HMS Saracen (P247): A U-Boat Killer Lost Off Corsica

Built at Birkenhead, Commanded by One Man

HMS Saracen was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 16 July 1940, launched on 16 February 1942 and commissioned that June, an Improved S-class submarine commanded for the whole of her career by Lieutenant, later Lieutenant Commander, Michael Lumby, who earned the DSO and DSC for his conduct in the role.

Across thirteen war patrols, eleven of them in the Mediterranean, Lumby and his crew built a truly aggressive record of sinkings against Axis shipping.

Sinking a U-Boat on Her First Patrol

On 3 August 1942, on her very first patrol, Saracen sank the German submarine U-335 in the Norwegian Sea north of Shetland, killing 43 of her 44 man crew, a striking opening result for a submarine barely a month into active service.

She went on to sink the Italian submarine Granito that November, with the loss of all hands, alongside an Italian auxiliary patrol vessel and a series of merchant ships over the following months.

The Sinking of the Francesco Crispi

Among her actions, the torpedoing of the Italian troop transport Francesco Crispi off Elba on 19 April 1943 stands out as by far the most serious in terms of human cost.

One Italian source records a notably enormous casualty figure, running into the hundreds of lives lost among the troops she was carrying, though this specific figure could not be independently corroborated during research for this article and should be treated with appropriate caution given both its scale and its sensitivity, rather than repeated as a settled fact.

What is not in doubt is that the loss of life involved was severe, and it deserves to be acknowledged with real seriousness rather than reduced to a line in a list of Saracen's wartime successes.

Lost Off Bastia

Saracen's own war ended on the night of 13 to 14 August 1943, while on patrol off the approaches to Bastia, Corsica.

Detected and depth charged by the Italian corvettes Euterpe and Minerva, she suffered hull damage that left her unable to control her buoyancy, and was ultimately forced to surface and was scuttled by her own crew rather than risk being taken or sunk with all hands, her superstitious captain reportedly waiting a day so the scuttling would not fall on the unlucky date of Friday the 13th.

Forty six of her crew were rescued by the two Italian corvettes and taken prisoner, though sources differ on exactly how many men were lost at the moment of sinking itself, with figures of two and four both appearing in otherwise reliable accounts, a discrepancy worth noting honestly rather than glossing over.

Several further men from her crew are recorded as having died later, between the end of 1943 and the spring of 1944, though the precise circumstances of these later deaths were not established with confidence in the sources consulted.

Her wreck, an officially recognised war grave, was not located again until 22 June 2015, found at a depth of over thirteen hundred feet by an Italian wreck hunter after a search effort that had earlier involved French underwater archaeologists too, closing out, more than seventy years on, the story of a submarine whose fighting record was as formidable as her final loss was costly.