The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice

A typical attack of the Second War was survived by HMS Sahib, although dozens were not. By now A/S escorts of all nations were fitted with the sound-ranging device known as ASDIC, the pulses of which, according to Commander Edward Young, ‘were as though someone was gently tapping on the outside of the pressure hull. I thought of Blind Pew’s stick in Treasure Island.’21 The Captain, Lieutenant John Bromage22, starts the narrative after he had successfully attacked an escorted Italian convoy:

‘Sahib was at 300 feet. The Climene took up position on the starboard quarter and maintained contact without difficulty in the perfect conditions… quite suddenly hydrophone effect [propeller cavitation], which was clearly audible to the naked ear in the control room, started up directly overhead. Very shortly afterwards the ASDIC office reported the unmistakable sound of depth-charges hitting the water.’

The helmsman, Leading Seaman Bobby Briard, takes up the story:

‘As was usual in these circumstances, I just gripped the wheel a little tighter and stared unblinking at the lubbers line in the compass in front of me. The pattern of depth-charges was right on target and it felt as if some giant hand had taken hold of the submarine and was continually slamming it down. The shock waves inside the boat seemed to burst inside my head and dim my sight. The stunned silence that followed the attack was punctured by a sort of hissing roar coming from the engine room. “All compartments report damage to the Control Room.” The Captain’s voice contained a note of urgency. The gyro in front of me was spinning wildly. When I attempted to put correction on the helm, the wheel spun loosely in my hands, I listened to reports coming in.’

Bromage continues:

‘I had ordered “full ahead group up” [high speed] when the very loud HE was directly overhead, and as a consequence by the time the depth-charges exploded the salvo must have been astern of the submarine. Nevertheless the result inside the boat was dramatic. A valve had been blown clean off the ship’s side leaving a one and a half inch diameter hole through which water entered like a steel bar. No little Dutch boy could have put a stop to that! The pressure hull itself was leaking in the fore-ends, and under the after ends bilge.’

Briard concludes:

‘The Captain’s face was still expressionless but his words, when they came, seemed to hold infinite regret. “I’m sorry lads… stand by to abandon ship.’23

Lieutenant Thomas Parkinson, First Lieutenant of HMS J2, in a report to Commodore (S), entitled ominously ‘A submarine has no friends’, provides a slightly different perspective:

‘J2 was depth-charged on the first Monday in August 1917 at about 8am by British Light Forces returning home. The submarine was on the surface proceeding at 15 knots to the patrol area; the weather was perfect and the sea glassy calm. On sighting the ships the boat was dived; had an excellent trim and the Captain commenced an attack. Discovering the ships were British we went to the bottom, 125 feet on the gauge. Between 80 and 90 feet the steering gear jammed, and I was ordered to go aft to investigate. While examining the gear a depth-charge exploded quite near. The crew space filled with a white haze and the hands present, the tables and stools, were lifted clear of the deck. On arriving in the Control Room to make a report on the helm a second charge exploded shaking the boat from stem to stern; she was still sinking slowly. As she grounded a third and last explosion, this being nearer than the preceding two, and the lighting switches were thrown off the board. They were put to the on position… All valves were examined and tightened by wheel spanner. WC and [garbage] ejector locked, Sperry [compass] stopped and every necessary precaution taken against betraying our position. The boat was perfectly tight and nothing was broken. Books, magazines, papers etc were issued to the crew, and many of the older ratings turned in. Hydrophones were used and the listener ordered to make his reports in secret to the Captain so as not to disconcert the younger members of the crew though for a long time the ships could be heard quite plainly through the hull as they passed to and fro. How long they stayed I do not know as I turned in and slept until we went to the surface at 3.30pm. My reason for turning in was to try and convince the crew that all was well. We were up and proceeding to the patrol area at 4.00pm. I cannot praise too highly the conduct of the crew but am of the opinion it was due to the cool quiet manner of the old submarine ratings. The reaction was worse than the actual experience for whilst it was taking place the mind was fully occupied in carrying out the necessary duties knowing that a mistake might lead to destruction… To be depth-charged once is good experience; it adds to the keenness and efficiency of the boat’s crew and shortens the time of a crash dive but it is something that no one could ever get used to. Familiarity would never breed contempt… I consider J2 was not lost for [one of] two reasons (a) The Light Forces were sure we were destroyed or (b) they lost our position.’24

