HMS Regent (N41): A Wreck Misidentified for Fifty Years

One of Four Rainbow-Class Boats

HMS Regent was one of just four Rainbow-class submarines built for the Royal Navy, and went on to serve through the demanding Mediterranean submarine campaign of the Second World War.

Four boats is a very small class, and they were not built for the sea that killed three of them. Regent, Rainbow, Regulus and Rover were large, long-legged submarines designed between the wars to patrol the Pacific and the China Seas, where a boat might be a fortnight from anywhere friendly. HMS Rainbow sets out why that made them such poor tenants of the central Mediterranean, and what it cost. Only Rover survived the war.

Regent did rather well before the Adriatic got her. She torpedoed the Italian merchant Città di Messina in January 1941, damaged the German merchant Menes the following month, sank the auxiliary minesweeper Igea by gunfire in August, and worked over the merchant Erice with torpedoes and then her deck gun in December. That is a working record from the same campaign that HMS Upholder and HMS Urge fought, and out of the same shrinking pool of targets.

The Bay of Kotor, April 1941

None of that is the reason to remember her. On 17 April 1941 Regent left Malta under Lieutenant Commander Hugh Browne with orders that read like a mistake: go to the Bay of Kotor, on the Yugoslav coast, and bring out the British minister. Germany had invaded Yugoslavia eleven days earlier and the country was collapsing. Sir Ronald Campbell, Britain's man in Belgrade, was somewhere down there with his staff, and the Royal Navy was going to fetch him in a submarine.

She reached the bay on 22 April, and what she did next is almost unbelievable for a boat whose entire survival depends on not being seen. At half past six in the morning Regent surfaced and drove straight in through the minefields, on the surface, in daylight, with the largest White Ensign aboard flying from her masthead. It was not bravado. She was announcing herself as a warship on a diplomatic errand, because the alternative was to be shot at as a submarine.

Then she sat there and waited, for nine hours. A Yugoslav officer eventually came out to explain that the country had gone, that the Italians now held the coast, and that Campbell was being held further along at Herceg Novi. Regent moved down to him, and the negotiation that followed had the shape of a hostage exchange: an Italian army officer came aboard the submarine to be held while Lieutenant D. Lambert went ashore to argue for the minister's release.

It was going tolerably well until aircraft arrived and began dive-bombing the submarine sitting motionless on the surface in a closed bay. Regent was hit hard enough to damage her battery, which is the one thing a submarine cannot do without, and three men were hurt including Browne himself and his first lieutenant. He had no choice left. He took his boat out, and Lambert, ashore and negotiating on his behalf, had to be left where he stood. Regent got back to Malta on 26 April with an Italian officer aboard, without her own lieutenant, and without the minister.

The mission was raised in the House of Commons a fortnight later, which gives some idea of how far outside the ordinary run of things it was. Campbell was eventually got out by other means. Whether a submarine was ever the right tool for the job is a fair question, and the answer is probably that by 22 April 1941 there was nothing else within reach.

Lost to a Mine Off Brindisi

HMS Regent was lost in April 1943, almost certainly after striking a mine off the Apulian coast, an explosion that triggered a secondary detonation in her ammunition storage that, in the stark words of researchers who later studied the wreck, literally gutted the boat.

In the days that followed, the bodies of four sailors were recovered from coastal locations near Brindisi, their uniforms identifying them as British submariners, and they were later laid to rest at the Bari War Cemetery.

The number of men in her is worth stating, and the sources do not quite agree. The Royal Navy Submarine Museum roll of honour carries sixty-three names; some published accounts say sixty-two. Either way it was everybody aboard, under Lieutenant Walter Knox, who had commanded her since July 1941 and taken her through the best part of two years of it.

The date and the place both deserve a little care. Regent sailed from Malta on 12 April 1943 for the southern Adriatic and made her last known attack on a convoy near Monopoli on the 18th. That is the last anyone heard from her, and it is where the 18 April date comes from; she was not actually posted overdue until 1 May. A mine is much the likeliest answer, but it is a deduction rather than a witnessed event, and the accounts put her end anywhere along a stretch of the Apulian coast from north of Monopoli down past Brindisi.

One of the four bodies was found still in a Davis escape apparatus. That is a hood and an oxygen bag, and a man is only wearing one because he got out of a sunken submarine and tried to reach the surface. Somebody survived whatever tore the boat open, found the set, put it on in the dark, and got clear. It did not save him, but it is the one thing anybody knows for certain about the last minutes aboard.

A Case of Mistaken Identity

For decades, the story of Regent's final resting place remained notably confused.

A research team in the 1990s believed they had located her wreck in the Apulia region near Barletta, roughly fifty years after her loss, but the Italian explorer Fabio Bisciotti and his team later determined that this earlier find was in fact the Italian submarine Giovanni Bausan, which had been repurposed as an oil depot and subsequently destroyed by British aircraft.

Bisciotti's team went on to locate what they believe is the true wreck of HMS Regent near Brindisi at a depth of around 75 metres, an 87-metre hull bearing the six torpedo tubes and distinctive cable-cutting rostrum unique to British R-class submarine design, finally bringing a measure of clarity to a mystery that had persisted for the better part of a century.

The dates on that muddle are worth having exactly, because the story is better than the summary. Divers found the Barletta wreck in August 1999 and it was taken for Regent almost at once. The identification was not merely a local enthusiasm either: it was accepted by the British authorities, and the wreck was formally declared a war grave. For twenty-one years the Royal Navy protected, and families visited, an Italian submarine.

The Bausan had earned an odd end herself. Launched in 1916, obsolete long before the war she ended up in, she had been stripped out and hulked as the oil depot G.R.S.251, and on 9 June 1944 she was towed off Barletta, anchored, and used as a target by British aircraft until she went down. Nobody was killed and nobody wrote it up. Fifty-five years later a team of divers took her for a British submarine, and she was given a British war grave.

A team of divers put that right in June 2020, which left Regent lost all over again. The candidate wreck since identified lies off the Apulian coast in seventy-odd metres, upside down, and the case for it is good: the length is right for a Rainbow-class boat, the six bow tubes are right, and so is the cable-cutting rostrum on the bow. Accounts differ on the exact position and depth, which is worth knowing rather than glossing over.

It is also worth saying plainly that this identification has not yet been through the process the first one went through, and the first one was wrong. That is no reason to doubt it. It is a reason to call it what it is, which is the best answer anyone currently has rather than a settled one. Sixty-three families waited the better part of eighty years for somebody to be certain, and they are owed accuracy more than they are owed an ending.