HMS Dunedin (96): Four Days Adrift, Hunted by Fish, After a U-Boat's Torpedoes

Built on the Tyne

HMS Dunedin was built by Armstrong Whitworth at Newcastle-on-Tyne and Hawthorn Leslie at Hebburn, laid down on 5 November 1917, launched on 19 November 1918, and commissioned on 13 September 1919, a Danae-class light cruiser displacing 4,276 tons, capable of 29 knots, and carrying six 6-inch guns alongside anti-aircraft armament and torpedo tubes, with a crew of 462 officers and men. Her pennant number changed several times over her career, from 96 to 93, then I.93, and finally D.93 by 1940.

Danzig, Earthquakes and the Interwar Years

HMS Dunedin was sent to Danzig in October 1920, alongside three other British vessels, to help protect the unloading of munitions intended for Poland, part of the complicated postwar settlement in the Baltic region. In 1931, she assisted the New Zealand city of Napier following the devastating Hawke's Bay earthquake, working alongside HMS Veronica and HMS Diomede in one of the more significant humanitarian relief efforts undertaken by Royal Navy cruisers between the wars.

Capturing an Enigma Machine

HMS Dunedin hunted the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau early in the Second World War, and by 1940 had intercepted the German merchant ship Heidelberg in the Caribbean and captured the Hannover, which was later converted into the escort carrier HMS Audacity. She took part in the blockade off Martinique between July and November 1940, and on 15 June 1941 achieved a genuinely significant intelligence coup, capturing the German tanker Lothringen, which was found to be carrying Enigma cipher machines, material of real value to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park working to crack German naval communications.

Sunk by U-124

HMS Dunedin's own fate came on 24 November 1941, while on patrol between Brazil and Africa in the South Atlantic. At 15:26 that afternoon, two torpedoes fired by the German submarine U-124 struck the cruiser, and she sank rapidly, taking 419 of her 486 crew down with her, a devastating loss of life. Only four officers and 63 men initially survived the sinking itself.

The ordeal for those who made it into the water was only beginning. Survivors spent between three and a half and four days adrift on basic rafts and a flottanet, a genuinely horrifying experience documented afterwards by Lieutenant-Commander Watson. On the first night, wounded men died as survivors huddled together on unstable rafts in cold conditions, and the ordeal grew steadily worse: small, blunt-nosed fish attacked survivors in the water, biting deeply, mostly at the soles of their feet, severing arteries and causing numerous further deaths among men already weakened by exposure and injury. Cold and psychological trauma led some survivors into delirium, with men developing delusions about simply returning to their ship's mess for a meal, unable to process that the ship itself no longer existed. Rescue finally came on the fourth day, when the merchant ship SS Nishmaha spotted the rafts and rescued 72 survivors at around 20:00 local time, an agonisingly long wait that claimed still more lives even after the initial sinking had been survived.

A Survivor's Second Disaster

Among those who survived the sinking of HMS Dunedin was Fred Hawks, a telegrapher for whom this was, remarkably, his second major naval disaster of the war, having also survived the sinking of HMS Royal Oak at Scapa Flow in 1939, a genuinely extraordinary run of survival against some of the very worst individual losses suffered by the Royal Navy across the entire conflict.