HMS Taku (N38): A Mediterranean Wrecking Ball

Birkenhead-Built

HMS Taku was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, laid down on 18 November 1937, launched on 20 May 1939 and completed on 3 January 1940, a T-class submarine that went on to serve across three very different theatres of the war.

She was one of the first group of T boats, ordered before the war and in the water before it started, and that put her among the small number of British submarines that fought from almost the beginning to almost the end. Fifteen war patrols across home waters, the Mediterranean and the Norwegian coast is a great deal of sea time for one hull, and rather more than most of her class managed before something found them.

The name is unusual and has nothing to do with the sea at all. Taku is the fort complex at the mouth of the Hai river in northern China, and it entered the Navy List in 1900. During the Boxer Rebellion a raiding party from the destroyers Fame and Whiting, led by Roger Keyes, took four Chinese destroyers lying off the Taku Forts without losing a man. The four were divided between the British, French, German and Russian navies, every one of them was named Taku, and the British boat, a German-built ship launched at Elbing in 1898 as Hai Lung, served as HMS Taku thereafter. Keyes ended up an Admiral of the Fleet. So the submarine carried a name commemorating a British raid on a Chinese fort, by way of a German-built Chinese destroyer taken as a prize.

An Awkward Start

Taku's early service included a notably alarming moment when she mistakenly fired torpedoes at the British destroyer HMS Ashanti, fortunately missing, before going on to damage the German torpedo boat Möwe and, on 2 November 1940, hit the German tanker Gedania in the Bay of Biscay with a torpedo that failed to explode.

The Ashanti business deserves its date and its second half. On 17 April 1940, off Norway and looking for German destroyers, Taku found a silhouette that her captain judged to be one and fired four torpedoes at it. It was HMS Ashanti. All four missed, which is the only reason this is an anecdote rather than a disaster, and Ashanti then depth-charged her, doing minor damage. The first ship to attack HMS Taku in the Second World War, and the first to hurt her, was British.

It is easy to be hard on a mistake like that and worth resisting. In April 1940 the Norwegian campaign had British and German destroyers operating in the same water at the same time, recognition signals were unreliable, and a submarine identifies a target through a periscope in a few seconds using a silhouette book. The official account is blunt about the cause: the ship's silhouette was very similar to that of a German destroyer. HMS Trespasser demonstrated later in the war just how far wrong identification could go, having spent three torpedoes on a dead whale.

The Gedania attack was worse in a way that has nothing to do with judgement. On 2 November 1940 Taku got into a firing position on a German tanker in the Bay of Biscay and put eight torpedoes into the water at a range of eight hundred yards, which is close enough to be certain. One hit. It failed to explode. Gedania went on to Saint-Nazaire and arrived the same day, lightly damaged. British torpedoes were unreliable in the first half of the war and every submarine commander in the fleet had a story like it, but eight fish for a dud at point-blank range is close to the worst of them.

A Mediterranean Rampage

Reassigned to the Mediterranean in 1941, Taku enjoyed a highly productive run, sinking the Italian transports Cagliari, Silvio Scaroni and Caldea, the tankers Arca and Delfin, the German munitions transport Tilly L. M. Russ at Benghazi, and further Italian and Greek vessels including the motor schooner Vincenzo P., a truly substantial tally that made her one of the more effective British boats operating in the theatre that year.

The word for what she was doing is interdiction, and it decided the North African campaign. Everything Rommel used had to cross the Mediterranean from Italy: fuel, ammunition, vehicles, men. A tanker sunk off Benghazi is petrol that never reaches a panzer division, and a munitions ship destroyed in harbour is an artillery barrage that never happens. British submarines working out of Malta and Alexandria sank an enormous share of that traffic at very heavy cost to themselves, and that list, transports, tankers, a munitions ship and a string of small sailing craft, is what one boat's contribution to it looks like.

It also made her a marked boat, and there is a contemporary verdict on what that was like. When she came home in the spring of 1943 the Admiralty released photographs of her, and the caption that went with them on 4 March called her the most elusive submarine and stated flatly that no British submarine had been hunted more relentlessly. It gives an example: earlier in the war, after torpedoing a large supply ship off the Norwegian coast, she was forced to lie on the seabed for four hours while the enemy rained down what the caption calls a perfect avalanche of depth charges. Her most recent escape had been in the Aegean.

Four hours on the bottom is a specific kind of ordeal. The boat is shut down, the air is going bad, the temperature is climbing, nobody moves or speaks unnecessarily because the hydrophones above can hear a dropped spanner, and every man aboard is counting explosions and working out how close the last one was. There is nothing to do. Doing nothing is the tactic. Boats of her class that got this wrong did not come back, and HMS Tally-Ho and HMS Thule both had their own versions of it in the Far East.

Striking a Mine Off Scandinavia

Later redeployed off Scandinavia in 1944, Taku sank the German merchantmen Rheinhausen and Hans Bornhofen and severely damaged the freighter Harm Fritzen, before striking a mine herself in April 1944 and sustaining damage, a close call that she nonetheless survived.

Thirteenth of April

Close call undersells it considerably, because what happened that evening ended her fighting career. Just before eight o'clock on the evening of 13 April 1944 one of her hydroplanes snagged the mooring wire of a mine, drew it in against the hull and set off one of the horns.

The explosion put out every light in the boat, sprang leaks in several places and knocked the entire ship's company unconscious. Not stunned. Unconscious, all of them, in a submerged submarine that was taking water and had nobody at the controls. They came round, in the dark, and got her under control and brought her home, which is about as much as can reasonably be asked of anybody.

The blast had cracked the pressure hull. A crack in a pressure hull is not something that can be patched and forgotten, because the whole point of the structure is that it holds a pressure difference of tons per square foot and does it repeatedly, thousands of times, for years. She was repaired well enough to keep operating but she never went back to full combat service. The submarine that had been the most relentlessly hunted boat in the fleet spent her last year doing what a cracked submarine can safely do.

She completed fifteen war patrols in total before being decommissioned into reserve in July 1945, and was sold for scrap in November 1946, broken up in South Wales.

She also went through commanding officers at a rate that tells its own story. Lieutenant Commander Walter Hall had her from June 1939, Lieutenant Commander Voltelin Van der Byl from February 1940, Lieutenant Hugh Turner for nine days in October of that year, Lieutenant John Beaufoy Brown until April 1941, then Lieutenant Commander Edward Nicolay, then Lieutenant Commander Peter Bartlett, and by 1943 Lieutenant A. J. W. Pitt. Submarine commands in wartime turned over fast, partly because the work used men up and partly because a service expanding quickly needed every qualified officer to have had a boat of his own.

She was luckier than most of her class. HMS Truculent, built to the same design, survived the whole war and was run down in the Thames Estuary in 1950 with the loss of sixty-four men. Taku got the mine, the depth charges, the friendly destroyer and the dud torpedo, and still finished in a breaker's yard rather than on the bottom, which for a T boat that fought from 1940 to 1944 counts as a considerable result.