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.

She belonged to a class that scattered further than most. The Danaes were the last British light cruisers of the First World War design, built for the North Sea and then spent, one by one, on the far corners of an empire that needed cheap cruisers more than good ones: Dunedin and Diomede to New Zealand, Dragon and Danae to the Polish Navy, and the rest to the East Indies and the Pacific. What happened to two of the others is set out in the article on HMS Danae (D44). Not one of them was a modern warship by 1941, and all of them were at sea anyway.

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 May 1924 she became flagship of the New Zealand Station, one of two cruisers Britain transferred to New Zealand that year to replace the ageing HMS Chatham, a role she went on to hold for the next thirteen years. The move was not entirely straightforward: unlike the coal-fired cruisers they replaced, Dunedin and her sister HMS Diomede were oil-fired, and Auckland's Devonport naval base had to build new fuel storage tanks in 1924-25 simply to keep them running.

Royal Marines from both cruisers went ashore at Apia on 21 February 1928 to support New Zealand's colonial administration in Samoa during unrest linked to the Mau movement, a non-violent independence campaign, a considerably less flattering role to look back on than the earthquake relief work that followed three years later.

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, landing 54 stretchers, five marquees, thirty-four tents and four hundred blankets, and putting her own sailors to work clearing streets and recovering bodies alongside the medical stores, relief remembered locally for years afterwards for its military precision.

Dunedin finally returned home to Britain in 1937, her long New Zealand posting over, with barely two years to spare before the next war broke out, one she would not survive.

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 genuine intelligence coup, intercepting the German supply tanker Lothringen in the South Atlantic. A boarding party led by Lieutenant-Commander Sowdon crossed before the German crew could scuttle her properly; below decks, Lieutenant-Commander Hughes and his men found six demolition charges still rigged and worked through the dark, unstable ship removing them by hand, with no way of knowing in the moment which, if any, carried a live fuse.

The real prize came down to a piece of persistence rather than brute searching. Telegraphist Percy Jackson combed the wireless office and at first found nothing, the German operator having smashed his own equipment before surrendering, but went back a second time alone and found the ship's own cypher log tucked away in plain language behind the wreckage, a document that could be matched against the coded German naval signals Bletchley Park was already working to break. Lothringen herself was sailed to Bermuda under a prize crew and later recommissioned as the fleet oiler HMS Empire Salvage, her German buoyant-rubber-hose refuelling-at-sea gear proving useful enough that the Admiralty adopted the technique for its own ships.

The Lothringen capture makes a great deal more sense set in its context, which is one of the most successful and most nerve-racking fortnights of the entire intelligence war. After the Bismarck operation collapsed, Bletchley was reading enough German naval traffic to know where the whole network of supply tankers waiting in the Atlantic actually was, and the Admiralty took them apart in a fortnight: Belchen sunk on 3 June between Greenland and Labrador, Gedania abandoned and captured on 4 June, Esso Hamburg and Egerland scuttled by their own crews on the 4th and 5th. It worked so completely that Churchill began to worry the Germans would draw the obvious conclusion, and orders went out to leave one ship alone specifically so as not to give the game away, whereupon HMS Marsdale ran into her by accident and sank her. By the middle of the month Lothringen was the last one afloat. Aircraft from HMS Eagle found her on 15 June and Dunedin did the rest.

What that meant for the men doing it is worth stating plainly, because they were never told. A boarding party rowing across to a scuttling tanker with six live demolition charges below decks, and a telegraphist going back alone into a smashed wireless office on a hunch, were the visible end of a machine none of them knew existed. Percy Jackson found a cypher log because he decided to look twice. Nobody could tell him why it mattered, or that Bletchley Park existed at all. The secret was not made public until the 1970s, by which time most of Dunedin's company had been dead for more than thirty years.

Sunk by U-124

HMS Dunedin's own fate came on 24 November 1941, while on patrol between Brazil and West Africa in the South Atlantic under Captain Richard Lovatt, hunting for a suspected German supply ship. Her lookouts spotted a periscope at around 14:50 and gave chase, but misjudged the U-boat's own course and turned away from the danger rather than toward it; the German submarine U-124, under Kapitänleutnant Johann Mohr, fired a spread of three torpedoes at 15:21, two of which struck the cruiser's starboard side five and a half minutes later.

The shot itself deserves a note, because by the standards of submarine warfare it should not have worked. Mohr had Dunedin at something over three miles, which was well beyond a sensible firing range for a 1941 torpedo against a warship making speed and zigzagging. He fired anyway, a spread of three at 15:21, and then everybody aboard U-124 waited for five minutes and twenty-three seconds while the torpedoes ran. Two of them arrived. Dunedin had half an hour of warning and turned the wrong way, and the difference between a cruiser sinking a submarine and 419 men dying in the South Atlantic came down to a single choice about which side of the contact to run.

Dunedin rolled first to port, then to starboard, before sinking stern-first roughly twenty minutes after the first hit, taking Captain Lovatt down with her along with 419 of her 486 crew, including 55 of the 63 Royal Marines aboard, 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. A hundred and forty-five men reached the ship's six Carley rafts and a single flotanet, a makeshift raft of rope and cork offering barely any protection from the sea, and survivors would spend between three and a half and four days adrift, a properly horrifying experience documented afterwards in Lieutenant-Commander Watson's own official report.

Commander Unwin gave up his own place on a proper Carley raft so a more badly injured man could take it, choosing the flotanet instead; of the seven men who ended up there, only one survived. Elsewhere, Able Seaman Fraser swam out through waters known to hold sharks to reach a drowning shipmate, and Sergeant King of the Royal Marines held up a badly wounded comrade for forty-eight straight hours, acts of endurance Watson singled out by name in his report.

On the first night, wounded men died as survivors huddled together on unstable rafts in cold conditions, and the ordeal grew steadily worse: Watson's own report records that an unidentified small fish was "extremely ferocious", attacking survivors in the water and 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 evening of 27 November, when a lookout aboard the American merchant ship SS Nishmaha, Roy Murray, spotted a raft "bobbing about on the swell... some three miles away", and her crew spent almost five hours combing ten miles of ocean to pull 72 men from the water. Even then the ordeal was not quite over: five more men died during the nine-and-a-half-day passage to Trinidad, leaving 67 men, four officers and 63 ratings and marines, to finally set foot on dry land.

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 remarkably extraordinary run of survival against some of the very worst individual losses suffered by the Royal Navy across the entire conflict.

The boat that sank her did not last much longer. U-124 was one of the most successful submarines Germany ever sent to sea, and Johann Mohr one of its best-known commanders. On 2 April 1943, west of Oporto, she was caught by the corvette HMS Stonecrop and the sloop HMS Black Swan and depth-charged to destruction with all hands. Mohr was twenty-six. The gap between the two events is sixteen months, which is roughly the average working life of a U-boat commander in the middle of that war, and is a smaller number than most people expect.