HMS Sahib (P212): A Formidable Record Shadowed by Tragedy

Built at Birkenhead, Commanded by One Officer Throughout

HMS Sahib was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 5 July 1940, launched on 19 January 1942 and commissioned that May, an Improved S-class submarine commanded for the whole of her operational life by Lieutenant John Henry Bromage, who would go on to earn both the DSO and DSC.

Across ten war patrols she built a properly formidable record, beginning with an unsuccessful attack on the German submarine U-658 while covering the Arctic convoys PQ17 and QP13, before moving to the Mediterranean, where she went on to sink Italian and German merchant shipping, damage harbour installations, and on 21 January 1943 sink the German submarine U-301 outright.

That is a rarer achievement than the sentence suggests. Very few British submarines killed a U-boat at all, because it requires finding a target that is itself trying not to be found, usually catching her on the surface, and getting a torpedo away before she dives. HMS Saracen managed it in the same sea in the same period and is remembered for it. HMS Splendid compiled a much larger tonnage without ever getting one.

The other end of her record is worth noting too. Her first serious action was an unsuccessful attack on U-658 while covering PQ17, which is the convoy that was ordered to scatter and lost two-thirds of its ships. Sahib was in the Arctic for that and in the Mediterranean by the autumn, which is a considerable change of climate in a few months.

The Sinking of the SS Scillin

It is essential to record, honestly and with real care, the most tragic episode of Sahib's entire war. On the night of 13 to 14 November 1942, Sahib torpedoed and sank the Italian steamer SS Scillin off the Tunisian coast, having sighted an unmarked, blacked out vessel with no red cross markings, prior notification, or any other indication of her true cargo.

He Found Out Within the Hour

What happened immediately afterwards is not in most accounts and it changes the whole shape of the story. Sahib surfaced.

She went in among the wreckage and started pulling people out of the water, and the people she pulled out were speaking English. Twenty-seven prisoners of war came aboard, twenty-six British and one South African, along with the Scillin's Italian captain and forty-five of her crew. She kept at it until an Italian warship came up and forced her to break off and dive.

So Bromage did not learn what he had done from a report months later. He learned it within the hour, on the casing, in the dark, from the men he was hauling out of the sea. Then he had to leave the rest of them and take his submarine down.

It is also why nobody could claim afterwards that the Navy did not know. The survivors were landed, the account was taken, and the facts were in Admiralty hands from November 1942.

Unknown to Lieutenant Bromage or his crew, Scillin was in fact carrying several hundred Allied prisoners of war, British and South African, battened below decks with no lifeboats or means of escape provided for them. Figures for the numbers involved vary between sources, with accounts of those aboard ranging from around 780 to over 800, and only a small number, generally put at around 27, survived.

The figure now generally accepted is 814 prisoners aboard and 787 or 788 dead, which sits inside the range the sources give and is the number most often quoted today. Either way it is one of the largest single losses of British prisoners of war in the entire conflict, and very nearly all of them were killed by a British torpedo.

And here is the part that is hardest to write about, because it is not about the war at all. The circumstances were kept from the families for more than fifty years.

The relatives of those men were not told that their sons and husbands had died in a ship sunk by the Royal Navy. Nothing was published, the file was not opened, and enquiries produced nothing. It was not until 1996, after years of persistence by families and researchers, that the Ministry of Defence placed an account of the sinking and a list of the prisoners into an existing file at the Public Record Office at Kew. When it was examined, both the account and the casualty list turned out to contain errors, which the department accepted once they were pointed out.

The reason usually offered for the original secrecy is the protection of signals intelligence, and for 1942 that is entirely plausible: an intercept that told the Admiralty where an Italian convoy would be was worth protecting at almost any cost, and admitting how a ship had been found could give the game away. What that explains about 1965, or 1980, or 1993 is another matter, and no satisfactory answer has ever been given.

It is worth being clear who this reflects on and who it does not. Bromage did nothing wrong, was cleared by an inquiry, and had pulled twenty-seven of the survivors out of the water himself. The decision to say nothing to eight hundred families for two generations was taken a very long way from any submarine.

