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.

There is a detail in that action which is not usually repeated and should be. Saracen surfaced afterwards and found two men alive in the water. She took one of them aboard. The other refused to be rescued and drowned.

Nothing in the record explains why, and there is no honest way to reconstruct what was going through a German submariner's mind in the Norwegian Sea in August 1942 with his boat and forty-two of his shipmates gone. He may have been injured beyond helping himself. He may have been past caring. He may have refused on principle. All that is recorded is that the offer was made and he did not take it.

Killing a U-boat with a submarine was rare and killing one on your first patrol is close to unheard of. It required Saracen to be in the right patch of empty ocean at the right hour, to see a small object on the surface before it saw her, and to get a torpedo away in the minute or so before it dived.

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 in the sources checked and should be treated with appropriate caution given both its scale and its sensitivity, rather than repeated as a settled fact.

The Crispi Figure, and What It Actually Is

That caution was right when it was written and the figure can now be given, because it is specific, it comes from Italian records rather than a single retelling, and it was repeated across the Italian coverage when the wreck was found in 2015.

Francesco Crispi was hit by three torpedoes about eighteen miles off Punta Nera, on the coast of Elba, and she sank in sixteen minutes. Italian accounts give 943 dead, of whom 534 were grenadiers and 409 were from other units, with 357 survivors.

Nine hundred and forty-three men in sixteen minutes. That is close to three times the death toll of the Belgrano and it is not a figure that appears in any British account of the Mediterranean submarine campaign, because Saracen's war record was written up as a troop transport sunk and the counting was done on the other side.

Lumby had no way of knowing how many men were aboard and every reason to sink her. A troop transport under escort carrying an army to a front where British soldiers were fighting is about as legitimate a target as exists, and sixteen minutes is what happens when a merchant hull takes three torpedoes with men below decks. The number still belongs in the record rather than in a footnote, and it can now be stated rather than gestured at.

It is the recurring shape of this campaign. HMS Sahib sank the Scillin with eight hundred British and South African prisoners in her holds. HMS Sportsman sank the Petrella with more than three thousand Italian internees in hers. Nobody involved knew, in any of the three cases, and in all three cases a great many men died in a few minutes in the dark.

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.

One of those corvettes had done it before. Euterpe was part of the group that destroyed HMS Sahib off Cape Milazzo on 24 April 1943, and four months later she was off Bastia when Saracen was caught. Two British submarines, four months apart, and the same small Italian escort in at the kill both times.

That is worth knowing because the Gabbiano class corvettes are almost entirely forgotten. They were built quickly and cheaply from 1942 for one purpose, escorting the North African convoys against exactly the submarines that were strangling them, and they were rather good at it: shallow draught so a torpedo would run under, a very tight turning circle, good sonar and a lot of depth charges. By 1943 the Mediterranean had become a considerably harder place for a British submarine than it had been in 1941, and these ships are a large part of the reason.

The Friday the thirteenth story is the sort of thing that gets attached to submariners after the event, and it may well be true. Lumby got his boat to the surface, got his people out, and put her down himself with the enemy alongside, which takes a good deal more nerve than waiting for midnight.

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.

The man who found her deserves his name. Guido Gay, an Italian engineer, spent two years looking for her with his own equipment and located her at about four hundred and twenty-two metres off the Corsican coast. The images went to the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, which confirmed the identification in June 2015.

He found the Francesco Crispi as well. So the ship that Saracen sank off Elba and the submarine that sank her, both of them holding a great many men, were located by the same person in the same search, seventy-two years after they went down within four months of each other. There is no tidy moral in that and it is a striking thing all the same.

Four hundred and twenty-two metres is a long way beyond diving. Nothing can be recovered, nothing can be repatriated, and there is no realistic prospect of anything changing, which is the usual position for a submarine war grave and the reason the identification itself matters so much to the families. HMS Simoom was found in the same way in the Aegean after seventy-three years.

Thirteen patrols in about fourteen months, a German submarine, an Italian submarine, a troopship and a string of merchant ships, and then a scuttling charge and an Italian prison camp. That is a very full war for a boat that was in commission for less than fifteen months, and it is why the record and the cost belong on the same page.