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.

Three years of peacetime service is worth more than it sounds. A crew that has spent that long in the same hull knows every noise she makes, every valve that sticks and exactly how she handles at periscope depth in a swell, and none of that can be taught ashore. The boats that went to war in September 1939 with settled crews and worked-up machinery were a different proposition from a submarine straight out of a yard in 1943 with a company that had never dived together.

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.

The second half of that job is the hard half and it is worth spelling out. Putting men ashore from a submarine is straightforward enough: close the coast at night, surface, launch a folding boat, and go. Going back for them is a different matter entirely. It means returning to a place the enemy may by then have found out about, on a night agreed weeks earlier, and waiting on the surface off a hostile shore for men who may have been captured, may be being followed, or may simply not be able to get there.

A submarine on the surface at a rendezvous has no way of knowing which of those it is dealing with until somebody appears out of the dark. Seawolf did it in July 1940, off an island in a country that had surrendered a month earlier, and brought her passengers home.

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.

On the evening of 6 March 1942 she sighted the German battleship Tirpitz and her escorting destroyers coming out of Trondheim to attack convoy PQ 12, and the signal she made reporting it is what told the Admiralty that the battleship was at sea.

The Signal That Started the Hunt

It is worth being clear about how much followed from one submarine seeing one ship. Tirpitz was the largest warship in Europe and the reason the Home Fleet existed in the form it did. While she sat in a Norwegian fjord she pinned down British battleships, carriers and cruisers that were needed everywhere else, and the one thing the Admiralty could not tolerate was not knowing where she was.

On the evening of 6 March 1942 Seawolf, patrolling off Trondheim, saw a very large warship come out with a destroyer screen and reported it. That signal is the reason the Admiralty knew Tirpitz was at sea, and it arrived while two Arctic convoys, PQ 12 going east and QP 8 coming west, were in the water with nothing between them and her.

What happened next is told from the other end elsewhere on this site. HMS Offa was with PQ 12 when the word came through. HMS Kenya was in a covering force cruising in the hope of drawing Tirpitz into a fight. HMS Inconstant was in the same operation and records that the two forces passed within about eighty miles of each other in bad weather and never made contact. On 9 March, on her way home, Tirpitz was found by Albacores from HMS Victorious and attacked without success.

Nothing was hit and nothing was sunk, which is why the whole episode is usually written up as an anticlimax. It was not. Two convoys got through because the Germans spent three days looking in the wrong part of a very large ocean, and the reason anybody was looking for Tirpitz at all was that a fifteen-year-old design of submarine had been sitting off Trondheim in the dark doing exactly what she was there to do.

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 carry out 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.

Polyarny deserves a word, because operating from it was its own ordeal. It is a small port on the Kola Inlet near Murmansk, inside the Arctic Circle, and British submarines were based there from 1941 alongside the Soviet Northern Fleet. Conditions were dreadful, the food was worse, the two navies had almost no common language, and the boats were patrolling water that freezes.

A submarine in the Arctic has particular problems nobody else has. Spray freezes on the casing and in the gun mounting, the periscope glass ices over, and in summer there is no darkness at all to charge batteries in, so a boat has to do her charging on the surface in broad daylight off an enemy coast. In winter there is no daylight to see targets by. There is no good season.

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.

That posting is less of a retirement than it reads. The Royal Canadian Navy was, by 1943, escorting a very large share of the North Atlantic convoys and had no submarines of its own to practise against, which meant its escort crews were learning to hunt U-boats on theory. Sending a real submarine with a real crew to be hunted, day after day, off Halifax, was worth more to the Battle of the Atlantic than another boat on patrol.

It also started something. The arrangement Seawolf was part of grew into a standing British submarine squadron at Halifax after the war, which ran until the late 1960s. HMS Alderney spent three commissions doing the same job in the same port twenty years later.

The men aboard will have had mixed feelings. It was safe, it was warm, there was food in Canada, and it was two years of being a target for other people's training after four years of Norway, the Arctic and the Bismarck patrol lines. Some of them will have thought they had earned it.

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.

Broken up at Montreal is an unusual end for a British submarine and a slightly forlorn one. She had been in commission for nine and a half years, four of them at war, and she was scrapped four thousand miles from the yard on the Clyde that built her, in a country she had gone to as a training aid.

Her record reads modestly: one confirmed merchant ship, a four-thousand-ton vessel in the Arctic, an unsuccessful attack on a torpedo boat and some agents landed on an island. Set against that is one signal sent on a March evening in 1942, which put the entire Home Fleet to sea and very nearly brought Tirpitz to action. Submarine records are not always a good guide to what a submarine was for.