HMS Sheffield (C24): The Shiny Sheff, Torpedoed by Her Own Side While Hunting the Bismarck

Stainless Steel and a Lasting Nickname

HMS Sheffield was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at High Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne, laid down in January 1935, launched in July 1936 and commissioned in August 1937.

She earned the enduring nickname Shiny Sheff for an unusual practical detail: unlike most Royal Navy ships of her era, her fittings were made from stainless steel rather than traditional brass, a deliberate choice intended to reduce the endless polishing that brass fittings otherwise demanded.

The stainless steel is worth following back to where it came from, because it is not a shipbuilder's whim. Sheffield in the 1930s was the stainless steel capital of the world: the alloy had been developed there by Harry Brearley at the Brown Firth laboratories twenty years earlier, and the city's steelmakers were not going to let a warship carrying their name go to sea with brass on her. So the fittings were stainless, presented by the firms that made them, and when the ship needed a bell it was cast by Hadfields of Sheffield in stainless steel as well. That bell now hangs in Sheffield Cathedral. A great many ships are named after places. Not many of them are made of the place.

The First Town Damaged by the Enemy, Then Force H

Sheffield's war started early and stayed busy. On 26 September 1939, screening the return of the damaged submarine Spearfish, she became the first Town-class cruiser damaged by enemy action, near-missed by Heinkel He 111 bombers with such accuracy that some bombs fell within twenty feet of the ship; a month later she captured the blockade runner Gloria in the Denmark Strait. After serving in the unsuccessful Norwegian campaign of spring 1940, she joined the celebrated Force H at Gibraltar that August, working alongside Ark Royal and the battlecruiser Renown, using her own radar to provide air-search cover for a squadron that otherwise had none.

Force H is worth a sentence of its own, because it was an odd and important formation: a self-contained striking force at Gibraltar, answering to nobody in the Mediterranean Fleet, able to go east into the Mediterranean or west into the Atlantic at a few hours' notice, and built round HMS Ark Royal and HMS Renown. Sheffield's contribution to it was her radar, which is a genuinely significant detail: in 1940 a set that could see aircraft coming was rare enough that one cruiser could provide the air warning for an entire squadron, and the whole force's ability to operate in range of Italian bombers rested substantially on her aerials.

Force H kept her properly busy through the winter: the Battle of Cape Spartivento on 27 November 1940, the bombardment of Genoa on 9 February 1941, mine damage off the Isle of Islay that March while escorting the troopship Strathmore, and a near miss from Vichy French bombers days later during a failed attempt to intercept a French convoy off North Africa, an eventful lead-up to the far more famous test still to come.

Attacked by Her Own Side During the Bismarck Hunt

Sheffield's most dramatic moment came during the desperate hunt for the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941. Ordered ahead to make contact with the German ship, she instead found herself the target of a torpedo attack by aircraft from the carrier Ark Royal, whose crews had not been informed of her presence and mistook her for the enemy.

Two things make that afternoon worse than the article can quite convey. The first is that Sheffield was sent ahead precisely because she was the one ship with the radar to find Bismarck in poor visibility, so the aircraft that attacked her were attacking the ship whose job was to tell them where the enemy was. The second is the reason none of the torpedoes hit: they were fitted with magnetic detonators, and the ones that were dropped at her mostly went off on hitting the water or ran wild before they got anywhere near. Sheffield's survival and Bismarck's destruction came from the same fault. Ark Royal's second strike went out with contact pistols instead, because of what had just happened to Sheffield, and that is the strike that jammed the rudder.

Remarkably, none of the six torpedoes actually launched at her found their mark. Captain Charles Larcom held his own guns silent throughout, correctly judging the whole thing a tragic mistake rather than an attack worth returning fire on, and Sheffield escaped the episode entirely undamaged, one aircrew even signalling an apology afterwards: "Sorry for the kipper."

Her actual damage that day came from a different quarter entirely. Later that same evening Bismarck herself briefly turned on her pursuers and straddled Sheffield with her own 15-inch guns, wounding her with splinters and killing three of her crew, a real reminder of just how dangerous shadowing a battleship could be even when the shadowing ship was never meant to be the target.

Sheffield nonetheless went on to direct destroyers shadowing Bismarck through the night, feeding the contact reports that kept the German battleship pinned until the main fleet caught up and sank her the following morning. It was Ark Royal's second strike that evening, flying with the misidentification behind them and older, reliable contact pistols fitted after the first strike's magnetic detonators had failed almost entirely, that finally struck home; one of the Swordfish pilots, Sub Lieutenant Jock Moffat, later recalled flying through flak "like hail coming at you, you wondered how they could miss" before his own torpedo, or one very like it, jammed Bismarck's rudder and sealed her fate. On 12 June, in a quieter postscript, Sheffield went on to intercept and sink the German supply tanker Friedrich Breme in the North Atlantic.

