HMS Satyr (P214): A U-Boat Killer That Ended Her Days as FS Saphir

Built on the Clyde for Norwegian Waters

HMS Satyr was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering at Greenock, laid down on 8 June 1940, launched in September 1942 and commissioned in February 1943, an Improved S-class submarine that operated with the Home Fleet's submarine flotilla out of Dundee.

Across thirteen war patrols between April 1943 and November 1944, she worked almost exclusively off the Norwegian coast, ranging as far north as the waters around Narvik, with only a couple of patrols taking her further afield into the Bay of Biscay.

Dundee is worth more than a passing mention. The base there was HMS Ambrose, home of the 9th Submarine Flotilla, and it was the Allied flotilla in the fullest sense: alongside the British boats lay Norwegian, Dutch, Polish and Free French submarines, all working the same stretch of enemy coastline from the same Scottish river. A good many of their crews were men whose countries had been overrun and who had got out with a submarine.

What made those patrols effective was not chance. Boats were positioned using signals intelligence from Bletchley Park and reports from Norwegian coastwatchers, civilians living under occupation who counted ships along their own coast and passed the information out at considerable personal risk. A submarine sitting in exactly the right square of the Norwegian Sea on exactly the right morning is usually the visible end of a great deal of work by people who never went to sea at all.

Sinking a U-Boat

Satyr's clearest fighting success came on 15 June 1944, when she sank the German submarine U-987 west of Narvik, with the loss of all 53 of her crew, a well documented and unambiguous result confirmed independently from both British and German records.

Eight Minutes, and Nineteen Days

The attack itself is recorded closely enough to follow minute by minute. At seven minutes past nine on the morning of 15 June 1944, west of Narvik, Satyr sighted a U-boat on the surface at four and a half thousand yards. Lieutenant Weston tracked her for eight minutes, closed to three thousand yards, and at a quarter past nine fired all six bow tubes.

Two minutes and twenty seconds later there were two explosions. One torpedo struck just behind the bow and the other directly beneath the conning tower, and the watchers through the periscope saw her appear to break in half. There was nothing left to hunt.

The other side of it is the part that stays with you. U-987 was nineteen days out of Stavanger on her first war patrol. It was also her last. She had sunk nothing, achieved nothing and been at war for less than three weeks, and all fifty-three men aboard her died that morning. Most of them will have been on their first operational voyage.

Why a U-boat was on the surface in daylight in June, at that latitude, is worth a thought. North of the Arctic Circle in midsummer there is no night at all, so a boat that needed to charge her batteries had no darkness to do it in and had to take the risk in broad daylight. The same midnight sun that made the Arctic convoys so murderous for merchant ships worked against the U-boats too, and on this particular morning it worked for Satyr.

One submarine sinking another was uncommon, and it almost always looked exactly like this: the victim on the surface, the attacker dived and never seen. The photograph the Admiralty released when Satyr got back to Dundee says so plainly, that she met a U-boat on the surface and torpedoed her. Doing it against a submerged target was another thing altogether, and HMS Venturer is the only boat that ever managed it.

She had already sunk the Norwegian merchant vessel Nordnorge off Stadlandet that March, and went on to make further, unsuccessful torpedo attacks against German merchant shipping and a convoy off Egersund later that year.

The Nordnorge is the entry that needs a second look. She was Norwegian, and Norway was an ally under occupation, which is why she was carrying cargo for the Germans off her own coast and why a British submarine sank her. It happened all along that shore and all along the French one: Germany did not have enough merchant shipping and used everybody else's. HMS Untiring spent 1944 sinking requisitioned French vessels for the same reason.

Converted to a Training Target

As the war drew to a close, Satyr was taken in hand for a significant refit, disarmed, streamlined and fitted with more powerful batteries to serve as a high speed target submarine for training the Navy's anti submarine forces, a common and useful second career for a good number of surplus S-class boats once the fighting was over.

It is worth being clear that this was not a demotion. The Royal Navy came out of 1945 knowing that the next submarine war would be fought against Soviet boats built on German designs, which meant fast, quiet and permanently submerged. Its escort crews had spent six years practising against submarines that spent most of their time on the surface, and all of that training was now out of date.

So boats were stripped of their guns and torpedo tubes, streamlined, given bigger batteries, and sent to sea to be as difficult to find as possible. Satyr spent her post-war career teaching the Navy how to catch the submarines it was about to face. HMS Sea Devil was used in the same way, including for trials of an infrared system meant to spot a submarine from the air, and HMS Untiring finished as an Asdic target off Devon.

A Second Career With France

In February 1952, Satyr was transferred to the French Navy and renamed Saphir, serving under the tricolour until August 1961, nearly a decade of further useful life beyond her original Royal Navy service.

She was not a one-off, and the pattern is clearer than any single article shows. France came out of the war with almost no submarine force and no yards to rebuild one, and Britain had a surplus of S-class boats it no longer wanted. In 1952 several went across together: Satyr became Saphir, HMS Spiteful became Sirene and HMS Statesman became Sultane, and all three came home again at the end of the 1950s when France had built her own.

Nine years is a substantial second career, longer than her Royal Navy service either side of the war. The boat that killed U-987 spent the 1950s flying the tricolour, and by the time she was cut up at Charlestown in 1962 she was twenty years old and had served two navies and three quite different purposes.

She was sold for scrap the following spring and broken up at Charlestown in Fife that June, bringing to a close the career of a submarine whose quiet, effective war against German shipping off Norway ultimately gave way to a second, equally long chapter of service with an entirely different navy.