HMS Dorsetshire (40): She Fired the Torpedoes That Finished the Bismarck

Constructed at Portsmouth

HMS Dorsetshire was built at Portsmouth Dockyard, her keel laid on 21 September 1927, launched on 21 January 1929, and commissioned on 30 September 1930, a County-class heavy cruiser of the Norfolk sub-class, sharing that particular design variant only with her sister ship HMS Norfolk.

What the County class actually were, and why the Washington Treaty made them the way it did, is set out in the article on HMS Cornwall (56). Norfolk and Dorsetshire came last, and got the benefit of everybody having noticed the problem: a proper belt over the machinery and heavier protection over the magazines, paid for by trimming weight out of the hull elsewhere. It made them the best-protected of the thirteen. It did not make them well protected, and both of them found out the hard way what a Val could do to a treaty cruiser.

Finishing the Bismarck

HMS Dorsetshire, under the command of Captain Benjamin Martin, took part in the final destruction of the German battleship Bismarck on 27 May 1941, arriving after HMS Rodney and HMS King George V had already reduced the German ship's main armament to wreckage. She had been on patrol off the West African coast when the hunt for Bismarck began, and was diverted at speed to join it, a Devonport-manned ship a very long way from home when the moment came.

Diverted is doing some work in that sentence. Dorsetshire was not ordered anywhere. She was the ocean escort of convoy SL-74 out of Freetown, sharing the job with a single armed merchant cruiser, HMS Bulolo, and when the signals began to come in about Hood, Captain Benjamin Martin took his cruiser out of the screen on the morning of 26 May on his own authority and went looking for Bismarck. He left a convoy of loaded merchant ships in the mid-Atlantic under the protection of a converted passenger liner with six old six-inch guns. It was the right call and it was also, until the moment his torpedoes went in, an entirely unforgivable one; had a U-boat found SL-74 that week, Martin's career would have ended in a court martial rather than in the history books. Nobody has ever settled whether he was brilliant or merely lucky, and the two are not mutually exclusive.

HMS Dorsetshire opened fire at a range of 20,000 yards and fired some 254 shells from her main battery during the engagement, before receiving orders to close in and finish the crippled battleship with torpedoes.

She fired three torpedoes, two of which struck home, contributing directly to Bismarck's final sinking at 10:40 that morning, a properly historic role in the destruction of one of the most feared warships in the German fleet. Watching from close range, Dorsetshire's own Instructor Lieutenant Commander R.D. East saw members of Bismarck's crew standing on her upturned hull as she rolled over and went down, a sight witnesses carried with them for the rest of their lives. Exactly how much of the sinking to credit to Dorsetshire's torpedoes and how much to scuttling charges German survivors later said had been set below decks has been argued over by naval historians ever since, a debate that has never been fully resolved, though there was no such argument at the time about which ship delivered the final blow.

The evidence has grown since, and it mostly favours the Germans. When Robert Ballard found the wreck on 8 June 1989 he found no underwater penetration of the armoured citadel at all: eight holes in the hull, one to starboard and seven to port, every one of them above the waterline. He also found a hull in remarkably good order, with none of the implosion damage a partly flooded ship suffers on the way down, which means her compartments were already full when she sank. James Cameron's expedition in 2002 went further and concluded the torpedoes had played no part in it whatever. Set against that, it is worth being clear about what Dorsetshire actually did and did not do. By the time she closed in, Bismarck had no steering, no working main armament, a burning superstructure and no prospect of reaching France; she was a wreck that had not yet gone under. Whether the last valve was turned by a German engineer or the last hole punched by a British torpedo is a question about bookkeeping. It is not a question about who won.

HMS Dorsetshire and HMS Maori attempted to rescue survivors from the water afterwards, but the effort was cut tragically short by a reported U-boat sighting, forcing both ships to abandon the rescue and depart the area.

Of Bismarck's roughly 2,200 crew, only 110 men were ultimately rescued, 85 of them aboard HMS Dorsetshire and 25 aboard HMS Maori, a stark illustration of just how few men survived the battleship's destruction, and how much worse that toll might have been had the rescue been allowed to continue.

HMS Dorsetshire herself suffered no casualties during the entire engagement.

Sunk by Japanese Dive Bombers

Command of HMS Dorsetshire had passed in July 1941 to Captain Augustus Agar, VC, DSO, a man whose reputation preceded him by more than two decades. In June 1919 he had single-handedly torpedoed the Bolshevik cruiser Oleg from a tiny Coastal Motor Boat during a raid on the Kronstadt naval base, stopping mid-attack to make emergency repairs in full view of the enemy before completing the job and escaping undetected, an action that earned him the Victoria Cross; a follow-up raid that August brought him the DSO as well.

