HMS Tantalus (P318): The Longest Submarine Patrol of the War

Never Satisfied

HMS Tantalus was laid down by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow on 6 June 1942, launched on 24 February 1943 and completed on 2 June 1943. She was one of the third and last group of T-class submarines, the big ocean-going boats of the Second World War: 273 feet long, about 1,400 tons on the surface, with eight bow torpedo tubes and more amidships, and a 4-inch gun.

She carried a crew of about sixty, and nothing like enough room for them.

She was the first ship of the Navy to carry the name. Tantalus, in the Greek myth, was punished by being made to stand in water up to his chin under a branch of fruit, with the water draining away whenever he bent to drink and the branch lifting whenever he reached for it.

Her official badge showed a hand reaching up for a bunch of grapes. Her crew took that and made their own, with a mermaid holding the grapes and the motto Numquam repleti: never satisfied. For a submarine whose whole job was to go looking for targets, it was a good joke and a better motto.

Rufus Mackenzie

Her captain was Lieutenant Commander Hugh Mackenzie, known as Rufus, and he came to her already one of the most experienced submarine officers in the Navy.

He had commanded HMS Thrasher in the Mediterranean, and it was in Thrasher, in February 1942, that two of his crew climbed into the casing under the gun to remove two unexploded bombs, lying on their backs in the dark, knowing that if the boat had to dive they would be drowned. Both were awarded the Victoria Cross.

Mackenzie had won the DSO by the time he took Tantalus east.

From Ceylon: the Malacca Strait

She worked up on the Clyde, and her first war patrol, from Lerwick in September 1943, took her into the Arctic. On 9 September she went into Isfjord in Spitsbergen and found the mining settlement at Barentsburg on fire and deserted: the battleships Tirpitz and Scharnhorst had shelled it the day before and put troops ashore, the one offensive operation Tirpitz ever carried out, which is described in HMS Obedient (G48).

Three days later Tantalus sighted a U-boat on the surface and lost her.

She was then modified at Portsmouth for the tropics and sailed in January 1944, by way of a patrol off Portugal, Gibraltar, Port Said, the Suez Canal and Aden, to Ceylon, where she joined the 4th Submarine Flotilla of the Eastern Fleet at Trincomalee on 28 March, part of the reinforcement of British submarines agreed in August 1943 to take the war to Japanese shipping in the Indian Ocean.

Her patrol area for most of 1944 was the Malacca Strait, the narrow sea between Malaya and Sumatra through which almost everything Japan sent to Burma had to pass.

The patrols were dangerous in more ways than the obvious one. On 17 April 1944, her second day in the Strait, an unknown submarine fired a torpedo at her, and her crew heard it running past. The targets were rarely large. On 19 April she sank a tug by gunfire, and ten days later a small coaster.

In late April she put an agent party of the Special Operations Executive ashore on the coast of Malaya. On 3 May, after a long chase and several failed attempts, she torpedoed and sank the army cargo ship Amagi Maru forty miles south of Port Blair in the Andamans.

In June she was depth-charged by a patrol vessel and lay quiet while an anti-submarine trawler swept overhead, laid twelve mines in the Strait, and on 10 June sank the army cargo ship Hiyoshi Maru with her gun. Gun actions were the rule rather than the exception in these waters, because most of what the Japanese had left was too small or too shallow to be worth a torpedo.

On 17 July, a day after an escort had depth-charged her close enough to cause damage, she found a Japanese submarine, I-166, and was manoeuvring to attack when the Japanese boat turned away before she could fire. Later that same day HMS Telemachus (P321) found I-166 and sank her with a single torpedo, and that story is told in Telemachus's article.

In July Tantalus was off Sabang in northern Sumatra as the lifeguard submarine for an Eastern Fleet air and gun attack on the harbour, waiting on the surface to pick up any aircrew who came down in the sea. Sabang is the one battle honour she carries.

From Fremantle: the South China Sea

In August, with Mackenzie ill, Lieutenant Jeremy Nash took her out instead, and on 29 August a bomb from an aircraft burst about seventy feet away and smashed the navigation lights on her bridge. She was depth-charged again on 1 September and hunted for hours on the 10th by submarine chasers and aircraft together, and she ended that patrol at a new base.

In September 1944 the flotilla moved to Fremantle in Western Australia, which put the South China Sea and the Java Sea within reach.

On 2 November, some 225 miles east of Singapore, she torpedoed and sank the cargo ship Hachijin Maru and damaged the submarine chaser escorting her, and on 11 November she sank the coaster Pahang Maru by gunfire off the east coast of Malaya, picking up survivors and putting the Malay crew ashore on a passing Chinese junk.

The wider story of British submarines against Japan, working from Ceylon and Fremantle, is told well in HMS Tally-Ho (P317), and HMS Statesman (P246) fired the last British torpedo of the war in the same waters.

Fifty-Five Days

On 3 January 1945 Tantalus sailed from Fremantle for her seventh war patrol. Her first job was to act as lifeguard again, this time for the British Pacific Fleet's carrier strikes on the oil refineries at Palembang in Sumatra in late January, waiting off the coast in case aircrew ditched.

One aircraft was thought to have come down in her area, but no distress call was heard and nobody had to be picked up.

Then she went hunting in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Thailand. There was very little left to hunt.

She sank a small motor vessel off the Bangka Strait on 30 January with her gun, most of whose survivors refused to be picked up, and a fishing vessel the next day, taking twelve of its crew aboard, and on 1 February a tug and three barges.

On 11 February, east of the Anambas Islands, her periscope showed her two of the strangest warships of the war: the battleship-carriers Ise and Hyuga, battleships with their after turrets replaced by flight decks, running north from Singapore to Japan loaded with fuel and stores. They had a heavy air escort, and Tantalus was forced to dive away before she could get into a firing position. It was as near as her name ever came to describing her.

She got back to Fremantle on 26 February. She had been at sea for fifty-five days, thirty-nine of them on patrol, and had covered 11,692 miles, nearly half the distance round the world, without putting into port. It was the longest patrol any British submarine made in the Second World War.

For a conventional submarine of the 1940s, running on batteries and diesels, with the fresh food long gone and the air below growing foul by every evening, it was an extraordinary piece of endurance by Mackenzie and his crew. The nuclear submarines that came after could stay down for months, and the record for those is told in HMS Trenchant (S91); but they make their own air and water.

After the War

Mackenzie handed over in June 1945 to Lieutenant Laurence Oliphant, and William Fox had her from August. The flotillas in the east were reorganised in April 1945, and Tantalus was sent home.

She served on into the late 1940s, and the photograph at the top of this page shows her lying at a buoy in Plymouth Sound on 5 August 1948, her bow tubes just clear of the water and her war over. She was sold for scrap and broken up at Milford Haven in November 1950.

Mackenzie's career did not end with her. He became Flag Officer Submarines, and in December 1962, after Britain agreed to buy the Polaris missile from the United States, he was told he was to be the first Chief Polaris Executive, the officer responsible for building the submarines, the base, the missiles and the trained crews of a national nuclear deterrent from nothing.

He did it in five years, and the first of the boats, HMS Resolution, went on patrol in 1968, on time. He retired that year as Vice Admiral Sir Hugh Mackenzie, wrote his memoirs as The Sword of Damocles, and died in 1996.

From the man who made the longest British submarine patrol of the war to the man who sent the first British deterrent submarine to sea on patrols of two months and more is not as long a step as it looks. Never satisfied, as his crew had said.