HMS Phoenix (N96): Lost Off Sicily in the Opening Weeks of the Mediterranean War

Constructed at Birkenhead

HMS Phoenix was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, ordered in February 1928, laid down that July, launched on 3 October 1929 and commissioned on 3 February 1931, a P-class submarine that spent her opening war patrols far from the Mediterranean, operating from Hong Kong across the Pacific and Yellow Sea from September 1939.

She had been out there a long time before that. Phoenix was commissioned in February 1931 and went almost straight to the China Station, where she spent essentially her entire peacetime career. She was one of six Parthian class boats, big long-range submarines built in the late 1920s to work the enormous distances of the Far East, and the same programme produced HMS Pandora and HMS Parthian. Nine years of showing the flag out of Hong Kong and Singapore, and then the world rearranged itself.

Her first year out there was not a quiet one for the class. On 9 June 1931, off Weihaiwei on the north China coast, her class-mate HMS Poseidon was rammed on the surface in clear weather by the merchant steamer Yuta and went down in minutes. Twenty-one men died. Eight got out of the flooded boat using the Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus, an early rebreathing set, and three of those eight did not survive the ascent or the aftermath, which still left five men who had escaped from a sunken submarine and lived.

That mattered out of all proportion to the numbers. Until Poseidon the Admiralty's standing advice to a trapped crew was to stay put and wait for rescue, on the reasonable grounds that trying to swim up from depth would probably kill you. Five men proving otherwise changed the policy: escape became the doctrine rather than the last resort, escape chambers began to be built into submarines, and the Navy started taking decompression seriously. There is a strange postscript, too. China quietly raised Poseidon from the seabed in 1972 and nobody outside China knew for another forty years.

A Rapid Transfer to the Mediterranean

Phoenix transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet in the spring of 1940, arriving at Alexandria that May just as Italy's entry into the war transformed the theatre into one of the most intensely fought submarine campaigns anywhere in the world. She took part in Operation MA 5 that July, covering vital convoys between Malta and Alexandria.

That is a considerable understatement. Operation MA 5 was the covering operation for the Malta convoys of early July 1940, and it turned into the Action off Calabria on 9 July, known to the Italians as the Battle of Punta Stilo. It was the first major fleet action of the Mediterranean war and one of the very few in which both sides brought battleships: Cunningham with HMS Warspite, Malaya and Royal Sovereign against the main body of the Italian fleet, thirty miles off the toe of Italy.

The moment everybody remembers is Warspite putting a fifteen-inch shell into the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare at something like thirteen miles, which remains among the longest gunnery hits ever made by a moving ship on a moving target. The Italian fleet turned away behind smoke and the action petered out, which is why it is usually written up as indecisive. It was not indecisive at all in one respect: it established in the first month that the Royal Navy would come and look for the Italian fleet, and the Italian fleet spent a good deal of the rest of the war declining to be found.

Phoenix was part of the submarine screen for that operation. Submarines were stationed on patrol lines across the routes the Italian fleet would have to use, to report movements and attack anything that came within reach, which is unglamorous work that generally produces nothing and occasionally produces everything. She survived it by a week.

Lost Off Augusta

HMS Phoenix, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Gilbert Hugh Nowell, was lost on 16 July 1940 off Augusta in Sicily, most likely sunk by the Italian torpedo boat Albatros.

The circumstances remain somewhat unclear, but it appears Phoenix may have been damaged after attacking the Italian tanker Dora C, with Albatros then delivering the fatal blow during the counter-attack, dropping a pattern of ten depth charges followed by a further eight.

The word most likely is carrying real weight there and it should not be quietly dropped. Albatros did not claim a submarine that day. What the Italian account records is that at 1252, Rome time, she sighted torpedo tracks running towards the tanker she was escorting, ran down the bearing and dropped a pattern of ten depth charges and then another of eight, and afterwards saw air bubbles coming up. She saw no oil, which is the thing everybody looks for, and she reported the submarine as possibly damaged rather than sunk.

The identification of Phoenix as the victim is an inference drawn later, and a reasonable one: a British submarine was attacked at that spot on that afternoon, and a British submarine operating in that area stopped answering. But nobody watched her sink and no wreck has been produced, and most likely remains the honest way to put it.

There is one detail that makes the whole thing sharper. Albatros was, at that point, the only ship in the Italian navy fitted with an experimental sonar set, which is precisely the equipment that turns a depth charge attack from guesswork into hunting. It had broken down. She made the attack without it, by eye and by dead reckoning off a torpedo track, and if she did kill Phoenix she did it with the one advantage she had over every other Italian escort switched off.

Phoenix was lost with her entire crew of 56 men, one of the earliest British submarine losses of the Mediterranean campaign, and an early sign of just how costly that theatre would prove to be across the years of fighting still to come.

She was declared missing on 21 July, five days after the attack, which is the usual gap between a submarine dying and the Navy accepting it. HMS Rainbow, who had made the same passage from the China Station, went the same way three months later and is the subject of the same kind of argument about what actually happened to her.

The scale of what was coming is worth stating. Italy declared war on 10 June 1940. Phoenix was on the bottom five weeks later. Before the Mediterranean campaign was finished the Royal Navy would lose more than forty submarines in that sea, a casualty rate worse than anything the submarine service suffered anywhere else, and the boats that died first were disproportionately the big pre-war ones like her: designed for the open Pacific, sent to work in clear shallow water within easy reach of enemy airfields, and too large to hide in it. Fifty-six men, in the fifth week of a three-year campaign.

Her class was almost wiped out. Six Parthians were built and five of them were lost: Poseidon rammed off China in 1931, Phoenix off Sicily in July 1940, HMS Perseus mined in the Ionian Sea in December 1941, HMS Pandora bombed at her berth in Malta in April 1942, and HMS Parthian gone in the Adriatic in August 1943. Only HMS Proteus came through, and she was sold for scrap in 1946. One boat out of six, and the one that survived did so by outliving the war rather than by being any luckier in it.