HMS Norfolk (78): The Cruiser That Shadowed the Bismarck, Then Helped Sink the Scharnhorst Too

Laid Down at Govan

HMS Norfolk was laid down at Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering in Govan in July 1927, launched on 12 December 1928 and commissioned on 30 April 1930, the lead ship of the Norfolk subclass of County-class heavy cruisers, of which only two were ever built, armed with eight 8-inch guns in four twin turrets and displacing 9,925 tons standard.

Mutiny, and a Miss From Günther Prien

HMS Norfolk made the first visit by a British warship to the German harbour at Kiel in July 1931, alongside HMS Devonshire, and that September her crew took part in the Invergordon Mutiny, a significant industrial protest by Royal Navy sailors against pay cuts that shook the Admiralty's confidence in the fleet's loyalty.

Shook is putting it gently. On the morning of 15 September 1931 the stokers of the forenoon watch in HMS Valiant refused duty and stopped their ship sailing. The crews of Rodney, Nelson and Hood, all due to follow her out, did the same. By half past nine the admiral commanding the Atlantic Fleet had cancelled the exercises and was recalling the ships already at sea. Large numbers of the twelve thousand men in the twelve capital ships lying at Invergordon had simply stopped.

The cause was money, and it is worth being exact about it. The National Government's emergency austerity package cut naval pay, and it cut it hardest at the bottom: a reduction of up to twenty-five per cent for the lowest paid ratings against ten per cent for everybody else, as set out in the article on HMS Rodney (29). The men found out the details from newspapers while ashore in Invergordon, which is not how anybody should learn that a quarter of their wages has gone.

There was no violence, no officer was touched and no ship was seized. The men simply did not turn to, held meetings on the forecastles, sang, cheered each other across the anchorage, and waited. It lasted two days. The Cabinet met in emergency session, the Admiralty ordered the fleet dispersed to its home ports, and the cuts were subsequently modified, though not withdrawn.

The consequence nobody in the anchorage intended is the extraordinary part. The news that the Royal Navy had refused duty went round the world and set off a run on sterling, and within the week Britain was forced off the gold standard, which she never returned to. Several hundred stokers and seamen at anchor in the Cromarty Firth, doing nothing more than declining to go to work, brought down the financial system their government had built its entire policy on. Ten years later the same ship was shadowing the Bismarck.

She served as flagship of the 8th Cruiser Squadron on the America and West Indies Station through the early 1930s, and was on Northern Patrol duty guarding the Denmark Strait when war broke out, pursuing the German battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst on 23 November 1939 after they had sunk HMS Rawalpindi, though the German ships escaped.

Five days later she survived an attack by U-47 under the celebrated German commander Günther Prien, whose torpedo missed despite his own false claim of a hit, a lucky escape for a cruiser that would go on to survive a great deal more before the war was through.

Bombed at Scapa Flow

HMS Norfolk was struck by a bomb on her quarterdeck during a German air raid on Scapa Flow in March 1940, causing hull damage and flooding her aft shell magazines, requiring three months of repairs, after which she received radar equipment for the first time, technology that would prove absolutely decisive in her next major action.

Shadowing the Bismarck

HMS Norfolk, under the command of Rear Admiral Frederic Wake-Walker, patrolled the Denmark Strait alongside HMS Suffolk on 23 and 24 May 1941, and made direct contact with the German battleship Bismarck and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, coming under fire from Bismarck's guns before escaping into the mist. Norfolk's own radar, a short-ranged Type 286M with a fixed aerial that meant steering the whole ship just to keep a contact in view, was markedly inferior to Suffolk's rotating Type 284, which meant Suffolk did the lion's share of the actual shadowing work over the days that followed.

Both British cruisers shadowed the German ships by radar, guiding HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Hood and accompanying destroyers into the intercept that led to the Battle of the Denmark Strait, in which HMS Hood was lost with almost her entire crew.

