HMS Sickle (P224): A U-Boat off Toulon, Agents for the Resistance and the Last Submarine Lost in the Mediterranean

An Admiral's Son and a Birkenhead Boat

HMS Sickle was ordered from Cammell Laird at Birkenhead on 2 September 1940, one of the third group of S Class submarines, and laid down on 8 May 1941 under the number P74. She was launched on 27 August 1942 and commissioned on 1 December 1942 as P224.

Her captain, from a few weeks after her launch to the end, was Lieutenant James Ralph Drummond, a 24-year-old son of Vice-Admiral the Honourable Edmund Drummond, who had already won the Distinguished Service Cross. She was lost before an official badge could be approved, and carried an unofficial one, a sickle on a green field with the motto "Onwards and Upwards".

She was adopted by Epping, Harlow and District, whose Warship Week in March 1942 raised £176,000, and her adoption plaque is still kept at Epping Town Hall.

The photograph was taken by Stewart Bale of Liverpool in December 1942, in her first weeks in service, as she came towards the camera with her bow hydroplanes folded, her gun trained forward and her ensign flying over the bridge.

North Cape to Gibraltar

Her first patrol, in January 1943, took her off Trondheim and then up to the far north of Norway, where she gave chase to a submarine one night that turned out, from its silhouette, to be the British Trident.

In April she left Portland for the Mediterranean in company with Taku and Ursula, was briefly sent to hunt an Italian blockade runner that turned back to Bordeaux, and reached Gibraltar to join the Eighth Submarine Flotilla at Algiers. On her work-up patrol she was told that the Italian steamer Mauro Croce would leave Valencia at seven one morning, and she was waiting for her just outside Spanish waters.

Both torpedoes, fired from only 400 yards, ran underneath before they had settled at their depth, so Drummond surfaced and hit her fifteen times in nineteen rounds before the gun jammed and the steamer reached Spanish territorial waters. Three of the steamer's crew were killed, and the Italian government protested that the attack had been made inside Spanish waters.

U-303

In May 1943 she was off the south coast of France, the waters in front of the U-boat base at Toulon. On 15 May she sank the German submarine chaser UJ 2213 south of Nice. On 20 May she fired six torpedoes at a U-boat setting out on patrol; the crew heard an explosion and breaking-up noises, but U-755 had escaped.

The next afternoon, 21 May, another U-boat came out of Toulon on trials. Drummond fired two torpedoes from about 3,000 yards and saw one hit thirty feet abaft the conning tower. An enormous column of water and smoke went up, and U-303 sank in about half a minute. Sickle went deep and slipped away to seaward.

Corsica and Genoa

In July she went hunting round Corsica and the island of Gorgona. On 18 July she surfaced on a small steam tug and a motor schooner, both serving as Italian auxiliary minesweepers, and sank the tug with thirty-five hits before chasing the schooner and sinking her too; an Italian motor torpedo boat picked up all the survivors.

The next day another schooner spotted her periscope at 400 yards, and her crew, instead of fighting, abandoned ship. Sickle came alongside, took off anything useful, set the schooner on fire and blew her up.

On 21 July, west of Elba, she hit the new 4,307-ton merchant ship Alfredo Oriani, which had survived an attack by torpedo bombers two hours earlier. Drummond sat out three patterns of depth charges, followed the ship as a torpedo boat took her in tow, and hit her again.

When he looked through the periscope an hour and a half later he was amazed to find her still afloat, now behind a tug. Drummond was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.

On 28 August, off the east coast of Corsica, she came on a convoy escorted by SG 10, a fast escort ship the Germans had made from a captured French fruit carrier. Two of Sickle's torpedoes hit her at 800 yards and she sank in less than a minute; 85 of her crew were killed or missing and 122 were picked up. Sickle was depth charged for two hours afterwards.

In September she carried out a different kind of mission. On the evening of 28 September she landed two Italian anti-fascists, Mino Steiner and Fausto Bazzi, near Sestri Levante on the Ligurian coast, with orders to gather intelligence, organise resistance and help escaped Allied prisoners of war to reach Switzerland.

Steiner was betrayed the following March and died in a German concentration camp in February 1945.

The Aegean

Like Sibyl and others of the flotilla, she moved to Beirut that autumn for the Aegean. On 17 November 1943, off Amorgos, she set a caique ablaze and found two Greek crewmen still aboard, one with half his foot shot away; Sickle's crew dressed his wound and gave him morphine before putting both men into a boat, and took a German from another boat prisoner.

Two days later she found the 3,000-ton Giovanni Boccaccio, an Italian ship in German service, at anchor close inshore off Monemvasia in the Peloponnese, guarded by two patrol vessels, and torpedoed her where she lay.

In December, off Samos, one of her torpedoes blew up only 300 yards ahead of her a second after firing, showering her bridge with fragments, and the next day she watched two German torpedo boats leave Karlovasi and was depth charged for her trouble. On 23 December she landed three Greek agents with a wireless set on the east coast of Euboea for the Special Operations Executive.

In May 1944 her first catch in the Doro Channel was a caique loaded with oranges and lemons, a thousand of which were taken aboard as a welcome change of diet before the boat was sunk. A few days later she surfaced to shell a German radar station on the north coast of Crete.

She hit it some seventeen times, but a shore battery replied within minutes, and three of the men on her bridge, Drummond among them, were wounded before she dived.

The Last Patrol

She sailed from Malta for the northern Aegean on 31 May 1944. On 4 June, at Mytilene on Lesbos, she fought a gun action with two German patrol vessels and the ships in the harbour. One of her men, Able Seaman David MacKay, was mortally wounded, two others were hurt, and Able Seaman Richard Blake was washed overboard.

The Germans picked him up. On 6 June, in the Doro Channel between Euboea and Andros, she torpedoed the small transport Réaumur, which was carrying 450 tons of olive oil and sank in ninety seconds.

Over the following week she reported a missed attack and a convoy passing out of reach, and was probably the submarine that sank three caiques off Skopelos and shelled the shipyard at Mytilene on 14 June.

By then she had been recalled, with orders to pass through the channels either side of Kythera and meet her escort off Malta at nine in the morning of 18 June. She never came. She is thought to have struck a mine on the way home, probably in the Anti-Kithera Channel, and she was lost with all hands.

The submarine historians' roll of honour for Sickle names fifty men, from Drummond, aged 26, to the youngest seamen not yet twenty. She was the last British submarine lost in the Mediterranean in the Second World War.

Richard Blake, taken prisoner a few days before she was lost, was her only survivor, and one other man, a leading seaman kept ashore by an injury, wrote afterwards to the Mayor of Epping to thank the town on behalf of his lost shipmates. After her loss the district adopted the monitor HMS Roberts.

Her wreck, unlike that of her sister Simoom, has not been found. Saracen, which had sunk U-335 in 1942, and Thorn were among the other British submarines lost in these waters.