To be sunk by the enemy is one thing, but to be sunk by one’s own forces is the ultimate waste. But J2’s ‘blue on blue’ experience was, regrettably, far from unique in the two World Wars, and such occurrences were generated by a variety of factors. In her case it was poor staff work by either the Light Forces Controllers/Submarine Controllers not operating the submarine in a ‘weapons-tight haven’, or one or other of the forces being out of position. Lack of knowledge of a friendly submarine’s patrol area led to the loss of HMS H5 through ramming by the merchant vessel SS Rutherglen in the Irish Sea in 1918. Because the Admiralty was keen not to dissuade our merchant marine Masters from using one of the few counters to a U-boat attack available to them, the M/V was never informed of the mistaken identity, the usual bounty was paid, and the Master was awarded the DSO. A combination of one submarine being out of its patrol area (remember that accurate navigation was far from guaranteed) and failing to respond quickly enough to the daily recognition signal caused HMS Triton to sink HMS Oxley in 1939. Indeed, even firing the correct signal was no guarantee of immunity from attack, for in 1918 HMS D3’s correct and speedily released recognition flare was taken as flak by a French airship, which responded to the ‘attack’ by sinking the submarine!

The ‘fog of war’ also left submarines particularly vulnerable to attack from friendly aircraft, and a combination of trigger-happiness by the pilot, poor navigation by the air-navigator and inadequate briefing before departure caused a number of incidents that often resulted in, at worst, the submarine’s loss or, at best, its removal from the operational scene in order to conduct emergency repairs. Lieutenant Rufus Mackenzie, the Commanding Officer of HMS Thrasher in 1941, came under attack by a Royal Navy Swordfish aircraft as he left Alexandria Harbour. His boat suffered significant damage, including the loss of 90 per cent of his battery, and barely made it back to base. Rufus’s punishment to the young airmen was simply to walk them through the submarine – they apparently refused the offer of a drink in the Wardroom after their tour!25

Despite everything they had to suffer, the health of submariners during both wars was, to the onlooker, surprisingly good.26 The-present day submariner would not be surprised, because it is now known that after 24 hours or so, individuals’ germs become immune to each other! It is only on return to harbour and being exposed to others’ ‘foreign bodies’ that submariners must rebuild their bacterial resistance with, in traditional fashion, alcohol proving a first-class catalyst. Indeed, letting off steam was a necessary relief to the pressures of patrol, and the role of the Depot Ship in this context was brought sharply into focus during the First War. The concept of the ‘Mother’ had been introduced from the earliest days of submarining (the first was HMS Hazard in 1902), but by tradition they tended to be hulks, with priority once again being given to workshop facilities rather than the comforts of attached crews. During the early conflict it was recognised that ‘rest and relaxation’, in as ‘hassle-free’ a scenario as possible, was the most beneficial recuperative tonic to get crews ready to go back to sea. It was concluded that a ten-day patrol needed four days rest to restore the balance (this compared with a ratio of 21:7 in the Second War in equivalent waters). Even those men who were showing the signs of neurasthenia were noted to recover rapidly after these few days in stress-free conditions.

