HMS Telemachus (P321): A Single Torpedo, Ninety-Four Seconds

Laid Down at Barrow

HMS Telemachus was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, launched on 19 June 1943 and commissioned on 25 October 1943 under Commander William Donald Aelian King, known to history as Bill King, a submarine commander who would later become famous as a solo round-the-world yachtsman.

That undersells him twice over. Bill King has a distinction no other man in any navy can claim: he was in command of a British submarine on the first day of the Second World War and in command of one on the last. Six years of it, without a break, in the arm of the service with the highest loss rate in the Royal Navy. He came out with a DSO and Bar and a DSC among seven decorations, and by his own account never fully slept again.

The sailing came out of that. In August 1968 he set off from Plymouth in the Golden Globe, the first race for a solo non-stop circumnavigation, in Galway Blazer II, a junk-rigged schooner of forty-two feet that he had helped design and had built for the purpose. He was fifty-eight. In the Roaring Forties, between South Africa and South America, she was rolled over in fifty-foot seas and both masts went. He got her to Cape Town.

He went again, and was holed by something in the Southern Ocean that he took to be a whale, and patched the hole himself in the water before making Fremantle for a proper repair. On the third attempt, in 1973, he got round. He then lived another thirty-nine years at Oranmore Castle in County Galway and died in 2012 at the age of a hundred and two, still, by all accounts, extremely fit.

It is worth holding those two halves together. The same man conned this submarine into firing position on a Japanese boat in the Malacca Strait in 1944 and, twenty-four years later, went round Cape Horn on his own in a wooden boat with sails borrowed from a Chinese junk. The temperament that makes somebody good at the first is not obviously different from the one that makes him attempt the second.

Sinking I-166

After a work-up patrol in the Norwegian Sea, Telemachus deployed to the Eastern Fleet at Colombo from July 1944 and, on 17 July, achieved her defining moment of the war. She sighted the Japanese submarine I-166 off One Fathom Bank in the Malacca Strait at 07:08, and twelve minutes later fired six torpedoes from a range of 2,300 yards.

A single torpedo struck home, and an explosion was heard just 94 seconds later; the Japanese submarine's commanding officer and several crew members survived the sinking, a rare moment of mercy amid the ruthless efficiency of the attack itself.

Ninety-Four Seconds

The numbers in that account repay a second look, because they describe the whole problem of a submarine attack. Telemachus saw I-166 at 07:08 and fired at 07:20. Twelve minutes to identify the target, work out her course and speed by watching her through a periscope that can only be raised for seconds at a time, calculate where she will be when the torpedoes arrive, manoeuvre onto a firing course without being seen, and shoot. That is the entire craft, compressed.

The ninety-four seconds is the run: the time between the torpedoes leaving the tubes and the explosion being heard. A torpedo of that era ran at about forty-five knots, so ninety-four seconds puts the hit at roughly the 2,300 yards the range had been estimated at, which means the solution was very nearly perfect. Six fired and one hit is not a poor return at that range against a target the width of a submarine; it is what a spread is designed to achieve.

What it did at the other end was total. Eighty-eight of I-166's crew were killed. Ten men who happened to be on the bridge, including her navigating officer, were blown into the water and left there, and seven hours later they were picked up by Malay fishermen who had no part in anybody's war and pulled them out anyway.

There is a symmetry to it that nobody aboard Telemachus can have known about. On the morning of 24 December 1941 the Dutch submarine K XVI torpedoed the Japanese destroyer Sagiri off Borneo, the first time any Allied submarine sank a Japanese warship. Within a day she was caught on the surface north-west of Kuching by a Japanese boat then numbered I-66, which put a single torpedo into her. She broke in two and went down with all thirty-six of her crew. That boat was renamed I-166 the following May, and two and a half years later she was destroyed in the Malacca Strait by a single torpedo, on the surface, exactly as she had done it herself.

A submarine killing another submarine was genuinely rare. It happened perhaps two dozen times in the whole war, almost always like this, with the victim on the surface and the attacker dived. HMS Tapir did it to U-486 off Bergen in 1945. Only HMS Venturer ever managed it with both boats submerged, which is a different order of difficulty and has not been repeated since.

Further Far East Service

Telemachus went on to transfer to the 8th Submarine Flotilla based at Fremantle in Western Australia, conducting special operations near Singapore that included agent insertion, a South China Sea patrol, and a final patrol cut short by engine trouble that required a medical evacuation.

Agent insertion is the phrase to slow down on. It means Telemachus closed a Japanese-held coast at night, put men into the water or into a folding canoe, and left. Those men went ashore into occupied Malaya to contact resistance groups, gather intelligence and survey beaches, knowing that capture meant interrogation and almost certainly death. The submarine then had to come back on an agreed night and find them again. HMS Stoic was doing the same work off Sumatra in the same period.

The rest of her Far East record is the ordinary version of that campaign, which HMS Thule describes: patrols in the South China Sea, a great deal of nothing, and small targets when anything appeared at all. Her last patrol was cut short by engine trouble and a man who needed a doctor, which is how a good many patrols actually ended.

A Long Posting to Australia

After the war, Telemachus deployed to Sydney in December 1949 and spent nearly a decade there, supporting Royal Australian Navy anti-submarine training. She returned to British waters on 9 December 1959 and was finally scrapped at Charlestown on 28 August 1961, closing out the career of a submarine commanded by one of the more colourful characters in Royal Navy history.

Ten years in Sydney is the larger part of her life and deserves more than a clause. She arrived in December 1949 as part of the Royal Navy's 4th Submarine Squadron, set up that year to give the Australian and New Zealand navies a real submarine to hunt, and she stayed until December 1959. HMS Trump carries the story of that squadron and of the evening in 1969 when the last British submarine left Sydney Harbour escorted by an Australian one.

So her record divides almost exactly in half. Two years of war, in which she killed a submarine and landed agents on a hostile coast, and a decade of peace spent being hunted by people learning how. She was scrapped at Charlestown in August 1961, eighteen years old, and her first captain outlived her by fifty-one years.