Service
The County class saw much service during the Second World War. HMS Norfolk and Suffolk were equipped with radar which was used to good advantage when they shadowed the Bismarck during the RN's attempts to hunt her down after the sinking of HMS Hood.
The class saw service in nearly every theatre of the war. Norfolk, Dorsetshire, and Berwick fought gunnery actions (and received shell damage) from German Navy surface units, while Suffolk, and Sussex suffered bomb damage from Luftwaffe aircraft. A number of losses were suffered by the class; with Canberra being hit by naval gunfire at the Battle of Savo Island then scuttled by an American destroyer, and Cornwall and Dorsetshire both bombed and sunk by Japanese carrier borne aircraft during the Indian Ocean raid (1942).
The survivors were all decommissioned by the 1950s, except Cumberland which was an armaments trials ship testing the automatic 6 inch and 3 inch guns that would be fitted to the Tiger class. She was scrapped in 1959.
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Famous quotes containing the word service:
“Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or “broken heart,” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)
“The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service, some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community,—these are the most vital things education must try to produce.”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)