HMS P48: The Beacon Submarine at Algiers and a Christmas Day Loss in the Gulf of Tunis

A Number, Not a Name

HMS P48 was one of the small U Class submarines that did so much of the Royal Navy's work in the Mediterranean, built by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow in Furness. She was ordered on 23 August 1940, laid down on 2 August 1941 and launched on 15 April 1942.

Boats of her class were less than 200 feet long, with a crew of little more than thirty, four bow torpedo tubes and a small deck gun, and they were handy in the shallow, crowded waters of the central Mediterranean. Like the other new submarines of the time she was given only a number.

Early in 1943, at the Prime Minister's urging, the numbered boats were given names, but by then P48 had been lost, and she is remembered only by her number. Her captain from the start was Lieutenant Michael Faber, who had come to her from the old training boat H33.

The photograph was taken in 1942 in Buccleuch Dock at Barrow, as she moved through the basin with P48 painted large on her conning tower and the dock's lifting bridge raised behind her. She was commissioned for trials at Barrow on 6 June, left the yard on 17 June and was formally handed over the next day at Holy Loch, where she did her diving, gunnery and torpedo trials in the Clyde and at Arrochar.

Norway and a Flooded Machinery Space

Her first war patrol, from Lerwick between 18 and 29 July 1942, was an anti-U-boat patrol in the Norwegian Sea, across the routes the U-boats took from Norway into the Atlantic. Twice she was sent off to intercept U-boats reported by aircraft or fixed by direction finding, and twice she saw nothing.

On 12 August she left the Clyde for Gibraltar. On the way she was ordered to wait out in the Atlantic west of Cape Finisterre for the German tanker Uckermark, the old Altmark, which was trying to break out from France for Japan, but the tanker turned back after being sighted from the air.

Then, on 20 August, water began pouring into her auxiliary machinery space through the log tube. She could no longer dive, and for a time she steered for the Spanish port of Vigo and asked for help, until the leak was stopped. A trawler, HMS Alouette, met her and escorted her into Gibraltar on 23 August.

The Beacon off Algiers

After repairs and a short patrol in the Alboran Sea she was given a special part in Operation Torch, the Allied landings in French North Africa. The assault convoys for Algiers were to arrive in the dark off unfamiliar beaches, and submarines were placed offshore as beacons to mark exactly where they should stop and put their landing craft away.

P48 was the beacon for the Beer sector, west of the city. From 4 November she lay off the coast, studying it by periscope by day.

On the night of 7 November she surfaced, launched a folding canoe, a folbot, with its crew to mark the beaches close inshore, released it just under five miles from the lighthouse on Cape Caxine, and moved out to the release position.

At about twenty past ten that night the ships of the Beer group, the headquarters ship Bulolo, the troopships and their escorts, among them the Hunt Class Wheatland, made contact with her, stopped, and began lowering their boats. She earned the battle honour North Africa 1942.

Malta and the Tunisian Convoys

The Germans answered the landings by pouring troops into Tunisia, and the 10th Submarine Flotilla at Malta was turned against the convoys carrying them. On 13 November, about ten miles north-east of Bizerta, P48 fired three torpedoes at the Italian motor ship Città di Napoli, and the next day three more at the transport Sivigliano, but both attacks missed.

She reached Malta on 18 November. On her next patrol, north of Tunisia, she saw the sky light up with gunfire to the north in the early hours of 2 December, as the cruisers and destroyers of Force Q, Quentin among them, destroyed an Italian convoy at Skerki Bank.

The next day she attacked another convoy, again without a hit, and on 5 December she fired four torpedoes at a German transport and a small tanker north of Cape San Vito in Sicily. They missed too, and the escorting torpedo boat Perseo dropped a large number of depth charges around her and claimed her sunk.

She returned to Malta on 8 December, probably needing time in dock after the battering.

It was a hard record, but not an unusual one. The convoys to Tunisia were short, fast runs, heavily escorted by sea and air, and the submarines sent against them, including Seraph and Unison, which were ordered into the same patrol line as P48 in December, were working in waters thick with minefields and anti-submarine craft.

Christmas Day 1942

P48 sailed from Malta for her last patrol on 23 December 1942, ordered to patrol in the Gulf of Tunis. On the morning of Christmas Day the Italian transports XXI Aprile and Carlo Zeno were on passage from Palermo to Tunis, escorted by the torpedo boats Ardito and Ardente, when an escorting aircraft fired bursts of machine gun fire into the sea to mark a submarine.

Ardente found her with her sonar almost at once and made several attacks, dropping forty-eight depth charges in all, and a patch of oil a hundred metres or more across spread over the water north-west of Zembra Island. The Italians claimed a submarine sunk. Nothing more was heard from P48.

When she did not answer signals ordering her on to Algiers at the end of the month she was presumed lost, and she was posted overdue on 5 January 1943.

She was very probably the submarine Ardente attacked, perhaps whilst closing to attack the convoy. All thirty-four of her company were lost, Faber among them; he was twenty-seven. She had served for a little over six months and had never been credited with a ship sunk.