HMS Sibyl (P217): Giraud's Staff, Secret Landings and the Malacca Strait

A Prophetess from Birkenhead

HMS Sibyl was ordered from Cammell Laird at Birkenhead on 4 April 1940, one of the third group of S Class submarines. She was laid down on the last day of 1940 under the number P67, launched on 29 April 1942 and commissioned at Holy Loch on 16 August 1942, after running her speed trials over the measured mile off Arran.

She was known at first only as P217; the name Sibyl, after the prophetesses of the ancient world, came early in 1943. Her captain for most of the war was Lieutenant Ernest Turner, who already held the Distinguished Service Cross.

The photograph was taken by Stewart Bale of Liverpool in August 1942, in the days around her commissioning, with her number painted in large white figures on her conning tower and a busy waterfront of warehouses, cranes and towers behind her.

A Blockade Runner and a General's Staff

After a first patrol off Norway she sailed for Gibraltar in October 1942 with P228, the future Splendid, and was sent on the way to wait off Ferrol for the German blockade runner Belgrano. On the night of 10 October her officer of the watch saw the phosphorescent wake of a darkened ship, and Turner fired four torpedoes from 1,000 yards.

Two passed ahead, one veered off to the right just as it seemed bound to hit, and the fourth began to circle. Sibyl dived to get out of its way, and two minutes later it passed overhead.

Her next task was a secret one. The Allies were about to land in French North Africa, and they hoped the French general Henri Giraud, who had escaped from a German prison, would rally the French forces there to their side. While Seraph brought out the general himself, Sibyl was sent to the coast near Cannes.

At two in the morning of 8 November 1942 a small boat put off from the shore, and in two trips seven people were brought aboard, one of them a woman. They were members of Giraud's staff, bound for Algiers.

On the way back to Gibraltar a lookout reported a dark shape in the night, and a German U-boat passed down her side only 300 yards away, having just torpedoed a merchant ship in the convoy. Turner swung hard towards it to ram, but the U-boat dived and Sibyl passed over the spot where it had been.

Algiers and the Eighth Flotilla

In December 1942 she patrolled the Tyrrhenian Sea, and on 5 December, ten miles south-west of Capri, she fired four torpedoes at two Italian merchant ships escorted by torpedo boats. Three explosions were heard and three hits claimed, but both ships escaped, and Sibyl sat out sixty-two depth charges without damage.

Through 1943 she worked from Algiers with the Eighth Submarine Flotilla, alongside boats such as Uproar and Unseen. On 14 March she sank the Italian steamer Pegli off Cape Gallo in Sicily, and spent the rest of the day being hunted; ninety-five depth charges were dropped on her.

In April a German submarine chaser hunted her after a convoy attack and claimed her sunk. On the night of 9 June, on the east coast of Corsica, she landed two French agents and took five others off, and as she slipped away a rifle shot and machine-gun fire rang out from the shore.

In July she landed another agent on the same coast, and on her way home she came across an Italian Cant Z.1007 bomber floating abandoned in the sea and finished it off with her gun. In August she put containers of sabotage material overboard in shallow water on the Ligurian coast for the Italian resistance.

On 23 September, off Sestri Levante near Genoa, she sank the German-controlled steamer St. Nazaire, which caught fire after a single hit and blew up twenty minutes later; thirty-eight of her crew were missing.

A week later, outside Bastia, she torpedoed a camouflaged auxiliary packed with German troops, the former French trawler Hummer, which sank within two minutes. Turner had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order that summer.

The Aegean

In October she moved to Beirut for the Aegean, where the targets were mostly caiques, the wooden sailing coasters carrying supplies for the German garrisons. On her first patrol there in November she stopped and sank several, taking off their crews first where she could; their cargoes ranged from raisins and empty drums to olive oil, soap and rice.

At New Year she landed a special operations party on Kastelorizo, the small Greek island off the Turkish coast, and in January 1944 she sank a schooner loaded with drums of petrol, which went up in flames after four rounds. In March she carried out Operation Clerk, landing two men of the Special Boat Section, Captain Lunn and Sergeant Gilmour, on the coast of Cephalonia.

Both had been carried to Salerno by Shakespeare the previous summer. The surf was too heavy for them to get back to her, and they lived with the Greek resistance for a month before a landing craft fetched them off. A few nights later she landed and recovered a beach reconnaissance party on the same island.

Refit and Far East

In April 1944 she came home in company with Shalimar and spent the summer refitting at Blyth. Her new captain, Lieutenant Huston Murray, took her through her trials and training, which included an unfortunate moment at Scapa Flow in December when she rammed the submarine Trusty, damaging her casing.

After a work-up patrol in the North Sea, when she was joined off Scapa by Sceptre and the brand-new Spearhead, she sailed for the Far East, and in May 1945 she was in the Malacca Strait. By then the Japanese supply traffic along the Malayan coast moved mostly in junks and small craft, and Sibyl hunted them with her gun and demolition charges, usually putting the crews into their own boats.

One junk she boarded was carrying rubber tyres and shoes. In July she destroyed a tug, a coaster and a junk in a single day and went on to sink several more sailing craft, though not always easily; a 150-ton schooner on tow survived fifty-three rounds.

Singapore

When the war ended she was at Trincomalee. She sailed for Singapore on 6 September and arrived on 11 September 1945, the day before the formal Japanese surrender was signed in the city.

The Royal Navy submarine historians at rnsubs record her as the first British submarine to surface in Singapore harbour at the surrender. She left three days later, came home by way of Suez and reached Portsmouth on 5 November 1945.

Her badge, a crowned eagle on a field of red and black, was approved only that August. She was broken up at Troon in March 1948. Strongbow had sailed with her on her way north in April 1944, and her brief captain of early 1944, Lieutenant Peter Beale, went on to command Spur.