HMS Sanguine (P266): The Submarine That Missed the War and Found a New Flag

Arriving Just as the Fighting Stopped

HMS Sanguine was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 10 January 1944, launched on 15 February 1945 and commissioned that May, an Improved S-class submarine that, like several sisters completed in the war's closing months, arrived too late to see any real fighting.

She departed for the Far East that August, intended for service with the British Pacific Fleet, only to reach Malta on 15 August 1945, the very day Japan's surrender was announced, and was promptly ordered home again, her wartime service amounting to little more than a work up cruise cut short by peace.

She was not even alone in it. HMS Sea Devil, another Improved S boat out of a Scottish yard, came into Grand Harbour on exactly the same day, 15 August 1945, on exactly the same errand and with exactly the same result. Two British submarines arrived at Malta bound for the Pacific on the morning the Japanese surrender was announced, and both were turned round and sent home.

It is worth thinking about what that felt like aboard. These were crews who had spent months working up, had been told they were going to the Pacific Fleet, and had made a long passage in a new boat expecting a war at the end of it. They got Malta, sirens, and orders to go back. Relief and a certain flatness, presumably, in whatever proportion each man found for himself.

A Place at the Coronation Review

Modernised with a snorkel and recommissioned in 1951 with the 1st Submarine Squadron based at Malta, Sanguine went on to take her place among the assembled fleet at the Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead on 15 June 1953, marking the coronation of the young Queen Elizabeth II, a proud, ceremonial moment in an otherwise fairly quiet peacetime career.

The snorkel fitted in that 1951 modernisation was the more consequential change, and it usually gets about three words. A snorkel is a mast carrying an air intake and an exhaust, which lets a submarine run her diesels and charge her batteries while still submerged at periscope depth, instead of having to surface completely.

Britain did not invent it. The Germans did, calling it the Schnorchel, and fitting it to U-boats from 1944 as an answer to Allied aircraft that were killing them whenever they came up to charge. It arrived too late to save the U-boat campaign, and the Royal Navy took the idea straight off the beaten enemy and put it into every boat it had. Sanguine, built without one, got hers six years after the war she was built for.

It changed the arithmetic completely. A wartime boat had to spend hours on the surface every night, visible and vulnerable. A snorkel boat could stay down for weeks with only a thin mast showing, which is why the postwar classes were so much harder to find, and why HMS Sentinel and her generation spent their careers being hunted by ships learning how to do it.

A New Life as INS Rahav

Sanguine was sold to Israel in October 1958, becoming the country's second submarine under the name INS Rahav, after the sea monster of Hebrew mythology, alongside her sister boat HMS Springer, renamed Tanin.

She went on to serve roughly a decade in Israeli hands, though it appears she was not operationally active during the Six Day War of 1967, unlike her sister ship, which reportedly took part in commando landing operations near Alexandria around the same time.

Where the Israeli Submarine Service Began

The sale tends to be described almost apologetically, and it should not be. Sanguine and Springer were the first two submarines the state of Israel ever operated. There had been none before them. An entire national submarine arm, which today runs some of the most capable conventional boats in the world, was founded in 1958 on a pair of worn-out British S-class boats that had reached Malta the day their own war ended.

Rahav and Tanin were therefore the boats in which the first generation of Israeli submariners learned the trade, and everything that followed came out of them. That is a considerably better second act than most 1945 submarines managed.

It is worth understanding why a country would start that way. A submarine arm is one of the most difficult things a navy can build, because the hardware is the easy part: what takes years is the people, the training pipeline, the maintenance skills and the accumulated habits of a service that cannot afford mistakes. Nobody sells that. The only way to acquire it is to get hold of some submarines, however old, and start.

So a pair of thirteen-year-old British boats with no combat record between them became the foundation of a national capability, and the officers who learned in them taught the ones who came after. The Israeli navy now operates modern German-built boats that are among the most capable non-nuclear submarines in existence. The line runs back to Birkenhead in 1944.

Tanin's war in June 1967 is worth stating plainly. She landed naval commandos in the harbour at Alexandria, which is the same class of operation British boats had been running off Sumatra twenty years earlier, and it was dangerous enough that her commanding officer was awarded the Medal of Courage for it. Rahav, by every account, was not in a fit state to take part.

Israel came back to Britain for submarines a few years later, and that story ended badly. HMS Truncheon sets out what happened to the T-class boats bought in the mid-1960s, including the loss of INS Dakar with all sixty-nine of her crew in January 1968.

Rahav was retired in 1968 and broken up at Haifa the following year, closing out the story of a submarine that never fired a shot for the Royal Navy but found a genuine, decade long second career flying another nation's flag instead.

The manner of that retirement is the detail worth having, and it is a quietly sad one. Rahav was not simply paid off and towed away. She was cannibalised: stripped for the spare parts needed to keep her sister Tanin running, because a twenty-three-year-old British submarine in Israeli service in 1968 could not be resupplied from anywhere else. She was taken apart to feed the only other boat like her, and what was left went to the breakers at Haifa in 1969.

That makes 1968 a hard year for a very small submarine service. In January it lost Dakar and sixty-nine men in the eastern Mediterranean, and in the same twelvemonth it dismantled one of its two original boats to keep the other at sea. Tanin herself lasted until 1972.

So the boat that never fired a shot for the Royal Navy ended up as the raw material of another navy's beginnings, which is a genuinely useful thing to have been. Not many submarines that missed their war can say they helped start a submarine service instead.