John Cunningham (Royal Navy officer)

Sir John Cunningham
The then Vice Admiral John Cunningham
Born	13 April 1885(1885-04-13) Demerara, British Guiana
Died	13 December 1962(1962-12-13) (aged 77) London, United Kingdom
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Service/branch	Royal Navy
Years of service	1900 - 1948
Rank	Admiral of the Fleet
Commands held	1st Cruiser Squadron Eastern Mediterranean Fleet Mediterranean Fleet
Battles/wars	World War I World War II
Awards	Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath Member of the Royal Victorian Order Legion of Merit (United States) Order of St Olav (Norway, twice) Legion d'honneur (France) Croix de Guerre(France) Order of George I (Greece) Legion of Merit (United States) War Cross (Greece) Honorary MIEE

Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Henry Dacres Cunningham GCB, MVO (13 April 1885 – 13 December 1962) was the Royal Navy First Sea Lord from 1946 to 1948. A qualified senior navigator, he was for a time an instructor at the Royal Navy navigation school. He was also Director of Plans at Admiralty House and later served as the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet during the Second World War.

(John Cunningham should not be confused with his predecessor in more than one role, Andrew Cunningham.)

Early life

Cunningham was born on 13 April 1885 at Demerara, British Guiana. His parents were Henry Hutt Cunningham QC and Elizabeth Harriet. He was educated until sixteen at Stubbington House School when, in January 1900, he enlisted in the Royal Navy as a sea cadet. He was assigned to the training ship HMS Britannia. After the Britannia, in June 1901, he was posted as a midshipman to the cruiser HMS Gibraltar, on the then Cape of Good Hope Station.

Cunningham was made acting Sub Lieutenant in July 1904 (confirmed October 1905): he returned home in 1904 to take the qualifying examinations for promotion to Lieutenant. He achieved a first-class top certificate in all five subjects and was therefore promoted in May 1906, with seniority backdated to October 1905. Cunningham entered and soon qualified at the navigation school and he was immediately appointed as assistant navigator for the battleship HMS Illustrious. During the next three years he graduated to the role of senior navigator of the gunboat HMS Hebe, the cruiser HMS Indefatigable in the West Indies, and the minelayer HMS Iphigenia in the Home Fleet. In 1910, he undertook an instructor's course and became an instructor at the Royal Navy navigation school.

In the same year, on 8 March, he married his first cousin, Dorothy May. Cunningham had spent some of his early years in Ulverston with Dorothy, after his parents had both died at sea. They were married for forty-nine years and had two sons, John and Richard; John became a fire brigade chief and Richard a Royal Navy Lieutenant in the Submarine Service. Richard was killed during World War II, in action on board HMS P33 in August 1941.

First World War

Cunningham returned to sea during the First World War in 1914 as navigator on the cruiser HMS Berwick in the West Indies station. The following year he was transferred to the battleship HMS Russell in the Mediterranean. Notably he survived her sinking by a mine, in Maltese waters in April 1916. After a brief rest, Cunningham was appointed as senior navigator in the battlecruiser HMS Renown. While serving in the Mediterranean he was promoted to Commander, in 1917. In the final year of the war he became navigator of HMS Lion in the Grand Fleet.

Inter-war years

After the war Cunningham served again as an instructor but was at one time appointed as navigator in the newly commissioned battlecruiser HMS Hood in 1920. During his time on the Hood, he became the squadron navigator for the entire battle-cruiser squadron, commanded at the time by Sir Roger Keyes.

He returned ashore in 1922 to serve as commander of the navigation school and followed this a year later by appointment as master of the fleet in HMS Queen Elizabeth, the flagship of Admiral Sir John de Robeck. He was promoted Captain in 1924 and served for a time on the staff of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. He then became deputy Director of Plans at Admiralty House (London). He again returned to sea, from 1928 to 1929 as commander of the minelayer HMS Adventure.

From 1930 to 1932 he was posted in Whitehall and was appointed director of plans. Emerging from a difficult period for the Royal Navy, Cunningham took command of the battleship HMS Resolution, while becoming flag captain to Admiral Sir William Fisher, the commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet (a position Cunningham would later hold). After being appointed aide-de-camp to the King in 1935, Cunningham reached flag rank in 1936 at the age of fifty-one and was promoted to Rear Admiral. Later in the year he took up the post of assistant chief of naval staff. This brought him into close contact with the influential figure of Admiral Sir Ernle Chatfield, the First Sea Lord. Cunningham's workload increased substantially in 1937 when he assumed responsibility for administering the Fleet Air Arm upon its transfer from the Air Ministry to the Admiralty. His new role initially brought with it a slight change of designation, but the importance of his duties was reflected in the elevation of the office in 1938 to that of Fifth Sea Lord, and Chief of Naval Air Services, with a seat on the Board of Admiralty.

Second World War

In the summer of 1939, as Europe prepared for war, he was promoted to Vice Admiral and was ordered to take command of the 1st Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean, flying his flag in HMS Devonshire. Shortly after war broke out in September, Cunningham's cruiser squadron returned to reinforce the Home Fleet under Admiral Sir Charles Forbes. He was assigned to the Norwegian campaign from the outset.

In the wake of the allied defeat, Cunningham was asked to lead a mixed force of three cruisers, nine destroyers, and three French transports to the port of Namsos, north of Trondheim, in order to evacuate the roughly 5,700 allied troops of ‘Mauriceforce’ that had concentrated there. Arriving off Namsos during the night of 1 May, Cunningham postponed the evacuation by twenty-four hours in the hope that clear weather would deteriorate and help to conceal the mass evacuation. On the evening of 2 May a bank of fog came, shrouding the evacuation operation from the Luftwaffe and allowing the entire ‘Mauriceforce’ to be spirited away from Namsos in a single night's work. Although badly mauled by bombing and strafing the next day, Cunningham's diminished task force returned with its evacuees safely to Scapa Flow, a few days later.

