HMS Scythian (P237): A New Zealand Captain, the Mergui Junks and the Search for the Affray

A Greenock Boat with a Kiwi Captain

HMS Scythian came from the Greenock yard of Scotts, one of the third and final group of S Class submarines. She was ordered on 12 July 1941, laid down on 21 February 1943 and launched on 14 April 1944, and she commissioned on 11 August 1944.

She took the name of the horsemen of the ancient steppes north of the Black Sea, and her badge was a golden griffin, the fierce eagle-headed, lion-bodied creature of Scythian art. Her captain was Lieutenant Connell Thode of the Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Reserve, born in Auckland in 1911, who had already been mentioned in despatches and had commanded the old training boats H50 and H33.

He stayed with her to the end of the war. He lived until 2014, when he died at the age of 103.

The photograph was taken in July 1944, a month before she commissioned, as she lay trimmed down on the surface in a light chop during her trials. Her rounded bow, her folded bow hydroplanes and the row of free-flooding holes along her casing show clearly, with her deck gun forward and the jumping wires stretched over her bridge.

Working Up

Her trials and training took her round the waters where every new British submarine learned its trade: the measured mile off Arran, the torpedo range at Arrochar, the noise range in Loch Goil, and Scapa Flow, where she spent September 1944 as a target for the Home Fleet's anti-submarine ships, among them Milne, and made practice attacks on the carrier Indefatigable.

Off Larne she exercised with Canadian destroyers and escort groups, and in October she spent several nights in the Clyde with a Combined Operations Pilotage Party, the canoeists and swimmers who surveyed enemy beaches in secret before a landing. In November she made a work-up patrol in the North Sea, ending at Lerwick.

On 12 December 1944 she sailed for the Far East, with a convoy as far as Gibraltar, where she arrived with Torbay on 20 December. She called at Malta, Port Said and Aden on the way out, and on 3 February 1945 she arrived at Trincomalee in Ceylon, where the British submarines in the Indian Ocean were based.

The Mergui Archipelago

By 1945 there were few large Japanese ships left in the waters round Burma and Malaya, and much of their supply traffic moved in coasters, junks and small craft, creeping along the coast among the islands. The British submarines from Trincomalee went after them with their guns.

Scythian's first patrol, from 24 February to 20 March, was off the Mergui Archipelago on the coast of southern Burma, broken by two spells of air-sea rescue duty waiting for aircrew who might come down in the sea. On 8 March she surfaced and sank a junk with her gun.

A second junk lowered her sails as soon as she was fired on, and when Scythian's boarding party found she was carrying only a little rice, vegetables and tobacco leaf, Thode let her go rather than sink so small a boat with so important a cargo. A third junk was sunk later that day, and on 14 and 15 March she sank five more among the islands near Oyster Island, some with gunfire and one with scuttling charges.

The Malacca Strait and Rangoon

Her second patrol, in the Malacca Strait in April, was cut short when she was recalled. On her third, from 25 April to 24 May, she was again in the Malacca Strait, one of the submarines covering Operation Dracula, the landing from the sea that retook Rangoon at the beginning of May.

On 11 May she found a Japanese coaster of about 100 tons, the Akiyama Maru No. 10, at anchor, and wrecked her and two landing craft with gunfire; she picked up eight survivors and took papers from the wreck.

On 18 May she set a junk ablaze with her Oerlikon after her demolition charges failed, and the next day she sank a Chinese twakow, a sailing coaster of about fifty tons, after her crew had left her at a single warning shot.

When she came in her battery was worn out and she was infested with rats. She had to be fumigated, and she spent June and July at Colombo having a new battery fitted. She was ready again at Trincomalee by the end of July, but the war ended before she sailed on another patrol.

The Search for the Affray

Scythian came home through the Suez Canal in the autumn of 1945, reached Portsmouth on 24 October and was laid up in reserve at Fort Blockhouse, the submarine base at Gosport, in November. She was back in service by the early 1950s, in the training and target work that kept the surviving S boats busy after the war.

On 16 April 1951 the submarine Affray dived in the Channel south of the Isle of Wight and was never heard from again, with seventy-five men aboard. Ships, aircraft and submarines were sent to search for her, and Scythian was one of the submarines that joined the hunt from Portland, with Scorcher and Sirdar.

In the first anxious days several of the searching submarines, among them Sea Devil, Sirdar and, by some accounts, Scythian herself, reported faint sounds on their listening gear that raised hopes the crew might still be alive. The hopes came to nothing; Affray was found on the seabed in the Hurd Deep two months later.

Scythian was broken up at Charlestown on the Firth of Forth in August 1960. Her Greenock-built sister Scotsman had a very different post-war career.