HMS Exeter (68): The Cruiser That Fought the Graf Spee, Then Vanished at Sunda Strait

The Second of the York Class

HMS Exeter was the second and final ship of the York-class heavy cruisers, laid down on 1 August 1928, launched on 18 July 1929, and completed on 27 July 1931. By naval tradition, a ship takes a real interest in her namesake town, and Exeter's own Mayor duly commissioned a silver model of the city's Guildhall as a gift, presented at Exmouth on 2 August 1931; the Captain's reply, that the ship's company hoped the city would "count us as citizens of Exeter, afloat", would prove rather more prophetic than anyone realised at the time.

She incorporated a range of improvements over her sister HMS York, including a wider beam to compensate for extra topweight and repositioned boiler uptakes that allowed straighter funnels set further from her bridge, along with a distinctive pair of fixed aircraft catapults angled outward in a V configuration, since her 8-inch gun turrets left no room for a conventional centreline catapult.

She displaced 8,390 tons standard, rising to 10,620 tons at deep load, measured 575 feet in length, and her Parsons turbines produced 80,000 shaft horsepower for a top speed of 32 knots. Her main armament comprised three twin 8-inch gun turrets, backed by 4-inch anti-aircraft guns and torpedo tubes, and she carried a crew of 628 officers and ratings.

It is worth understanding what the York class actually was, because it explains a great deal about the fight she is famous for. The Washington Treaty allowed heavy cruisers of 10,000 tons with 8-inch guns, and the Royal Navy's County class, described in the article on HMS Cornwall (56), were built right up to it. They were also expensive, and the Treasury would not pay for as many as the Navy said it needed to police an empire. So the constructors were asked for a cheaper heavy cruiser: York and Exeter came out at around 8,400 tons standard with six 8-inch guns instead of eight. Exeter was a deliberate economy, a treaty cruiser trimmed to a budget, and she was the ship that ended up alongside a German raider built to destroy exactly her kind.

And the Admiral Graf Spee was a very deliberate piece of design. The Versailles Treaty capped German warships at 10,000 tons, so German constructors built to that figure, or close enough to it to argue, and made every ton count: six 28cm guns, which is to say eleven-inch, capable of destroying any cruiser afloat; welded construction and diesel engines instead of steam, giving something in the order of twenty thousand miles of range at cruising speed, which is more than most battleships had; and twenty-six to twenty-eight knots, slower than a heavy cruiser but faster than any battleship then in service. The design principle is usually put in one line, and it is exactly right: stronger than anything faster, faster than anything stronger. Every British cruiser that found one was, by design, in the wrong fight.

HMS Exeter served with the 2nd Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet from 1931 to 1933, before joining the 8th Cruiser Squadron based at Bermuda in 1934, spending most of the following years in the Atlantic aside from a temporary deployment to the Mediterranean during the 1935 to 1936 Abyssinia Crisis.

The Battle of the River Plate

HMS Exeter's defining early action came at the outbreak of war, when she was assigned to Force G under Commodore Henry Harwood, hunting German commerce raiders off the eastern coast of South America. On 12 December 1939, she rendezvoused with the light cruisers HMS Ajax and HMNZS Achilles off the River Plate estuary.

The following morning, the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee engaged all three British and Commonwealth ships.

The German cruiser concentrated her formidable 11-inch main guns almost entirely on HMS Exeter, under the command of Captain Frederick Bell, while directing her secondary 5.9-inch guns at the two lighter cruisers. Fire opened at 06:18, and by the third salvo Admiral Graf Spee had straddled HMS Exeter.

Which is why Harwood did what he did, and why Exeter took what she took. His plan was not to fight the German ship; it was to make her choose. He split his three ships into two groups on opposite bows, Exeter on one flank and the two light cruisers on the other, so that Langsdorff had to either divide his six heavy guns between two widely separated targets, halving the weight of each broadside and doubling the fire-control problem, or concentrate on one group and leave the other free to close and shoot. Langsdorff concentrated on Exeter. That was the correct choice against the heaviest of the three, and it meant that Harwood's plan worked exactly as intended, at Exeter's expense. The sixty-one men killed aboard her were the price of a tactic that let Ajax and Achilles get in close and do the damage that eventually sent Langsdorff into Montevideo.

A direct hit knocked out her B turret and killed nearly everyone on the bridge except three men; Captain Bell himself, wounded in the face, was forced to relocate to the aft conning position to keep fighting the ship.

Further hits disabled A turret, started fires that crippled fire control and navigation circuits, and opened a flooding list of seven degrees. When Y turret was temporarily knocked out of action too, Bell is reported to have declared his intention to ram the German ship rather than let her escape, though the turret was repaired before it came to that.

