HMS Swordfish (61S): The Wreck That Rewrote a Mystery

Chatham-Built

HMS Swordfish was built at Chatham Dockyard, ordered on 2 July 1930, laid down on 1 December 1930, launched on 10 November 1931 and commissioned on 28 November 1932, a first-batch S-class submarine of 730 tons surfaced displacement, armed with six 21-inch torpedo tubes and a 3-inch deck gun.

A War Full of Near Misses

Swordfish's twelve war patrols from September 1939 were marked by a properly striking run of scrapes that never quite proved fatal.

Read that list again and notice who was doing the shooting. Her own sister put three torpedoes at her. An Allied aircraft bombed her. A drifting mine nearly got her. Of the four near-disasters in her record, three were caused by her own side, and the fourth was a mine that had come loose from somebody's minefield and was floating about being dangerous to everybody equally.

That is not bad luck so much as a fair description of 1939 and 1940 at sea. Recognition between friendly forces was close to impossible, aircrews had been told that any submarine was a German one, and the seas around Britain were being filled with mines by both sides faster than anybody could chart them. HMS Sturgeon carries the story of that first incident, and of the far worse one four days earlier that made everybody so jumpy.

She was mistakenly targeted by her own sister boat HMS Sturgeon, which fired three torpedoes at her without effect, attacked German convoys in April 1940 without scoring a hit, narrowly avoided a drifting mine, and was bombed in error by an Allied Lockheed Hudson aircraft, a submarine that seemed to attract danger from every direction except, so far, a fatal one.

She was also outlasting her sisters, which cannot have gone unnoticed aboard. Four boats of that first S-class group were built at Chatham: Swordfish, Sturgeon, HMS Seahorse and HMS Starfish. Seahorse failed to return from the Heligoland Bight in the first week of January 1940 and Starfish was lost there on the 9th. By the spring of 1940 half the group was gone, and Swordfish had spent the winter being missed by everything that tried to kill her.

Lost Without a Trace

Swordfish departed Portsmouth on 7 November 1940 with 40 men aboard and failed to signal as scheduled. She was never heard from again, and the Admiralty declared her lost on 23 December 1940, with German destroyers long assumed to have been responsible, though no confirmed account of her final hours ever emerged.

That assumption about German destroyers is worth holding on to, because it is what everybody believed for the next forty-three years. Swordfish was ordered to patrol off Brest, so the natural conclusion was that she had reached the Bay of Biscay and been hunted down there by the German escorts operating out of the French Atlantic ports. It was a reasonable inference and there was no evidence against it.

It also gave forty families a picture of what had happened: a boat lost far from home, at the end of a long passage, in a fight with the enemy. That picture was wrong in every particular.

A Wreck Found Four Decades Later

The true cause of her loss remained a mystery until July 1983, when local diver and museum founder Martin Woodward discovered her wreck south of the Isle of Wight in 46 metres of water, the first Second World War submarine wreck ever located.

Twelve Miles From Home

The position is the whole thing. Woodward found her about twelve miles south of St Catherine's Point, which is the southern tip of the Isle of Wight, in forty-six metres of water. She had sailed from Portsmouth. That is a few hours' steaming from her own berth.

She never got anywhere near Brest. She never got out of the Channel. Swordfish died on the first day of her patrol, in home waters, within sight of an English island on a clear day, and for four decades everybody who cared about her had been looking four hundred miles in the wrong direction.

The trim dive explains the rest. It is the first thing a submarine does after leaving harbour: she goes down in controlled conditions to check that she is correctly ballasted, because the weight of fuel, stores, water and torpedoes changes every time and the boat has to be balanced before she is any use. It is routine, it is done in shallow water close to home, and it is the safest dive of the whole patrol. Swordfish appears to have made hers straight onto a mine.

There is a particular cruelty in the timing that is worth stating. A crew leaving harbour for a war patrol has just said goodbye. They have had their last run ashore, written their last letters, and settled into the long grim business of getting to the patrol area. The trim dive happens before any of that has properly begun, while the boat still smells of the dockyard and half the stores are not stowed. Whatever happened to Swordfish happened before her patrol had started.

Whose mine it was has never been established, and given how thickly both sides seeded the Channel approaches in 1940 it probably never will be. The hull is split in two just forward of the gun, which is consistent with a mine detonating under the forward part of her, and the rest of the wreck is reported to be in remarkably good condition.

The hull had been split into two sections just forward of the gun, and it is now believed she struck a mine, most likely while carrying out a trim dive shortly after sailing, a quiet and largely accidental end that had waited over forty years to be properly understood, and one that claimed all 40 of her crew.

The man who settled it deserves naming properly. Martin Woodward is an Isle of Wight diver who has found a number of significant wrecks in those waters and founded the Shipwreck Centre and Maritime Museum on the island to keep what he learned from them. Swordfish is not even his most historically weighty find: he also located the SS Mendi, the troopship that went down in the Channel in 1917 with six hundred and forty-six men of the South African Native Labour Corps, a loss that had been almost entirely forgotten in Britain and is now properly commemorated in South Africa.

The Solent and the water south of the Wight hold a great deal of this sort of thing. HMS Upstart lies off the island too, sunk deliberately as a sonar target in 1959 and dived regularly today. Swordfish is a different matter: she is a war grave with forty men in her, and she is left alone.

What the 1983 dive gave those families, four decades late, was the truth. Not a better story, and in most respects a bleaker one, since it means the boat was lost to an accident of geography a few hours out rather than in any kind of action. But it is where she is, and it is what happened, and for forty-three years nobody had either.