HMS Tempest (N86): A Six-Hour Hunt in the Gulf of Taranto

Built at Birkenhead

HMS Tempest was built by Cammell Laird at Birkenhead, launched in June 1941 and commissioned on 6 December 1941, a T-class submarine of 1,090 tons surfaced displacement, armed with eleven torpedo tubes and a 4-inch deck gun, carrying a complement of around sixty and assigned to the 1st Flotilla operating out of Alexandria.

The dates are worth putting together, because they explain a good deal about what went wrong. She commissioned on 6 December 1941 and she was dead on 13 February 1942. Ten weeks. The encounter described below was her second war patrol, which means her crew had been a crew for a matter of weeks and had been shot at exactly once before.

She had also arrived at the worst possible moment. The Mediterranean in early 1942 was killing British submarines at a rate the service could not sustain: HMS Upholder and HMS Urge were both gone within nine weeks of Tempest, and they were the two best boats in the flotilla with the two most experienced captains in it. A brand new boat on her second patrol was going into the most dangerous water in the world.

A Fateful Encounter

On 13 February 1942, during only her second war patrol, Tempest encountered the Italian torpedo boat Circe, commanded by Capitano di Corvetta Stefanino Palmas, while Circe was escorting the merchant vessel Bosforo towards Taranto. Under her commanding officer, the Australian-born career Royal Navy officer Lieutenant Commander Cavaye, Tempest attempted a surface attack, likely underestimating the danger Circe posed.

When the Italian vessel turned to ram, Tempest crash-dived, but the first depth charges struck as she was still descending, at around 03:22.

That timing is the whole disaster in a sentence. A crash dive takes a T-class boat something over half a minute to get under and rather longer to reach a depth where depth charges stop mattering, and during all of it she is going down slowly, in a straight line, from a position the man above just watched her leave. Charges arriving while she is still descending catch her shallow, level and exactly where Circe expected her to be.

It also explains the damage. A depth charge does not need to hit; it needs to be near, and the shock goes through the water into the pressure hull and shakes everything bolted to it. The things that break first are the ones full of liquid and glass, which on a submarine of 1942 meant the batteries.

A Long, Grim Hunt

What followed was a sustained six-and-a-half-hour hunt, during which Palmas expended his depth charges methodically until, with his very last pattern, he finally damaged Tempest badly enough to force her to the surface roughly 1,000 metres from Circe, a remarkably relentless piece of anti-submarine work by any measure.

Gassed Out, Not Sunk

It is worth being exact about what finally drove her up, because "damaged badly enough" covers something specific and horrible. Her battery tanks burst. A submarine battery is an enormous array of lead-acid cells sitting in a compartment beneath the deck plates, and when seawater gets into sulphuric acid the reaction produces chlorine gas.

Chlorine is heavier than air, so it fills a submarine from the bilges upwards. It attacks the eyes and the lungs, and in a sealed steel tube with no ventilation there is nowhere to go and nothing to breathe. It was the thing submariners feared more than drowning, and it is why boats surfaced into gunfire rather than stay down.

So Tempest was not sunk by Palmas. She was gassed out. After six and a half hours of being hunted she came up because the alternative was for sixty-two men to choke in the dark, and she came up a thousand metres from a warship that had been waiting all night for exactly that.

A Measure of Humanity Amid Loss

Of the 62 men aboard Tempest, only 23 survived, the remainder killed by Circe’s gunfire or lost to the cold Mediterranean waters.

The Boat That Would Not Sink

What happened after the crew went over the side is the extraordinary part, and it is missing from most accounts. Tempest, abandoned, refused to sink.

Palmas understood at once what was floating in front of him. An intact British submarine, empty, is not wreckage: it is the codes, the signal logs, the charts with the patrol areas marked on them, the Asdic set, and the boat herself. He tried to put a boarding party across and the sea was too rough to do it. He then opened fire at close range and scored more than a dozen direct hits on her, and she still would not go down, which says something about how these boats were built.

Eventually two of Circe's crew got aboard her. Two Italian sailors stood on the casing of a British submarine in the Gulf of Taranto and rigged her for towing, and Circe began to manoeuvre to take up the strain. Then Tempest chose her moment. She started to go, the two men had to jump for it, and she slid under stern first with her bows lifting until they were vertical.

That is as close as the Royal Navy came to losing a submarine intact to the enemy in the entire Mediterranean campaign. Everything aboard her went to the bottom of the Gulf of Taranto, and the Admiralty never had to find out what had been in her safe.

Circe deserves her due here, uncomfortable as it is. She was not a destroyer but a Spica class torpedo boat, a small escort of well under a thousand tons, and she was comfortably the most dangerous ship the Royal Navy submarine service met in that sea. She sank HMS Grampus off Sicily in June 1940, HMS Union off Cape Bon in July 1941, Tempest in February 1942, and then HMS P38 ten days after Tempest. Four British submarines to one little escort.

She did not last much longer than her victims. Circe was lost on 27 November 1942, not to the enemy at all but in a collision, which is a thoroughly undignified end for the best submarine-hunter Italy had.

What has been separately and consistently recorded, however, is that Palmas treated the survivors he recovered with genuine humanity, providing food, hot drinks and clothing before delivering them to the Italian mainland, a small note of decency in an otherwise sombre and costly episode of the war at sea.

It is worth noticing how unusual it is to be able to say that at all. Most submarines that failed to return simply failed to return, and the whole account of their last hours is a blank: HMS Thorn has no survivors and no wreck, and the same is true of the great majority. Tempest is documented in this detail for one reason only, which is that the man who killed her pulled twenty-three of her people out of the water and looked after them, and they came home in 1945 and were able to say what had happened.

Palmas went on hunting submarines and was good at it. Cavaye did not survive, and neither did thirty-eight of his men. Ten weeks and two patrols is the whole of Tempest, and she is remembered for a night when she was hunted for six and a half hours, gassed out of her own hull, shot to pieces, boarded, and then sank rather than be taken. HMS Torbay and the boats that lasted longer wrote better records. Very few wrote a stranger one.