HMS Seadog (P216): From the Fjords of Norway to the Malacca Strait

Built at Birkenhead

HMS Seadog was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 31 December 1940, launched in June 1942 and commissioned that September, an Improved S-class submarine that went on to fight in two entirely different theatres of war.

Sources differ on exactly how many patrols she completed in total, with figures ranging between eleven and sixteen depending on the account consulted, a discrepancy worth noting honestly rather than settling by guesswork.

Sinking the Oldenburg

Operating off the Norwegian coast from late 1942, responding to intelligence reports of German heavy surface units in the area, Seadog achieved her clearest success on 28 December 1943, torpedoing and sinking the German transport Oldenburg with a full salvo of six torpedoes, at 8,537 tons a remarkably substantial kill, close to Honningsvåg on the Norwegian coast.

Rescuing American Airmen

Redeployed to the Far East, Seadog reached Trincomalee in Ceylon in January 1945 to join the 2nd Submarine Flotilla, going on to conduct four patrols off Siam, the Andaman Islands, northern Sumatra and the Malacca Strait.

In one of her more memorable moments, she rescued four American airmen from a life raft in the Bay of Bengal that February, before going on to sink a Japanese coaster and destroy a number of small sailing vessels by gunfire and demolition charge across her final patrols that summer.

Home, and Scrapped at Troon

Seadog returned to Portsmouth in October 1945 following Japan's surrender, and was sold for scrap at the end of 1947, arriving at the breakers at Troon on the Ayrshire coast the following year, though sources differ on exactly how long the process of breaking her up actually took, with some suggesting the physical work was not completed until the summer of 1949.

It was, in the end, a fitting close for a submarine whose war had taken her from the icy fjords of northern Norway to the humid waters of the Bay of Bengal and back again.