The sinking of HMS Rawalpindi

On the afternoon of 23 November 1939, in the waters between Iceland and the Faroe Islands, the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau came upon the British armed merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi, a former passenger liner armed with a few old guns. Her commanding officer, the sixty-year-old Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy, refused the order to stop and gave battle without the slightest chance of success. After a quarter of an hour or so of shelling Rawalpindi had been turned into a blazing wreck, and in the evening she sank. Some 265 men were killed and 37 survived. It was the first battle fought by the new German battleships and the first clash of the war between German heavy ships and British warships in the North Atlantic.

Chronologies link two further events with this action: the return of the “pocket battleship” Deutschland to Gotenhafen, which they place under 13 November, and the sailing of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau on 21 November. The second date is correct. The first is not: according to German and British tallies Deutschland passed through the Denmark Strait around 15 November and anchored at Gotenhafen, as the Germans called occupied Gdynia, on 17 November. The casualty figures for Rawalpindi vary between sources, as explained below.

The return of Deutschland

From the end of September two German “pocket battleships” had been at work on the ocean routes: Admiral Graf Spee in the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and Deutschland in the North Atlantic. The Admiralty and the French navy formed hunting groups with aircraft carriers, battlecruisers and heavy cruisers to track them down. Deutschland achieved little. She sank the British freighter Stonegate and the Norwegian Lorentz W. Hansen, while the American City of Flint, which she had seized, was handed back to her rightful crew by the Norwegians at Haugesund. North Atlantic gales and engine defects hampered her operations, and Adolf Hitler feared that the loss of a ship bearing the name “Germany” would be a propaganda disaster.

At the beginning of November the Seekriegsleitung recalled the ship home. She passed unobserved through the Denmark Strait and on 17 November anchored at Gotenhafen. The balance of the cruise was two ships sunk and one captured. Soon afterwards she was renamed Lützow and reclassified as a heavy cruiser. Admiral Erich Raeder also counted on the change of name to mislead British intelligence. And so it did: for several more weeks the British believed that Deutschland was at sea, which played a part in the events of 23 November.

Marschall’s sortie

Raeder did not want the heavy ships of the Kriegsmarine to lie idle in port. Graf Spee was still at sea: on 15 November she sank a small British tanker in the Mozambique Channel, with British and French squadrons searching for her. A sortie by the new battleships into the North Atlantic was meant to tie down part of the British forces, draw them away from Graf Spee and show that the Kriegsmarine could threaten the blockade that the British were tightening around Germany.

The target was the Northern Patrol, the British blockade patrol that since the first days of the war had been guarding the passages between Scotland, the Faroes and Iceland. Its ships stopped vessels bound for Germany and hunted German merchant ships trying to get home from overseas ports. The service was carried out by old light cruisers and by a growing number of armed merchant cruisers, that is, converted passenger liners.

Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had entered service in 1938–1939. Each displaced more than 31,000 tons, made over 31 knots and was armed with nine 11-inch (283 mm) guns. They were called battleships, although the British, in view of their speed and relatively light guns, often described them as battlecruisers. At 1.10 p.m. on 21 November 1939 both ships left Wilhelmshaven under the Fleet Commander, Admiral Wilhelm Marschall, who flew his flag in Gneisenau. In the First World War Marschall had been a U-boat commander and had been awarded the Pour le Mérite. Until the following day they were accompanied by the light cruisers Köln and Leipzig and three destroyers, which then turned back to operate with Lützow in the Skagerrak; a gale soon forced them home. A line of U-boats waited on the approaches to the Orkneys, ready to attack the Home Fleet if it put to sea. The British did not notice the German ships sail.

Rawalpindi and her captain

Rawalpindi was a P&O liner, built in 1925 by Harland and Wolff. She measured nearly 16,700 GRT and until the war had carried passengers and mail on the London–Bombay route. On 26 August 1939 she was requisitioned by the Admiralty. One of her funnels was removed and eight 6-inch (152 mm) guns dating from before the First World War were mounted on her decks, together with two anti-aircraft guns. The ship had no armour and no modern fire-control equipment, and her high sides made an easy target. Armed merchant cruisers of this kind could stop merchant ships, but not fight warships. From October Rawalpindi served with the Northern Patrol in the waters around Iceland. On 19 October, in the Denmark Strait, she intercepted the German tanker Gonzenheim, which was scuttled by her own crew before a boarding party could get aboard.

Her captain, Edward Coverley Kennedy, had joined the navy in 1892. In the First World War he served in the battlecruiser New Zealand, and in 1918 he commanded the cruiser Cassandra, which sank on a mine in the Baltic during the intervention against the Bolsheviks. In 1921 he was retired as part of the cuts in the naval budget; he then worked for the Conservative Party. In September 1939, at the age of sixty, he returned to service and was given Rawalpindi. Her crew of about three hundred consisted largely of reservists; many of them were fishermen and seamen from the north of Scotland, from Caithness and from the islands.