Mined on the Arctic Run

Assigned to escort Arctic convoys to northern Russia from January 1942, Sheffield struck a mine on the evening of 4 March, east of Iceland en route to Seidisfjord, requiring four months of repair before she returned to Arctic operations that autumn, rejoining one of the war's most physically brutal convoy routes.

Sinking a Destroyer at the Battle of the Barents Sea

In December 1942, Sheffield formed Force R alongside HMS Jamaica under Rear-Admiral Robert Burnett at the Battle of the Barents Sea, where she scored three hits damaging the German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and sank the German destroyer Friedrich Eckoldt outright, a truly significant victory that helped protect the convoy she was escorting from a much stronger German surface force.

What Force R prevented at the Barents Sea is the point of it. Convoy JW 51B was carrying tanks, aircraft and fuel to Russia and the Germans had sent a pocket battleship, a heavy cruiser and six destroyers against a screen of five destroyers and two corvettes. That should have been a massacre. It was not, because the escort fought a delaying action for two hours until Sheffield and HMS Jamaica arrived out of the snow and shot the Friedrich Eckoldt to pieces at close range in the belief, on the German side, that she was joining her own flagship. Not one merchant ship was lost. HMS Obedient (G48) was one of the destroyers doing the delaying.

The consequence was political rather than naval and it was enormous. Hitler, told that his surface fleet had been driven off by a handful of British destroyers, flew into a rage and ordered the whole of it scrapped; Raeder resigned and Donitz replaced him, and the German navy was never again allowed to risk its heavy ships as it had. A cruiser action in a snow squall north of Norway on 31 December 1942 is one of the reasons the Arctic convoys got through for the rest of the war.

First to Sight the Scharnhorst

A year later, at the Battle of the North Cape in December 1943, Sheffield was the first ship to sight the German battleship Scharnhorst and engaged her directly in combat, though engine trouble prevented her from taking part in the climactic sinking that followed.

The engine trouble is a bitter footnote. Sheffield found Scharnhorst, engaged her, and then a shaft coupling failed and she had to fall out of the line and watch HMS Duke of York (17), Jamaica and HMS Belfast (C35) finish the job she had started. She had made the first sighting at both ends of the German surface fleet's Arctic career, and was present at the kill for neither.

Even so, her role in locating and engaging one of Germany's most feared capital ships secured her a place at the heart of another decisive Arctic convoy battle.

Twelve Battle Honours

Sheffield went on to take part in Operations Torch and Avalanche, supported anti-submarine operations in the Bay of Biscay, and provided fire support at Salerno, before an extended refit in 1944 brought her active combat service to a close. By war's end she had accumulated twelve battle honours, placing her fourth among all Royal Navy vessels of the period, an exceptional record for a single cruiser.

Twelve battle honours puts her among a very small group. The Royal Navy has awarded more to a handful of famous ships, Warspite chief among them, and to have a single Second World War cruiser in the top half-dozen is a measure of how relentlessly she was used: Norway, the Atlantic, Spartivento, Bismarck, Malta, the Arctic, the Barents Sea, North Cape, North Africa, Salerno and Biscay, in six years, in one hull.

Flagship, Film Star, Then Retirement

Sheffield served as flagship of the America and West Indies Station based in Bermuda between 1946 and 1948 and again from 1951 to 1954, took part in the 1953 Coronation Fleet Review, and even appeared in the 1955 film The Battle of the River Plate.

And the film role is better than it sounds, because of who she played. In Powell and Pressburger's The Battle of the River Plate she was cast as HMS Ajax, with Jamaica standing in for HMS Exeter, the former HMS Achilles playing herself under an Indian flag, and an American heavy cruiser doing duty as the Graf Spee. So the two cruisers that had fought the Barents Sea together in a snowstorm spent 1955 pretending, in the Mediterranean sunshine, to be two other cruisers in a battle neither of them was at. There are worse ways for a ship to end her career.

She was placed in reserve in 1959, decommissioned in 1964 and broken up at Faslane in 1967, but her stainless-steel ship's bell, crafted by Hadfields of Sheffield, survives today hanging in Sheffield Cathedral alongside her battle ensign, a lasting physical tribute to a ship that outlasted plenty of near misses, one enemy battleship's own guns, and at least one embarrassed Swordfish crew, to become one of the Royal Navy's most decorated cruisers.