HMS Parthian (N75): Lost in the Adriatic After Three Years of Hard Fighting

Built at Chatham

HMS Parthian was built at Chatham Dockyard and commissioned on 13 January 1931, a P-class submarine that would go on to give the Royal Navy over three years of demanding Mediterranean war service, arriving in theatre in May 1940 and conducting numerous patrols through 1943.

A Perfect Spread of Torpedoes

On 20 June 1940, Parthian sank the Italian submarine Diamante, with all four of her torpedoes finding their mark, a remarkably rare and skilful piece of submarine-versus-submarine combat.

Two things about that make it more remarkable than it reads. The first is the date. Italy declared war on 10 June 1940 and this was the twentieth, so Parthian sank an Italian submarine ten days into a Mediterranean war that would run for three more years.

The second is the shooting. Four torpedoes fired and four hits is close to unheard of. A torpedo attack in 1940 was a prediction made through a periscope raised for seconds at a time, and a spread is fired precisely because the captain expects most of them to miss. Getting the whole salvo into a target as narrow as a submarine means the estimate of her course, her speed and the range were all very nearly perfect.

She was also one of the boats that had just come the long way west. HMS Rainbow sets out the great redeployment of 1940, when these big inter-war submarines were pulled in from the Far East to hold the Mediterranean, and why they turned out to be so badly suited to it. Parthian lasted longer than most of them.

She went on to damage the Italian cruiser Giovanni Boccaccio in March 1941, sink the Italian merchant Carlo Martinolich that January, and damage the Italian oiler Strombo in June 1941, a substantial tally of successful attacks across her Mediterranean patrols.

On 25 June 1941, she added a second submarine kill to her record, torpedoing Souffleur, a Vichy French submarine, off Beirut during the Syria-Lebanon campaign; a single hit broke the French boat in two and she went down almost immediately.

Two Submarines, and One of Them French

Set those two kills side by side, because the record does not do it. One submarine sinking another was uncommon enough that it happened only a couple of dozen times in the whole war. Parthian did it twice. It is a distinction shared by very few boats in any navy, and most accounts of her never remark on it.

The Souffleur is the harder of the two to write about, because she was French. By June 1941 France had been out of the war for a year, the Vichy government held Syria and Lebanon, and Britain invaded to stop those territories being used by Germany. So Parthian was operating off Beirut against the ships of a country that had been an ally eighteen months earlier, and the submarine she sank was crewed by Frenchmen.

It was not the first time and it is not comfortable. HMS Pandora torpedoed the French sloop Rigault de Genouilly on 4 July 1940, two days after the Royal Navy had opened fire on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir and killed nearly thirteen hundred French sailors. The Syria campaign was the same argument continued: better to fight former allies than let the Germans have the ports.

A single torpedo breaking a submarine in two tells you what the weapon does to a pressure hull. There is no armour, the structure is a tube designed to resist pressure evenly from outside, and a shock delivered to one point of it does not dent her, it breaks her back. Only HMS Venturer ever managed this against a fully submerged target, which is a different order of difficulty again.

Reconnaissance for Operation Abstention

Parthian also carried out periscope reconnaissance in February 1941 in support of Operation Abstention, the British operation to capture the small island of Castelorizo, a useful and quietly important contribution to an operation that has largely faded from popular memory but mattered a great deal to the commanders planning it at the time.

It is worth being honest about how Abstention turned out, because the reconnaissance was sound and the operation was not. British and commando forces took Castelorizo, a very small island off the Turkish coast, in February 1941, and then discovered that they could not supply or support it. The Italians counter-attacked, the naval arrangements broke down, and the island was evacuated within days. It was an embarrassment and it was studied afterwards as an object lesson in how not to run a combined operation.

None of which is Parthian's fault. Her job was to lie off a hostile island and look at it through a periscope, recording the beaches, the batteries and the approaches, and she did it. What the planners then did with the information was somebody else's failure.

Lost in the Adriatic

HMS Parthian departed Malta on 22 July 1943 for further patrol operations and was reported overdue at Beirut on 11 August that year, presumed to have struck a mine in the Adriatic sometime in late July or early August 1943. Among those lost was Timothy Walker, son of Captain Frederic John Walker, the Royal Navy's celebrated wartime U-boat hunter.

The U-Boat Hunter's Son

That sentence needs opening, because it is one of the cruellest coincidences of the naval war. Frederic John Walker, known throughout the service as Johnnie, was the most successful anti-submarine commander Britain produced. Working out of Liverpool with his support groups, he was credited with something in the order of twenty U-boats, more than any other Allied officer, and he did more than almost anyone alive to win the Battle of the Atlantic.

His entire professional life was spent killing submarines and the men inside them. In August 1943 he was told that his son, Sub-Lieutenant Timothy Walker, had died in one.

What he did with that is recorded by everyone who served with him: he went back to sea and hunted harder. He drove himself and his groups without let-up through the winter and spring that followed, and it killed him. He died in July 1944, worn out at forty-eight, and was buried at sea out of Liverpool with the city lining the waterfront. He never saw the end of the war he had done so much to decide.

There is no moral to be drawn from it and it would be wrong to try. It is simply the case that the Royal Navy's greatest destroyer of submarines lost his son inside one, and that both of them were dead within a year of each other.

Her loss, with the entire crew who had fought so hard and so effectively across three years of Mediterranean war, made her one of the many British submarines that never returned from that gruelling and dangerous campaign.

Where she died is not actually known, and the record is not consistent. The usual account puts her on a mine in the Adriatic, and another has her lost on passage eastward. She sailed from Malta on 22 July 1943 and was expected at Beirut, which is a long way and takes in a good deal of sea, and a patrol in the Adriatic followed by a passage east would fit both versions. Nobody has found her.

Three years and two months is a very long time for a submarine in that theatre. She was in the Mediterranean from May 1940, which is before Italy even entered the war, and she was still there in the summer of 1943 when Sicily was being invaded. HMS Upholder lasted eighteen months and is remembered as the great boat of that campaign. Parthian fought it from the first month to the last and is remembered chiefly for who was aboard her at the end.