HMS Taurus (P339): Engaging Cavalry From the Sea

Constructed at Barrow

HMS Taurus was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 30 September 1941, launched on 27 June 1942 and commissioned on 3 November 1942, a T-class submarine that would go on to serve across the Mediterranean, the Aegean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific in a properly varied war.

One name on her list of victims ought to stop a reader, and usually does not. The Bartolo was SPANISH, and Spain was neutral. Sinking a neutral merchant ship is not a small thing, and the reason it happened is that Taurus was working out of Algiers enforcing the blockade of Marseilles, which was in Vichy French hands and supplied through it. Neutral flags carried a great deal of the traffic the Allies were trying to stop, and running a blockade is a risk the shipowner takes knowingly.

The action itself was not clean or quick. On 6 March 1943, about twenty-five miles west of Marseilles, Taurus fired four torpedoes at the Bartolo from three thousand yards and missed with all of them. She then surfaced, chased the ship down, opened up with her four-inch gun from five thousand yards and fired thirty-four rounds before the Bartolo stopped. That is a long, grinding, entirely visible gun action against a three-thousand-ton merchantman in daylight off an enemy coast, and it is a very long way from the tidy periscope attack of the popular imagination.

A Ramming in the Aegean

In March 1943, Taurus sank the French merchant Clairette, the Spanish merchant Bartolo and the Italian merchant Derna by gunfire and torpedo, and that June she turned her attention to Greek waters, sinking seven Greek sailing vessels by gunfire in a single action off Piscopi on 11 June, and even ramming an eighth.

In one especially unusual episode during her coastal operations, she bombarded a small port and found herself engaging a Bulgarian cavalry unit, an odd sight for a submarine crew more used to shipping targets than mounted troops.

The Bulgarians need explaining, because they are the detail everybody stumbles over. Bulgaria joined the Axis in 1941 and was rewarded with a slice of northern Greece and Greek Thrace, which she occupied and administered for the next three years. So the coast Taurus was shelling was Greek, and the troops garrisoning it were Bulgarian, and there is nothing improbable about it at all once you know the map.

The cavalry part is genuinely odd, though. Horses were still in wide use in that theatre because the terrain is mountainous and there was very little fuel, and a mounted unit moving along a coast road was exactly the sort of target a submarine with a four-inch gun could reach and almost nothing else could. It remains a strange sentence to write: a British submarine, surfaced off a Greek island, shooting at horsemen.

Sinking a Japanese Submarine

Redeployed to the Far East, Taurus achieved her most significant success on 12 November 1943, torpedoing and sinking the Japanese submarine I-34 off Penang, along with two tugboats, a barge and the salvage vessel Hokuan I-Go. Mines she laid off Penang in April 1944 went on to damage the Japanese submarine I-37 and sink the transport Kasumi Maru, a lingering harvest from a single minelaying patrol.

The First Japanese Submarine

That sentence contains the most important thing Taurus ever did and rather undersells it. I-34 was the first Japanese submarine sunk by a Royal Navy submarine in the entire war. What she was carrying makes it better.

I-34 had left Kure on 13 October 1943 on the third of what the Japanese called the Yanagi missions: submarine voyages all the way to occupied Europe, carrying the raw materials Germany could not get and bringing back the technology Japan could not build. She was loaded with tin, tungsten, raw rubber and opium. Tin ingots had been built into her keel to serve as ballast, and bales of rubber were stowed under the planking of her upper deck, because there was no other space.

She was, in other words, a cargo ship disguised as a warship, on a voyage of some twelve thousand miles, carrying materials that mattered to the German war economy far more than anything her torpedoes could have achieved. She sailed from Seletar for Penang on 11 November 1943 and never got there.

Taurus was waiting because of codebreaking. Her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Mervyn Wingfield, had been positioned on Ultra intelligence, which is to say that somebody at Bletchley had read the Japanese signals and Taurus was told where to be. She sighted I-34 running on the surface at fourteen knots, fired six torpedoes and put one into her starboard side just below the conning tower.

Eighty-four of I-34's crew were killed. Around twenty men were still alive in the forward compartment with the boat on the bottom, and they got out because a chief petty officer, Miyake Kazumasa, managed to force a deck hatch open. Fourteen of them were picked up by a local junk whose crew had nothing to do with anybody's war, and were landed at Penang that evening. HMS Telemachus did the same thing to I-166 in the Malacca Strait eight months later, and the survivors there were also pulled out by fishermen.

One caution on the date. British records give 12 November and the standard Japanese reference puts the attack at half past seven on the morning of the 13th. That is almost certainly the two navies keeping time in different zones rather than anybody being wrong, and it is not the sort of thing that can be resolved now.

A Long Retirement Under Two Flags

Taurus survived the war and was transferred to the Royal Netherlands Navy on 4 June 1948, serving under the name Dolfijn before returning to British control in December 1953. She served a further seven years under her original name before being sold for scrap in April 1960, broken up at Dunston, a fittingly long career for a boat whose war had ranged from Greek islands to Bulgarian cavalry to Japanese submarines.

The minefield deserves a word too, because it is the quietest entry on her record and possibly the most efficient. Mines laid off Penang in April 1944 went on to damage the submarine I-37 and sink the transport Kasumi Maru, and they did it after Taurus had left, without anybody aboard her knowing. One night's work in shallow water close to an enemy base kept producing results for months. HMS Stoic and HMS Thule were doing similar work in the same waters.

Wingfield had her for the whole of it. He took command in September 1942 and ran twelve war patrols in two years, working first from Algiers on the Marseilles blockade, then from Malta into the Aegean, then from Beirut landing agents on Greek islands, and finally in the Far East. In May 1944 he brought her home the long way, by Aden, Port Said, Malta and Gibraltar to the Holy Loch, for a refit she had thoroughly earned. He finished his career as a captain, was naval attache in Athens and Tel Aviv through the Suez crisis, and retired in 1963.

Her Dutch years are the other unremarked chapter. The Netherlands had lost most of her submarine force and the yards that built them, so Britain lent her hulls, and Taurus became Dolfijn from 1948 to 1953. HMS Sturgeon had gone the same way five years earlier and for the same reason. Then Taurus came back, served another seven years under her own name, and was cut up at Dunston in 1960 after eighteen years, having sunk a submarine carrying opium and rubber to Hitler and shot at Bulgarian horsemen off a Greek island. Not many boats can claim either.