A subsequent Admiralty inquiry formally cleared Bromage of any wrongdoing, on the reasonable grounds that the ship carried no markings and that her prisoner cargo had never been properly notified through the channels meant to protect it.

Those channels existed and were used. A ship carrying prisoners of war could be declared through the protecting power and the Red Cross, given a safe-conduct and marked, and if that was done she was not attacked. It required the country moving the prisoners to say what she was carrying, and Italy did not.

The reason is straightforward and unedifying. Declaring a prisoner transport means declaring her route and her timing, which means guaranteeing that the ship will not also be carrying fuel, ammunition or troops, and the Axis merchant fleet in the Mediterranean by late 1942 was far too stretched to run ships that could only carry prisoners. So the prisoners went in ordinary cargo ships in ordinary convoys, undeclared and unmarked, in the holds.

It kept happening. HMS Sportsman torpedoed the transport Petrella off Crete fifteen months later with more than three thousand Italian internees aboard and killed something over two and a half thousand of them, and in that case the men in the holds had been reclassified specifically to put them outside the Geneva Convention. Same sea, same practice, and the nationalities the other way round.

It remains one of the most tragic losses of Allied prisoners at sea in the entire Mediterranean campaign, an accidental act of war with devastating consequences, and it belongs in her record alongside the patrol results.

Lost Off Sicily

Sahib's own end came on 24 April 1943, on what proved to be her final patrol off Cape Milazzo, north eastern Sicily. Having torpedoed and sunk the Italian merchant Galiola from an attack on a small escorted convoy, Sahib came under sustained depth charge attack from the Italian corvettes Gabbiano and Euterpe, joined by an aerial bombing attack.

With her depth gauge damaged and her pressure hull ultimately holed, Bromage was forced to bring the submarine to the surface, where she came under direct gunfire from her pursuers before being abandoned and scuttled by her own crew.

The sequence deserves a moment because it is a textbook example of how a submarine dies and occasionally does not. A damaged depth gauge is worse than it sounds: a submarine flies by instrument, and a captain who cannot read his depth cannot tell whether he is going deep enough to be safe or deep enough to be crushed.

A holed pressure hull removes the choice. Water comes in, she gets heavier, and the only options are to blow the main ballast and go up, or to keep going down. Bromage took her up into gunfire from two corvettes, which is a decision to accept certain capture in exchange for his crew being alive, and then had to open the vents and sink his own boat quickly enough that she could not be salvaged while getting everybody out.

That he managed it is the reason nearly all of them survived. Six officers and forty-one ratings went into Italian captivity, which for a submarine sunk in a defended sea by two escorts and an aircraft is an extraordinary outcome. One of those two escorts, the corvette Euterpe, would do it again four months later off Bastia, where she was part of the group that destroyed HMS Saracen.

Remarkably, almost the entire crew of six officers and forty one ratings was rescued and taken prisoner, though accounts differ on the precise circumstances and even the exact number of men lost in the process, a discrepancy that deserves to be acknowledged rather than resolved by guesswork given how directly it concerns the fate of Sahib's own sailors.

Of those taken prisoner, a substantial number later attempted escape, with a good proportion reportedly achieving a successful return to Allied lines, a note of resilience and courage to close out the story of a submarine whose record combined real fighting success with one of the war's more painful accidental tragedies.

The escapes have a straightforward explanation that is worth giving. Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943, five months after Sahib's crew were captured, and for a short and chaotic period the camps in northern Italy were between guards: the Italians had stopped and the Germans had not yet arrived.

Thousands of Allied prisoners walked out. Some got south to the advancing armies, some got north over the Alps into Switzerland, and many were sheltered by Italian farming families at considerable risk. Those who did not move fast enough were put on trains to Germany. Sahib's people were among the ones who moved.

So the boat that caused one of the worst prisoner-of-war disasters of the Mediterranean war ended by putting her own crew into prisoner-of-war camps, from which most of them walked out. Bromage came through his captivity. The eight hundred men in the Scillin got nothing at all for fifty years, not even the truth.