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

HMS Dorsetshire (40)

Built 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.

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. 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 genuinely historic role in the destruction of one of the most feared warships in the German fleet.

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

HMS Dorsetshire's own end came less than a year later, 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 as part of the wider Japanese carrier raid into the Indian Ocean known as the Easter Sunday Raid. 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. Between the two ships, 1,122 of a combined 1,546 crew were 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 genuinely 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.