HMS Strongbow (P235): Fourteen Hours Under the Depth Charges off Port Swettenham

Built at Greenock

HMS Strongbow was ordered from Scotts of Greenock on 12 July 1941, one of the third group of S Class submarines. She was launched on 30 August 1943 and commissioned on 23 December 1943.

Her name was the nickname of Richard de Clare, the Anglo-Norman Earl of Pembroke who died in 1176, and her badge was taken from his arms: three red chevrons with an archer's bow. Her only captain was Lieutenant Anthony Troup, who had won the Distinguished Service Cross earlier in the war and had commanded the old training boat H32.

He went on to become a vice-admiral and was knighted in 1975.

The photograph was taken in the Clyde in January 1944, only weeks after she commissioned. A line of her crew stands along the forward casing and more men are on the bridge, where her number is painted on the conning tower, with her gun trained ahead and her bow hydroplanes folded.

North, Then East

Her start was not smooth. In March 1944 she went back to her builders for repairs and alterations, and on her way north in April, sailing in company with Sibyl and the Dutch submarine O 19 under the escort of Sardonyx, she had to put a man ashore at Aultbea with chicken pox.

Her first patrol was an anti-U-boat patrol in the Norwegian Sea from Lerwick. In the summer she sailed for the Far East, passed through the Suez Canal on 21 July and joined the submarines at Trincomalee in Ceylon.

Off Phuket

Her first patrol from Ceylon, from 19 August 1944, was off Phuket on the west coast of Siam. There were few large targets left there, and the war was fought with the gun against the small ships and sailing craft that carried supplies along the coast.

On 30 August she sighted the smoke of a ship of about 1,000 tons thirteen miles away and chased her for four hours, much of it on the surface, before she could get within gun range. She fired fifteen rounds and scored two hits before a motor torpedo boat came racing out and forced her down.

On 2 September, after boarding and sinking a junk carrying cigarettes and rice, she sank the small Japanese army cargo ship Toso Maru No. 1 and six other small vessels with gunfire and demolition charges. The next night she stopped a junk that had no boat of her own and a sick man aboard, and Troup let her go after taking her papers and one prisoner.

On 4 September an aircraft caught her on the surface and dropped a depth charge, causing minor damage.

The Malacca Strait and Sumatra

In October she was in the Malacca Strait near the One Fathom Bank, the shoal off the Malayan coast where the coastal traffic for Port Swettenham passed. On 11 October she fired five torpedoes at an escorted merchant ship, two of which exploded prematurely, and then saw a second ship with two more escorts.

Her crew carried out what the patrol report called a frenzied reload, but the target turned away and was soon out of sight. The next afternoon, watching a junk through six inches of periscope, Troup suddenly saw a submarine behind it, and then a second one.

They were Japanese, and he fired four torpedoes and later two more, but both submarines got away. Later the same day she torpedoed the merchant ship Manryo Maru, of 1,185 tons, with a single torpedo.

On 18 October she crept into Sabang Bay at the northern tip of Sumatra to fire at a laden ship at anchor, but her torpedo exploded against an anti-torpedo net.

Her third patrol from Ceylon, in November, took her down the west coast of Sumatra. On 28 November she surfaced 1,000 yards from a 150-ton Japanese tug towing a large steel lighter and fired 118 rounds, scoring seventy or eighty hits, before the tug disappeared in a cloud of steam.

The next day she carried out a special operation whose details are still not known, and on 30 November she sank a prau and three junks.

Port Swettenham

She sailed again for the Malacca Strait on 30 December 1944. On 8 January she surfaced and chased a big tug towing two oil lighters off the coast of Sumatra, but broke off after twenty-three rounds when a larger ship was seen coming down the coast, and the larger ship turned and fled.

On 10 January she sank a junk south-west of Penang and took one of her crew prisoner, a well-educated Chinese man who spoke good English, and that afternoon a Japanese warship dropped six depth charges on her without effect.

Three days later, at six in the morning of 13 January, off Port Swettenham, she found herself in the middle of a Japanese anti-submarine sweep, with four ships closing on her, two from the north and two from the south.

Troup silenced the boat and took her deep, and for the rest of the day the hunters came back again and again, finding her with their asdic, losing her, and finding her again. Three charges went off close astern, then three more down her port side.

At 0859 a pattern of four exploded close and did some damage, and she went down to 125 feet. At 0956 five more went off very close. There were long silences while the escorts listened and waited, and then at 1412 one of them passed directly overhead and dropped three charges that caused considerable damage.

Troup put Strongbow on the bottom at 165 feet and switched everything off. No more attacks came. At eight that evening, fourteen hours after the hunt began, she surfaced and crept away southwards on her main motors while her crew made what repairs they could.

Never Again

She reached Trincomalee on 19 January. After three months of repairs her flotilla captain thought her fit to fight again, but the Admiralty did not agree, and in April 1945 she was sent out only on a weather-reporting patrol in the Bay of Bengal before going home.

She sailed from Trincomalee on 23 May and reached Portsmouth on 30 June, and in July she was surveyed at Chatham, where it was decided not to refit her. She was broken up at Preston in April 1946.

Her Jolly Roger, the flag on which a submarine recorded its successes, is in the Royal Navy Submarine Museum at Gosport. Stonehenge, lost in the same waters in 1944, was less fortunate, while Statesman and Spark fought on to the end of the war. Only days before Strongbow's ordeal, Shakespeare had also come home from the Indian Ocean too damaged ever to fight again.