HMS Tally-Ho (P317): Sinking a Cruiser and a Very Unlucky Submarine

Barrow-Built

HMS Tally-Ho was built by Vickers Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness and launched on 23 December 1942, a T-class submarine that under the command of Lieutenant Commander Leslie William Abel Bennington went on to serve extensively, and eventfully, in the Far East.

Sinking the Kuma

On 11 January 1944, Tally-Ho engaged the Japanese light cruiser Kuma and her escorting destroyer Uranami near Penang, firing seven torpedoes from 1,900 yards. Two struck the cruiser's starboard side aft, and Kuma sank stern-first, a remarkably significant success against a proper warship rather than the merchant vessels that made up most submarine targets.

Seven torpedoes at nineteen hundred yards is worth understanding as an act of judgement. A light cruiser making speed with a destroyer in company is among the hardest targets a submarine can be offered: fast, zigzagging, escorted, and capable of killing you within minutes of being missed. Bennington fired most of his bow salvo at close range rather than nibbling at her, which is the correct answer and the one that requires nerve.

Two hits aft were enough. Kuma went down by the stern off the north-west coast of Penang, and the Uranami then spent a considerable time dropping depth charges on the area. That is the price of the shot: having fired seven torpedoes you have announced exactly where you are to a destroyer whose entire purpose is to find you.

An Unlucky Valentine's Day for UIT-23

Just over a month later, on 14 February 1944, Tally-Ho encountered another submarine roughly 80 miles south of Penang: UIT-23, originally the Italian submarine Reginaldo Giuliani and transferred to German command after Italy's surrender, now sailing to France under Oberleutnant Werner Striegler with a cargo of tin and quinine and a mixed German and Italian crew aboard.

Tally-Ho attacked her submerged, firing three torpedoes and obtaining two hits, and UIT-23 sank quickly with the loss of 26 men, though 14 survivors were picked up by Axis seaplanes and taken to Penang.

What UIT-23 Was Carrying

The cargo is the part that explains everything. UIT-23 was not on patrol. She had been the Italian Reginaldo Giuliani, taken over by Germany when Italy changed sides, and she was running from Singapore towards occupied France with a hold full of tin and quinine, crewed by Germans and Italians together.

That was a strategic cargo. Germany had almost no access to natural rubber, tin, tungsten or quinine once the blockade tightened, and the only way to get any of it from the Far East was to load a submarine and send her twelve thousand miles. Japan ran the same traffic in the other direction. HMS Taurus sank the Japanese submarine I-34 off Penang three months earlier, and she was carrying tin, tungsten, rubber and opium on exactly the same errand. Two cargo submarines, sunk by two British submarines, in the same stretch of water, within twelve weeks.

Quinine deserves a line of its own. It was the only effective treatment for malaria, the Dutch East Indies had supplied most of the world's supply before 1942, and Germany had been cut off from it. Sinking a submarine carrying quinine is an attack on the enemy's ability to keep his own troops alive in the tropics, which is a stranger and more effective kind of warfare than sinking another warship.

One point of detail: accounts differ by a day on when this happened, some giving 14 February and others the 15th. That is a common feature of actions in that theatre, where British and Japanese records kept time in different zones, and it is not worth trying to resolve now. HMS Telemachus shows the same kind of attack, on a Japanese submarine in the same strait, five months later.

Surviving a Ramming

Ten days later, on 24 February 1944, Tally-Ho herself came under serious attack, surviving a ramming by a Japanese torpedo boat that caused serious damage to her port ballast tanks, a close call that she nonetheless weathered, reaching Trincomalee for repairs on 29 February.

The Propellers That Ran Down Her Side

That deserves telling properly, because it is one of the more extraordinary escapes of the submarine war. At about ten to three in the morning of 24 February 1944, in the Malacca Strait, a Japanese torpedo boat came at her while she was on the surface and hit her along the port side.

The attacker did not simply strike and bounce off. Her hull and then her turning propellers ran the entire length of Tally-Ho's port main ballast tanks, chewing them open as they went, while she continued dropping depth charges and firing her gun. When the submarine was eventually examined, fragments of phosphor bronze from the torpedo boat's propeller blades were found inside her ballast tanks.

Bennington did not dive during it, and that was the decision that saved her. A submarine with her port ballast tanks torn open, going down, underneath a ship that is actively ramming and depth charging, does not come back up. He held her on the surface, took the damage, got clear and dived afterwards.

The other half of the story emerged after the war. Tally-Ho's own port forward hydroplane, lowered and sticking out from her side like a blade, had pierced the torpedo boat's hull as she passed, and the torpedo boat's port screw had been sheared of its blades almost down to the hub. The submarine had done comparable damage to her attacker without anybody aboard intending it or knowing it at the time, which is why the Japanese vessel broke off.

She then took five days to reach Trincomalee with her port side opened up, which for a boat that relies on the integrity of her tanks to control her depth is a long and anxious passage.

A Long Peacetime Career

Tally-Ho survived the war and went on to a substantial postwar career, taking part in the 1953 Coronation Fleet Review and conducting notable transatlantic underwater voyages, before finally being sold to Thos. W. Ward and scrapped at Briton Ferry in Wales on 10 February 1967, a fitting long retirement for a boat whose wartime record had been dramatic.

Those postwar submerged Atlantic crossings were a genuine milestone rather than a stunt. What made them possible was the snorkel, taken from the Germans after 1945, which let a diesel boat charge her batteries at periscope depth instead of surfacing. Suddenly a wartime submarine could cross an ocean without ever showing herself, and the Royal Navy set about finding out how far that could be pushed. HMS Truncheon and the Super T conversions were the next step in the same programme.

She lasted until 1967, twenty-four years, which is a long life for a boat that had a cruiser, a cargo submarine and a torpedo boat's propeller blades on her record before she was fifteen months old. HMS Thule and the rest of the T class fought a quieter version of the same war. Very few of them had a year like Tally-Ho's 1944.