HMS Hawkins (D86): China Station Flagship, Prize Taker off Somalia, and a Gun Line at Utah Beach

The Name Ship

HMS Hawkins gave her name to the Hawkins Class, five big cruisers designed in 1915 to hunt German raiders on the ocean trade routes, with seven 7.5 inch guns and a speed of 30 knots.

She was laid down in Chatham Dockyard on 3 June 1916, launched in October 1917, and named after Sir John Hawkins, the Elizabethan seaman, slave trader and Treasurer of the Navy who rebuilt the English fleet before the Armada and commanded a squadron against it. The war ended before she was ready, and she was completed on 19 July 1919.

The story of how slowly the rest of the class followed, and of the treaty limits drawn around them, is told in the article on HMS Effingham, the last of the five.

One of her sisters was finished as something else altogether. Vindictive, originally to have been called Cavendish, was completed in 1918 with a flight deck forward as one of the Navy's first aircraft carriers, and is one of the prints of this class.

Eight Years in China

In 1919 Hawkins went out to the China Station, and from 1920 she flew the flag of the 5th Light Cruiser Squadron at Hong Kong for some eight years.

These were the years of the warlords and of the Nationalist revolution, when British warships patrolled the Yangtze and the coast to protect British subjects and trade, and an album kept by one of her midshipmen in 1927, now at the National Maritime Museum, records her at Shanghai, Nanking and Hankow as the Nationalist armies swept north.

The photograph at the top of this page belongs to these inter-war years, with the ship alongside a dockyard quay, a crowd of her men along the rails and dockyard workers and sailors on the steps below.

She came home in 1928 for a long refit, recommissioned in 1929 as a flagship in the Atlantic Fleet, and later went out to the East Indies, again flying a flag. In 1935 she came home and was paid off into reserve.

Disarmed and Rearmed

Under the London Naval Treaty of 1930 Britain had agreed to cut the number of cruisers it kept with guns over 6.1 inches, and in 1937 and 1938 Hawkins lost her 7.5 inch guns and became a training ship for cadets. When war threatened again the decision was reversed.

She was taken in hand at Portsmouth in 1939 and rearmed with her old guns, the work finishing on 23 December 1939, and she sailed the same day to work up at Portland. In February 1942, after a Warship Week savings campaign, she was adopted by the people of Stockport.

The South Atlantic

She was sent to do the job she had been built for. She reached Freetown on 14 January 1940 and went on to the South Atlantic, a month after the Battle of the River Plate, to join the cruisers watching the Plate estuary and the German merchant ships sheltering in Argentine and Uruguayan ports.

The story of that squadron in the weeks before is told in the article on HMS Cumberland. She worked from Port Stanley in the Falklands, patrolled off the Plate and called at Montevideo, and in July 1940 was sent to the West Indies after a reported raider.

After a refit at Durban that autumn she escorted the big WS troop convoys, carrying soldiers from Britain round the Cape to Egypt and India, and in January 1941 she was transferred to the East Indies Squadron.

Prizes off Somalia

In February 1941 British and South African troops advanced into Italian Somaliland, and Hawkins joined Force T, with the carrier Hermes, the cruisers Capetown, Ceres and Shropshire and the destroyer Kandahar, to support them from the sea, while aircraft from HMS Formidable attacked Mogadishu.

As Kismayu and Mogadishu were about to fall, the Italian and German merchant ships in the two ports made a dash for the open sea. Hermes's aircraft found them on 11 February, and Hawkins was sent after them.

She took the Italian Adria and Savoia that day, and the prize crew put aboard Adria went on to capture another Italian ship, the Erminia Mazzella. The next day she took the Manon, while Hermes captured the Leonardo da Vinci. Several more ships were scuttled by their own crews as the cruisers approached.

Later that month she joined the hunt across the Indian Ocean for the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, which escaped.

The rest of 1941 was spent on convoy escort between the Cape, Aden and Bombay, and in November she was ordered home for a long-overdue refit.

The 1942 Refit

She was taken in hand at Portsmouth in December 1941. Two years of war had shown how vulnerable the older cruisers were to aircraft, and she came out with Oerlikon and pom-pom guns fitted wherever there was room, air warning radar on a new tripod mainmast, surface warning radar, and radar control for her 4 inch anti-aircraft guns.

The photograph above shows her on 23 May 1942, just as the work was finished, painted in the bold disruptive camouflage of the time. A few days later she sailed for Scapa Flow, worked up with the Home Fleet, and in July helped escort HMS Duke of York to Iceland.

The Eastern Fleet

That autumn she went back to the Indian Ocean, by way of Freetown and the WS convoys, and spent the next eighteen months with the Eastern Fleet, mostly on convoy escort and patrol, with a refit at Simonstown at the end of 1943. On 12 February 1944 she was the escort of convoy KR8 from Kilindini to Colombo when the Japanese submarine I-27 torpedoed the troopship Khedive Ismail, which sank in about two minutes.

Some 1,300 people were lost, among them nurses and Wrens, one of the worst losses of life in a British troopship in the war. Hawkins kept the rest of the convoy moving while the destroyers Paladin and Petard hunted down and sank the submarine.

In March 1944 she was ordered home. On the way, in the Red Sea, she collided with the Greek destroyer Kanaris, and she reached the Clyde at the end of the month for repairs.

Utah Beach

She was then assigned to Force U, the American Western Task Force, for the invasion of Normandy, as part of Bombarding Force A with the battleship USS Nevada, the American cruisers Quincy and Tuscaloosa, the monitor Erebus and the cruisers Black Prince and Enterprise.

On the morning of 6 June 1944 she opened fire on the German batteries behind Utah Beach, at Maisy and St Martin de Varreville, as the American 4th Infantry Division went ashore. Utah had the fewest casualties of the five landings, and the warships' guns had a good deal to do with it.

A week later she was supporting the small craft at the Gooseberry breakwater off the beach. Her sister HMS Frobisher was doing the same at Sword Beach.

The End

At the end of July she was withdrawn from operational service and earmarked to replace the old cruiser Dauntless as a training ship, but the plan was dropped in 1945 and she was reduced to reserve. Laid up at Falmouth after the war, she was used for target trials, then sold for scrap on 26 August 1947 and towed to Dalmuir, where she arrived that December.

Of her four sisters, Raleigh had been wrecked in 1922, Effingham in 1940; Vindictive had gone to the breakers in 1946, and Frobisher followed in 1949. Both of her photographs on this page, the 1942 portrait in camouflage among them, are sold as prints, and the rest of her class are in the Hawkins Class cruisers collection.