laststandonzombieisland

Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher EgerWarship Wednesday (on a Thursday) May 23, 2024: Taking One’s Place for Overlord

Warship Wednesday (on a Thursday) May 23, 2024: Taking One’s Place for Overlord

Above we see Royal Navy’s D (Danae)-class light cruiser HMS Durban (D 99) at Honolulu harbor, 22 May 1928, with a good view– captured by a U.S. Navy photographer– of one of her four sets of triple 21-inch torpedo tube mounts trained out, with a pair of torpedoes visible in lower tubes! She was on her way to Bermuda to take up a position on the West Indies Station after spending six years in Hong Kong, the hard life of a British cruiser in the 1920s, you see.

Designed for the Great War, Durban missed her dance but made it to the next one– although she never saw the end.

“The Ds”

A heavier and more seaworthy (not to mention better armed) follow-up to the Royal Navy’s five sprawling classes of “C” type light cruisers, the Admiralty wanted a full dozen more advanced “D” class units and began ordering them in 1916 under the Emergency War Program, with class leader HMS Danae.

Some 4,850 tons (pushing 6,000 later) they were rakish ships, with a 472-foot overall length and a perfect 1:10 ratio beam of 47 feet to match. Powered by a half dozen Yarrow boilers pushing a pair of geared steam turbines– which the British had really figured out by this point in time– they were planned to make 29 knots. However, on trials, some bested this.

They also had limited aircraft facilities. 

Armament was a main battery of a half dozen 6″/45 BL Mark XIIs in single shielded mounts– good guns that could fire a 112-pound HE shell to 23,770 yards at a rate of as many as seven shells per minute with a well-rehearsed crew. These were arranged in a straight line down the center of the ship with each able to fire broadside but only two able to fire ahead and two astern.

A pair of QF 3-inch 20 cwt L/45 Mk. I AA guns– meant more for counter zeppelin use than planes– four 3-pounders, as well as a couple of Lewis guns, rounded out the armament with her brace of 12 torpedo tubes in four triple mounts, enabling six torpedoes in a broadside, closing us out.

Meet Durban

Our subject, the second RN warship named for a then-colonial South African city, was laid down at Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, Greenock, in January 1918, at a time when the German High Seas Fleet had been bottled up for more than a year. The Kaiser threw in the towel and his fleet was soon littering the floor of Scapa Flow, which slowed down Durban’s construction.

HMS Durban was only completed by the Devonport Dockyard in November 1921 and joined the fleet, one of only eight cruisers to carry a Mark III* Dreyer Table and one of only 10 to carry the new 12-foot U.B.3 Combined Height and Rangefinder as part of her fire control system.

Durban was one of the lucky ones. Of the dozen classmates ordered, four– Daedalus, Daring, Desperate, and Dryad— were all canceled. Meanwhile, only four– Danae, Dauntless, Dragon, and Delhi— actually saw a few weeks of wartime service.

With the London Naval Treaty limiting the RNs cruiser tonnage, two of the class, Diomede and Dunedin, were loaned promptly to the nascent Royal New Zealand Navy from 1924—25 until 1937 when such treaty limits were cast aside.

In truth, it was surprising that Durban never saw service during the same period with a South African Navy, although she did call on her namesake city at least once. This was likely because the circa 1920s and 30s South African Naval Service was cash-strapped in the extreme and, while they operated the old 4,000-ton Mersey-class cruiser HMS Thames (as SATS General Botha) it was as a dockside training hulk, with her guns and boilers removed and the former engine and boiler rooms converted into a gym!

Happy Interbellum Cruises

Durban’s first detail was to the 5th Light Cruiser Squadron on China Station, where she arrived in early 1922 before transferring six years later to the West Indies Station.

Her time in China included sending ashore various naval landing parties in Nanking and Shanghai during periods of unrest.

Via the Gordon Smith collection, Naval-History.net, taken by Chief Yeoman of Signals George Smith, DSM, Royal Navy 1904-28:

While on Atlantic service, she made at least one call at Boston and was photographed by Boston Globe photographer Leslie Jones.

