HMS Dorsetshire (40)

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Career

Ordered:
Laid down:
Launched:	29 January 1929
Commissioned:
Fate:	Sunk
General Characteristics
Displacement:
Length:
Beam:
Draught:	16.4 ft (5.0 m)
Propulsion:	Parsons geared or Brown Curtis steam turbines, 4 shafts, 8 boilers, 80,000 shp (60 MN)
Speed:	32.5 knots (60.2 km/h)
Range:
Complement:
Armament:
Aircraft:	Supermarine Walrus

HMS Dorsetshire (pennant number 40) was a heavy cruiser 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. 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.

In World War II, she was commanded by Captain Augustus Agar V.C.

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 December 13th, and was still in transit on December 17th when the Germans scuttled the Graf Spee.

In late May 1941, Dorsetshire was one of the ships which engaged the 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. Bismarcks crew however had already begun the process of scuttling the ship, which then sank rapidly. Dorsetshire was able to recover only 110 of Bismarcks crew from the sea, before being forced to evade a suspected U-boat.

On 21 November 1941, Dorsetshire was involved in sinking Atlantis (the "Raider C") which had preyed on Allied shipping. She also chanced upon the German supply ship Python on 1 December 1941, which was refuelling U-boats in the South Atlantic. The submarines dived, and one of them fired torpedoes at Dorsetshire which missed. The crew of Python scuttled their ship.

In 1942 Dorsetshire was assigned to the Eastern Fleet in the Indian Ocean. In the Indian Ocean raid, Dorsetshire and her sister ship Cornwall were attacked by Japanese dive-bombers 320 km southwest of Ceylon on 5 April 1942. Dorsetshire was hit by ten bombs and sank quickly at about 13:50; Cornwall was hit eight times and sank about ten minutes later. Of Dorsetshire's crew, 234 men were killed in the attack; more than 500 survived in the water or on rafts to be picked up by the cruiser Enterprise and the destroyers Paladin and Panther the next day. Captain Agar was among the survivors.