HMS Tigris (N63): A Decorated Career Cut Short Off Capri

Built at Chatham

HMS Tigris was built at Chatham Dockyard, launched in October 1939 and commissioned on 20 June 1940, a T-class submarine that would serve first under Commander Howard Bone in the Bay of Biscay and later, under Lieutenant Commander George Robson Colvin, in the Mediterranean.

The Bay of Biscay and Beyond

From July 1940, Tigris completed seven patrols in the Bay of Biscay, sinking the French fishing vessel Charles Edmond, the merchant ship Jacobsen and the German naval tanker Thorn, and attacking, though missing, the German U-boat U-58. She also carried out special operations inserting SOE agents, before moving to the North Sea near Scandinavia in 1941.

Those Biscay patrols need a word of explanation, because it is not obvious why a British submarine was hunting off the French Atlantic coast. After the fall of France the Germans gave the Italians a submarine base at Bordeaux, known as BETASOM, and something like thirty Italian boats operated into the Atlantic from it. So the Bay of Biscay in 1941 contained U-boats going to and from Lorient and Saint-Nazaire, Italian submarines going to and from Bordeaux, and British submarines lying off the estuaries waiting for both.

The special operations in that same paragraph are worth their own sentence, because they are a different thing from the Far East agent work that submarines are usually remembered for. Putting Special Operations Executive men into occupied France from a submarine off the Biscay coast meant closing a shore that was being fortified into the Atlantic Wall, at night, and landing people who would be shot if caught. A submarine can do it because she can arrive unseen and leave the same way, and in 1940 and 1941 there was almost no other means of getting anybody into France at all.

The Scandinavian work was more than the phrase suggests. Under Commander Bone she went a good deal further than the North Sea, operating into Arctic waters off northern Norway and Russia in support of the convoy route, and came home to the Holy Loch in December 1941 having made a considerable mess of a German convoy. That is three quite different wars, in three quite different seas, inside eighteen months.

Two Submarines and a Decoration

Tigris added two Italian submarines to her tally: the Michele Bianchi, torpedoed on 5 July 1941 some 150 nautical miles off the Gironde estuary, and then, after her redeployment to the Mediterranean in late 1942, the Porfido that December, a success that earned her commander, George Colvin, the Distinguished Service Order.

Two Submarines, Two Very Different Endings

The Michele Bianchi was one of the BETASOM boats. She was a Marconi-class submarine that had sailed from Bordeaux on 4 July 1941, and Tigris caught her the next day, on the surface, about a hundred and fifty miles out. She went down with every man aboard.

There is a footnote to that which says something about how these things were established. The Admiralty initially credited the sinking to HMS Severn, and it was only later that the times and positions were worked through and the kill was reattributed to Tigris. Submarine warfare is fought without witnesses, and who sank what was frequently settled years afterwards by clerks comparing two sets of paperwork.

The Porfido, eighteen months later and in a different sea, ended differently. Tigris fired two torpedoes on 6 December 1942; the first ran under her stern and the second hit between the conning tower and the stern, and she sank. Colvin then took his submarine to the spot and picked up survivors from the water: one Italian officer and three ratings.

That is worth pausing on, because surfacing beside a fresh sinking is how submarines get killed, and a great many captains did not do it. HMS Ultimatum took fourteen Italians out of the sea off Calabria for the same reason, and HMS Telemachus shows the more usual outcome, where the survivors were simply left. Four men came home from the Porfido because Colvin decided to stop.

In January 1943 she also sank the Italian merchant ship Citta di Genova, which was carrying Italian troops and Greek prisoners of war, a properly difficult and morally fraught target even in the context of submarine warfare.

The details are worse than the summary and should be set down. The Citta di Genova was a ship of some five and a half thousand tons running from Patras in Greece to Bari in Italy on 21 January 1943, and she was carrying about two hundred Italian military personnel and a hundred and fifty-eight Greek prisoners of war. She sank quickly. A hundred and seventy-three men died, and the survivors were pulled out by an Italian auxiliary called the Eolo and by a fishing boat.

So among the dead were Greeks who had been fighting on the Allied side, taken prisoner by the Italians, and killed by a British torpedo while being shipped to a camp. There is no satisfactory way to file that. The ship was a legitimate target carrying enemy troops, the submarine had no possible means of knowing who else was aboard, and the outcome was that an Allied boat killed Allied prisoners.

It happened repeatedly and on a far larger scale elsewhere in that war, and it is one of the reasons submarine warfare is so difficult to write about honestly. HMS Uproar had a very similar episode off Elba later the same year and it is still argued about in Italy.

Lost Without a Trace

HMS Tigris departed Malta on 18 February 1943 to patrol south-west of Naples and was last sighted at 07:30 on 24 February, 39 miles from Capri.

She is believed to have been sunk on 27 February 1943 by the German auxiliary submarine chaser UJ 2210 south-east of Capri, which hunted her with three separate depth-charge runs before a fourth and final pattern of fifteen charges found their mark, and was declared overdue on 10 March 1943 with the loss of her entire crew of 59, a heavy loss for a boat whose service record had been distinguished right up to her final, unwitnessed patrol.

The account of that hunt deserves reading slowly, because it describes exactly how a submarine dies when nobody survives to say so. UJ 2210 made three separate depth-charge runs and lost her each time. On the fourth she put down fifteen charges together, and that was the one that worked.

Three failed attacks means Tigris was doing everything right: going deep, going quiet, turning, changing depth, using whatever layers of temperature she could find. A hunt like that takes hours, and everybody aboard knows precisely what is happening because they can hear the propellers overhead and count the charges. HMS Thorn died the same way in the same sea six months earlier, after seven attacks.

Fifty-nine men were lost, and the Admiralty declared her overdue on 10 March 1943, eleven days after she had actually gone. She had been in commission for two years and eight months and had fought in the Atlantic, the Arctic and the Mediterranean, which is about as much as any submarine of that war was asked to do.