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.

That lieutenant is worth stopping on. When Roxburgh took Tapir out of Barrow at the end of 1944 he was already a DSO, a DSC and Bar. That is three decorations for gallantry earned before he had ever been given a boat of his own, all of it won as a junior officer in other people's submarines.

He went a very long way afterwards. Roxburgh finished as Vice-Admiral Sir John Roxburgh, KCB CBE, and was Flag Officer Submarines from 1969 to 1972, which is to say he ran the entire British submarine service through the years the Polaris boats took over the deterrent. The lieutenant who fired at U-486 spent the last part of his career deciding where the nuclear submarines went.

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.

One hit from six at 3,200 yards is a good shot and not a lucky one. A mile and three quarters is long range for a wartime torpedo attack, the target was a submarine rather than a ship, which means something small, low and difficult to range on, and a submarine attacking another submarine has to solve the problem in three dimensions rather than two. Firing a spread of six is not scattergun: it is the standard way of covering the errors in your own estimate of the enemy's course and speed, and one hit out of a spread is what a spread is for. HMS Trespasser fired three at a dead whale and HMS Taku fired eight at a tanker from eight hundred yards for a dud, which puts Roxburgh's afternoon in some perspective.

It also puts Tapir in a very small group. HMS Venturer had sunk U-864 two months earlier with both boats dived, which had never been done before and has not been done since. Tapir shot hers on the surface, which is the ordinary way of it, but killing a U-boat with a torpedo fired from a submarine remained a rare thing to the end of the war.

It is worth saying why there were U-boats off Bergen at all in April 1945. As the Red Army and the western Allies overran the German Baltic coast, the U-boat arm lost the bases and training areas it had used since 1939 and moved what was left to Norway. Bergen and Trondheim became the last working submarine ports Germany had, and boats were still sailing from them in the final month of the war. British submarines were stationed outside to catch them going in and out, which is precisely what Tapir was doing, and it is why a boat that commissioned at the end of December 1944 got a target at all.

What U-486 Had Done

The kill matters far more than a pennant number suggests, because of what U-486 was. On Christmas Eve 1944 she had torpedoed the Belgian troopship Leopoldville in the Channel, five and a half miles short of Cherbourg. Aboard were more than two thousand American soldiers of the 66th Infantry Division, being moved across to the Ardennes. More than seven hundred and sixty of them died, some in the explosion, many more in the water or crushed trying to jump to the rescuing destroyer in a heavy swell. Figures vary a little between accounts; none of them are small.

It happened within sight of a friendly port, on Christmas Eve, to men who had been in Europe for a fortnight. The United States Army classified the whole thing and kept it classified for about fifty years, so that families were told their sons had died in the Battle of the Bulge and were not told how. It is one of the worst troop transport losses of the war and one of the least known.

Two days later the same boat attacked the 1st Escort Group off Cherbourg with acoustic torpedoes and hit two frigates. HMS Capel sank. HMS Affleck was towed in and written off as a constructive total loss. All of that, the troopship and both frigates, was U-486's first war patrol.

She never completed a second. On 12 April 1945, three and a half months later and a couple of thousand miles north, Tapir found her off Bergen and put a single torpedo into her, and all forty-eight men aboard died. There is no tidy moral in that. The men in U-486 in April were largely the men who had been in her at Christmas, and the men they had killed were infantry who never saw the sea again either.

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 loan says something about 1948. The Netherlands had come out of the war with its navy wrecked and its empire in the East Indies coming apart, and it needed submarines quickly and had no way of building them. Britain had far more than it could man and was happy to lend. Zeehond means seal, which is a good deal more nautical than Tapir, and she spent five years in Dutch colours including a scientific expedition to Curaçao in 1949 before coming home in 1953.

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.

Twenty-two years, one war patrol and one torpedo that hit. There is an accident of geography in the ending: by 1966 Faslane had become the home of the Polaris force her old captain would shortly be commanding, and boats of her own class were being cut in half and rebuilt to chase Soviet submarines, as HMS Truncheon describes. Tapir was not one of those. She had done the thing she was built for once, comprehensively, and spent the remaining twenty-one years being useful in quieter ways.