HMS Seawolf (47S): From the Skagerrak to Convoy Duty in the Arctic

Built on the Clyde Before the War

HMS Seawolf was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering at Greenock, laid down in May 1934, launched in November 1935 and commissioned in March 1936, an S-class submarine that was already three years into service by the time war broke out in 1939, giving her a longer and more varied career than many of her wartime built sisters.

Early War in the North Sea

Seawolf spent the opening months of the war patrolling off Norway and in the Skagerrak, attacking a German torpedo boat without success that October and enduring a depth charge attack from German submarine chasers that December.

Her first confirmed success came on 18 April 1940, when she torpedoed and sank the German merchant Hamm off the Norwegian coast, and that July she carried out a special operation landing and later retrieving Norwegian officers on Ullerøy Island, quiet, dangerous work well away from the more conventional business of sinking enemy shipping.

Hunting the Bismarck, Watching the Tirpitz

In May 1941, Seawolf was one of six submarines ordered to take up an intercepting position off Brest as part of the desperate hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, though no contact with the enemy was recorded for her specifically during the operation.

One account suggests she also sighted the German battleship Tirpitz and her escorting destroyers during a sortie against convoy PQ 12 in March 1942, though this specific claim rests on a single source and could not be independently verified, so it should be treated with appropriate caution rather than repeated as established fact.

Into Arctic Waters

Seawolf's war took her into truly Arctic conditions during 1941, operating from the Soviet port of Polyarny near Murmansk and sinking a vessel of around four thousand tons while based there, before going on to fly convoy escort duty for a Russia bound Arctic convoy in the summer of 1942, exactly the kind of gruelling, weather beaten service that defined the Arctic convoy campaign for so many Royal Navy submarines and escorts alike.

A Second Career Training the Canadians

In 1943, Seawolf's operational war came to an end when she was sent to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to serve as a training target for the Royal Canadian Navy's developing anti submarine forces, a role she continued in until she was finally paid off there in June 1945.

She was sold for scrap that November and broken up at Montreal, closing out the career of a submarine that had fought, in one form or another, across nearly the entire span of the Second World War.