laststandonzombieisland

Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.

– Christopher Eger

Warship Wednesday April 23. The Hard Life of the Dorsetshire

Here we see the hard-living heavy cruiser of His Majesty’s Navy, the HMS Dorsetshire (Pennant 40). A heavy cruiser of the County class, her and her 12 sisters were all 1920s-era 10,000 ton treaty cruisers designed with experience gained from the naval battles of WWI. Although ostensibly within limits, their wartime displacement shot up to well over 14,000-tons and with a 31.5-knot speed, 8000-nm range, and 8 × BL 8-inch (203 mm L/50) Mk.VIII guns in twin mounts alongside another eight deck-mounted torpedo tubes, the class were bruisers capable of taking on just about any cruiser in the world and able to run away from any 1920s era battleship on the waves.

One of the last of her class completed, Dorsetshire was finished to an improved design that included  a lowered bridge and after superstructure, improved MkII turrets, a different secondary gunnery plan, and the ability to make 32.25-knots, which is always appreciated. Like the rest of her sisters, she was also one of the first ships in the British navy with a functional surface-search radar. But more on this later.

Laid down at Portsmouth in 1927, she was commissioned 30 September 1930, assigned as flagship of the 2nd Cruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet before moving on to the China station in the Far East. When World War Two erupted in Europe, she sailed for the South Atlantic to join the hunt for German surface raiders including the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee. For the first twenty months of the war she crashed sortied around the Atlantic and Mediterranean looking for one Axis capital ship after another, never actually finding one. Then in May 1941, that all changed.

The lucky cruiser soon joined the hunt for Hitler’s newest toy, the 55,000-ton ton SMS Bismarck, then loose in the cold North Atlantic near Iceland. The German brawler soon found herself cornered on May 24th by the largest British ship, HMS Hood, which she sank, and the new and incomplete battleship HMS Prince of Wales, which broke off the engagement.

Dorsetshire, along with her earlier sisters HMS Norfolk and Suffolk, used their 25-kw Type 284 radar to good advantage when they shadowed the Bismarck during the RN’s attempts to hunt her down after the sinking of HMS Hood. Then on 27 May the hunt was over. Dorsetshire joined in the kill of the mighty German ship alongside a combined British Task Force. During the one-sided engagement, the cruiser fired 254 rounds of 8-inch shells and no less than three torpedoes into the stricken battlewagon, with her fish being one of the main reasons for the warship’s ultimate sinking.

Of the 110 German sailors rescued from the Bismarck, most of these were picked up by the Dorsetshire. After this engagement, her skipper became the noted WWI VC winner Augustus Agar (the cheeky fellow who torpedoed half the Bolshevik fleet in 1919 from a little Coastal Motor Torpedo boat).

The ship then counted a more solitary coup on the SMS Atlantis, a 7800-ton converted freighter-turned merchant raider. Encountering the disguised ship in the Atlantic on 22 November 1941, it was an easy kill, and Atlantis was sent to the bottom after zapping her with salvos from 9-miles out.

Then came the war in the Pacific just six months later. This sent the big D to the Indian Ocean to protect His Majesty’s sea lanes between Australia and India. In March 1942, she became part of Force A, under the command of Admiral James Somerville, which was composed of the old battleship Warspite and the carriers Indomitable and Formidable. Forced to leave the task force to return to port to refuel as there were to tankers assigned to the group, Dorsetshire and her sister Cornwall were caught in the open on April 5 by more than 40 Japanese aircraft. With her anti-aircraft armament marginal, the cruiser was effectively as sitting duck.

In the span of about eight minutes, Dorsetshire was hit by ten 250 lb and 550 lb bombs and several near misses; she sank stern first at about 13:50. One of the bombs detonated one of her ammunition magazines and contributed to her rapid sinking. The Cornwall was sunk as well.

Agar was wounded and drug down so deep by his sinking ship that he suffered from the bends when he finally made it to the surface. Some 500 crew, including the Captain, survived in the water until rescue 32 hours later. Only 16 of the men who went into the water died, a testament to crew discipline and the leadership of Agar and the other officers and petty officers.

Of the 13 County-class heavy cruisers, besides Cornwall and Dorsetshire who were lost in the war, and both nearly side by side each other on the same day by grim irony, only HMAS Canberra was sunk in combat. The 10 remaining sister-ships were retired and scrapped between 1948-1959.

Specs:

 

Displacement:     10,035 long tons (10,196 t) (standard)
13,420 long tons (13,640 t) (full load) (Some sisters went nearly 15,000)
Length:     632 ft 9 in (192.86 m)
Beam:     66 ft (20 m)
Draught:     18 ft (5.5 m)
Installed power:     80,000 shp (60,000 kW)
Propulsion:     4 × Parsons geared or Brown Curtis steam turbines
8 × boilers
4 × shafts
Speed:     31.5 kn (58.3 km/h; 36.2 mph)
Range:     12,000 nmi (22,000 km; 14,000 mi) at 12 kn (22 km/h; 14 mph)
Complement:     653
Armament:     8 × 8 in (200 mm) Mk VIII guns
8 × 4 in (100 mm) dual purpose guns
24 × 2-pounder pom-pom anti-aircraft guns
8 × 24 in (610 mm) torpedo tubes
numerous light anti-aircraft guns
Aircraft carried:     2 × Supermarine Walrus floatplanes (operated by 700 Naval Air Squadron)
Aviation facilities:     1 × catapult

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