She returned home after service with the South Atlantic Division for an extensive overhaul that added a new style of advanced range finders. Also added were more AAA guns: a total of three 4-inch (in place of the older two 3″L/45s) 2-pounder pom-poms, two Vickers machine guns, and eight Lewis guns.

Re-commissioned at Portsmouth on 6 March 1934 for service with the Third Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean, Durban was sent to the Med for two years.

Open-source naval journals carried the news of this cyclic movement of HMs cruiser force, with Durban often appearing in the pages of such volumes, with ONI dutifully cataloging each piece of news.

The U.S. ONI kept extensive files on foreign warships, which included the best photographs that could be taken during port calls or whenever a vessel passed through the Panama Canal. Several of the D-class got close enough to be immortalized in the ONI collection– for instance, sister HMS Delhi when she called at Long Beach in 1932.

Durban had her visit from a Navy shutterbug on 22 May 1928 while in Honolulu, as this series will show:

Returning to the Home Isles in September 1936, she was in ordinary when the Germans marched into Poland three years later. Plans were afoot to refit the class with a battery of newer 4.5-inch guns instead of their old-style 6-inchers, but that was shelved as there simply weren’t enough funds.

War!

Assigned to the 9th Cruiser Squadron, Durban was reactivated and dispatched to perform convoy defense in the South Atlantic between Freetown and the Cape.

Soon transferred to her old 5th Squadron beat on China Station, she arrived in Singapore by Halloween 1939 and sailed for Hong Kong soon after. Deployed for trade defense and patrol, her primary duty going into 1940 was to keep tabs on German shipping plying the Dutch East Indies ports and then, later, join in the chase of the Hilfskreuzer Atlantis (HSK 2), aka “Raider C.”

Had Durban encountered Atlantis (which carried six 6-inch guns and four torpedo tubes) it could have been a fight similar to that of the German merchant raider Kormoran and Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney, who clashed in a mutually destructive battle in the Pacific in 1941. Still, there is no doubt that both ships would have given it their best. 

This sort of campaigning in the backwater of the war, at least until December 1941, continued including riding shotgun on the occasional Bombay to Singapore convoy (BM 005, BM 004/2, BM 009, etc).

Meanwhile, the war on the other side of the world was less kind, with sister Dunedin torpedoed and sunk by U-124 off Saint Paul’s Rock in the South Atlantic, on 24 November 1941.

When the Japanese decided to go manic, all the obsolete Durban could do was help pick up the pieces. She escorted the troopships taking the survivors of the lost HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales to Colombo and in January 1942 evacuated Royal Navy staff from Singapore to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies.

While escorting troop and evac convoys between Singapore and the Dutch Indies in February 1942, she came under a Japanese air attack north of the Sunda Strait which left her forward 6-inch gun out of service. Eight ratings were killed and several were wounded.

Ordered to put into Freemantle the next week, she was sent on the slow route via the Indian Ocean to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for repairs– dropping off Admiral Thomas C. Hart, former commander of the doomed U.S. Asiatic Fleet, at Colombo.

On her way to the U.S, Durban came across the German minelayer Doggerbank (Schiff 53) (5154 GRT, built 1929, former British Speybank) as she was sowing a minefield off Capetown, a task that Durban came close to, but not close enough, to stopping, on the evening of 13 March 1942.

As detailed here:

Operation Kopenhagen comprised the laying of a minefield near Capetown, where many shipping lanes converged. Ships from Australia and New Zealand arrived here to make the final leg to Britain, while important troop convoys passed through the area en route to the Middle East. Doggerbank, unlike a normal minelayer, wasn’t equipped with mine rails on a lower deck, which meant that all mines had to be hoisted to the main deck. For operation “Kopenhagen”, 75 of them were prepared, disguised as deckcargo. Schneidewind decided to start the operation during the nighttime hours of March 12. Carefully, the Doggerbank approached the target area on the 12th. Things almost went wrong when in the late afternoon, an aircraft was sighted. It hailed the ship, asking for its name and destination. Schneidewind [her skipper] ordered to signal “Levernbank from New York via Recife to Capetown”, waved a few times with his hat and then left the bridge. His resolute performance worked and the aircraft was apparently satisfied with the answer. Later that evening, a small ship was sighted, which was easily evaded. Sixty mines were laid in the early morning of the 13th.

