HMS Shakespeare (P221): Beacon Boat for Three Invasions, an Italian Submarine Sunk and a Day Under the Bombs

A Barrow Boat Named for the Bard

HMS Shakespeare was ordered from Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness on 4 April 1940, one of the third group of S Class submarines. She was laid down on 13 November 1940 under the number P71, launched on 8 December 1941 and commissioned on 10 July 1942 as P221, taking her name early in 1943, when Churchill insisted that submarines should have names rather than numbers.

Her badge, approved in 1919 for the destroyer leader of the same name, showed a tilting spear in a green wreath, a play on the poet's name and arms, with a motto taken from Hamlet: "By opposing, end them." Her first captain was Lieutenant Michael Ainslie, a South African-born officer who already held the Distinguished Service Cross.

The photograph was taken on 6 August 1942, less than a month after she commissioned. She is moving slowly through calm harbour water with a few of her crew on the bridge and the casing, while behind her a large grey ship lies alongside a long quay lined with cranes.

Lighting the Way for Torch

Her first two patrols were in northern waters, the second in the Norwegian Sea as part of the cover for the Arctic convoys PQ 18 and QP 14. In October she went south, and on 1 November 1942 she sailed from Gibraltar for a task that would become her speciality.

The Allied landings in North Africa, Operation Torch, were to go ashore round Algiers on the night of 7 November, and Shakespeare was sent ahead to study the beaches through her periscope and then to act as a beacon, a fixed point that the landing craft could steer for in the dark.

On the night of 4 November she launched a folding canoe, a folbot, with two officers, Lieutenant Lyne and Lieutenant Thomas, to look at the beach code-named Apples. The weather worsened, they could not get back to her, and they were picked up by a Vichy French trawler and made prisoner.

Shakespeare waited for them at the rendezvous for two more nights in vain. On 7 November she put another canoe in the water to mark the small beach called Apples White, and at 2135 she took up her beacon position and began flashing a light to seaward and transmitting a radio signal. An hour later the landing convoy came in sight.

The Mediterranean, 1943

After a refit at Chatham she returned to the Mediterranean in the spring of 1943 and worked from Algiers. On 13 April, diving to avoid an aircraft at night, she felt something strike her after casing with a loud crack: it was a bomb, and it did not explode.

In May she sank two Italian schooners with her gun east of the Strait of Bonifacio and surfaced off Calvi in Corsica to shell aircraft hangars until the shore batteries drove her under. In June, just as she was about to attack a U-boat, she was attacked herself with rockets by an Allied aircraft, which spoiled the chance.

When the Allies landed in Sicily in July she was the beacon submarine off Gela, laying a buoy at her position and waiting there until her escort, the American destroyer USS Cole, found her on the evening of 9 July. In August she fired three torpedoes at a pair of Italian cruisers north-west of Ustica, without success.

At the end of the month she carried a Combined Operations beach party and three men of the Special Boat Section, among them Captain Lunn and Sergeant Gilmour, who would be landed in Greece by Sibyl the following spring, to survey the beaches of Salerno. She found a minefield in the bay with a mine detector, and her canoeists spent their nights inspecting the shore.

Velella

On the evening of 7 September 1943, as the invasion fleet closed on Salerno, her listening gear picked up propellers in the failing light, and two Italian submarines came into view, heading south from Naples to attack the landings. Ainslie chose the one that would stay longest against the last of the light in the western sky and fired a full salvo of six torpedoes at about 800 yards.

Four hit, and the Italian submarine Velella disintegrated. There were no survivors. The next day Italy announced its armistice, and Velella was the last Italian submarine lost to enemy action. That night Shakespeare was in her beacon position once more, handing her beach pilots over to an American patrol craft.

In November Ainslie was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. She finished the year in the Aegean, working from Beirut, before going home to refit.

East of Suez

Her new captain was Lieutenant David Swanston, who had earlier commanded HMS Graph, the U-boat captured in the Atlantic in 1941. After an anti-U-boat patrol east of Shetland in the summer of 1944, during which she sailed north with Voracious, Shakespeare went out to Ceylon.

On 31 December 1944, off the Nicobar Islands, she sighted a small Japanese convoy coming out of the Nankauri Strait and sank the cargo ship Unryu Maru with a salvo of six torpedoes.

The Third of January

Three days later, on 3 January 1945, she fired four torpedoes at another ship off the same strait and missed. Swanston surfaced to finish the job with his gun, but his target, the Japanese auxiliary minesweeper Wa 1, turned towards him and fought back.

One of her shells struck Shakespeare's pressure hull just forward of the engine room and tore a hole nine feet long and four feet high. Water poured into the boat, flooding the motors, the wireless and the compass. She could no longer dive.

Her gunners went on firing until they put the enemy's gun out of action, and the minesweeper, listing, turned away.

That was only the beginning. Unable to submerge, Shakespeare limped west on one engine with a chain of buckets passing water up from the control room to the bridge, while her petty officer telegraphist and leading telegraphist clambered down on to the saddle tanks to stuff a blanket into the hole.

A shell burst blew the petty officer's boots off and burned his feet, and later he fell over the side and had to be fished out, but he went back to work and spent the rest of the day as an air lookout. A Japanese seaplane came in low and was shot down by the second coxswain with a Vickers gun.

Then came the floatplanes, a bomber with two heavy bombs and fighter-bombers in groups of four, attack after attack until sunset, met by the 3-inch gun, the Vickers guns and the Oerlikon whenever it could be made to fire. About two hundred rounds of 3-inch were fired that day.

Two of her men were mortally wounded, Able Seaman Thomas Motteram while firing at the aircraft and Able Seaman George Taylor while working in the bucket chain, and both were later buried at sea.

On the night of 5 January, with the hole patched from outside and grenades and flares going up every hour, she met Stygian, outward bound for patrol. Her captain, Lieutenant Clarabut, was a friend of Swanston's and suspected a trap; he asked by lamp for the Christian names of Swanston's wife, and got them, together with his own wife's for good measure.

Stygian sent over men, medicines and bread, a destroyer took off the wounded, and Whelp towed her the last miles into Trincomalee on 8 January.

Swanston received the Distinguished Service Order. Shakespeare never went to sea on patrol again. The damage was too great to be worth repairing, and in July 1946 she was sold and broken up by Ward at Briton Ferry.

She was adopted by Truro, St Agnes and Perranzabuloe in Cornwall, whose Warship Week in November 1941 had been held for the submarine HMS Triumph; when Triumph was lost, they took on Shakespeare instead.