HMS Starfish (19S): A Drill Error Off Heligoland

The Build: Chatham

HMS Starfish was built at Chatham Royal Dockyard, ordered on 16 March 1931, laid down on 29 September 1931, launched on 14 March 1933 and commissioned on 27 October 1933, a first-batch S-class submarine designed for operations in the cold, congested waters of the North Sea and off Norway.

She was one of the first batch, a small boat of about 640 tons designed in the early 1930s for exactly the job she died doing. The first S boats were built short-ranged and handy on the assumption that Britain's next submarine war would be fought in the North Sea and the Baltic approaches, against Germany, close to home. For once the planners had guessed right about the enemy and the place.

What they had not allowed for was how quickly that particular corner of the sea would become lethal. The Heligoland Bight is shallow, narrow and was the front door to the German naval bases, which meant it was mined, patrolled and flown over constantly. Sending small submarines into it in the first winter of the war cost the Royal Navy dearly.

A Quiet Start to the War

Under Lieutenant Thomas Anthony Turner, Starfish carried out five war patrols between August 1939 and January 1940 southwest of Norway, northwest of Bergen and across the North Sea, without significant contact with the enemy, the kind of watchful, uneventful work that made up so much of a submarine's war even when nothing happened.

Five patrols in five months is a hard programme, and the phrase "without significant contact" hides what was actually happening to that flotilla. This was the winter the Royal Navy lost submarines in the Bight at a rate it could not afford. HMS Seahorse went out at the same time and never came back at all, with every man aboard. Starfish was the lucky one, which is a strange thing to say about a boat that was sunk.

A Costly Misfire

On her sixth patrol, off Heligoland Bight on 9 January 1940, Starfish located and attacked the German minesweeper M 7, only for her torpedoes to remain stuck in their tubes owing to a drill error at the critical moment. A second attempt was thwarted when her hydroplanes jammed, forcing her to settle on the seabed for emergency repairs while M 7 hunted overhead.

What a Drill Error Actually Is

"Drill error" sounds like paperwork and it was nothing of the kind, so it is worth setting out what went wrong. A submarine torpedo tube has two doors. There is a rear door inside the boat, through which the torpedo is loaded, and there is an outer bow cap at the front, which is part of the hull and is kept shut. Before firing, the tube is flooded and the bow cap is opened.

If the bow cap is not opened, the torpedo is fired into a sealed steel tube with a closed door at the end of it. Nothing comes out. That is what happened off Heligoland: the target was found, the attack was set up, the firing lever went over, and the torpedoes stayed where they were.

It is worth being fair about how it happens. This was a crew of a boat that had spent five patrols seeing nothing whatever, suddenly given a real target after five months of empty sea, working at speed in a cramped compartment on a sequence that has to be done in the right order every time. Attacks were lost this way throughout the war in every navy. The difference here is that the failure left her still in the same square of water as an enemy who now knew she was there.

The jammed hydroplanes made it final. Hydroplanes are the small horizontal fins that control depth, and a submarine with jammed planes cannot hold a depth or run away at speed; she has to stop. So Starfish put herself on the bottom of the North Sea and lay there trying to fix them while the minesweeper she had just failed to sink circled overhead looking for her.

Hunted to the Surface

M 7 began a sustained depth-charge attack at 10:50 that morning, and by early evening the situation aboard Starfish had become remarkably dangerous, with flooding in the engine room crankcases and the starboard main motor bearings. Her commander gave the order to surface at 18:20, and the submarine sank shortly afterwards at approximately 19:32 in the North Sea.

Look at the clock on that. The first depth charges came at 10:50 and the order to surface was given at 18:20. That is seven and a half hours on the seabed, in a boat with jammed hydroplanes, being bombed by somebody who knew roughly where she was and had all day. By the end the engine room crankcases and the starboard main motor bearings were flooding, which means the boat was filling from the bottom up and would not have been able to move even if the planes had been repaired.

Coming up was the only thing left. And the sinking an hour or so later was not the sea finishing the job: her own crew scuttled her, opening her up deliberately so that she could not be boarded, salvaged or towed in. It is the same decision submarine captains made everywhere, and it is why so few submarines were ever captured intact by anybody.

All 48 of her crew survived and were taken prisoner, a fortunate outcome given how close the attack had come to a far worse ending, while M 7's commander, Heinrich Timm, received the Iron Cross Second Class and promotion for the sinking.

The Man Who Sank Her

Timm did rather more than sink her: he then pulled all forty-eight of them out of the water. Every man in Starfish lived because the officer who had spent the day trying to kill them spent the evening picking them up.

He was at the beginning of a career that turned out to be extraordinary. He had taken command of M 7 in July 1939 and Starfish was his first real success. He collected the Iron Cross First Class during the Norwegian invasion that May, and then transferred out of minesweepers into the U-boat arm, qualifying as a commander at Pillau in August 1941 and commissioning the new U-251 the following month.

His war finished about as far from Heligoland as it is possible to get. In 1944 he took the long-range U-862 out of Kiel as one of the Monsun boats sent to work the Indian Ocean and the Far East, and he sank seven ships out there, including the American Liberty ship Robert J. Walker just off Sydney. He is the only U-boat commander to have operated in the Pacific in that way.

The most remarkable thing he did came around midnight on 15 January 1945, when he took U-862 on the surface straight into Gisborne harbour on the east coast of New Zealand, as far in as the Kaiti Basin, looking for something worth a torpedo. There was nothing there but small fishing boats, so he backed his submarine out again and left, and nobody ashore knew anything about it. He survived the war and later served in the West German navy.

Starfish's forty-eight, meanwhile, went into captivity in January 1940 and stayed there until 1945. They were among the very first British prisoners of the naval war, and they sat out the whole of it: five and a half years, which is longer than most of the men who fought it spent in uniform. Being the crew that all survived came at a price that is easy to skate over. HMS Truculent and HMS Thorn show the two other ways it usually went, and neither is better.