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.

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.

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.

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.

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 quiet tragedies that deserve to be remembered with the same seriousness as any wartime casualty, whatever their less dramatic circumstances.

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.