HMS Sturgeon (73S): Scoring Britain's First Submarine Kill of the War

Chatham-Built

HMS Sturgeon was built at Chatham Dockyard, launched on 8 January 1932 and entered service on 27 February 1933, a first-batch S-class submarine of 640 tons surfaced displacement and 187 feet in length, crewed by 38 officers and ratings.

Four boats of that first group were built at Chatham, and their names are worth setting down together: HMS Swordfish, Sturgeon, HMS Seahorse and HMS Starfish. They were laid down together, launched within months of each other, and went to war together in 1939. Three of the four did not come back, and everything below is really the story of the one that did.

An Awkward Start

Sturgeon's war began with an embarrassing near-miss rather than a glorious victory: on 14 September 1939 she accidentally discharged three torpedoes at HMS Swordfish, a sister S-class boat also built at Chatham, fortunately without hitting her, an alarming reminder of how dangerous submarine operations could be even without the enemy's help.

That incident is usually told as a comic near-miss and it was nothing of the kind, because of what had happened four days earlier. On 10 September 1939, a week into the war, HMS Triton sighted a submarine on the surface off the Norwegian coast, challenged her, got no answer she recognised, and fired. The boat she sank was HMS Oxley. Two men survived out of her whole company. Oxley was the first Royal Navy vessel lost in the Second World War, and she was sunk by a British submarine.

So when Sturgeon put three torpedoes into the water in the direction of Swordfish on 14 September, it was the second such episode in five days, and everybody in the flotilla knew about the first one. The problem was structural rather than personal. Submarines could not safely transmit, recognition signals meant showing a light or firing a flare in waters full of enemies, patrol areas overlapped, and one submarine on the surface at night looks very much like another through a periscope.

The Admiralty tightened patrol boundaries and recognition procedures hard after Oxley, and the Oxley affair itself was not made public for years. Sturgeon and Swordfish had the luck that Triton did not, and it was luck: three torpedoes and no hits.

The First British Submarine Success of the War

Sturgeon soon put that mishap behind her. On 20 November 1939, under Lieutenant G. D. A. Gregory, she torpedoed and sank the German anti-submarine trawler V209, also known as Gauleiter Telschow, the very first submarine success recorded by any British boat in the Second World War.

It is worth appreciating how badly that was needed. The submarine service had been at war for ten weeks and had, between all of its boats, sunk nothing whatever. What it had achieved was the accidental destruction of one of its own submarines and a near-repeat four days later. Morale in the flotillas was not high.

The V209 was not a glamorous target. Gauleiter Telschow was a trawler taken up and converted into an anti-submarine vessel, which is to say a fishing boat with depth charges whose entire purpose was hunting the likes of Sturgeon. Sinking one was both useful and pointed: the hunters could be hunted. After ten weeks of nothing, on 20 November 1939, a British submarine had finally sunk something, and it happened to be something that had been looking for her.

The Pionier the following September is a different order of target altogether. A troop transport carries soldiers, and September 1940 was the month the invasion of Britain was expected daily, with barges and shipping being assembled along the Channel and North Sea coasts. Submarines were watching that coastline very closely indeed, and sinking a vessel full of troops in that particular month was worth a good deal more than its tonnage.

She went on to sink the German troop transport Pionier in September 1940, and engaged the German submarines U-23 and U-43 without securing hits, adding some 10,000 tons of shipping sunk in the North Sea and off Norway to her tally between 1940 and 1942 under her later commander, Lieutenant Commander D. St. Clair-Ford.

What Happened to Her Captain

Drummond St Clair-Ford took Sturgeon through her most productive period, the North Sea and Norwegian patrols that account for most of that ten thousand tons. Then he left her, as officers do, and was given a brand new T-class boat.

She was HMS Traveller, and he sailed her from Malta on 28 November 1942 to carry out a reconnaissance of Taranto harbour ahead of a human-torpedo attack. She was mined on or about 4 December. Every man aboard was lost, sixty-five of them, and St Clair-Ford was thirty-four years old.

It is a common enough shape for a submariner's career and it is worth pausing on anyway. He survived the worst months of the war in a small boat in the North Sea, made a success of it, was promoted to something bigger and better, and that is what killed him. Sturgeon went on without him and outlived the war by two years.

The Sole Survivor of Her Sisters

Of the four S-class submarines built at Chatham in her batch, Sturgeon was the only one to survive the war.

The dates make that harder reading than the sentence suggests. Seahorse failed to return from the Heligoland Bight around 7 January 1940 and Starfish was lost there on the 9th, two days apart, in the same stretch of shallow water, in the first winter of the war. Swordfish lasted longer: she sailed from Portsmouth on 8 November 1940 with forty men aboard and simply disappeared, and nobody knew what had become of her for forty-three years.

Three sister ships, built in the same yard by the same people, all gone inside fourteen months. Sturgeon fired three torpedoes at one of them in September 1939 and missed, and that miss is the only reason the number is three rather than four.

She was lent to the Royal Netherlands Navy on 14 October 1943 and served under the name Zeehond until the Dutch decommissioned her in September 1945, before returning to British control and finally being scrapped at Granton, Scotland, in 1947, a long and eventful career for a boat that had started it all with a friendly-fire scare.

The Dutch chapter deserves an explanation. The Netherlands had been occupied since May 1940, but her navy had not surrendered: ships and submarines that could get out did, and the Royal Netherlands Navy spent the rest of the war operating from British ports and from the Dutch East Indies until those fell too. It fought hard and it lost boats it could not replace, because the yards that built them were in German hands.

So Britain lent submarines. Sturgeon went over on 14 October 1943 and became Zeehond, the seal, and she was a Dutch warship with a Dutch crew for the last two years of the war. She came back in 1945 to a Royal Navy that had no use for a thirteen-year-old boat of a design now three generations old, and she was cut up at Granton in 1947, having outlived her three sisters by seven years and her most successful captain by five.