WWII Cruiser HMS Exeter Found
The Heavy Cruiser that fought like a Lion in World War Two
Jun 21, 2008
It can be argued Battleships really started World War One. The Anglo-German naval arms race was the kindling to the fire that erupted all of the Europe in that Great War. At Versailles, Germany, vanquished in combat, was to rid herself of most of her Great High Seas Fleet, keeping only a few old tubs. In the inter-war period she was allowed to build a class of 16,000-ton ‘pocket-battleships’ -essentially very large cruisers with a battleship’s guns. The pocket battleships were to be the scourge of the sea in the event of war, ranging the globe sinking merchantmen by the dozens. One of these, the Admiral Graf Spee, engaged in the legendary Battle of the River Plate with three British cruisers and eventually scuttled herself on a bluff. In this battle the cruiser HMS Exeter, with her 8-inch guns, was the only ship that could make effective hits on the German battleship’s armor. One of these hits by the Exeter effectively wrecked the Graf Spee’s boiler room and caused her to withdraw and seek repairs.
These cruisers, the Ajax, Exeter and Achilles earned everlasting naval fame in this running battle in 1939. All went onto very different fates. The HMS Ajax, a 7000-ton Leander class light cruiser, went on to fight in the Pacific and then in the Battle of Normandy before being broken up and scrapped in 1949. The HMS Achilles, a sister ship of the Ajax also finished the war and, in the service of the Royal New Zealand Navy, was eventually scrapped in 1976 after decades of peacetime service. The HMS Exeter, a 10,000-ton heavy cruiser of the York class, was severely damaged in the battle with the Graf Spee but was repaired in time to see combat in the Pacific.
As a member of the ABDA “Fleet that God Forgot” that fought the Imperial Japanese Navy under impossible odds in 1942, HMS Exeter was lost. She was heavily damaged in the Battle of the Java Sea and was ordered away to limp home. Finding herself just days later in combat with four Japanese cruisers and five destroyers and only supported by a pair of destroyers herself she was sunk 90 miles off Bawean Island in what is now Indonesia on March 1st, 1942 after a terrific gunfight. She has just been found after being lost at sea for over sixty years. Her wreck shows signs of the battle and it remains as a final testament to her short wartime service. Her last commander, RN Captain Oliver Loudon Gordon MVO, survived the war in a Japanese POW camp in published a memoir entitled "Fight It Out" published in 1957
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