HMS Sceptre (P215): The Tow Boat Behind the Midget Submarine Raids

Built on the Clyde

HMS Sceptre was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering at Greenock, laid down on 25 July 1940 and commissioned at Holy Loch on 15 April 1943, an Improved S-class submarine that went on to fly the flag of two very different kinds of undersea warfare during her career.

It is worth saying at the outset what towing an X-craft actually cost a submarine, because it was not a taxi service. The parent boat dragged a fifty-foot craft on a long line for a thousand miles or more, spending much of the passage dived with something astern of her that she could not see, could not manoeuvre freely with, and could not leave behind if she was attacked.

A submarine under tow cannot turn hard, cannot go deep quickly and cannot use her speed. She is, for the duration, a slow and clumsy version of herself in exactly the waters where being quick matters most, and she has four other men's lives on the end of the rope.

Across eleven war patrols, chiefly off the Norwegian coast with one excursion into the Bay of Biscay, she built a solid record of her own against enemy shipping, sinking the German merchants Hochheimer and Baldur, badly damaging and beaching the merchant Lippe, sinking the Norwegian vessel Vela alongside a German minesweeper, and sinking an armed German auxiliary submarine chaser off Lister that October.

Towing the X-Craft

Sceptre's most historically significant role, however, was as a tow boat for the Royal Navy's midget X-craft submarines during some of the most daring special operations of the entire war. In September 1943, as part of Operation Source, she towed the midget submarine X-10 towards Alten Fjord in northern Norway, part of the wider attack aimed at Germany's powerful capital ships sheltering in the fjords.

Sources differ on exactly which enemy vessel X-10 herself was ultimately assigned to attack, with the operation as a whole most commonly remembered for its assault on the battleship Tirpitz, though X-10 suffered a series of mechanical failures, including a defective periscope motor and a failed gyro compass, and her operational crew was ultimately forced to abandon the attack, the midget submarine being recovered and later scuttled once towing her home proved impractical in worsening weather.

X-10 Was Sent to Attack a Ship That Was Not There

The uncertainty about her target can be cleared up, and the answer makes the whole episode considerably sadder. Operation Source assigned its six craft in three groups: X-5, X-6 and X-7 to Tirpitz, X-8 to the Lutzow, and X-9 and X-10 to the battlecruiser Scharnhorst. X-10 was going for Scharnhorst.

Scharnhorst had left. She was out of the fjord on gunnery exercises, so her mooring was empty and had been for some time, and nobody on the British side knew. X-10 crept the whole way in with a periscope motor that had failed and a gyro compass that had died, and her commander called it off because he could not attack properly and would not risk compromising the boats going for Tirpitz. Had every single piece of equipment aboard her worked perfectly, he would have arrived at an empty berth.

The other Scharnhorst craft never got that far. X-9 parted from her tow behind HMS Syrtis in heavy weather on 16 September and was lost with her three-man passage crew. HMS Truculent brought X-6 across, and X-6 and X-7 were the two that got through the nets and put their charges under Tirpitz.

So of the six craft, X-10 was the only one to come back at all. She was recovered, put back on tow for Scotland, and scuttled in the open sea when the weather made it impossible to get her home. Everything about Operation Source that went right was done by two craft, and everything else was loss.

There is a postscript. Three months later Scharnhorst came out again, and this time she was found. She was sunk at North Cape on 26 December 1943 by a force led by HMS Duke of York. X-10 had been sent to do it with four men and a clock, and in the end it took a battleship.

Two More Raids on Bergen

Sceptre returned to X-craft towing duty twice more in 1944. In April, as part of Operation Guidance, she towed X-24 towards Bergen, where poor visibility led her crew to misidentify their intended target, a floating dry dock, and instead lay their charges beneath the German merchant vessel Barenfels, which was sunk regardless, the operation's commander earning the DSO for his trouble.

The target they missed is worth explaining, because a floating dry dock sounds like an odd thing to send men to die for and it was one of the best targets in Norway. A U-boat that is damaged, or simply due for maintenance, has to come out of the water, and the nearest alternative to Bergen was a long and dangerous passage home to Germany. Destroy the dock and every boat in the northern theatre either operates with defects or goes away for weeks.

It also cannot be repaired quickly and cannot be replaced, which is exactly what a four-man craft carrying a pair of two-ton side charges is for. Sinking the Barenfels by mistake was not a bad afternoon's work, and it is a fair guess that the DSO was awarded for getting into Bergen and out again rather than for what was hit.

That September, in Operation Heckle, Sceptre towed X-24 back to Bergen a second time, this occasion successfully destroying four of the six sections of the floating dry dock at Laksevåg and disrupting port operations for well over a day, a genuine and significant success achieved through the same patient, unglamorous towing work that rarely gets the credit its own combat actions might earn.

And the craft that did it is still with us, which is the best fact in the whole story. X-24 is the only X-craft left anywhere in the world, and she is on display at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum at Gosport, a few hundred yards across the harbour from Portsmouth.

She is fifty feet long. Four men lived in her for up to a fortnight at a time, and anybody who stands next to her and works out where those four men put themselves generally stops talking for a moment. Sceptre towed that exact craft to Bergen twice, in April and again in September 1944, and the second time she came back having wrecked four of the six sections of the dock.

It is also the only surviving object from any of these operations. Every other X-craft that made an attack was scuttled, sunk, captured or lost. The one in Gosport went to Bergen behind this submarine and came home.

A Price Paid Quietly

The demanding, dangerous nature of submarine service extracted its own cost from Sceptre's crew away from enemy action.

Able Seaman George Dunkey was lost overboard and presumed drowned at Loch Cairnbawn in August 1944, and Able Seaman Alexander Douglas was killed instantly the following month when a hydraulic ram moved unexpectedly at full power while he lay asleep nearby, two men killed in circumstances that will never appear on a battle honours board.

Both deaths are worth understanding rather than simply listing. Loch Cairnbawn in the far north-west of Scotland was where the X-craft trained and where the boats assembled before operations, and a submarine casing in that water is wet, curved, unlit and has almost nothing to hold on to. A man who goes over the side at night in a Highland sea loch in August has minutes.

The hydraulic ram is worse because it was avoidable. Submarine hydraulics operate at very high pressure and move heavy machinery, and the systems of the 1940s had far fewer interlocks than anything built since. A man asleep in a submarine is asleep wherever there is room, which often means alongside working machinery, and there was no guard, no cut-out and no warning.

Neither man died fighting. They were killed by the job itself, which is what submarine service was and largely still is: a very small number of people living inside high-pressure machinery, where the ordinary risks of the place account for more of the casualty list than most people realise.

The End of the Line

Sceptre was converted into a streamlined, high speed target submarine in late 1944, before being damaged by a battery explosion in August 1949 and sold for scrap shortly afterwards, broken up at Gateshead that September, bringing to a close the career of a submarine whose own fighting record was properly respectable, but whose real historical significance lay in the quiet, patient work of towing other men's midget submarines into some of the most daring attacks of the entire war.

The conversion at the end of her life is worth a note as well. Turning her into a high-speed target submarine in late 1944 meant stripping the gun and the external gear and cleaning up her lines so that she could run fast and quietly for other people to practise on. It is the same idea that produced the whole streamlining programme of the 1950s, arrived at early and for a different reason: escort crews cannot learn to hunt a fast submarine on a slow one.

Then a battery explosion in August 1949 finished her. A submarine battery gives off hydrogen while charging, and hydrogen in an enclosed space needs only a spark, which is why battery ventilation is one of the things submariners are most careful about and why the accidents that do happen are so violent. She was six years old and went to a breaker at Gateshead within a month.