HMS Suffolk (55): The Radar Contact That Led to the Bismarck

Laid Down at Portsmouth

HMS Suffolk was built at Portsmouth Dockyard, laid down on 30 September 1924, launched on 16 February 1926 and entered service on 31 May 1928, a County-class heavy cruiser that spent her interwar years on the China Station, becoming its flagship in 1934.

Carrying China's Treasures to London

In one of the more unusual assignments of her peacetime career, Suffolk carried over a thousand pieces of Chinese artwork on a 45 day voyage from Shanghai, arriving at Portsmouth in July 1935 with 100 cases containing 1,022 objects, 780 of them belonging to the Beijing Palace Museum, for the International Exhibition of Chinese Art that opened at the Royal Academy's Burlington House that November and ran through to March 1936. Drawing on loans from Britain, China and several other nations, the exhibition attracted some 420,000 visitors and turned a profit, a properly significant piece of cultural diplomacy carried out aboard a warship, though it also stirred genuine debate back in China, where a rising tide of nationalism made some uneasy at seeing the nation's own treasures shipped abroad at all, even in the name of goodwill.

The objects themselves went on to have a harder time than the exhibition did. They were returned to China in 1936, and within a year the Japanese invasion had begun; the Palace Museum collections were packed again and moved inland ahead of the fighting, spending the war being carted between temples, caves and warehouses in the Chinese interior in one of the great feats of cultural evacuation. When the civil war ended in 1949 a large part of what had survived went to Taiwan with the Nationalist government, and much of it is in the National Palace Museum in Taipei today. A number of the pieces that were craned aboard a British cruiser at Shanghai in 1935 have therefore never been back to Beijing.

Damaged Off Norway

Suffolk took part in operations against Norway in April 1940, sinking the German tanker Skagerrak on 14 April, before taking a far heavier hit three days later. On 17 April, as Operation Duck, she and four escorting destroyers bombarded German-held Sola airfield near Stavanger, firing 202 shells that, with barely any spotting to guide them through low cloud and snow, mostly overshot the runway and instead wrecked the neighbouring seaplane base and several aircraft on it.

The retaliation very nearly finished her. A Junkers 88 dive bomber put a 500kg bomb clean through the Ward Room and several storerooms before it detonated close to the after engine room, tearing out both X and Y turrets, flooding the ship with some 1,500 tons of water within twenty minutes and pushing her over to an eight degree list, with flame reportedly visible as high as the main mast. Thirty-two men were killed and thirty-eight wounded, and Suffolk endured a further 33 separate air attacks over nearly seven hours before she could limp clear under tow, eventually beaching at Long Hope in Scapa Flow for emergency repairs. She was out of the war for the best part of a year afterwards, properly rebuilt at the Fairfield yard on the Clyde until February 1941.

Shadowing the Bismarck

Suffolk's defining moment came during the Battle of the Denmark Strait in May 1941, and it was made possible by a piece of then-secret technology: she had come out of ten months of repairs only weeks earlier carrying two brand new radar sets, and one of them turned out to be capable of something nobody had designed it for. Patrolling the Denmark Strait with her sister ship HMS Norfolk as part of the 1st Cruiser Squadron under Admiral Wake-Walker, Suffolk's lookouts sighted the German battleship Bismarck and the cruiser Prinz Eugen emerging from a snow squall at 7.22pm on 23 May, at a point-blank range of just seven miles, prompting one midshipman's now-legendary deadpan remark, "Hood and Prince of Wales, I suppose."

Suffolk turned hard into the enveloping mist, worked up to nearly 30 knots and began transmitting the enemy sighting reports that set the whole chase in motion, using her radar to maintain contact through the night once Norfolk had joined the shadowing. Contact was briefly lost in a snowstorm around midnight, raising fears Bismarck had doubled back for home, before Suffolk's radar picked her up again at 2.47am. HMS Hood and Prince of Wales, vectored in by Suffolk and Norfolk's reports, intercepted at 5.35am and opened fire shortly after 6, a crucial reconnaissance role that set in motion the chain of events leading to Bismarck's eventual destruction days later, one of the most consequential single contributions any Royal Navy cruiser made during the entire war.

The Set That Was Not Meant to Do It

The radar is worth getting right, because the real story is better than the simple one. Radar had been going to sea in the Royal Navy since 1938 and by May 1941 a great many ships had it, including Norfolk in company with her. What Suffolk had was newer and different. She had come out of ten months of repairs at Fairfield only weeks earlier, and had been given a Type 279 air warning set and, crucially, a Type 284 gunnery set, a shorter wavelength, higher definition instrument designed for one job: measuring the range to a target the guns were already pointed at.

That distinction decided the whole chase. Norfolk carried an older Type 286, whose aerials were fixed at the masthead and pointed permanently forward, so she could only see what was ahead of her and only to about fourteen thousand yards. Suffolk's Type 284 aerials were bolted to the roof of the main gunnery director, which meant they pointed wherever the director was trained: ahead, abeam or, decisively, astern, out to twenty-six thousand yards. So when Suffolk turned away into the mist after sighting Bismarck at seven miles, she could keep looking backwards at the ship she was running from, which is exactly what shadowing requires and exactly what no purpose-built surface search set of the period could do.

It was not what the equipment was for and it was hard on it. Searching with a gunnery radar means slewing the entire director round and back again, hour after hour, on training gear built to hold a steady bearing rather than to sweep, and the operators were nursing a set that had never been asked to work like that. They did it for the best part of thirty-six hours in Arctic weather, losing contact once in a snowstorm around midnight and regaining it at ten to three in the morning. What Suffolk did in the Denmark Strait is generally reckoned to be the first sustained radar tracking of an enemy surface force in history, and it was improvised on a gunnery set by tired men turning a director back and forth in the dark.

What followed was witnessed from Suffolk's own deck: within minutes of the battle opening, Hood was struck and destroyed in a single catastrophic explosion, taking all but three of her company of over 1,400 men down with her, a devastating loss that the crews shadowing nearby could scarcely believe even as they watched it happen.

Almost every ship in that action has an account here, and between them they carry the whole of it: HMS Norfolk (78) shared the shadowing, HMS Hood (51) is the ship they watched blow up, HMS Sheffield (C24) was attacked by her own aircraft during the pursuit, HMS Rodney (29) did most of the shooting at the end and HMS Dorsetshire (40) finished it. None of it happens without a cruiser holding a radar contact she was not supposed to be able to hold.

Arctic Convoys and the Indian Ocean

After her part in the Bismarck action, Suffolk served with the Home Fleet on Arctic convoy duties throughout 1942, before a refit that swapped her X turret for additional anti-aircraft guns and a transfer to the Eastern Fleet, where she operated in the Indian Ocean for the remainder of the war.

Bringing the Troops Home

From August 1945, Suffolk turned to the equally important task of bringing military and civilian personnel home from Australia and the Far East, making further voyages to Australia and Singapore in 1946 before entering reserve. She was decommissioned on 25 March 1948 and scrapped at J. Cashmore's yard in Newport, arriving there that June, a quiet end for a ship whose radar contact had once helped bring down one of the most feared battleships in the world.