Dorsetshire HMS

[john sefton]

Class and type: County class heavy cruiser
Name: HMS Dorsetshire
Builder: Portsmouth Dockyard
Laid down: 21 September 1927
Launched: 29 January 1929
Commissioned: 30 September 1930
Fate: Sunk by IJN aircraft 5 April 1942
General characteristics
Displacement: 10,035 tons standard
13,420 tons full load
Length: 610 ft (190 m)
Beam: 66 ft (20 m)
Draught: 16 ft (4.9 m)
Propulsion: Parsons geared or Brown Curtis steam turbines
4 shafts
8 boilers
80,000 shp (60 MN)
Speed: 31.5 knots (58 km/h)
Range: 12,000 nautical miles (22,000 km) at 12 knots (22 km/h)
Complement: 653
Armament:

8 × 8 inch (203 mm) guns
8 × 4 inch (102 mm) guns
24 × 2 pounder AA (40mm) guns
8 × 24 inch (610 mm) torpedo tubes
Smaller anti-aircraft guns
Aircraft carried: Two Walrus aircraft (operated by 700 Naval Air Squadron)

Upon commissioning she became the flagship of the 2nd Cruiser Squadron. In 1931 she was part of the Atlantic Fleet during the Invergordon Mutiny but the incident was brought to a close before her crew joined the mutiny. From 1933 until 1936 she served on the Africa Station. In 1936 she received a refit, and the following year she joined the China Station.
In December 1939, a couple months after war was declared, Dorsetshire, with other Royal Navy heavy units, was sent to Uruguay in pursuit of German surface raider pocket battleship (heavy cruiser) Admiral Graf Spee, in the aftermath of the Battle of the River Plate. Dorsetshire left Simonstown, South Africa on 13 December, and was still in transit on 17 December when the Germans scuttled the Graf Spee.

She operated in the Atlantic for a short while, and in February 1940, she intercepted the German supply freighter Wakama, which was promptly scuttled by her crew. On 2 March 1940 Devonshire left the Falklands with wounded sailors from the cruiser HMS Exeter, en route to Cape Town via Tristan da Cunha, where the islanders were supplied with stores. On the 11th, the wounded and the prisoners from the German freighter were put ashore.

Devonshire then returned to the UK, arriving at Plymouth on 25 May. She spent less than a week here, departing again for Freetown at the end of the month. In June, she set out from Freetown to follow the French battleship Richelieu which had left Dakar for Casablanca. The Richelieu was eventually ordered to return to Dakar by her admiral, François Darlan. Dorsetshire continued to monitor French Naval Forces off Dakar throughout July. On 4 September, she was dry-docked at Durban, and on the 20th she arrived back in Simonstown. She sailed for Sierra Leone the next day.

Now operating in the Indian Ocean, in November she bombarded Zante in Italian Somaliland. In December she was back in dock at Simonstown, before departing later that month to search for the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, which had recently sunk a British refrigerator ship in the South Atlantic. On 18 January 1941, she captured the Vichy French freighter Mendoza and escorted the ship to Takaradi. By March, she was once again at Simonstown.
In late May 1941, the Dorsetshire was one of the ships which engaged the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic. On 27 May, the Dorsetshire was ordered to torpedo the Bismarck, which had by that point been crippled by repeated aircraft and naval attacks. The Bismarck's crew however had already begun the process of scuttling the ship, which then sank rapidly. The Dorsetshire was able to recover only 110 of the Bismarck's crew from the ocean, before being forced to leave to evade a suspected U-boat.

In September, the Dorsetshire departed Freetown to cover the five-ship convoy WS-10X which arrived in South Africa from the U.K. with troops in route to the Middle East. During November/December, a convoy of 10 troop transport ships steamed out from Halifax, Canada en-route to Bombay, India. On 9 December WS-12X arrived in Cape Town, and departed with the Dorsetshire as an escort. This convoy was labelled “12X” instead of “13” in deference to nautical superstition, but to no avail. The entire 18th Division landed at Singapore, but it barely had time to get into action before the capitulation of Singapore. The units involved were the 53rd, 54th, and 55th brigades.
On 21 November 1941, the Dorsetshire was involved in sinking the German commerce raider Atlantis (the "Raider C") that had preyed on Allied shipping. The Dorsetshire also chanced upon the German supply ship Python on 1 December 1941, which was refueling U-boats in the South Atlantic Ocean. The U-boats dived, and one of them fired some torpedoes at the Dorsetshire, but missing her. The crew of the Python scuttled their ship.

In 1942, the Dorsetshire was assigned to the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean. In the Imperial Japanese Navy's Indian Ocean raid, the Dorsetshire and her sister ship the HMS Cornwall were attacked by Japanese Navy dive-bombers 320 km southwest of Ceylon on 5 April 1942. The Dorsetshire was hit by ten bombs and sank stern first at about 13:50 hours. The Cornwall was hit eight times and sank bow first about ten minutes later. Of the Dorsetshire's crew, 234 men were killed in the attack; more than 500 survived in the water or on rafts, being picked up by the cruiser HMS Enterprise (D52) and the destroyers HMS Paladin (G69) and HMS Panther (G41) the next day. Captain Agar was among the survivors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Dorsetshire_(40)
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