In addition to comfortable bunks and good laundry facilities, there was a general call for the adjacency of a soccer pitch so that the crews could take exercise, although one cynical CO remarked that ‘those that took exercise the most, missed it the most’ and he was probably right. Four designated Depot Ships were built between the wars with, in addition to their routine comforts, rest-camps being established at every opportunity, although, hurriedly one should add, without the extremes of pleasure that were provided for German U-boat crews! These rest camps were much more appreciated than soccer pitches, and Leading Telegraphist Arthur Dickison of HMS Safari waxed lyrical about their recuperative qualities.27

Malta under siege and the base of the famous ‘Fighting Tenth’, however, offered few comforts, and in a renowned exchange between Captain Shrimp Simpson and Flag Officer Submarines (Horton), after the former had been taken to task for inviting HMS Turbulent, in the same signal that provided vital routing instructions, ‘to bring plenty of booze’, retorted to his senior:

‘Sir, I would have you know that in all the time I have commanded the Tenth Submarine Flotilla, never have I known anything like the disastrous series of misses that have occurred during the last month. This has coincided with Lazaretto’s supply of refreshment being completely exhausted. The two matters are not disconnected. I consider that anything to relieve the staleness of my overstrained COs is a matter of the most vital importance.’28

Ben Bryant commented: ‘Malta at the end of the siege was dreary; men who are subjected to considerable strain do not readily relax and regain their resilience when all is dull and depressing; they go stale. A stale CO would be that second or two slower, the second or so that makes the difference between success and failure.’29

Bromage’s action in Sahib in speeding up at the crucial moment was an example of the second between life and death. After one aircraft bomb (dropped on the area of torpedo discharge disturbance) and 56 depth-charges, Sahib managed to stagger to the surface, and the crew abandoned ship to be subsequently picked up and made prisoners of war by the Italians.

During each of the World Wars a number of British submariners became prisoners of war: 152 during the First, and 359 during the Second. To read the accounts of the manner in which they survived attack and remained alive to go into captivity is to appreciate the significance of the expression ‘a hair’s breadth’ in war. To put this into context, every 2 feet of depth for a submarine equates to an extra pound per square inch of pressure on the hull, so at the 500-foot depth at which HMS Splendid (Lieutenant Ian McGeoch DSO DSC) began her recovery from a depth-charge attack by the German frigate Hermes that felt as ‘if a gigantic sea-terrier had grabbed the submarine by the scruff of the neck with intent to kill’30, she would have been subjected to 2501b per square inch. For her to reach the surface before flooding water under this tremendous pressure overcame the reserve of buoyancy required to maintain upward momentum, was a miracle, and testimony to McGeoch’s speed of reaction. He and two-thirds of his crew became Italian POWs.

Others who survived from submarines attacked on the surface rather than dived were spared the gut-wrenching minutes of wondering whether the pressure hull would remain sufficiently intact to avoid its becoming their tomb, but their shortened experiences were nevertheless just as terrifying.

One of the unluckiest submarines to suffer such a fate was HMS E20 in the Sea of Marmara in November 1915. She had been working with HMS H1 as ‘chummy boat’31 and although they had both been surprised by the presence of FS Turquoise, they became a threesome. Part of the process of working together, in addition to conducting local water-space management and co-ordinating tasking, was to arrange a rendezvous to agree future tasking. HMS E20 was waiting for Turquoise in the agreed position when, at about 5pm in glassy conditions with a slight haze, the party on the upper deck, enjoying a leisurely smoke, suddenly spotted a periscope soon followed by the wake of a torpedo. The subsequent explosion blew the British submarine in half. Lieutenant AN Tebbs RN, the First Lieutenant, describes how ‘the wire for the heel of the foremast caught my foot and carried me down with the boat to a considerable depth. A rather curious fact was that the air which must have been forced out of the fore-hatch enabled me to take a breath before I actually got to the surface, and before I had got clear of the boat itself.’ Eight other men survived and were picked up by their attacker, U-14, an Austrian-built boat manned mainly by Germans. ‘We were treated with the utmost kindness and courtesy. Everything that could be done for our comfort was done.’ Tebbs was to learn the circumstances of HMS E20’s loss from U-14’s CO:

“‘You have the Frenchman to thank. We knew where you would be this evening from the Turquoise’s chart.” Some ten days previous to our being sunk we had arranged the rendezvous for the 4th/5th, and in the meantime, without informing us, she had attempted to go down the Straits once more, owing I believe, to lack of fuel. His periscope was shot away, and he surrendered his boat… On his chart was found, in writing, the time and place of the intended meeting with us.’32

Tebbs and his colleagues became Turkish POWs.

