HMS Sportsman: A Tragedy Aboard the Petrella

Chatham-Built

HMS Sportsman was built at Chatham Dockyard, ordered on 14 October 1940, laid down on 1 July 1941, launched on 17 April 1942 and commissioned on 21 December that year, an S-class submarine that after initial patrols off Norway spent the bulk of the war in the Mediterranean under Lieutenant Richard Gatehouse and, later, Lieutenant Peter Langley-Smith and Lieutenant Commander Norman Jewell.

That third name is worth stopping on, because it belongs to one of the more remarkable officers in the submarine service. Norman Limbury Auchinleck Jewell had commanded HMS Seraph, the boat that put a dead man carrying false invasion plans into the sea off Spain in April 1943 and persuaded the German high command to defend the wrong island. He had also landed an American general on a beach in North Africa and smuggled a French one out of the south of France.

By the time he took Sportsman the war in Europe was effectively over, so the two names sit together as a piece of trivia rather than a chapter. It is still an odd thought that a boat best known for a catastrophe spent her last months in commission under the officer who ran the most successful deception operation of the war.

A Highly Productive War

Sportsman proved one of the more successful S-class boats of the war, sinking twelve Axis ships totalling over 20,000 tons.

Her targets included the Vichy French passenger ship Général Bonaparte on 19 May 1943, the Italian merchant Bolzaneto on 29 June 1943, and the German merchant Lüneburg on 28 April 1944, alongside numerous Greek and German vessels in the Aegean and special operations landing agents near San Remo.

One that is missing from that list deserves adding: in December 1943 she sank the Bulgarian transport Balkan, carrying troops. Eleven war patrols produced that record, almost all of it in the Aegean and the Ligurian Sea, and it puts her among the better S-class boats without quite reaching the front rank. HMS Splendid sank more in less time before she was caught, and HMS Simoom did not last long enough to try.

The agent landings near San Remo are the part of the job that never shows up in a tonnage table. A submarine closing an enemy-held Italian beach at night to put men ashore in a folding boat is doing something with no upside whatever: nothing is sunk, nothing is credited, and if anything goes wrong she is stopped, on the surface, in shallow water, close inshore. Boats did it because somebody had to.

At 04:51 on 12 September 1943 she was mistakenly attacked by an Allied B-24 Liberator of the 480th Bombardment Squadron, which dropped seven depth charges and wounded one crew member, sustaining serious damage in a friendly-fire incident that could easily have ended her career there and then.

It very nearly did. One of those seven charges went off at twenty-five feet, close enough to wreck the bridge, and the officer of the watch was seriously burned. A submarine caught on the surface at five in the morning has perhaps thirty seconds of warning if the lookouts are good, and the man conning her is the last one down the hatch.

The recognition problem was real and it went both ways all war. Aircrew were being trained to attack a small grey object on the sea immediately, without hesitating, because hesitating let the U-boat dive, and no aircrew could tell a British S-class boat from a German Type VII in the few seconds available. The Royal Navy's own answer was to route submarines through declared safe corridors and hope everyone had the same chart, which they frequently did not.

The Loss of the Petrella

On 8 February 1944, Sportsman torpedoed and sank the German transport Petrella off the Greek coast, a strike that resulted in devastating loss of life among the roughly 3,173 Italian prisoners of war being transported aboard her, with 2,670 confirmed killed.

What Actually Happened in Those Holds

The attack can be set out precisely. Petrella was 4,785 tons, built in 1923, a French ship called the Aveyron until the Germans took her over. At about half past eight in the morning on 8 February 1944, north of Suda Bay off the Cretan coast, Sportsman fired four torpedoes at her from three thousand yards and hit with two.

She did not sink. Broken in the middle but still afloat an hour later, she was attacked again, and it was that second attack that finished her. Gatehouse had no way of knowing what was inside her and every reason to believe he was looking at a German transport in a war zone, which is exactly what she was.

The reason the death toll is so appalling is not entirely the torpedoes, and the accounts given by the men who survived are worse than the bare number suggests. The prisoners were in the cargo holds. When the ship was hit they went for the hatches, and according to survivor testimony the German guards stationed at the hatch openings stopped them, first by breaking the fingers of the men trying to pull themselves out and then with grenades and machine guns.

That testimony is the basis of the Italian accounts of the sinking and it should be presented as what it is, the evidence of frightened men remembering the worst hour of their lives, rather than as a settled finding. But it is consistent, it is recorded, and it means the question of who killed 2,670 men has more than one answer.

Accounts differ on whether Petrella carried markings identifying her as a vessel transporting prisoners of war, and this painful episode is remembered as one of the heaviest losses of life connected to any British submarine action of the war, a tragedy for the Italian servicemen aboard that belongs in the record alongside the tonnage.

The argument about the markings makes far more sense with one piece of context that is usually left out. These men were not prisoners of war in the legal sense, because Germany had gone to some trouble to make sure they were not.

Italy signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943. German forces immediately disarmed the Italian army wherever they could reach it and deported hundreds of thousands of its soldiers, and Berlin classified them not as prisoners of war but as Italian Military Internees, a category invented for the purpose. The point of the invention was that internees fell outside the Geneva Convention, so the Red Cross had no right of access, no register of names and no say in how they were fed, housed or moved. The men on the Petrella were from the Siena division and had been in German hands for five months.

Set against that, a claim that the ship was properly marked as a prisoner transport sits awkwardly with everything else Germany was doing with these particular men, and the sources genuinely do not agree. What is not in doubt is that the men in the holds had no way out, no lifejackets and no say in any of it.

It was not the only time it happened. HMS Sahib torpedoed the Italian steamer Scillin off Tunisia in November 1942 with something like eight hundred British and South African prisoners battened below and a handful of survivors. Nobody in either submarine knew, and in both cases the ship was a legitimate target carrying a cargo nobody had declared. The Admiralty suppressed the Scillin story for decades. Publishing both, plainly, is the only decent thing to do with them.

Lost with All Hands as Sibylle

Sportsman survived the war and was placed in reserve at Harwich, before being lent to the French Navy on 8 July 1952 and renamed Sibylle. She was lost with all 47 of her crew during anti-submarine exercises off Toulon on 23 or 24 September 1952, the exact cause never conclusively established, a sobering end for a submarine whose wartime record had been so eventful.

She went down about forty miles east of Toulon while exercising with anti-submarine forces, and no cause has ever been established. The wreck lies deep, the loss was investigated at the time and the file produced no answer, and forty-seven French officers and ratings are still aboard her.

The published record disagrees about when she actually changed flags. Some sources put the loan to France in 1951 and others in the summer of 1952, and the date of the loss is given as either the 23rd or the 24th of September. She had been a French submarine for either fourteen months or ten weeks, and nobody writing about her seems entirely sure which.

A ten-year-old submarine wearing out on a training range is how a great many of these boats ended, and it is worth remembering that the men in her were doing the one thing everybody thought was safe. Sportsman survived eleven war patrols, a British aircraft and the German Aegean. What killed her was an exercise.