HMS Devonshire (39): The Cruiser That Hunted Down the Raider Atlantis

The Build: Devonport

HMS Devonshire was built at Devonport Dockyard, her keel laid on 16 March 1926, launched on 22 October 1927, and completed on 18 March 1929, a County-class heavy cruiser of the London sub-class, displacing 9,850 long tons standard, capable of 32.35 knots, and carrying eight 8-inch guns in four twin turrets alongside a substantial anti-aircraft and torpedo armament, with a crew of 784 officers and men.

What the County class was, and what the Royal Navy gave up to build a ten thousand ton cruiser under the Washington Treaty, is set out in the article on HMS Cornwall. The short answer is armour, and the long range they bought with it is exactly why these ships spent the war chasing raiders across empty oceans.

Evacuating the King of Norway

HMS Devonshire served with the Mediterranean Fleet before transferring to the Home Fleet, and took part in the Norwegian Campaign between April and June 1940.

On 7 June that year, she evacuated King Haakon VII, Crown Prince Olav, and members of the Norwegian government, carrying 461 passengers to safety as Norway fell to German invasion, a significant piece of naval diplomacy carried out under considerable time pressure and real danger.

What happened the next day is the part of this ship's war that people still argue about, and the article ought not to pass over it. Devonshire was flying the flag of Vice-Admiral John Cunningham and her orders were absolutely explicit: get home independently, at full speed, in complete radio silence, with the King of Norway, the Crown Prince, the government and 461 passengers aboard. On the afternoon of 8 June 1940, somewhere in the region of thirty-two miles away from her, the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau found the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her two escorting destroyers, Ardent and Acasta, and sank all three. One thousand five hundred and thirty-one officers and men were lost.

Devonshire received a signal from Glorious. That much is not in dispute. What is disputed is everything else. Cunningham said afterwards that the message was garbled and possibly corrupt, and that he could make nothing definite of it; he did not break radio silence to pass it on, and he did not turn. Devonshire's own log, however, records that she went to action stations, increased speed and exercised her main armament shortly afterwards, which is not what a ship does about a signal she has understood nothing from. Nobody else in the fleet knew Glorious was in trouble for a considerable time, which is a large part of why so few men were taken out of the water afterwards.

It is worth being fair about the position he was in, because it is genuinely horrible. A County-class cruiser sent alone against two battleships would have been sunk without appreciably helping anybody, and she had the head of state of an allied nation and his entire government sitting in her wardroom, which was the only thing standing between occupied Norway and having no legal government at all. Breaking radio silence would have told two German battleships exactly where she was. On any operational reading, Cunningham did the right thing and knew what it cost.

What has never sat well is the account rather than the decision. Had the signal simply been reported as received and deliberately not acted on, for the reasons above, there would be very little left to argue about eighty years later. Instead the story was that it could not be read, and the ship's own log does not comfortably support that. The King and his cabinet reached Britain safely and set up the Norwegian government in exile, which went on to put the fourth largest merchant fleet in the world at the Allies' disposal for the rest of the war. That was worth a great deal. It is also not the same thing as saying nothing happened.

HMS Devonshire took part in the ill-fated Operation Menace against Dakar in September 1940, an attempt to seize the strategically important French West African port from Vichy French control, though the operation ultimately failed and HMS Devonshire herself fired some 200 shells from her main guns without scoring a single hit against French ships obscured by smoke screens, a frustrating experience even by the standards of a truly difficult and poorly executed operation.

Sinking the Atlantis

HMS Devonshire's finest hour came on 22 November 1941, when she sank the German auxiliary cruiser Atlantis north of Ascension Island.

By that point Atlantis, known to the German Navy as Schiff 16 and to the Royal Navy simply as Raider C, had been at sea for 622 days, the longest cruise of any German warship of the entire war, sailing more than 100,000 miles and sinking or capturing twenty-two Allied ships totalling some 144,000 tons, all while disguised, at various points, as a rotating cast of entirely innocent-looking merchantmen. Her single most consequential capture came in November 1940, when she took the British steamer Automedon off Sumatra and found fifteen bags of secret mail in the strongroom, including a copy of the War Cabinet's own assessment that Britain's Far Eastern colonies were effectively indefensible, papers that were passed on to Japan and are widely thought to have shaped its calculations in the run-up to Pearl Harbor a year later.

