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.

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.

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.

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.

Her loss, with the entire crew who had fought so hard and so effectively across three years of Mediterranean war, deserves to be remembered with the seriousness it warrants, one of the many British submarines that never returned from that gruelling and dangerous campaign.