HMS Pandora (N42): Sunk at Her Own Dockyard in Malta

The Build: Barrow

HMS Pandora was built by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness, ordered in February 1928, laid down that July, launched on 22 August 1929 and commissioned on 30 June 1930, a P-class submarine that would go on to serve across nearly two years of intense Mediterranean combat.

From Hong Kong to the Mediterranean

Pandora began the war patrolling from Hong Kong between November 1939 and April 1940, before transiting via the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean that May and June, arriving just as the theatre was about to become one of the most intensely fought submarine campaigns of the entire war.

A Formidable Combat Record

Under the command of Lieutenant Commander John Wallace Linton, Pandora sank the French sloop Rigault de Genouilly on 4 July 1940, and went on to sink Italian vessels including the Famiglia in September that year and both the Valdivagna and the Palma in January 1941, a remarkably formidable combat record across a period of sustained Mediterranean patrol work, before Lieutenant Robert Love Alexander took command through to April 1942.

Sunk at Her Own Berth

Pandora's war ended not in combat at sea but at her own dockyard, sunk at Valletta in Malta by two bombs from German Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers on 1 April 1942, part of the devastating aerial siege that Malta endured throughout that period, when even ships safely tied up alongside were far from safe from the near-constant bombing.

She was raised in September 1943 but found to be beyond economical repair, and remained beached at Malta until finally being scrapped in 1957, a long, quiet postscript to a submarine that had fought hard across two years of Mediterranean war.