The action of 23 November

On 23 November Rawalpindi was patrolling south-east of Iceland, north-west of the Faroes. At about 3.30 p.m. British time (German accounts give times an hour later) a large ship was sighted from her. It was Scharnhorst. Kennedy took her for Deutschland, of whose return home the British were unaware, and tried to escape towards a bank of fog. Before 4 p.m. he signalled that he had sighted an enemy battlecruiser, and a few minutes later that she was Deutschland. The Germans signalled several times ordering him to stop, and when the ship did not comply they fired a warning shot. Soon Gneisenau appeared on the other side. The British laid a smokescreen, but some of the smoke floats failed to ignite. According to one of the survivors, Kennedy said on the bridge: “We’ll fight them both, they’ll sink us, and that will be that. Good-bye.”

At about 4.03 p.m. Scharnhorst opened fire at a range of some 8 kilometres, and a few minutes later Gneisenau joined in. Rawalpindi replied with the guns that could bear. The very first salvoes destroyed the bridge and the wireless office, and a shell in the engine room knocked out the generators powering the ammunition hoists, so the gunners had to carry shells by hand. One British 6-inch shell hit the after part of Scharnhorst, causing light splinter damage. After a quarter of an hour or so Rawalpindi was ablaze from stem to stern and her guns had fallen silent. Kennedy was killed on deck, reportedly as he was making his way with two sailors to one of the smoke floats. When a lamp signal asking for boats was sent from the burning ship, the Germans ceased fire and began picking survivors out of the water.

After dark the British light cruiser Newcastle, which had received Rawalpindi’s reports, arrived on the scene. Her lookouts sighted Gneisenau in the darkness but soon lost sight of her. Marschall, unwilling to risk a night action with destroyers and cruisers, broke off the rescue and withdrew northwards with both ships. Rawalpindi burned for several more hours and sank at about 8 p.m., the first British armed merchant cruiser lost in the war.

The casualties

The casualty figures vary between sources. According to P&O’s figures 265 men were killed – Captain Kennedy, 38 officers and 226 ratings – and of the roughly 300 men on board 37 survived. The Germans picked up 26 or 27 survivors (according to the British naval chronology, 6 were taken aboard Scharnhorst and 21 aboard Gneisenau) and made them prisoners. Another eleven, who survived in a lifeboat in the icy sea, were picked up some thirty-six hours later by another P&O armed merchant cruiser, HMS Chitral. Figures of between 238 and 279 dead are also found in the literature; popular chronologies give about 270 dead and 38 survivors, which falls within that range.

The pursuit

Rawalpindi’s report set the whole Home Fleet in motion. Admiral Charles Forbes sailed from the Clyde with the battleships Nelson and Rodney, a heavy cruiser and destroyers to cut the Germans’ route home off the Norwegian coast. Cruisers and destroyers from Rosyth took up positions in the passage between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, further cruisers covered the approaches west of Scotland, and from Plymouth and Brest an Anglo-French force with the battlecruiser Hood and the French battleship Dunkerque put to sea to bar the way into the Atlantic. A convoy due to leave the Firth of Forth for Norway was turned back. All this was done in the belief that the quarry was Deutschland.

Marschall knew of the British movements thanks to the German radio intercept service, the B-Dienst. Instead of attempting to break out into the Atlantic, he withdrew into the Norwegian Sea and waited for bad weather. In a gale he slipped between the Shetlands and Norway through the line of British patrols, and on 27 November both battleships returned to Wilhelmshaven, battered by the seas but without losses to the enemy.

Aftermath

German propaganda presented the action as a great victory over a “cruiser”, and the crews of both battleships received the High Seas Fleet Badge for taking part in it. Within the naval leadership, however, Marschall was judged critically: sinking one weakly armed merchant cruiser was not much, and the admiral had withdrawn instead of going out into the Atlantic. This dispute – whether a commander at sea should risk his ships or preserve them – recurred in the Kriegsmarine throughout the war.

In Britain Rawalpindi’s fight became a legend. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, paid tribute to her crew in the House of Commons in December. Kennedy was posthumously Mentioned in Despatches – one of the few honours that the regulations of the time allowed to be awarded posthumously. His son Ludovic, a young naval officer, became a well-known journalist and writer after the war, the author among other books of an account of the pursuit of the Bismarck. At the Admiralty less romantic conclusions were drawn. Armed merchant cruisers were defenceless against enemy heavy ships, and the mere sortie of the German battleships had caused enormous confusion and for several days absorbed almost the entire Home Fleet, although its commanders never knew what they were up against.

Significance

The sinking of Rawalpindi was the first action of ships that in the following years were among the Royal Navy’s most dangerous opponents. In June 1940 Scharnhorst and Gneisenau sank the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and two destroyers off the Norwegian coast, and in the winter of 1941 their Atlantic sortie cost the Allies more than 20 ships. In February 1942 they broke through from Brest up the English Channel to Germany. Scharnhorst was sunk on 26 December 1943 in the Battle of the North Cape, in which the cruiser Belfast, put out of the war by a mine in November 1939, also took part.

Rawalpindi’s fate was shared in November 1940 by the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay, which, while escorting a convoy, took on Admiral Scheer and was sunk, saving most of the ships in her charge. For the Germans the sortie of November 1939 foreshadowed a strategy in which heavy ships, instead of seeking a decisive battle with the stronger British fleet, were to strike at shipping and blockade forces and tie down as many British warships as possible. For Graf Spee, however, the relief came too late: three weeks later, on 13 December 1939, she was cornered by British cruisers off the River Plate.