HMS Saga (P257): The Submarine That Sank a Trawler in Peacetime

Built Too Late for the War She Was Meant For

HMS Saga was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 5 April 1944, launched on 14 March 1945 and commissioned that June, an Improved S-class submarine that arrived just as the war she had been built for was drawing to a close.

She spent her early months on trials and training out of Holy Loch and Scapa Flow, working with Allied vessels, and by the time Japan surrendered that August she was, in the words of one specialist naval history source, still working up.

Like a good number of her sister boats completed in the war's final weeks, Saga never undertook a single war patrol.

She is one of a whole cohort. Britain ordered submarines on the assumption the war would run well into 1946, and the yards kept delivering them for months after there was anything left for them to do. HMS Sentinel was not completed until December 1945, HMS Sanguine reached Malta on the day the Japanese surrender was announced, and Saga spent the summer of 1945 working up at Holy Loch for a war that ended while she was doing it.

It is worth resisting the temptation to call that a wasted boat. Nothing about the design or the building was wrong, and the crews who took these submarines to sea did everything asked of them. They simply arrived after the argument had been settled, which is nobody's fault and happens at the end of every long war.

A Collision With a Fishing Trawler

Her single best documented moment of drama came not from enemy action but from an accident close to home. On 10 February 1946, HMS Saga collided with the fishing trawler Girl Lena in the English Channel, sinking her, an incident confirmed consistently across every source consulted and by some distance the most solidly attested fact of her entire career.

What the Record Does Not Say

There is something missing from that account, and it should be pointed at rather than passed over. Every source records that the Girl Lena sank. None of them says what happened to the men who were aboard her.

A trawler is a small wooden vessel with a crew of perhaps half a dozen, and this was the English Channel in February. Whether they were all picked up by Saga, whether some were lost, or whether the submarine even knew immediately what she had hit, does not appear in the material available. That silence is itself worth noting. It is entirely possible everyone was saved and nobody thought it worth recording, and it is entirely possible they were not.

The collision itself is not the freak accident it sounds. Submarine and trawler collisions have happened regularly for a century and the reasons are structural. A submarine at periscope depth sees a narrow, wet, magnified slice of horizon for a few seconds at a time and can very easily miss a small wooden boat lying low in the water. Her sonar hears engine and propeller noise, and a drifting trawler with her engine idling makes very little. From the trawler's side there is nothing to see at all until the water opens.

It kept happening long after 1946, in peacetime, with modern equipment, on both sides of the Atlantic. Saga was neither the first nor the last, which does not help the Girl Lena.

A Long Second Career With Portugal

In 1948, Saga was sold to the Portuguese Navy and renamed Nautilo, given the pennant number S161, one of three sister S-class boats transferred to Portugal that same year. She went on to serve in Portuguese hands for over two decades, reportedly remaining in service into the late 1960s alongside her transferred sisters, before being placed on the disposal list in 1969.

Twenty-one years under the Portuguese flag against three in the Royal Navy, and not one shot fired in anger in either. Portugal took three of these boats in 1948, and she gave them by some distance the longest second career any of the S class had anywhere.

The timing of the Portuguese purchase is worth a moment. Portugal had stayed neutral through the war, though she leased the Azores to the Allies in 1943, and in 1948 she had very little in the way of a modern navy. The following April she became a founding member of NATO. Buying three submarines from Britain in 1948 is what a country does when it has decided which side of a new confrontation it intends to be on and needs something to contribute.

It was also an excellent bargain for both parties. Britain had far more submarines than she could man or maintain and was scrapping them at a rate of dozens; Portugal needed hulls, training and a starting point. A three-year-old boat that had never been shot at was about as good a place to begin as existed.

And she is part of a much larger pattern that only shows up when the class is looked at whole. The S class was the most numerous submarine class Britain ever built, sixty-two boats, and by 1946 there were far more of them than anybody wanted. What happened next is that they became the founding stock of other people's submarine services.

Three went to Portugal in 1948. HMS Satyr and two sisters went to France in 1952. HMS Untiring went to Greece in 1945, HMS Sleuth's contemporaries went to the Netherlands, two were lent to the Soviet Union in 1944, and HMS Sanguine and her sister founded the Israeli submarine arm in 1958. The related U class went to Denmark from 1946.

So half a dozen navies learned to operate submarines in second-hand British boats, and a considerable number of those boats, like this one, had never fired a torpedo at anybody. Saga's real contribution to naval history was not made in the Royal Navy at all.

What became of her physically after that point, whether she was broken up immediately or lingered in reserve for some further years, could not be confirmed from any source consulted, and is best left as an honest gap in the record rather than guessed at.

It is a quietly fitting afterlife all the same for a submarine that missed the war she was built to fight, finding a longer and more useful career flying another nation's flag instead.

The honest gap at the end of her record is worth defending too. A boat placed on a disposal list in 1969 might have gone to the breakers that year or sat at a wall for another five, and the Portuguese records of it are not readily available in English. Saying so is better than inventing a date. What is known should be stated plainly, and what is not known should be admitted just as plainly, which is a rule that would improve a great deal of naval history.