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.

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.

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.

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.

It remains one of the most tragic losses of Allied prisoners at sea in the entire Mediterranean campaign, an accidental act of war with remarkably devastating consequences, and deserves to be remembered with full seriousness rather than treated as a footnote to an otherwise successful patrol record.

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.

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.