Schneidewind decided to retreat through the normal shipping lanes around Cape Good Hope to avoid suspicion. The idea was to lay more mines near Cape Agulhas for operation “Kairo”. Around 1945 that evening, a warship appeared on the horizon, flashing signals with a red light. Schneidewind himself thought it was a Birmingham-class cruiser, but it was in fact the older HMS Durban, en route to Simonstown for repairs. The signal the cruiser flashed was the standard “NNJ” signal, ordering to hoist the secret letters for identification. Naturally, the Germans didn’t know this signal and simply didn’t send a reply. After coming closer, the Durban asked “What ship”, to which Schneidewind replied, “Levernbank from New York to Durban, good night”. Again, his bold answer worked, as the Durban steamed on and disappeared in the dark.

Durban arrived in New York on 9 April 1942 for a period of repair that would last two months, she would emerge for a week of full power trials and gunnery exercises off Hampton Roads before leaving for Portsmouth Dockyard, where she would arrive at the end of June.

She would also pick up radar– a Type 286 air warning– but, uncommon for her class, retain her torpedo tubes, a feature she would only share with sister Despatch, as the rest of the “D” class cruisers had landed theirs. Likewise, she would have 8 20 mm Oerlikon singles installed in place of the old 2-pounder pom-pom guns. A puny counter-aircraft fit, but better than what she had anyway. To offset this extra topside weight, she lost her aircraft handling capability and landed one of her 6-inchers.

Further refits and workups would see her emerge and join a “Winston Special” Convoy (WS 23) in October, sailing from Scotland via the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt and, later, India, ultimately arriving in Bombay in December.

Durban would continue to serve in the Indian Ocean on trade defense, undertaking several additional convoys, until ordered back to Portsmouth in October 1943.

Somewhat hopelessly obsolete by this point in the war– her sisters — she was reduced to a skeleton crew and laid up, with dockyard personnel instructed to remove her armament, sensors, and virtually anything else of value so long as she could still make steam and revolutions.

She had one more run to make.

Normandy

Durban was tapped, along with several older warships, to become part of the Gooseberry breakwater that would shelter the Mulberry Port off the beach at Normandy, allowing the rapid landing of large cargo to move ashore in the days after successful Overlord landings in June 1944.

On D+3, 9 June 1944, Durban was scuttled to form part of Gooseberry 5 off Ouistreham in the Seine Bay, with gunners stationed on the grounded ships helping defend the enterprise.

Notably, Durban would soon be joined in the Gooseberry by sister Dragon, which had been operated by the Free Polish Navy since January 1943 but had been damaged off Caen by a German human torpedo on 8 July. Ironically, Durban would herself be hit by another fish launched from a Marder on 3 August while already reefed, after surviving a fierce three-day storm.

Nonetheless, the harbor worked.

By D+5, with the artificial harbor in place, 10,000 tons of cargo a day would be unloaded, a rate that would increase to 20,000 tons per day by D+20, keeping pace through the end of August.

Epilogue

Today, what is left of Durban remains in 36 feet of water off Ouistreham.

Few artifacts remain ashore of the cruiser, notably her ship’s bell, which has long been housed at the chapel in the Old Fort in Durban.

Her 1942 repair records from the Brooklyn Navy Yard are in the National Archives.

As for Durban’s sisters, the five still afloat after VJ-Day were soon paid off, and all were quickly sold for scrap, with the last, Delhi, leaving for the breakers in 1948.

The Royal Navy never reused the name “Durban” but the South African Navy did, ordering the SAS Durban (M 1499), one of several Ton class mine sweepers built in the UK during the 1950s specifically for the SAN.

She was preserved as a museum in her namesake city from 1991 through 2022.

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Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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