the ship was towed into Kingston, requisitioned, and eventually converted into HMS Audacity, the first British escort carrier. One saved hull, one new type of warship. Dunedin's story is told in the article on HMS Dunedin (96).

She went on to Mediterranean convoy escort duties, and on 27 November 1940 was stationed with the convoy some twenty-five miles from the main clash at the Battle of Cape Spartivento, screening the merchant ships of Operation Collar rather than trading fire herself while Force H and the Mediterranean Fleet fought off the Italian battle squadron sent to intercept them.

Headquarters Ship for the Mulberry Harbours

HMS Despatch's most distinctive wartime role came at the 1944 Normandy landings, where, from 6 to 8 June, she served as headquarters ship for Force Mulberry off Arromanches, coordinating the assembly of Mulberry B, the British-built artificial harbour serving Gold Beach, with naval signallers running telephone cable directly between the ship and the shore to keep the whole operation in touch, the extraordinary artificial ports towed across the English Channel and assembled off the invasion beaches to allow the Allies to land supplies and equipment without needing to capture a French port intact.

The scale of what she was coordinating is worth setting out, because artificial harbour is a phrase that hides an enormous amount of concrete. A Mulberry had three parts. Old ships were sunk in line to make a first breakwater, the Gooseberries; the Polish-crewed cruiser ORP Dragon, whose story is told in the article on HMS Danae, ended up as one of them. Then came the Phoenixes, concrete caissons of up to six thousand tons each, towed across the Channel and sunk in position; the first went down off Arromanches at dawn on 8 June and by the 15th another 115 had followed, making a breakwater five miles long. Inside that sat the Whales, six miles of flexible steel roadway riding on pontoons, rising and falling with a tide that runs over twenty feet on that coast.

It very nearly did not work. On 19 June the worst Channel storm in forty years came on and blew for three days, and it took Mulberry A, the American harbour off Omaha, apart: twenty-one of its twenty-eight Phoenix caissons were destroyed outright, the floating breakwaters broke adrift and the roadways and piers were smashed. It was written off. Mulberry B at Arromanches, the one Despatch had spent three days helping to assemble, held. Over the following ten months it landed more than two and a half million men, half a million vehicles and four million tons of stores, which is to say that the invasion of Europe was supplied through a harbour that had been towed across the Channel in pieces.

For this role, her original armament was replaced with sixteen 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns, operated by army gunners rather than her own naval crew, a notably unusual arrangement reflecting just how specialised and important the Mulberry harbour project had become to the invasion's overall logistics.

The gunners are worth a footnote of their own. Putting soldiers in charge of a warship's anti-aircraft armament sounds like an oddity and was in fact routine by 1944: the Royal Artillery ran a Maritime Regiment whose gunners served afloat in merchant ships and auxiliaries throughout the war, precisely so that the Navy's own trained ratings could be used where only sailors would do. Despatch by then was not really a cruiser at all. She was a floating headquarters with a signal office, a telephone cable running ashore and sixteen Bofors on her upper deck worked by the army, moored off a Normandy beach while a harbour was built around her.

The End of Service

HMS Despatch was reduced to reserve in January 1945, and was sold for scrapping on 5 April 1946, arriving at Arnott Young's yards in Troon, Scotland, on 5 May that year, closing out a career that had taken her from South Atlantic commerce raiding operations and a major Mediterranean fleet action to a particularly unique final role at the very heart of the Normandy invasion's logistical machinery.