HMS Rainbow (N16): Lost Off Calabria in a Mystery That Endures

From Hong Kong to Alexandria

HMS Rainbow served the Royal Navy from 1930, and following Italy's declaration of war in June 1940, was sent from Hong Kong to the Mediterranean, joining the 4th Submarine Flotilla based at Alexandria in Egypt, part of the rapid redeployment of British submarines to meet the new threat in that theatre.

She had been a Far East boat for most of her life. Launched at Chatham on 14 May 1930 and commissioned there on 27 October 1931, she was one of the big long-range submarines built between the wars for exactly one purpose: patrolling the enormous distances of the Pacific and the China Seas, where a British boat might be a fortnight from the nearest friendly harbour. By the middle of the 1930s she was with the Fourth Submarine Flotilla on the China Station, and Hong Kong is where the war found her.

What happened in June 1940 was one of the great redeployments. Italy came into the war, the Mediterranean turned overnight from a British lake into the most contested sea in the world, and boats were pulled in from everywhere to hold it. Rainbow made the passage from Hong Kong to Alexandria, which is the better part of seven thousand miles, and joined a flotilla facing an Italian navy operating close to its own bases with air cover overhead.

The cost was appalling and it fell fastest on exactly her sort of boat. Large submarines designed for deep ocean work were badly suited to the shallow, clear, heavily patrolled water of the central Mediterranean, where a big hull is easy to see from the air and slow to get down. HMS Phoenix was gone within weeks of Italy entering the war. HMS Parthian lasted three years before the Adriatic took her. HMS Pandora was bombed at her own dockyard wall in Malta. Rainbow was in the Mediterranean for about three months.

A Final Patrol Off Calabria

Under the command of Lieutenant Commander L.P. Moore, Rainbow sailed from Alexandria on 23 September 1940 for a patrol area off Calabria, a routine assignment that would prove to be her last. She failed to return, and her fate has never been definitively resolved.

Failed to return is a phrase that hides a process. A submarine on patrol keeps radio silence almost completely, because transmitting is how you are found, so the absence of signals means nothing at all for days at a time. What happens is that she is given a date to be back, and the date passes, and somebody notes it. Then a signal is made asking her to report, and there is no answer. Then another. Then, at some point that is a judgement rather than a fact, the flotilla accepts that she is not coming and the telegrams go out. By the time those telegrams reached fifty-six households, the men they were about had been dead a fortnight.

A Disputed Loss

Historical accounts of Rainbow's loss remain divided. Some sources hold that she was sunk by the Italian submarine Enrico Toti, a claim now generally believed to have actually involved a different British boat, HMS Triad, while more recent research, developed since 1988, suggests Rainbow herself collided with the Italian merchant vessel Antonietta Costa on 4 October 1940 while attacking a convoy.

Neither candidate wreck has ever been properly surveyed, leaving the true circumstances of her loss honestly unresolved even today.

The Action That Was Not Hers

The claim that had to be taken away from her is worth telling, because it is one of the strangest actions of the naval war and because a real submarine and a real ship's company have been standing behind it in the dark for fifty years.

On the night of 15 October 1940, in the Gulf of Taranto, the Italian submarine Enrico Toti found a British submarine on the surface. Both boats were surfaced, which almost never happened, and what followed was a gun action between two submarines, which happened even less often. The British boat began to dive. She was hit twice by gunfire while going down, possibly hit by a torpedo as well, and did not come up. For decades the victim was recorded as HMS Rainbow, on the reasonable grounds that Rainbow was missing in the Mediterranean at about the right time and somebody had to be.

She was not. Research published from 1988 concluded that the boat the Toti sank was HMS Triad, which had sailed from Malta on 9 October, and that Rainbow was nowhere near the Gulf of Taranto that night and had in all probability already been dead for eleven days. Triad's own loss had been put down to a mine. Two submarines, two wrong answers, and they were wrong in a way that swapped them over. HMS Regent spent a similar half century attached to the wrong wreck.

Triad was commanded by Lieutenant Commander George Stevenson Salt, who had taken her over on 15 August 1940 and had been in command for two months. He was lost with everyone aboard. His son had been born at Yeovil on 19 April that year and was six months old.

That son was Captain Sam Salt, and in 1982 he was in command of HMS Sheffield when she was hit by an Exocet on 4 May and became the first Royal Navy ship lost in action since the Second World War. He got most of his people off. Forty-two years separate the two events and the family connection is not a coincidence so much as a description of how the Royal Navy works, but it is a hard thing to read twice: a father lost in a submarine whose killer was credited to the wrong boat for half a century, and a son who lost his own ship and had to stand on the deck of another one afterwards and account for it.

What is known for certain is the human cost: 57 men were lost in total, one earlier death in February 1937 and 56 more in the presumed sinking on 19 October 1940, a figure that does not change whichever account of her final hours eventually proves correct.

The two dates in the record are worth reconciling, because they look like a mistake and are not. The collision with the Antonietta Costa, if that is what happened, was on 4 October 1940. The men are recorded against 19 October. There is nothing contradictory in it: a submarine is not declared lost on the day she sinks, because nobody knows, but on the day the Navy stops expecting her. The fortnight between the two is the fortnight in which fifty-six families had no idea.

The man who died in February 1937 is a reminder that a submarine kills people without any help from an enemy. Whatever happened to him happened in peacetime on the China Station, three and a half years before the rest of them, and he is counted with them because the Navy counts everybody a ship takes.

What can be said about her end is that it was probably quick and probably nobody's fault. A submarine at periscope depth attacking a convoy is looking at the escorts and the target and is a few feet below the keels of everything else in it, and the merchant ship she hits may not even notice. Neither candidate wreck has been surveyed. Until one is, Rainbow is a boat that sailed from Alexandria on 23 September 1940 and did not come back, which is what her people were told and all that anybody has been able to add since.