HMS Exeter remained in the fight until flooding finally disabled Y turret's machinery at 07:30, and by 11:07 Bell could report only one 8-inch and one 4-inch gun still in local control, with her maximum speed cut to 18 knots. Harwood ordered her to the Falkland Islands for emergency repairs.

HMS Exeter had been struck by seven 11-inch shells, losing 61 killed and 23 wounded, a heavy toll for a single action. She had, however, given as good as she got: three of her own hits struck Admiral Graf Spee, one narrowly missing the German ship's engine room, and another disabling her oil purification equipment, a hit that effectively doomed the German raider's chances of ever making it back to Germany.

Admiral Graf Spee's captain, Hans Langsdorff, boxed in and misled about the strength of forces awaiting him outside Montevideo harbour, and granted only the seventy-two hours in a neutral port permitted under the Hague Convention, chose to scuttle his own ship on 17 December rather than fight on. He took his own life three days later, a grim final act to a resounding strategic victory for the badly battered Royal Navy squadron that had faced her down.

The action was recognised with a genuinely lavish spread of honours: two Distinguished Service Orders, seven Distinguished Service Crosses and nearly forty Distinguished Service Medals across the three ships' companies, published in the London Gazette on 22 December 1939. One of Exeter's own DSO recipients, Commander Robert Rule Graham, had form for dramatic rescues: a decade earlier, in 1929, Spain had awarded him the Cruz del Merito Naval for personally pulling Ramon Franco, elder brother of the future dictator Francisco Franco, out of the sea after an air crash, a genuinely strange footnote for a ship's officer better known for gunnery than for fishing out future strongmen's relatives. Graham did not long outlive his own moment of fame, killed on 3 May 1940 and commemorated on the Chatham Naval Memorial.

Rebuilt on Churchill's Orders

HMS Exeter reached Port Stanley still capable of 18 knots but sitting four feet down by the bow with an eight-degree list, her decks awash in fuel oil and seawater.

Emergency repairs there lasted until January 1940, and Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, personally intervened to ensure she was properly rebuilt rather than written off, insisting she be strengthened internally and brought home for full repair.

Her crew's own homecoming, once they reached British soil, was every bit as dramatic. On 29 February 1940, Captain Bell, eight officers and seventy-nine men were granted the Freedom of the City of Exeter, an honour the city had previously given only to Nelson and Beatty, and marched with fixed bayonets up a bunting-lined Queen Street, carrying the ship's own shell-torn White Ensign, past a crowd of some fifty thousand cheering Exonians. Churchill himself, addressing the celebratory Guildhall luncheon that followed, remarked that in "a dark cold winter it warmed the cockles of the British hearts", Britain's first real victory of the war.

She underwent extensive reconstruction and modernisation at Devonport from 14 February 1940 to 10 March 1941, receiving a rebuilt and enlarged bridge, twin 4-inch anti-aircraft mounts in place of her original single guns, additional pom-pom mounts, and new radar. Her intended new commanding officer, Captain W. N. T. Beckett, tragically died on 10 March 1941, the very day she was due to recommission, from complications following surgery connected to poison gas injuries suffered earlier in his career, and Captain Oliver Gordon took command instead.

East to Singapore and the Fall of the Indies

HMS Exeter departed Britain for the last time on 22 May 1941, escorting Convoy WS-8B towards Aden via Freetown and Durban, her departure coinciding with the wider hunt for the German battleship Bismarck.

She joined the East Indies Squadron, later redesignated the Far East Fleet, escorting convoys across the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, and was rushed to Singapore in December 1941 as the Pacific War erupted, arriving on 10 December, the same day HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese aircraft, too late to help but in time to treat some of their survivors in her own sick bay.

HMS Exeter spent the following two months escorting convoys between Bombay, Colombo and Singapore as the situation across South East Asia deteriorated rapidly, right up to Singapore's fall on 15 February 1942. She was attached to the newly formed American-British-Dutch-Australian Command as the Allies scrambled to organise a coherent defence of the Netherlands East Indies against the advancing Japanese.

The Battle of the Java Sea

HMS Exeter joined Dutch Rear Admiral Karel Doorman's Allied Striking Force, enduring repeated Japanese air attacks through mid-February 1942 that left her with shrapnel damage and a badly wrecked Walrus floatplane, before the decisive Battle of the Java Sea unfolded on 27 February.

Japanese heavy cruisers opened fire at long range, and Japanese light forces closed in to launch their formidable Type 93 Long Lance torpedoes.

