HMS Kent (54): From Hunting the Graf Spee to the Arctic Convoys

Chatham-Built

HMS Kent was laid down on 15 November 1924 at Chatham Dockyard, launched on 16 March 1926 and commissioned on 25 June 1928, the lead ship of the Kent subclass of the County-class heavy cruisers, displacing 9,850 tons and capable of a respectable 31.5 knots on her four Parsons geared steam turbines.

Those numbers conceal an argument that ran for twenty years. Nine thousand eight hundred and fifty tons and eight-inch guns were not a design decision; they were the ceiling the Washington Treaty of 1922 had imposed, and every navy that signed it built the same ship to the same limit and then had to decide what to leave out. Britain, with an empire to police and oceans rather than seas to cross, chose endurance, speed and seakeeping, and paid for them by leaving out the armour: Kent went to sea with an inch of plating on her side and an inch and a quarter over her machinery, which would stop a splinter and very little else, wrapped around a flush-decked hull of six hundred and thirty feet with a freeboard high enough to keep her forecastle dry in weather that would have had most foreign contemporaries shut down and hove to. Even the silhouette was a consequence: two boiler rooms exhausting into four uptakes, the middle pair trunked together, which is why she had three funnels of conspicuously unequal thickness and why nobody has ever mistaken a County for anything else. What the class gave up and what the critics called them is set out in the article on HMS Cornwall (56). Hold on to the compromise, because it looked disastrous in the Mediterranean and turned out to be exactly right in the Arctic, which is where she spent most of her war.

She spent much of the 1930s on the China Station, before returning home for a major refit at Chatham in 1937 and 1938 that added new armour plating, radar and improved anti-aircraft defences ahead of the war that everyone increasingly expected was coming.

Much of the 1930s undersells it: she went out as flagship of the Commander-in-Chief China Station and of the 5th Cruiser Squadron within months of commissioning and stayed east of Suez for the best part of nine years. The China Station was the largest and strangest command in the Royal Navy, and the flagship's work on it was almost entirely diplomatic. There was Hong Kong for the winter, working out of the base ship Tamar; Weihaiwei on the Shandong coast for the summer, a leased British enclave whose entire purpose was to give the fleet somewhere cool to go; Singapore, being turned into a fortress that was going to face the wrong way; and, hundreds of miles inland, a flotilla of flat-bottomed gunboats patrolling the Yangtze to protect British trade through the middle of a civil war. Within six months of arriving Kent was at Yokohama for the naval review marking Hirohito's coronation, and the years that followed were a circuit of Japan, the Philippines, Saigon, Nanking, Borneo, Java and Singapore, the whole of it recorded on film that the Imperial War Museum still holds. Two extra four-inch guns were fitted beside her forward funnel in 1932 and 1933, which is the first sign that anybody on the station had begun to take aircraft seriously.

The Chatham refit of 1937 and 1938 was an attempt to buy back what the treaty had taken. Armour was worked into her side at the waterline over the machinery spaces, which is the single thing the original design had been unable to afford; her torpedo tubes came out; twin four-inch high-angle mountings and multiple pom-poms went in, together with the high-angle directors needed to make them worth having, because anti-aircraft guns without fire control are a way of making noise. She came out heavier, marginally slower and enormously better able to survive being hit. Very few British cruisers got that treatment, because it took the better part of two years apiece in a yard and the yards were wanted for new ships, and it is worth remembering when reading the next section: the ship that took an Italian aerial torpedo in the stern in 1940 and was still afloat the following morning had been rebuilt for exactly that eventuality two years before.

Hunting the Graf Spee

HMS Kent joined the hunt for the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee in November 1939, teamed with the French heavy cruiser Suffren and the Australian destroyers HMAS Vampire and HMAS Voyager as Force M, part of the wide-ranging Royal Navy effort to track down and destroy the raider that had been preying on Allied merchant shipping across the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Force M patrolled out of Nancowry in the Nicobar Islands and swept the Bay of Bengal before reaching Colombo on 2 December, only for that particular chase to be brought to its famous conclusion elsewhere, by other ships, at the Battle of the River Plate.