The Victoria Cross he got for it is one of the strangest ever awarded, because the citation did not say what he had done. It could not: the Royal Navy was not officially at war with the Bolsheviks, the Oleg attack had not been authorised by anybody, and Agar's real job was not attacking cruisers at all. He was running a secret intelligence service agent in and out of Petrograd by coastal motor boat, a man he knew only as ST-25, whose actual name was Paul Dukes and who was busy inside the Bolshevik government copying documents. The Bolsheviks put five thousand pounds on Agar's head. So the award was gazetted with the details left out, and it has been known ever since as the mystery VC. Dukes got out overland through Latvia and was later knighted, the only man in history to be knighted purely for spying.

Under Agar she did something else that has been almost entirely forgotten, and it may have been worth more to the war than the torpedoes. On 1 December 1941, directed onto the spot by Ultra decrypts, Dorsetshire came upon the German supply ship Python in the empty middle of the South Atlantic, sitting stopped with two U-boats alongside taking on fuel. U-68 and UA crash-dived; UA fired five torpedoes at Dorsetshire, all of which missed as she manoeuvred; and Python, unarmoured, unarmed for this sort of thing and with two submarines to protect, blew her own scuttling charges and rolled over that evening. She was the last of the German ocean supply ships. With her went the Kriegsmarine's ability to keep U-boats and raiders on station in the South Atlantic without going home for fuel, and the campaign in those waters effectively ended. What happened to the 414 Germans she left in the water is one of the great sea rescues, and it is told in the article on HMS Devonshire (39), whose own victim, the raider Atlantis, had put many of them aboard Python nine days earlier.

HMS Dorsetshire's own end came less than a year after Bismarck, on 5 April 1942, while en route to Colombo to refuel alongside her sister ship HMS Cornwall. The two cruisers were spotted by reconnaissance aircraft launched from the Japanese cruiser Tone, and were subsequently attacked by 53 Aichi D3A2 'Val' dive bombers launched from the carriers Akagi, Hiryu and Soryu, part of the wider Japanese carrier raid into the Indian Ocean known as the Easter Sunday Raid.

The men who did it, and what the raid was for, are set out in the article on HMS Cornwall. The short version is that Nagumo had brought the Pearl Harbor carriers into the Indian Ocean with much the same aircrew, and the two cruisers had no air cover, no warning worth the name and about a quarter of an hour.

HMS Dorsetshire was struck by approximately ten bombs and sank stern first at around 13:50 that afternoon; HMS Cornwall sank roughly ten minutes later. As she went down, Agar gave the order to hoist her silk battle ensign; it never reached the masthead, but it was still flying when Dorsetshire finally slipped under the water. Agar himself had already been wounded in the leg by shrapnel during the attack, then was dragged down with his sinking ship and suffered a serious air embolism coming back up, yet in the water he organised the survivors into a single group, went round the scattered rafts in a whaler collecting the wounded and stragglers, and, by more than one account, kept his voice as calm as if he were still standing on his own bridge. He was mentioned in despatches for his conduct.

The hours that followed were not merely a long wait for rescue. Japanese fighters returned to strafe the men in the water, killing two officers and a stoker petty officer among them, an incident recorded independently by survivors from separate parts of the ship. More than forty of the South Africans serving aboard Dorsetshire and Cornwall did not survive the sinking and its aftermath. Even so, morale reportedly held remarkably firm through around thirty hours adrift, with some of the younger stokers said to have organised an impromptu game of water polo to pass the time, before, between the two ships, 1,122 of a combined 1,546 crew were finally rescued the following day by the cruiser HMS Enterprise and the destroyers HMS Paladin and HMS Panther, though the losses among those who did not survive remained devastating.

Legacy

HMS Dorsetshire's career traces one of the most striking arcs of any Royal Navy cruiser in the entire war: from delivering the killing blow against Germany's most powerful battleship to being sunk herself less than eleven months later by an entirely different enemy on the opposite side of the world, a particularly sobering reminder of just how rapidly the balance of naval power was shifting in favour of aircraft carriers and air power over even the most successful gun-armed cruisers of the era.

There is one more thing worth saying about that arc, and it concerns the two ships she killed. Dorsetshire finished Bismarck, the largest warship Germany ever sent to sea, and she finished Python, an unarmed converted liner nobody has heard of. The battleship is on every bookshelf in the country. The supply ship, sunk without a shot being fired at her, did more to close the South Atlantic to the German navy than the battleship had ever managed to open it. Naval history is written by the size of the target, which is a shame, because it is very rarely the size of the target that decides anything.