That torpedo needs a paragraph, because it was the most dangerous weapon in the Pacific and the Allies spent two years refusing to believe in it. The Type 93 was a 24-inch torpedo burning pure oxygen rather than compressed air, which meant it left almost no bubble trail, and it could run something over twenty miles at high speed carrying a warhead roughly twice the size of an Allied torpedo's. British and American torpedoes of the period ran perhaps five or six miles. Japanese cruisers and destroyers were therefore able to fire torpedoes from ranges at which Allied officers were certain no torpedo could reach them, and when ships blew up unaccountably in the middle of a gun action, the explanations offered were mines, submarines and bad luck. Nobody in the Java Sea that afternoon knew what was actually being shot at them.

One struck HMS Exeter at 16:35 but failed to detonate; moments later, a shell from the Japanese cruiser Haguro penetrated her starboard aft 4-inch gun mount and detonated in her after boiler room, knocking six boilers offline and killing fourteen of her crew, among them the Royal Marines Corporal William Lamb and Marine Harry Cox, manning the very mount that took the hit.

Reduced to just 5 knots, HMS Exeter was shepherded to safety by the Australian cruiser HMS Perth, which laid smoke to cover her withdrawal, while escorting destroyers fought a desperate rearguard action, HMS Electra sinking after damaging a Japanese destroyer of her own.

HMS Exeter limped into Surabaya under escort of the Dutch destroyer Witte de With, badly damaged but still afloat.

Sunk at Sunda Strait

Following hasty temporary repairs and refuelling, HMS Exeter departed Surabaya on the evening of 28 February, escorted by HMS Encounter and the American destroyer USS Pope, attempting to reach Colombo via the Sunda Strait. On the morning of 1 March 1942, the three ships were intercepted by an overwhelming Japanese force of four heavy cruisers and four destroyers.

HMS Exeter accelerated to 26 knots in a desperate attempt to break away, but a hit in her forward boiler room around 11:20 catastrophically knocked out all remaining power, leaving her utterly defenceless, unable to train or traverse a single gun. Captain Oliver Gordon, with no way to fight back and every reason to save what remained of his crew, ordered the ship scuttled.

Japanese destroyers closed in and finished her with torpedoes, HMS Exeter capsizing and sinking beneath the waves of the strait that gave the battle its name. HMS Encounter sank roughly fifteen minutes later, and USS Pope was finished off shortly afterwards by Japanese aircraft and gunfire.

Of HMS Exeter's crew, 652 men were rescued by the Japanese and taken into captivity as prisoners of war, and roughly a quarter of them, around 163 men, died during that captivity before the war's end, a brutal coda to a battle that had already cost the ship her freedom.

It stands as one of the heaviest cumulative losses suffered by any single Royal Navy ship's company across the whole war, when the deaths in battle are combined with those who did not survive years of imprisonment afterwards.

Found, Then Plundered

HMS Exeter's wreck was located on 21 February 2007 by four divers, Vidar and Alice Skoglie, Captain Phil Yeutter of the US Navy (retired) and Kevin Denlay, working from the dive vessel MV Empress, who found her using side-scan sonar on the second-to-last day of a fourteen-day expedition after years of searching. She lay on her starboard side at around 200 feet depth roughly 90 miles northwest of Bawean Island, some distance from where Captain Gordon had originally estimated she went down. HMS Kent held a memorial service over the site in July 2008, a fitting tribute to a ship whose two great actions, at the River Plate and at Sunda Strait, bookended one of the most dramatic careers of any Royal Navy cruiser of the Second World War.

Back home, Exeter Cathedral had already marked her loss in its own way: on 1 March 1948, six years and a day after she went down, a memorial window depicting Christ walking on the water was dedicated in the cathedral's St Andrew's Chapel, designed by Sir Ninian Comper at a cost of £410.

Tragically, by 2016, illegal salvagers had substantially destroyed the wreck. The British and Dutch Ministries of Defence jointly confirmed that year that three Dutch, three British and one American Second World War wreck in the same waters, HMS Exeter and HMS Encounter among them, had been almost entirely stripped from the seabed for scrap metal, work later attributed to Chinese, Mongolian and Cambodian-flagged vessels, in flagrant breach of the wrecks' protected status as war graves under British, Indonesian and Malaysian law, a quiet but truly dispiriting postscript to a ship whose story had already given her more than enough drama to be remembered by.

There is a reason those particular wrecks were worth stealing, and it is genuinely strange. Every ton of steel smelted anywhere in the world since July 1945 carries a faint trace of fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing, picked up from the air blown through the furnace. It is harmless, and it is also enough to spoil the most sensitive radiation-measuring instruments there are, the sort used in medical scanners, particle physics and Geiger counters. Steel made before that date, and better still steel that has spent the intervening decades under water, is uncontaminated and cannot be manufactured any more; the only supply is old ships. That is why men with a barge and an air compressor spent years taking apart a war grave in ninety feet of water. Exeter survived eleven-inch shells, Long Lance torpedoes and seventy-four years on the seabed, and was finally destroyed for the physical properties of the steel she was made of.