Force M's sweep looks like wasted effort and was nothing of the kind, because tying up ships was the whole object. Graf Spee sank nine merchant vessels in three months, a trivial figure by the standards of the U-boat war, and in doing so caused the Allies to form eight or nine separate hunting groups and commit something over twenty major warships, British and French, including battleships, battlecruisers and aircraft carriers, across the South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the approaches to the Plate. That is what a commerce raider is for. And Kent was not looking in the wrong ocean. Captain Langsdorff had taken his ship round the Cape into the Indian Ocean at the end of October precisely in order to make the Admiralty look there, and on 15 November 1939 he stopped and sank a small coastal tanker, the Africa Shell, ten miles off Cape Zavora in the Mozambique Channel, before turning about and slipping back into the Atlantic. The tanker's crew, landed on the Portuguese coast, reported in perfect good faith that they had been sunk by the Admiral Scheer, which improved the deception no end. So Force M swept the Bay of Bengal for a raider who had genuinely been in those waters a fortnight earlier, was travelling under somebody else's name in the Admiralty's plot, and was by then two thousand miles away and steering for the ships that would finish her. That end of the story is in the article on HMS Exeter (68).

HMS Kent herself then settled into convoy escort duties in the Indian Ocean, before Italy's entry into the war saw her transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet in August 1940.

Torpedoed Off Bardia

HMS Kent was struck by a torpedo from an Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bomber on the night of 17 to 18 September 1940, while preparing to take part in the bombardment of Bardia, a hit that struck her aft and left her badly damaged; she had to be taken in tow by HMS Nubian and made her way to Alexandria for temporary repairs before departing for home waters on 26 October, capable of only 15 to 17 knots in good weather.

The one thing missing from that account is the cost, which was thirty-two of her people killed. The aircraft were Savoia-Marchetti SM.79s of the 279th Squadriglia Autonoma Aerosiluranti, led by Carlo Emanuele Buscaglia, who dropped from something like seven hundred metres in the dark and put a torpedo into her right aft. That is the worst place on a cruiser to be hit: the stern holds the steering gear, the tiller flat and the after end of the shafts, and a warship that cannot steer, several hundred miles from a friendly port and within easy flying time of Italian airfields, is a good deal closer to being lost than the phrase badly damaged suggests. Nubian got a tow aboard with Mohawk standing by her, and Orion, Calcutta, Jervis, Janus, Juno and the Australian Vendetta were all sent out to bring her in; one of those destroyers has her own article, on HMS Jervis (F00/G00). Removing a heavy cruiser from Cunningham's fleet for more than a year, at a moment when he had very few, did rather more for the Italian position in the Mediterranean than most of the surface actions of that autumn.

It is worth saying plainly that the Italian torpedo bomber squadrons were extremely good, and that British accounts have been grudging about them for eighty years. The aircraft, the SM.79 Sparviero, was a three-engined machine with a hump behind the cockpit that its crews called the damned hunchback, and the tactics were to come in low at dusk or before dawn, unseen against the dark half of the sky, and drop close enough that the target had no time to comb the tracks. What that force did over three years and what it was up against is described in the article on HMS Indomitable (92). As for Buscaglia, he was not finished with Royal Navy cruisers: he put a torpedo into HMS Glasgow by the same method less than three months later, an episode covered in the article on HMS Glasgow (C21). He was shot down and taken prisoner in 1942, ended up flying for the Italian co-belligerent air force after Italy changed sides, and was dead by 1944.

Full repairs at Devonport Dockyard took the best part of a year, not complete until September 1941, during which she was fitted with six Oerlikon 20mm guns and modern radar, emerging from the yard considerably better equipped than she had gone in.

Arctic Convoys and a Diplomatic Mission

HMS Kent spent 1941 to 1944 escorting the brutal Arctic convoys to Russia, some of the most dangerous convoy runs of the entire war, and on 8 December 1941 sailed from Scapa Flow carrying Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky to Murmansk, arriving on 12 December so the two men could travel on to meet Stalin in Moscow, a reminder that cruisers were sometimes called upon for rather more than combat duty.

Escorting is not quite the right word for what a heavy cruiser did on the Russian run, and the distinction matters. The convoy had its own close escort of destroyers, corvettes, minesweepers and armed trawlers, whose business was submarines and aircraft. The cruisers formed a covering force, sailing separately and keeping station between the convoy and the Norwegian coast, and their business was the German surface fleet: Tirpitz, Scharnhorst and the heavy cruisers lying in the northern fjords, any one of which could have destroyed an entire convoy in an afternoon if it got among them. What that meant in practice was a fortnight of steaming in company in twenty hours of darkness, in weather that put ice on the upper deck faster than men could chip it off, waiting for a signal that in most cases never came, and going home again. Kent did it for PQ3, PQ13 and QP9, PQ14 and QP10, PQ16 and QP12, RA51, JW52 and RA52, JW54A and RA54B, and JW56A, JW56B and RA56, which is a very large share of the whole Arctic campaign, and she spent part of May 1942 nursing the torpedoed cruiser Trinidad west of Bear Island as well. This is where the design argument finally comes right. Enormous freeboard, huge endurance and messdecks built for long periods away from a dockyard are precisely what is wanted north of the Arctic Circle in January, and precisely what nobody had in mind when the Counties were drawn up for the tropics.