Cunningham's next major assignment took him back into the Norwegian Sea and beyond the Arctic circle to the port of Tromsø on 7 June to evacuate King Haakon VII, Crown Prince Olav, and other members of the Norwegian royal family, along with government ministers and over 400 other passengers, mainly British. Under strict instructions not to break radio silence, Cunningham in the Devonshire had picked up his evacuees and was on the return journey to the United Kingdom when they received an enemy sighting report from the British carrier HMS Glorious, only some 50 miles away, which was being engaged by vastly superior forces. Because of his orders to recover the Norwegian Royal Family and Government, important contributors to the war-effort, the crew of the Glorious and her two screening destroyers HMS Acasta and HMS Ardent were left to fend for themselves against overwhelming odds. Despite taking the fight courageously to the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, all three British warships were sunk in two hours with the eventual loss of 1519 officers and men.

The sighting report was not received by any other ship or shore station and no rescue effort was mounted. Only thirty nine survived after two days on rafts in the Norwegian Sea at latitude 69 degrees North. They were rescued by Norwegian ships making for the Faeroe Islands. The analysis of the action, supported by eyewitnesses from Devonshire, concludes that Cunningham took steps to suppress the sighting signal and left the area, but it could be argued that this was a correct although an extremely difficult decision, of the kind that is forced on senior commanders in war-time.

Cunningham's dilemma was described by the Norwegian liaison officer present on board Devonshire, Lt. Skule Storheill, many years later, after he had advanced to the rank of Vice-Admiral. "His Majesty King Haakon took me aside one day asking: 'Do you remember when we were together in Devonshire in 1940? That day, when we later learned that they had sunk the Glorious, Admiral Cunningham approached me, showing me a signal he had received regarding an emergency near by. I asked him, what are your orders? Cunningham answered: 'To bring you safely to England'. No further words were spoken between us', the King said, 'but I realised that this was not to Admiral Cunningham's liking'".

In September 1940, he was appointed joint commander, with Major-General Noel Irwin, of Operation Menace, an effort to land a mixed force of 6670 British and Free French soldiers at Dakar in Senegal (formerly French West Africa) in a bid to provide a base for General Charles de Gaulle's Free French movement in west Africa. This expedition turned out to be a failure, undermined by a lack of secrecy and co-ordination on the one hand and compromised by resolute Vichy French hostility and defensive firepower on the other.

Knighted in the 1941 New Year Honours, Cunningham was recalled to Admiralty House in the early months of 1941 and appointed Fourth Sea Lord and Chief of Supplies and Transport. He remained at the position for more than two years before being sent in June 1943 to the eastern Mediterranean as Commander-in-Chief, Levant, with the acting rank of Admiral. Promotion to admiral followed in August and when the two Mediterranean commands were merged later in the year he was confirmed as the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Fleet, and assumed the responsibility for all allied warships in the that theatre. Admittedly, by this time the naval situation in the Mediterranean had improved significantly, but there were still important amphibious operations to launch at Anzio and in the south of France, both of which he oversaw.

First Sea Lord and last years

Cunningham remained in the Mediterranean, until he returned home to relieve Andrew Cunningham as First Sea Lord in May 1946. Substantial budget cuts and disarmament had already taken place and more of the same were due to continue. His time as First Sea Lord was spent overseeing the downsizing of the Royal Navy and preparing the Navy for a role in the Cold War.

He retired in September 1948. In 1946 he was made a Freeman of the City of London, and was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet in January 1948. He had also received a set of distinguished orders and decorations from France, Greece, Norway, and the United States. After leaving the navy Cunningham spent the next ten years as chairman of the Iraq Petroleum Company, before retiring finally in 1958 at the age of seventy-three. He died in the Middlesex Hospital on 13 December 1962.

Awards and honours

Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath - 1 January 1946 (KCB - 1 July 1941; CB - 11 May 1937)
Member of the Royal Victorian Order - 26 July 1924
Mentioned in Despatches - 11 July 1940
Grand Officiers de la Legion d'Honneur (France) - 1945
Croix de Guerre avec Palmes (France) - 1945
Grand Cross of the Order of George I (Greece) - 22 May 1945
Chief Commander of the Legion of Merit (USA) - 17 July 1945
War Cross 1st Class (Greece) - 19 March 1946
Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav (Norway) - 22 July 1947 (Commander - 13 October 1942)

References

• Official Programme for the Victory Parade in which J H Cunningham took part
• Murfett, Malcolm H.(1995). The First Sea Lords from Fisher to Mountbatten. Westport. ISBN 0-275-94231-7
• Heathcote, T. A. (2002). The British Admirals of the Fleet 1734 - 1995. Pen & Sword Ltd. ISBN 0 85052 835 6
• Royal Navy Flag Officers
• World War II Officer Histories
• John Winton, Carrier "Glorious": The Life and Death of an Aircraft Carrier (Cassell Military, London, 1999) ISBN 0-304-35244-6 (first published 1986)
• Scharnhorst history: analysis of the action with HMS Glorious

Military offices
Preceded by Sir Geoffrey Arbuthnot	Fourth Sea Lord 1941–1943	Succeeded by Frank Pegram
Preceded by Sir Henry Harwood	Commander-in-Chief, Levant June 1943–August 1943	Succeeded by Sir Algernon Willis
Preceded by Sir Andrew Cunningham	Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Fleet October 1943–February 1946	Succeeded by Sir Algernon Willis
Preceded by The Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope	First Sea Lord 1946–1948	Succeeded by The Lord Fraser of North Cape