HMS Osiris (S13): Sold for Spare Parts to the Canadian Navy

Built by Vickers-Armstrongs

HMS Osiris was built by Vickers-Armstrongs, launched on 29 November 1962 and commissioned on 11 January 1964, an Oberon-class submarine measuring 295.2 feet overall and displacing 2,410 tons submerged, powered by diesel generators and electric motors producing 3,000 shaft horsepower each, and armed with eight 21-inch torpedo tubes carrying 24 torpedoes.

Her keel went down at Barrow on 26 January 1962, ten months before that launch. The name is a peculiar one to give a warship and an oddly fitting one to give this particular boat. Osiris is the Egyptian god of the dead, murdered by his brother, cut into pieces and scattered, then gathered up and put back together well enough to rule the underworld. A submarine that would end her days being taken apart so that other submarines could keep running could hardly have been better named, though nobody in 1962 can have intended it.

She was the second of the name. The first HMS Osiris, an O-class boat also built by Vickers, commissioned in January 1929 and spent the war in the Mediterranean. She sank the Italian merchant Morea by gunfire west of Durazzo in August 1940 and torpedoed the Italian torpedo boat Palestro the following month, but her war was defined less by what she sank than by what kept going wrong: chronic engine defects forced her to abandon patrol after patrol and put her through long repairs at Alexandria and Port Said. She was paid off at Kilindini in March 1945 and broken up at Durban, a boat largely defeated by her own machinery.

A Jubilee Appearance

Osiris took her place in the 1977 Silver Jubilee Fleet Review at Spithead as part of the Submarine Flotilla, one of the great ceremonial gatherings of the Royal Navy's Cold War fleet.

That was a crowded anchorage rather than a distinction. Most of the fleet was there and a good many of her sisters were lying alongside her, and HMS Cachalot carries the fuller account of what the day amounted to. The work that actually filled Osiris's twenty-five years was the sort nobody photographs.

A Winter Off the Argentine Coast

The best documented of it came after the Falklands War rather than during it. By the beginning of 1983 Britain was holding the islands with a single nuclear submarine on station, and intelligence assessments that January suggested the Argentine threat had not gone away with the surrender. The Commander British Forces Falkland Islands asked for more. On 24 January 1983 the Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, agreed that Osiris should be sent south temporarily to reinforce the boat already there, and he told the Prime Minister two days later, noting that the arrangement would be kept under review and the force level returned to normal as soon as it could be, because the Navy simply did not have enough diesel-electric submarines to keep doing this.

What she did there was surveillance: quiet intelligence-gathering patrols off the Argentine coast, watching warships and monitoring military activity. It is precisely the task a conventional boat does better than a nuclear one, because she can shut down and sit almost silent in shallow coastal water in a way a reactor plant, which must keep pumping coolant whatever else is happening, cannot. Osiris went back again, and her longest deployment of all was a Falklands patrol in 1984.

A word of caution about 1982 itself. A number of reference works state that Osiris was employed on minelaying work in the South Atlantic during the war, and the sentence is repeated in much the same wording wherever it appears. The Royal Navy has never confirmed it, no released document supports it, and it sits awkwardly beside the far better established record that HMS Onyx was the only conventional British submarine to reach the war itself. It may be true and it may be a long-lived error. Until something is released that settles it, it is better recorded as a claim than repeated as a fact.

Her last significant piece of work was done in dockyard hands rather than at sea. Osiris went into Devonport in 1988 to be fitted with modern sonar, and that refit was the first at a Royal dockyard to be completed commercially rather than by the yard itself, a small administrative milestone in the long process by which Britain stopped running its own dockyards. She was decommissioned the following year.

An Unusual Final Role

Rather than being decommissioned and simply scrapped, Osiris was sold to Canadian Forces in 1989 for an unusual purpose: not to sail again under a new flag like several of her sister boats, but purely to be stripped for spare parts to keep Canada's own Oberon-class submarines running.

She was towed to Birkenhead for stripping by Cammell Laird, the very yard that had built several of her sisters, before being moved to Garston for final demolition and scrapped in 1992, a quietly practical end for a submarine that spent her final years keeping her Commonwealth cousins at sea.

The Boats She Kept Running

It is worth knowing who she was bought for. Canada operated three Oberons of her own, Ojibwa, Onondaga and Okanagan, all built at Chatham and commissioned between 1965 and 1968. The first of them had actually been laid down for the Royal Navy as HMS Onyx and was handed over to Canada partway through building, which is why the Royal Navy's eventual Onyx is a later boat altogether. By the late 1980s those three were ageing, their replacements were nowhere in sight, and the Royal Navy was retiring the only other Oberons in existence. Canada bought the spares while there were still spares to buy: HMS Olympus went over in 1989 as an alongside training boat, and Osiris went for parts.

The most striking use they made of her came in 1994, when Ojibwa was literally cut in half so that her worn-out engines could be lifted out and replaced with the newer ones taken from Osiris. Which closes the circle rather neatly: the first HMS Osiris spent her war limping back to Alexandria with broken engines, and the second HMS Osiris ended her existence as a set of engines good enough to give another navy's submarine several more years at sea.

There were not many of them left to give. Okanagan and Ojibwa paid off in the late 1990s and Onondaga, the last of them, at Halifax on 28 July 2000, by which time Canada had moved on to the second-hand Upholders, among them HMS Unseen. Two of the three survive as museums, Ojibwa at Port Burwell in Ontario and Onondaga at Rimouski in Quebec, so a visitor to a lakeside town in southern Ontario can now walk through a submarine that ran for its last years on machinery out of a Barrow-built boat scrapped on Merseyside. Okanagan was less fortunate and was broken up at Port Maitland in 2011. Of Osiris's own sisters, HMS Ocelot had the happiest ending of the lot, and never left the yard that built her.