HMS Dunedin

HMS Dunedin was a Danae-class cruiser light cruiser of the Royal Navy, pennant number D93. She was launched from the yards of Armstrong Whitworth, Newcastle-on-Tyne on 19 November 1918 and commissioned on 13 September 1919. She has been the only ship of the Royal Navy to bear the name Dunedin (named after the capital of Scotland, generally Anglicised as Edinburgh).

Service history
In October 1920 she, with the other three British vessels, was sent to assure protection of the unloading of munitions intended for Poland, at Danzig.

In 1931 she provided assistance to the town of Napier, New Zealand, after the strong Hawkes Bay earthquake, in a task force with the sloop HMS Veronica (1915) and the cruiser HMS Diomede (D92).

Second World War
Early in the Second World War, Dunedin was involved in the hunt for the German battleships GERMAN BATTLESHIP Scharnhorst and GERMAN BATTLESHIP Gneisenau after the sinking of the armed merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi.

In early 1940 Dunedin was operating in the Caribbean Sea, and there she intercepted the German merchant ship Heidelberg west of the Windward Passage. Heidelberg's crew scuttled the ship before Dunedin could take her. A few days later, Dunedin, in company with the Canadian destroyer HMCS Assiniboine (I18), intercepted and captured the German merchant ship Hannover near Jamaica. Hannover later became the first British escort carrier, HMS Audacity (D10). Between July and November, Dunedin, together with the cruiser HMS Trinidad (46), maintained a blockade off Martinique, in part to bottle up three French warships, including the aircraft carrier FRENCH AIRCRAFT CARRIER Béarn.

On 15 June 1941, Dunedin captured the German tanker Lothringen and gathered some highly classified Enigma cipher machines that she carried. The Royal Navy reused Lothringen as the fleet oiler Empire Salvage. Dunedin went on to capture three Vichy French vessels, Ville de Rouen off Natal, the merchant ship Ville de Tamatave east of the Saint Paul's Rocks, and finally, D'Entrecasteaux.

Dunedin was part of the escort of Convoy WS 5A when it was attacked by the German heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper.on 25 December 1940. The attack was repulsed by other ships of the escort, without losses to the convoy.

Dunedin was still steaming in the Central Atlantic Ocean, just east of the St. Paul's Rocks, north east of Recife, Brazil, when on 24 November 1941, at 1526 hours, two torpedoes from the GS U-124 (1940) sank her. Only four officers and 63 men survived out of Dunedin's crew of 486 officers and men.