HMS Springer (P264): From the Clyde to the Suez Canal as INS Tanin

Laid Down at Birkenhead, Too Late for War

HMS Springer was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, ordered on 29 April 1943, her keel laid on 8 May 1944 and launched on 14 May 1945, commissioning on 2 August 1945 under Lieutenant John Francis Michell, just days before Japan's surrender brought the Second World War to its close.

She was still working up when hostilities ended, departing her builders for Holy Loch on 31 July 1945 and taking part in radar exercises with HMS Talent and HMS Hastings in the Clyde that August, but never saw the wartime action her class had been built for.

The dates are almost comically tight. She commissioned on 2 August 1945 and Japan surrendered on the fifteenth: thirteen days. Her one recorded piece of activity from the war is a radar exercise in the Clyde with HMS Talent, another submarine finished too late, which is about as neat an illustration of the position as the period offers. Two brand new boats practising on each other in a Scottish sea loch while the war ended without them.

She was one of a great many. Britain had ordered submarines on the assumption the war would run into 1946 and beyond, and the yards went on delivering them for months after there was anything for them to do. What happened to those boats afterwards is one of the more interesting threads in this whole subject, and Springer's answer turned out to be more dramatic than most.

A Quiet Peacetime Career

Springer's Royal Navy service settled into the more sedate rhythm of peacetime, including a role in the 1953 Fleet Review that celebrated the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, a considerably calmer occasion than the war patrols her older sisters had endured.

Thirteen years of that is the part nobody writes about. Exercises, training, being hunted by frigates learning their trade, refits, and a fleet review. Her sister HMS Sanguine spent the same years doing the same things and went to the same buyer at the end of them. HMS Stoic and the boats that had actually fought were mostly scrapped before either of them.

A Second Life as INS Tanin

On 9 October 1958, Springer was transferred to the Israeli Navy and renamed Tanin, and it was in this second identity that she found the dramatic service her original commissioning had been too late to provide.

At the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967, Tanin was the only Israeli submarine serviceable for operations, and she conducted commando operations against the port of Alexandria, attempting to torpedo an Egyptian vessel before sustaining severe damage in the retaliatory depth-charge attack that followed and returning to Alexandria to extract the commandos.

Israel's Only Submarine

Two things need saying about that paragraph, and the first is how much weight was resting on this one elderly British boat. In June 1967 Tanin was the only submarine Israel had that could go to sea. Her sister Rahav was not fit for operations. A country at war, with a coastline to defend and an enemy fleet at Alexandria and Port Said, had exactly one working submarine, and she had been built on the Mersey in 1944.

The second is that the unit itself had been built round her. Tanin reached Haifa in December 1959, and the Israeli submarine flotilla, Shayetet 7, was formed on the back of her arrival. Everything the Israeli submarine service has done since traces back to two second-hand British S-boats and the men who learned the trade in them.

The operation itself was a classic of its kind and it went badly. Tanin put six combat divers of Shayetet 13, the Israeli naval commando unit, into the water off the entrance to Alexandria harbour, with orders to attack Egyptian warships lying inside. It is the same job the Royal Navy had been doing off Sumatra twenty years earlier and the risks had not changed at all: the submarine has to sit still off a defended harbour and come back for men who may not be there.

What the divers achieved is not agreed. Some accounts credit them with sinking an Egyptian minesweeper, others with damaging two submarines and two missile boats, and the truth is probably somewhere in that range and will not now be settled. What is certain is what happened to them: all six were captured. They were held in Egypt and not released until January 1968, seven months after a war that lasted six days.

It is worth understanding why a submarine is used for this at all, rather than a fast boat or a helicopter. Divers going into a defended harbour have to arrive without anybody knowing they have arrived, and everything on the surface can be seen, heard or picked up on radar. A submarine can be a mile off the harbour entrance for hours with nothing showing but a few inches of periscope, put men into the water, and still be there afterwards. There is no other way of delivering eight men quietly to a hostile coast and expecting to get them back.

And Tanin took a beating for it. She was depth charged severely enough to be badly damaged and still went back in towards Alexandria to try to recover the men, which is the correct thing to do and by any measure a brave one, given that the Egyptians now knew a submarine was there and were looking for her.

Her commander was awarded Israel's Medal of Courage for the operation.

The End of Her Story

Tanin received spare parts from her sister ship Rahav when that submarine was retired in 1968, keeping her running for a few more years before she was listed for disposal in 1972, bringing to a close a career that had begun too quietly in the Clyde and ended in genuine combat under a different flag entirely.

The spare parts are the detail that says most about the state of that little flotilla. HMS Sanguine was not retired in 1968 so much as dismantled to feed this boat, because a twenty-three-year-old British submarine in Israeli service could not be resupplied from anywhere on earth. One of the two original boats was taken apart to keep the other running.

That was also the year Israel lost her newest submarine. INS Dakar, formerly HMS Totem, disappeared in the eastern Mediterranean in January 1968 with all sixty-nine hands, and HMS Truncheon carries that story. So 1968 saw the loss of a crew, the cannibalising of an old boat, and Tanin carrying the whole capability on her own again.

She lasted until 1972, twenty-seven years old, having spent thirteen of them in the Royal Navy doing nothing in particular and fourteen as the foundation of somebody else's submarine service. For a boat that commissioned thirteen days before her war ended, that is a considerably better second half than the first.