HMS Devonshire finally caught up with her disguised as the Dutch merchantman Polyphemus, refuelling the submarine U-126 near Ascension Island. Wary of a torpedo from the U-boat lurking nearby, Captain R. D. Oliver kept his distance and opened fire from around 17,000 yards rather than closing in; Atlantis, unable to reply in kind, was hit repeatedly, and her commander, Bernhard Rogge, ordered her scuttled rather than fight on. Nine of her crew were killed.

Her captain is one of the more unusual figures of the war. Bernhard Rogge sank or took twenty-two ships and put several hundred merchant seamen and passengers, of a dozen nationalities, into his own holds, and the recurring testimony afterwards was that he had treated them decently. The master of the British steamer City of Baghdad, one of his victims, put it plainly: his treatment of prisoners left respect instead of hatred. It saved him. Rogge was one of very few German officers of flag rank not arrested by the Allies in 1945, precisely because of how he had run that ship, and he went on to serve in the postwar West German navy as a rear admiral. Along the way he had collected something almost nobody else did: a ceremonial sword given personally by Emperor Hirohito, one of only three ever presented to German officers. The other two went to Goering and to Rommel.

U-126 surfaced once Devonshire had left the area and took the survivors under her wing, around three hundred men in all, a hundred and seven crammed aboard the submarine itself and the rest towed behind in six lifeboats bound for South America. The German Navy sent the supply ship Python to complete the rescue, only for her to run into Devonshire's own sister ship HMS Dorsetshire a little over a week later and be scuttled in turn, a thoroughly bad fortnight for what had, until then, been one of the most successful raiding cruises of the entire war.

What happened to those survivors afterwards is one of the great sea rescues and it is barely known. When Dorsetshire sank Python on 1 December there were suddenly 414 men in the middle of the South Atlantic, in lifeboats and on rafts, four thousand miles from any friendly port, and the Kriegsmarine decided to bring every one of them home. Four U-boats reached them first and took the boats in tow, in weather that made towing a nightmare, with men packed onto the casings and inside the hulls. Then, off the Cape Verde Islands, four Italian submarines came out from the Atlantic base at Bordeaux to take over part of the load: Luigi Torelli, Enrico Tazzoli, Giuseppe Finzi and Pietro Calvi, whose own story is set out in the article on HMS Columbine.

They all landed at Saint-Nazaire between 24 and 29 December 1941. Every man who had been in the water was accounted for; not one of the 414 was lost on the passage. It took eight submarines of two navies the better part of a month, and it is the largest submarine rescue operation anybody has ever attempted. Devonshire had opened fire at 17,000 yards to avoid a torpedo, which was the correct and unsentimental decision, and it left three hundred men in boats. The other side then spent Christmas getting them back.

Earlier that same month, on 2 November 1941, HMS Devonshire had also helped capture a Vichy French convoy bound for French Indochina.

Escort Duty Across Three Oceans

HMS Devonshire escorted aircraft carriers raiding Norway and Finland in July 1941, and provided cover for the first Soviet convoy under Operation Dervish that August, part of the earliest efforts to establish the Arctic convoy route that would later become so famous, and so dangerous.

She supported Operation Ironclad, the invasion of Madagascar, in April 1942, and escorted convoys across the Indian Ocean through 1942 and 1943, before undergoing an extensive refit between May 1943 and March 1944.

HMS Devonshire went on to escort carrier operations against Norwegian targets between July 1944 and May 1945, escorted the surrendered German cruisers Prinz Eugen and Nürnberg back to the United Kingdom in May 1945, and transported troops to and from Australia between June and December that year.

A Cadet Training Ship

HMS Devonshire was converted to a cadet training ship in 1947, taking part in the coronation Fleet Review of June 1953, before being sold for scrap on 16 June 1954 and broken up by John Cashmore Ltd at Newport, Wales, arriving there on 12 December that year, closing out a career that had carried her from rescuing a king to hunting down one of the most successful commerce raiders the Kriegsmarine ever put to sea.

Her last years are worth a line as well, because they are the reason so many people remember her. From 1947 she was a cadet training ship, which for a heavy cruiser meant taking several hundred very young men to sea at a time and showing them what the job was. She went to the Coronation Review at Spithead in June 1953 in that role, an eight-inch-gun cruiser at the last great gathering of the old fleet, and was sold for breaking a year later. A ship that had carried a king out of a falling country, chased a raider across the South Atlantic and brought two surrendered German cruisers home finished up as a floating classroom, which is what happened to almost every survivor of her generation and is not the worst way to end.