HMS Dorsetshire (40)

HMS Dorsetshire (pennant number 40) was a heavy cruiser of the County class of the Royal Navy, named after the English county (now usually known as Dorset). She was launched on 29 January 1929 at Portsmouth Dockyard, UK. During the Second World War, she was last commanded by Captain Augustus Agar V.C.. The Dorsetshire was sunk by Japanese dive bombers in the Indian Ocean in 1942.

Interwar
Upon commissioning, Dorsetshire 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 1933–1936, she served on the Africa Station. In 1936, she received a refit, and the following year she joined the China Station.

The Atlantic and South Africa
In December 1939, a couple months after war was declared, Dorsetshire — with other Royal Navy ships— was sent to Uruguay in pursuit of the German pocket battleship GERMAN POCKET BATTLESHIP 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 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, Dorsetshire left the Falklands — with wounded sailors from fellow cruiser HMS Exeter (68) — 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.

Dorsetshire 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 FRENCH BATTLESHIP Richelieu, which had left Dakar for Casablanca. Richelieu was eventually ordered to return to Dakar by her admiral, François Darlan. Dorsetshire continued to monitor the French Navy 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 pocket battleship 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.

The Bismarck and Singapore


In late May 1941, Dorsetshire was one of the ships which engaged the German battleship GERMAN BATTLESHIP Bismarck in the North Atlantic. On 27 May, Dorsetshire was ordered to torpedo Bismarck, which had by that point been crippled by repeated aircraft and naval attacks. Dorsetshire torpedoed Bismarck, which then sank rapidly, either from the damage she had received from the British, or from Bismarck's crew working to scuttle her. 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. Dorsetshire's navigating officer, Lieutenant Commander Durant, sighted on the starboard bow two miles away a smoky discharge in the water. He pointed it out to Captain Benjamin Charles Stanley Martin and others on the bridge. No one knew what it was but the most likely explanation was a U-boat. The Admiralty had sent a warning that U-boats were on the way and they were lucky not to have encountered any already. And if it was a U-boat, Dorsetshire, lying stopped in the water, was a sitting target. In the circumstances, Captain Martin had no choice but to ring down for full speed and in HMS Maori, Commander Armstrong did the same.

In September, Dorsetshire departed Freetown to cover the five-ship convoy WS-10X which arrived in South Africa from the UK with troops in route to the Middle East. In November–December, WS-12X, a convoy of 10 troop transport ships, steamed out from Halifax, Canada en route to Bombay, India. However, when WS-12X arrived in Cape Town on 9 December, it was diverted to Singapore 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 successfully landed only to surrender a few weeks later after seeing little action in the capitulation of Singapore.

Eastern Fleet and sinking


Dorsetshire was deployed on 11 November in the search for the German commerce raider GERMAN AUXILIARY CRUISER Atlantis (the "Raider C") that had preyed on Allied shipping. Dorsetshire also chanced upon the German supply ship Python on 1 December, which was refuelling U-boats in the South Atlantic. The U-boats dived, and one of them fired some torpedoes at Dorsetshire, but missing her. The crew of Python scuttled their ship.

In 1942, Dorsetshire was assigned to the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean. In the Imperial Japanese Navy's Indian Ocean raid, she and her sister ship HMS Cornwall (56) were attacked by Japanese Navy Aichi D3A Val dive bombers 320 km southwest of Ceylon on 5 April. Dorsetshire was hit by 10 bombs and sank stern first at about 13:50. Cornwall was hit eight times and sank bow first about 10 minutes later. Of 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.