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.

She was one of a whole generation pulled in from the other side of the world that summer. HMS Rainbow made the same journey from Hong Kong and sets out what the move meant and why these big ocean-going boats turned out to be so badly suited to the sea they were sent to. Her sister HMS Parthian went the same way, and HMS Phoenix was dead within weeks of arriving. Pandora lasted longer than most of them.

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.

The Man Who Would Win the Victoria Cross

That first name is worth stopping on, because it belongs to one of the most decorated officers of the entire submarine war and is usually passed over in five words. John Wallace Linton, known throughout the service as Tubby, was commanding Pandora at the start of the Mediterranean campaign. He went on to command HMS Turbulent, and on 21 May 1943 he was awarded the Victoria Cross.

The citation is an unusual one and repays reading. Most Victoria Crosses are given for a single identifiable action on a single day. Linton's was not. It was given for sustained conduct across nearly four years of command and twenty-one war patrols, on the reasoning that no one moment could be separated out from what he had done continuously since 1939. Under him Turbulent sank something in the order of ninety thousand tons of shipping, including a cruiser, a destroyer and a U-boat, and shot up three trains with her gun for good measure. She endured some two hundred and fifty depth charges.

He never knew about the medal. Turbulent sailed on her last patrol before a refit and did not come back; she was lost with all hands off La Maddalena in Sardinia in March 1943, probably mined, and her wreck has never been found. The Victoria Cross was gazetted two months after he died. Only HMS Upholder's Malcolm Wanklyn stands beside him in that company.

A French Sloop, Two Days After Mers-el-Kebir

The first name on Pandora's list of victims deserves an explanation it rarely receives. The Rigault de Genouilly was French, and on 4 July 1940 France had been out of the war for a fortnight and was not an enemy in any ordinary sense. Two days earlier, on 3 July, the Royal Navy had opened fire on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria to stop those ships falling into German hands, killing nearly thirteen hundred French sailors in a single afternoon.

Pandora's attack the following day was part of the same operation and the same logic. It was, by any measure, a terrible thing to have to do, and it was done because the alternative was thought to be worse. It poisoned Anglo-French relations for years and it is still argued about in both countries. A submarine crew who had spent the previous winter patrolling off Hong Kong found themselves torpedoing an ally, and there is no comfortable way to record it.

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 not simply parked there, which makes it worse. By the spring of 1942 Malta was being starved out. Surface convoys were being destroyed before they arrived, and the island was being supplied in part by submarines, which arrived with their torpedoes landed and every available space filled with ammunition, aviation spirit, food and medical stores. Pandora had come in on 31 March 1942 on exactly that errand.

She was still unloading the next day when the raid came in, and a decision was made to keep unloading rather than stop, because time in Grand Harbour was the most dangerous commodity there was and the sooner she was empty the sooner she could leave. It was a reasonable judgement and it was the wrong one. She was hit by two bombs while alongside with her hatches open and her cargo half out, and she sank in four minutes.

The month she picked was the worst one there has ever been. More than six and a half thousand tons of bombs fell on Malta in April 1942, on an island about a fifth the size of Greater London, which is a heavier tonnage than fell on Britain in any single month of the Battle of Britain. Between January and late July that year there was exactly one period of twenty-four hours in which no bombs fell at all. Two weeks after Pandora went down, on 15 April, the King awarded the George Cross to the entire island, which is the only time that has been done for a whole population.

Twenty-seven men were killed: two officers and twenty-five ratings. They died in harbour, at a dockyard wall, on a working party, having survived nearly two years of patrols in the most dangerous sea in the world. It is a particularly bitter way for a submarine crew to go, and it bears out the point that being tied up alongside in Malta in 1942 was no safer than being at sea.

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.

Fifteen years beached is a strange afterlife. She was raised in September 1943, once the siege was over and the harbour could be cleared, and the survey found what everybody expected: a thirteen-year-old submarine with bomb damage was not worth the steel and the yard time to put right, not in 1943 and not afterwards. So she was pulled up onto the shore and left there, and Malta got on with rebuilding around her.

She was still there in 1957, by which time the officer who had commanded her had been dead for fourteen years and had a Victoria Cross, the boat he died in had never been found, and the Royal Navy had begun building nuclear submarines. Then somebody finally cut her up.