HMS Stygian (P249): Towing a Midget Submarine to War

Built at Birkenhead

HMS Stygian was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 6 January 1943, launched on 30 November 1943 and commissioned on 29 February 1944 under Lieutenant Arthur George Chandler, a fourth-group S-class submarine that nonetheless retained the external stern torpedo tube of the earlier third group.

That stern tube is a small thing with a large consequence, and it is the reason wrecks of these boats can be told apart on the seabed. It fires astern, which sounds useless until you are being chased, and it is the feature that identified another lost S boat on the bottom of the Aegean seventy years later, as HMS Stratagem's sister story shows.

A Productive Run Against Japanese Shipping

Across eight war patrols between 1944 and 1945, Stygian built up a substantial record against Japanese shipping in the Malacca Strait, the Java Sea and the South China Sea, sinking eight sailing vessels, five coasters and numerous other small craft by gunfire and demolition charge, along with the tanker Nichinan Maru and the auxiliary minesweeper Wa 104, formerly the Dutch vessel Djember.

One entry there needs pinning down, because there were two Japanese ships of the name and they get muddled. Stygian's Nichinan Maru was a small tanker of about five hundred tons, sunk on 17 January 1945 off the Perak coast. The larger Nichinan Maru, of 1,945 tons, was sunk two months earlier by HMS Stratagem, three days before Stratagem herself was destroyed. Different ships, same name, both correctly credited.

The rest of the list is the ordinary shape of that campaign. Eight sailing vessels, five coasters, assorted small craft, most of it done on the surface with the gun and with demolition charges laid by boarding parties, because by 1944 there was almost nothing left out there worth a torpedo. HMS Thule sets out what that work was actually like.

She damaged the auxiliary submarine chaser Cha 104 near Bali, and on 27 March 1945 damaged the Japanese minelayer Wakataka, before attacking the destroyer Kamikaze on 8 June 1945, an attack that missed but left her with only minor damage of her own.

Attacking a destroyer at all in June 1945 says something about how thin the pickings had become. The Kamikaze was one of the very few Japanese warships still operating in those waters and she was a hard, fast target that could hunt back, and Stygian took the shot anyway. Coming out of it with minor damage was the good outcome; HMS Terrapin was wrecked by depth charges in the same campaign and never sailed again.

A Role in Operation Struggle

Stygian's most historically notable contribution came as a support vessel: she towed the midget submarine XE3 as part of Operation Struggle, the daring attack in July 1945 that saw XE3 place explosive charges beneath the Japanese heavy cruiser Takao in Singapore Harbour, one of the most audacious special operations of the entire Far East campaign.

The Last Victoria Crosses

That sentence is carrying an enormous amount and should be unpacked, because Operation Struggle produced two Victoria Crosses and they were the last ever awarded to submariners.

Start with what Stygian actually did, since a tow sounds passive. An XE craft was thirty feet long with a crew of four and nothing like the range to reach Singapore, so a full-sized submarine dragged her there: roughly six hundred miles, submerged for much of it, on a line that had to be watched constantly because if it parted the midget was finished. A passage crew rode in the XE craft during the tow and swapped with the operational crew shortly before release, so that the men who had to do the attack arrived rested rather than exhausted. Stygian slipped the tow at ten past eleven on the night of 30 July 1945.

XE-3 was commanded by Lieutenant Ian Fraser, with Leading Seaman James Magennis as her diver. She got through the minefields, the boom and the shallows of the Johore Strait and found the Takao lying in a hollow of the seabed with very little water under her. Fraser drove XE-3 underneath the cruiser and wedged her there, which was the only way to do the job and left him with no room to manoeuvre at all.

That is where it becomes remarkable. The diver's hatch would not open properly, because the midget was jammed hard against the Takao's hull, so Magennis stripped off his equipment and forced himself out through the gap. He then found the cruiser's bottom so thickly encrusted with barnacles that the magnetic limpet mines would not hold, and so he spent the next half hour scraping the hull clean by hand with a knife, one patch at a time, on a breathing set that was leaking, in the dark, underneath an enemy heavy cruiser inside a Japanese naval base.

He placed six limpets, got back in, and then had to go out a second time when one of the carriers holding the main charges failed to release. Fraser worked XE-3 out from under, and the charges brought down a large section of the Takao's side. She never went to sea again. Stygian picked the midget up afterwards and brought everybody home.

Fraser and Magennis were both awarded the Victoria Cross. Two weeks after the operation the war was over, and no submariner has won a Victoria Cross since.

What happened to Magennis afterwards is worth recording, because it is not a happy ending. He was a working-class Catholic from Belfast and he held Northern Ireland's only Victoria Cross of the Second World War, which turned out to suit nobody. The Unionist establishment was awkward about who had won it, and nationalists were reluctant to celebrate a Catholic who had served in the British forces. He was discharged in 1949 into a city that did not know what to do with him.

In 1952 he sold his Victoria Cross for seventy-five pounds. The newspapers made a good deal of it, the dealer who bought it gave it back, and in 1955 he left Northern Ireland altogether and settled in Yorkshire. He died of acute bronchitis in a Halifax hospital on 12 February 1986. His medals went to auction at Sotheby's and fetched twenty-nine thousand pounds, rather more than the seventy-five he had needed.

Belfast put up a memorial to him in the grounds of the City Hall in 1999, in bronze and Portland stone, thirteen years after he died and fifty-four years after he scraped the barnacles off a Japanese cruiser with a knife. It took the city rather longer to make its mind up than it took him to place the charges.

The End of Her Service

HMS Stygian was sold to be broken up for scrap on 28 October 1949, and was finally scrapped by Metal Industries of Ardgour in August 1950, closing the book on a submarine whose own kills were matched by the quiet but crucial support she gave to one of the war's more remarkable special operations.

Clarabut had her for the whole of that and handed her over in November 1945, going almost straight on to HMS Sentinel, a brand new submarine finished four months after the war ended and with nothing whatever to do. It is as neat a picture of the change as the period offers: the same officer, six weeks apart, going from towing a midget submarine into Singapore to commanding a boat that would never fire a shot in anger.

Stygian herself lasted until 1950 and was cut up at Ardgour on Loch Linnhe. She had been in commission for less than six years and had spent about eighteen months of it at war, which was enough to put her name on one of the two or three most audacious things anybody did underwater in the whole conflict.