The Eden voyage was not a piece of ceremonial ferrying, and the dates make the point. She sailed from Scapa on 8 December 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor and the day the Japanese landed in Malaya, at a moment when nobody in London yet knew what the war had just become. Eden reached Moscow on the 16th, with German troops close enough to the city that the sound of the guns was a matter of record and the Soviet counter-offensive barely a week old, and asked Stalin for a formal alliance. Stalin named his price at once: British recognition of the Soviet frontiers as they had stood in June 1941, which meant recognising the annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the Soviet half of Poland and the territory taken from Romania. Eden answered that he could not concede territory without consulting the Dominions and the Americans, and Stalin declined to sign anything at all. It was the first serious conversation between the two governments about what Europe was going to look like afterwards, it went badly, and it was settled in Stalin's favour anyway by 1945 without anybody needing Eden's signature. Kent's captain for the passage, Angus Cunninghame Graham, left an account of it, and it says a good deal about the winter of 1941 that the safest way to get a British Foreign Secretary to Moscow was in a heavy cruiser through the Barents Sea in December.

In mid-1944 she escorted aircraft carriers conducting strikes against German shipping and airfields in occupied Norway, before serving as flagship during Operation Counterblast in November 1944, alongside HMS Bellona, the Canadian destroyer HMCS Algonquin and the destroyers HMS Myngs, Verulam and Zambesi. The force caught the German convoy KS-357-ST near Lister Fjord, south-east of Egersund, sinking the freighters Greif and Cornouaille and five of the convoy's six escorts, the minesweepers M416 and M427 and the submarine chasers UJ1221, UJ1223 and UJ1713, a satisfying final major action for a cruiser that had already survived a torpedo strike and years of hard convoy work.

It is worth asking why there was a German convoy off Egersund at all in November 1944, five months after Normandy. The answer is that Hitler had put something like three hundred thousand men into Norway in 1940 and never took them out again, so that a large German army sat out the entire war garrisoning a country nobody was going to invade, and had to be fed. That, and the Swedish iron ore coming south from Narvik, moved by sea along the Leads, the sheltered channel that runs for most of the length of the Norwegian coast behind a screen of offshore islands, where a convoy can creep along in shallow water with rock on one side and escorts on the other. Getting at that traffic occupied the Royal Navy and Coastal Command for the last eighteen months of the war. Counterblast, with Kent flying the flag of Rear Admiral Rhoderick McGrigor, was one of the successful nights: a convoy of eleven ships caught in the dark off Lister Fjord and very nearly annihilated, with two freighters and five of the six escorts sunk. A night surface action that destroys almost an entire convoy is a rare thing at any point in the war, and rarer still in 1944. The cruiser alongside her that night has her own article, on HMS Bellona (63). McGrigor went on to become First Sea Lord.

A Quiet Retirement

HMS Kent was paid off into reserve in January 1945 as the war drew to its close, briefly serving as a target ship before she was sold for scrap on 22 January 1948. She arrived at Troon on 1 March that year for breaking up by West of Scotland Shipbreakers, with the job finally finished in May 1949, closing out the career of a cruiser whose service, taking in the hunt for one of the war's most notorious commerce raiders, a serious torpedo hit survived, a Foreign Secretary safely delivered to Stalin's doorstep, and years of gruelling Arctic convoy escort, marked her out as one of the hard-working ships of her class.

Paying off in January 1945 with the war still running is not a slight, it is arithmetic. She was seventeen years old, she had spent six years working the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean and the Arctic with a year in dockyard hands in the middle of it, and the Navy by then had newer cruisers and rather fewer men to put in them. Her last useful service was as a target, which is the naval equivalent of being asked to stand still and take it, and then she went to BISCO on 22 January 1948, lay at Dalmuir from the end of that month, was towed round to Troon on 1 March and was cut up over the following year. The class did better than its reputation. Thirteen Counties were built, three were lost, and the survivors spent the war doing the two jobs that most needed a big, dry, long-legged hull with a great deal of fuel in it: chasing raiders across empty oceans and covering convoys in the worst weather in the world. The ships that critics had written off as too thinly plated to fight turned out to be the ships that could get to where the fighting was and stay there, which is a distinction the Washington Treaty never thought to measure.