The experience of being well-treated once picked up was universal, but until that moment of recovery there was little respite from attack even though the submarine was evidently ‘hors de combat’. McGeoch in Splendid lost 18 men out of his crew of 48 through the continued shelling of the Hermes, and Bromage in Sahib reported that although it was obvious that his submarine was being abandoned, she still came under heavy attack from two escorts and a Ju88 aircraft. After he had been rescued Bromage thanked the CO of Climene for not firing to hit his stricken submarine, but the latter said he had been! What this demonstrates, despite the gracious charm shown by his enemy when Bromage had been rescued, was the determination to sink the hated submarine without regard for the survival of the crew. A similar plight befell HMS E13 when she ran aground in 1914 when attempting to enter the Baltic. Although in the neutral waters of Denmark she was repeatedly attacked by two German destroyers, and her crew fired upon by machine-gun when they attempted to swim to safety. It was only through the intervention of a Danish destroyer that the other half of the crew was not massacred.

In a similar vein, no comparison between the two wars would be complete without a brief mention of two actions that have been branded by some commentators as ‘war crimes’. Each involves British submarine commanding officers. They were those of Herbert in Baralong33 in 1915 and Miers in Torbay34 in 1942. Both ordered the shooting of apparently unarmed survivors following attacks conducted by them (albeit Herbert was in command of a Q-ship). Their thought processes were very similar to those who pressed home attacks with men in the water – while they remained a perceived threat, and until their contribution could be guaranteed to be at an end, they were subject to the ultimate penalty simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ben Bryant reinforces this message: ‘Submarining is often painted as a brutal game, but submariners are no more brutal than anyone else. Nobody should criticise the submariner unless he himself has been hunted, for it is when harassed that an animal becomes vicious.’35 Both Herbert and Miers had been hunted, and were in the classic mould of submarine commanding officers.

In both wars there could have been few greater responsibilities given to a young man than to command a submarine. Onboard he was a ‘Dictator’ simply because it was his judgement and actions alone that could bring success, failure or death. As Captain Fell, a ‘Captain Teacher’ on two occasions, put it, ‘He has no one to hold his hand, to advise or correct a fatal move. His eye alone can see, and his instinct sense, the correct and only tactic to pursue; on him rests all responsibility.’36 Dictator, yes, full of determination, yes, but as Ben Bryant points out, ‘no man relies more completely upon each and every member of his crew. A good submarine crew is far more than a team; they are as near as possible during attack, a single composite body using the CO as their eye and their director.’37

So perhaps there is after all an explanation of ‘The Trade’, but let a United States Air Force Officer have the last word on the subject. Colonel Bradley Gaylord was on board HMS Seraph for ‘Operation Kingpin’ in 1942 (the pick-up of General Giraud from Vichy France) when he noted in his diary:

‘How could you have claustrophobia among these smiling boys whose easy informality was so apparently a thin cover for the rigid discipline on which every man knows his life depends upon the other fellow. It is so completely infectious. You suddenly realise that here is one of the essential points about war: there is no substitute for good company. The boys in the Submarine Service convey a spirit which quickly explains why they would sooner be in submarines than anywhere else.’38

Notes on contributors

Commander Jeff Tall OBE RN, Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Gosport, UK.

Commander Jeff Tall is the Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, a post he has held since August 1994 when he retired from the Royal Navy. A submariner for twenty eight years, he has served all over the world and commanded four submarines: HMS Olympus, HMS Finwhale, HMS Churchill and, finally, the nuclear powered Polaris Missile submarine, HMS Repulse. He served as Admiral Sandy Woodward’s submarine staff officer during the Falklands Conflict in 1982. He was co-author, with the naval historian Paul Kemp, of HM Submarines in Camera, he wrote the historical element of the CD-Rom The RN Submarine Service - Past Present and Future, produced jointly with the Royal Naval School, which is available to the general public.