HMS Syrtis (P241): Lost Off Bodo After a Grim Run of Losses

Laid Down at Birkenhead

HMS Syrtis was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 14 October 1941, launched on 4 February 1943 and commissioned on 23 April 1943 under Lieutenant Michael Hugh Jupp, a third-batch S-class submarine of 865 tons surfaced displacement that would find herself closely bound up with Operation Source, the extraordinary midget submarine attack on the German battleship fleet moored in northern Norway.

A Difficult Role in Operation Source

In September 1943, Syrtis took part in Operation Source, towing the midget submarine X9 towards Alten Fjord in Norway; X9 had been assigned to attack the battlecruiser Scharnhorst, one of three targets in the operation alongside Tirpitz and the Lutzow. The tow parted on 16 September, and X9's three-man passage crew were lost, a heavy blow before the main operation had even properly begun.

The three men were Sub Lieutenant Edward Kearon, Able Seaman Harry Harte and Stoker First Class George Hollett, and what they were doing is worth explaining because it is one of the stranger arrangements of the war. An X-craft could not make a thousand-mile passage with the men who were going to fight her still fresh at the end of it, so each craft carried two entirely different crews. A passage crew of three nursed her across on tow, living in a hull the size of a small caravan, surfacing every few hours to ventilate. Off the Norwegian coast an operational crew of four came across from the parent submarine and took over. Forty-two X-craft men sailed on Operation Source, eighteen of them passage crew.

The tow itself was a manila rope with a telephone cable woven through it, which was the only way the two crews could speak to each other. Syrtis spent much of the passage dived, dragging a craft she could not see astern of her on a line she could not inspect, and when a manila towline lets go in a heavy sea in the Norwegian Sea there is nothing to feel and nothing to hear. The telephone simply stops working, which it does anyway when it gets wet.

It was not the only one to go. Two of the six tows failed on that passage: X8 parted from her parent boat as well, was eventually recovered, and had to be scuttled after her side charges were jettisoned and went off close enough to wreck her. HMS Sceptre brought X10 across, and HMS Truculent brought X6.

And Operation Source worked, which is the part that never gets mentioned alongside the losses. X6 and X7 got through the nets and laid their charges under Tirpitz. The explosions shook her the length of her hull, wrecked machinery and turret mountings, flooded compartments, and put the most feared ship in Europe out of the war for months without a shot being fired at her. Donald Cameron of X6 and Godfrey Place of X7 were both awarded the Victoria Cross for that night. Kearon, Harte and Hollett had been dead for six days by then.

In February 1944, tragedy struck again when Syrtis, turning to rescue a watch officer who had been washed overboard, collided with the midget submarine X22, which she was towing towards Scapa Flow, sinking her with the loss of her entire crew, a difficult chapter for a boat that had already suffered so much loss in support of operations she was never able to see through to their conclusion herself.

Five Men, and Nobody Saved

That February incident deserves setting down in full, because it is worse than the summary suggests. It happened on 7 February 1944, as Syrtis came in towards Scapa Flow with X22 on the line behind her, and the man who went over the side was her own officer of the watch, Lieutenant C. Blythe, RNR.

Every instinct in a seaman says put the helm over and go back for him, and that is exactly what Syrtis did. It is also the one manoeuvre a submarine towing another submarine cannot make. She swung, the tow went slack, and she ran straight over X22. The midget went down with all four of her passage crew.

Blythe was never recovered either. Five men died in the space of a few minutes, four of them because of an attempt to save the fifth, and the fifth was not saved. There is no lesson in that and no fault worth apportioning. It is simply one of the cruellest sequences in the submarine service's war, and it happened at the entrance to a British anchorage in sight of home.

X22 had been earmarked for the next operation against Tirpitz. Losing her cost the X-craft flotilla a quarter of its remaining strength in an afternoon, and Syrtis had now been the parent boat at the death of two midget submarines and seven men, without once having been anywhere near a German warship.

Convoy Escort and a Final Success

Between her special operations work, Syrtis carried out more conventional duties, including escorting the Russia-bound convoys JW 55 and RA 55 in December 1943 and January 1944, and attacking German shipping off Stadlandet in February 1944. On 22 March 1944 she sank the small Norwegian merchant vessel Narvik by gunfire, her only confirmed success against enemy shipping.

The convoy work is worth pausing on for a reason nobody usually notices. Syrtis was at sea covering the JW55 and RA55 convoys over Christmas 1943, which is the exact week Scharnhorst came out of Alten Fjord to get at them and was hunted down and sunk at North Cape on 26 December by a force led by HMS Duke of York. Scharnhorst was the ship X9 had been assigned to attack. Syrtis lost the craft that was meant to kill her in September, and in December she was on station when somebody else did it.

Her last full day can be reconstructed almost hour by hour, which is unusual for a boat that disappeared. At about five past one on the afternoon of 22 March 1944 she attacked a German convoy with torpedoes and missed. Just under an hour later she surfaced and sank the Norwegian coaster Narvik with her gun near Svinvaer, off Rodoy.

Narvik was 241 tons and had been built in 1895, so Syrtis's only confirmed success in seven patrols was a forty-nine-year-old coasting steamer of a size that would fit twice over inside the submarine that sank her. That is not a criticism of anybody. It is what was left to sink on that coast by 1944, and it is why so many Norwegian patrols read like nothing at all happening for a fortnight.

Lost Without a Trace

HMS Syrtis departed Lerwick on 16 March 1944 for her seventh patrol and was never seen again after 22 March. The most probable explanation is that she struck a German minefield near Bodo, though enemy shore batteries have also been suggested as a possible cause, closing out the story of a submarine that had already given so much in support of others before her own loss went unwitnessed and unexplained.

The evidence about her end is thin and does not entirely fit together, which is worth saying plainly rather than smoothing over. The likeliest answer is a German minefield off the Norwegian coast, one catalogued as NW 53, laid across exactly the water she had been ordered to patrol. A moored contact mine kills a submarine instantly and leaves nothing on the surface, which is consistent with the silence.

The German alternative is a shore battery reporting a submarine engaged in the Bodo area at about the right time, though gunners claiming a submarine and a submarine actually being lost are two different things and the war is full of the first without the second.

The awkward piece of evidence is the wreckage. Something identifiable was sighted on 1 April 1944 at a position several hundred miles south of Bodo, out in the Norwegian Sea on the route home to Lerwick. If that was Syrtis then she survived her patrol area and was lost on passage, quite possibly to a drifting mine, around the end of March. Nobody has ever reconciled the two, and there is no wreck to settle it.

The Admiralty recorded 28 March 1944 as the date of death for her whole company. The roll of honour lists forty-seven names, though the figure is given elsewhere as forty-eight, and the discrepancy is not one that can be resolved from published sources. Lieutenant Michael Hugh Jupp, DSC, who had commanded her since the day she was accepted, was among them.

She was one of a good many boats that simply stopped reporting. HMS Stonehenge went the same way in the same month on the other side of the world. What sets Syrtis apart is that she had already buried seven other men before she went, none of them her own, and the operations she died supporting were among the most successful the Royal Navy ever mounted.