HMS Tapir (P335): Disintegrating a U-Boat Off Bergen

Built on the Clyde and at Barrow

HMS Tapir's construction was shared between Vickers Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness and John Brown at Clydebank, laid down on 29 March 1943, launched on 21 August 1944 and commissioned on 30 December 1944 under Lieutenant John Charles Young Roxburgh, a T-class submarine that would score one of the more dramatic single kills of the closing months of the European war.

A Devastating First Patrol

Tapir departed Lerwick on 5 April 1945 for her first war patrol, bound for Norwegian waters north of Bergen, and on 12 April found and engaged the German U-boat U-486. Firing six torpedoes from 3,200 yards, she scored a single hit that proved utterly decisive: U-486 blew up and was seen to disintegrate, a spectacular and conclusive result for a boat barely a few months into her operational life.

Two Spells as a Dutch Submarine

After the war, Tapir was loaned to the Royal Netherlands Navy on 18 June 1948 and recommissioned as HNLMS Zeehond, serving in Dutch colours through a scientific expedition to Curaçao in 1949 before returning to British service on 15 July 1953 and being recommissioned under her original name that December.

The End of Her Service

HMS Tapir was finally scrapped at Faslane in December 1966, closing out the career of a submarine whose single torpedo hit off Bergen remains one of the more emphatic U-boat kills recorded by any British boat in the closing stages of the Second World War.