HMS Shark (54S): A Chatham Boat, the Esher Girl Guides and a Fight to the Last off Norway

Chatham Built

HMS Shark was one of the second group of S Class submarines, the small, handy boats designed in the early 1930s for the narrow waters of the North Sea and the Mediterranean. She was ordered from Chatham Dockyard on 2 January 1933, laid down on 12 June 1933 and launched on 31 May 1934, and she commissioned on the last day of that year with the pennant number 54S.

Her badge, approved in 1920 for an earlier Shark, showed a silver shark rising from the sea with the motto "Celer et tenax", swift and tenacious.

The photograph was taken on the River Medway in 1935, her first year in service. She lies broadside on with a long, low pier behind her, a few of her crew on the casing at one end and at the foot of her conning tower, and a flag flying from a short staff aft.

Famous Captains

She spent the years before the war with the First Submarine Flotilla in the Mediterranean, and her captains in those years included two names that would become well known for very different reasons. Lieutenant-Commander Guy Bolus commanded her in 1935; in June 1939 he was in command of the new submarine Thetis when she sank on her trials in Liverpool Bay with the loss of 99 lives.

Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Sladen took over in 1937, and in the war he gave his name to the Sladen suit, the diving dress worn by the crews of the human torpedoes. In January 1939 her command passed to Lieutenant Peter Buckley, a Lancashire man.

The First Months of War

The outbreak of war found her exercising at Malta, and in October 1939 she came home to Portsmouth. Her first war patrol, in October and November, was on the Dogger Bank, and in November she sailed down the east coast in company with her sisters Snapper, Sealion and Sunfish for a docking at Chatham.

Her patrols that winter took her off Texel and into the Heligoland Bight, cold and mostly empty waters where the British boats watched for the German fleet. After a refit she was sent into the Skagerrak in April 1940, when Germany invaded Norway, and on 15 April off the Skaw she fired five torpedoes at two German transports and their escort.

They saw the tracks and turned away in time. Three days later German anti-submarine trawlers dropped six depth charges close to her, but did no damage. After patrols off Texel and in the North Sea, and exercises with Seawolf off Rosyth, she sailed on 3 July 1940 for the coast of south-west Norway off Skudesnes.

Skudesnes, July 1940

On 5 July she was on the surface when a seaplane was sighted astern. As she dived, two or three bombs exploded close to her stern, followed by at least two more. The damage was severe. Her steering gear was wrecked and her hydroplanes jammed hard to rise, and her bow broke the surface, where more bombs greeted her.

She began to sink by the stern, and Buckley used all the high-pressure air in the boat to bring her back up.

On the surface she got under way again, steering on her main engines alone, but she had been seen. With no air left to blow her tanks and a flat battery she could not dive, so Buckley fought it out on the surface with her gun and machine guns while aircraft attacked her again and again.

Several accounts credit her gunners with shooting down one of their attackers. Her No. 4 ballast tank was holed, more aircraft arrived, and by now two of her crew were dead and twelve wounded, Buckley among them. With nothing left to fight with and no way of escape, he had no choice but to surrender.

Back at Scapa Flow the cruisers Southampton and Coventry and the destroyers Cossack, Maori, Fame and Fortune were sent out in the early hours of 6 July to try to reach her, but they were too late, and Fame was damaged by German bombs on the way. At about four that morning three German minesweeping trawlers came up and took the crew off.

They tried to tow Shark to Stavanger, but she was beyond saving, and some accounts say her crew had made sure of it before leaving her. She sank stern first about twenty-five miles west-south-west of Egersund.

Prisoners

Petty Officer James Gibson and Stoker James Walsh were killed in the action. Stoker Eric Foster died in August and was buried at Sola, and Able Seaman Richard Benton died as a prisoner later that month and was buried in Berlin. The rest of her company spent nearly five years in German prison camps.

Buckley was awarded the Distinguished Service Order after his release in 1945 and rose to be a rear-admiral.

Shark had been adopted at the start of the war by the Girl Guides of Esher in Surrey. The Rangers, Guides and Brownies sent parcels to her crew and wrote to them and their families, her captain sent them photographs of the submarine and her company, and her crew made them a white ensign with a submarine embroidered in one corner and her motto in the other.

When she was lost the Guides kept in touch with the family of every man in her. Her sisters Sterlet and Swordfish were also lost in 1940, while Sturgeon survived the war.