HMS Rawalpindi

The Vessel

HMS Rawalpindi was an armed merchant cruiser of the Royal Navy, converted at the outbreak of the Second World War from the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company's liner of the same name. She was 168 metres long, 16,697 gross tons, built at Harland and Wolff in 1925 for the P&O's London-to-Bombay mail service. Her peacetime role, for fourteen years between 1925 and 1939, had been the principal British imperial liner on the India run, carrying mail, passengers, and bullion between the British capital and the largest component of the British Empire.

At the outbreak of the war in September 1939 she was requisitioned by the British Admiralty and converted to an armed merchant cruiser at Liverpool over four weeks: eight obsolete 6-inch guns of 1890s vintage were mounted on her upper decks, two 3-inch anti-aircraft guns added, her public rooms converted to crew accommodation, and her cargo spaces converted to ammunition magazines. Her conversion was typical of the Royal Navy's AMC programme of late 1939: it was cheap, fast, and produced vessels of minimal military capability.

The AMC class was intended for distant-station patrol work against a specific and (in the event) largely absent threat: German merchant raiders operating on the world trade routes. The eight 6-inch guns gave her nominal capability against an unarmed merchant vessel and essentially no capability against any German warship of battleship, battlecruiser, or pocket battleship class. Her crew was a mix of Royal Naval Reserve and Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve officers and ratings; her commanding officer was Captain Edward Coverley Kennedy RN (Ret.), 60, a retired Royal Navy officer recalled to service.

The Voyage

On 23 November 1939 Rawalpindi was on the Northern Patrol, the Royal Navy's blockade of German access to the Atlantic via the gap between the Faroes and Iceland. Her assignment was to check merchant traffic in the Iceland-Faroes gap for German blockade-runners and to report German warship movements to the Home Fleet. She was patrolling at 10 knots, in worsening weather, approximately 150 nautical miles southeast of Iceland.

At approximately 15:45 on 23 November 1939, Rawalpindi sighted two ships on the northern horizon. They were the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, under the overall command of Vice-Admiral Wilhelm Marschall, conducting a commerce-raiding sortie into the North Atlantic. The two German ships displaced approximately 30,000 tons each, were armed with nine 11-inch guns and twelve 5.9-inch guns apiece, and were faster than Rawalpindi by approximately 11 knots.

Rawalpindi's situation was, from the moment of the sighting, hopeless. Captain Kennedy's options were limited: flee, which was impossible given the speed disparity; strike the colours, which was not in Royal Navy practice; or fight. His decision, recorded in his last wireless message to the Admiralty, was to engage. His specific signal, "Have sighted two battleships", was sent at 16:00 and was followed at 16:20 by "Engaging enemy". No further message was received.

The Disaster

Scharnhorst opened fire on Rawalpindi at 16:03 on 23 November 1939 at a range of 10,000 metres. Kennedy returned fire with his forward 6-inch guns as he turned to bring his broadside to bear. The range was at the extreme limit of Rawalpindi's gunnery; her shells either fell short or were deflected by Scharnhorst's armour. Scharnhorst's 11-inch shells were not deflected.

The engagement lasted 14 minutes. Scharnhorst fired approximately 42 rounds of 11-inch ammunition; Gneisenau, which had closed to engage from a different bearing, fired approximately 15 rounds of her own. Rawalpindi was struck repeatedly. Captain Kennedy was killed on his bridge by a German shell at approximately 16:08. Her wireless was destroyed almost immediately; the senior officers in the forward compartments were killed in succession; her 6-inch guns were put out of action one by one.

Rawalpindi sank at 20:05 on 23 November 1939 at approximately 63°40′N 11°30′W. Of her 313 crew, 275 died. 27 were rescued by the Germans (prisoners of war) and transferred to the German battleships for the remainder of Marschall's sortie; another 11 survived in lifeboats and were eventually picked up by HMS Chitral, a sister AMC, two days later.

The British Home Fleet, alerted by Rawalpindi's signal, deployed HMS Repulse, HMS Hood, HMS Newcastle, HMS Delhi, and seven destroyers to intercept the German raiders. Marschall, having confirmed by the engagement with Rawalpindi that the Royal Navy was fully alerted, decided to abort his Atlantic sortie and return to Germany. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau reached Wilhelmshaven on 27 November 1939.

The Legacy

The Rawalpindi engagement has entered the Royal Navy's institutional memory as the canonical case of "last stand" conduct: the deliberate decision of a hopelessly-overmatched commander to engage regardless. Captain Kennedy's action was praised in the House of Commons by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill on 6 December 1939, in a speech that contained the famous passage: "In the confidence of the fires of this attack — in the blaze of a thousand suns — her Captain and her crew stand forth for ever as the bravest of the brave." The speech is one of Churchill's most-cited 1939 war-cabinet addresses; the phrase "bravest of the brave" has become the conventional descriptor of Rawalpindi's engagement.

The more consequential strategic result was German. Marschall's decision to abort his sortie after the Rawalpindi engagement meant that Scharnhorst and Gneisenau did not enter the Atlantic in November 1939. The two ships' eventual Atlantic sortie under Admiral Günther Lütjens in January 1941 (Operation Berlin) was a direct consequence of the German staff's assessment that the November 1939 approach had failed because of the alerting effect of Rawalpindi's engagement. The British intelligence apparatus, by the time of Operation Berlin, had matured significantly; the 1941 German Atlantic sortie ended in the destruction of Bismarck, the eventual destruction of Scharnhorst at the Battle of the North Cape in 1943, and the progressive reduction of German surface naval capability.

The wreck of HMS Rawalpindi has never been located. Her position is known approximately from the 1939 German engagement reports and from the subsequent British inquiry. She lies at approximately 63°40′N 11°30′W in approximately 1,500 metres of water, northeast of the Faroe Islands. The Royal Navy has not conducted a dedicated search for her wreck; the depth and position make her recovery unlikely to be commercially or archaeologically attractive.

Captain Edward Kennedy's 275 dead are commemorated on the Tower Hill Memorial in London. The name Rawalpindi has not been carried by any subsequent British warship. Her story is recalled at every Royal Navy training establishment as one of the three canonical Royal Navy "last stand" engagements of the twentieth century (the other two being Jervis Bay in 1940 and Glowworm in April 1940).