HMS Norfolk and HMS Suffolk continued shadowing afterward, briefly losing contact on 25 May when Bismarck manoeuvred away, before Norfolk resumed the pursuit once air reconnaissance relocated the German battleship on 26 May.

A Crucial Hit on the Bismarck's Fire Control

HMS Norfolk joined the battleships HMS Rodney and HMS King George V in the final action against the Bismarck on 27 May 1941, opening fire at 08:47 from a range of 22,000 yards. At 08:59 she scored a crucial hit on Bismarck's foretop, destroying the German ship's central fire control station and severely degrading her ability to fight back effectively.

HMS Norfolk launched four torpedoes at 09:10, all of which missed, and fired a total of 527 eight-inch shells over the course of the engagement, providing flank marking for the British battleships throughout. Bismarck finally sank at 10:40, brought down by the combined weight of British gunfire and torpedoes in one of the most famous naval actions of the entire war.

Years on the Arctic Run

HMS Norfolk escorted Arctic convoys to and from northern Russia through much of 1941 and 1942, including the ill-fated Convoy PQ 17, scattered by British order and subsequently decimated by German aircraft and U-boats, and the following Convoy PQ 18, part of a truly gruelling stretch of escort duty in some of the most hostile waters any Royal Navy ship faced during the war, punctuated by five separate wartime refits as her anti-aircraft armament and radar were continuously upgraded to keep pace with the evolving threat.

The Battle of the North Cape

HMS Norfolk formed part of the 10th Cruiser Squadron covering Convoys JW 55A and JW 55B on 26 December 1943, tasked with shadowing the German battleship Scharnhorst while HMS Duke of York remained concealed at a distance, ready to spring the trap. When HMS Sheffield sighted Scharnhorst at 09:21, HMS Norfolk opened fire and scored two hits, disabling the German ship's aft radar.

Scharnhorst attacked again at 12:10, and this time HMS Norfolk took two hits herself, one disabling her X turret and a second exploding midships below the main deck, killing six of her crew; Scharnhorst broke off the engagement, wary of a torpedo attack.

HMS Duke of York finally engaged Scharnhorst in the battle's decisive final phase from 16:51, with HMS Norfolk linking up and opening fire again at 17:00, and by 19:45 Scharnhorst had been sunk by a combination of Duke of York's gunfire and destroyer torpedoes, making HMS Norfolk one of very few Allied warships present at the destruction of both Bismarck and Scharnhorst, Germany's two most feared surface raiders.

A Final Raid and Bringing Home a Royal Family

HMS Norfolk, under Vice Admiral Rhoderick McGrigor, conducted a raid on Norwegian coastal shipping near Egersund on 11 January 1945 alongside HMS Bellona and four destroyers, sinking two freighters and the minesweeper M 273.

On 4 May 1945 she served as flagship for Operation Judgement, a Fleet Air Arm strike on a U-boat base that destroyed two ships and the submarine U-711 in what proved to be the war's final European air raid.

HMS Norfolk sailed from Edinburgh on 5 June 1945 carrying King Haakon VII, who had spent the war in London with the Norwegian government-in-exile, along with Crown Princess Martha and her children, who had spent it rather further away in the United States. Crown Prince Olav, serving as Norway's Chief of Defence, had already returned home on 13 May and rejoined his family by boarding Norfolk himself as she entered Oslo fjord on the morning of 7 June, the whole family finally reunited on the very ship bringing them home. The date was no accident: 7 June 1945 fell exactly five years, to the day, after King Haakon had first sailed into exile on 7 June 1940, a truly moving final wartime duty for a cruiser that had already done so much.

Broken Up at Newport

HMS Norfolk served with the 5th Cruiser Squadron on the East Indies Station after the war, becoming flagship at Batavia in the Dutch East Indies in January 1946, before returning to Britain in 1949 and entering reserve.

She was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation for scrapping on 3 January 1950, proceeding to Newport, Wales, on 14 February and arriving for breaking up on 19 February that year, closing out the career of a cruiser that had, remarkably, been present at the destruction of both of Germany's most dangerous battleships.