HMS Seraph (P219): The Submarine Behind the Man Who Never Was

A Submarine Chosen for Secrets

HMS Seraph was built by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down in August 1940 and launched in October 1941, commissioned into service the following June under the command of Lieutenant Norman Jewell, an officer who would go on to lead her through some of the most remarkable special operations undertaken by any Royal Navy submarine in the entire war.

Landing General Mark Clark in Algeria

In October 1942, ahead of the Allied invasion of North Africa, Seraph carried out Operation Flagpole, secretly landing the American General Mark Clark, along with several staff officers, on the Algerian coast near Cherchell to hold a clandestine meeting with the French General Charles Mast, part of the delicate diplomatic work needed to secure French non resistance to the coming landings.

Rough seas nearly undid the whole enterprise on the return journey, when one of the party's collapsible kayaks capsized and was lost along with a set of secret papers, and reportedly General Clark's own trousers, an undignified footnote to an otherwise deadly serious mission.

A Submarine Flying Two Flags

Seraph's next major task, that November, was to extract General Henri Giraud from Vichy France, an operation whose codename is recorded inconsistently between sources and so is best left unstated with false precision.

Because Giraud refused, as a matter of pride, to be rescued aboard a British vessel, an American naval officer, Captain Jerauld Wright, was placed in nominal command for the operation, and Seraph briefly sailed flying American colours as though she were a United States Navy submarine, a British crew quietly getting on with the actual business of sailing her regardless.

Giraud and his party were successfully picked up off the southern French coast near Le Lavandou and transferred to a flying boat for the journey onward, an audacious piece of Allied cooperation carried out almost entirely in secret.

The Man Who Never Was

Seraph's most famous mission by far came in April 1943, when she carried a specially prepared canister containing the body of a deceased man dressed and equipped as a fictitious Royal Marines officer, Major William Martin, complete with a briefcase of forged documents designed to convince German intelligence that the Allies intended to invade Sardinia and Greece rather than their actual target, Sicily.

Seraph's own crew were kept below decks and told only that the canister contained a secret meteorological instrument, with just the ship's officers aware of its true and rather macabre contents.

The body was released into the sea off Huelva in southern Spain on the night of 29 to 30 April 1943, in an operation that came to be known as Operation Mincemeat, and the deception is judged, on the strength of surviving German intelligence records, to have worked exactly as intended, helping draw enemy forces away from Sicily ahead of the real invasion that July.

It is worth handling this episode, remarkable as it is, with a degree of care, since it did after all involve the body of a real, deceased man whose family had consented to his use in the operation, a notably unusual chapter even by the standards of wartime deception.

A Long Postwar Career and a Memorial in South Carolina

After a serious accident in May 1944, in which she struck the seabed at a depth of nearly five hundred feet, Seraph was converted into a high speed training target for the Royal Navy's anti submarine forces, continuing in that role for the best part of two decades before finally being scrapped at Briton Ferry in Wales, with sources giving her exact final year variously as 1962, 1963 or 1965.

In recognition of her extraordinary wartime record and the close Anglo American cooperation it represented, parts of Seraph, including her periscope, torpedo loading hatch, steering wheel and ship's bell, were later presented to The Citadel military college in Charleston, South Carolina, where they remain on permanent display, reportedly the only site on American soil formally authorised to fly the Royal Navy's White Ensign, a fitting and notably moving memorial for a submarine whose war was fought as much with secrecy and deception as with torpedoes.