HMS Tiptoe (P332): Named Personally by Winston Churchill

Constructed at Barrow, Named by the Prime Minister

HMS Tiptoe was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 10 November 1942 and launched on 25 February 1944. She holds a particularly unusual distinction: she was one of only two Royal Navy vessels ever named personally by Winston Churchill.

The story behind it is better than the distinction. Churchill wanted a name that said what a submarine actually does, and his idea was a boat that could come up on the enemy quietly, on tiptoe. The Admiralty naming committee hated it. Their objection, recorded in the driest possible language, was that the name was derogatory to one of His Majesty's ships.

They lost. It is not difficult to picture the exchange, and it is a fair guess that the committee had a rather stronger case than the Prime Minister did and never stood the slightest chance of winning it. The other boat he named was HMS Varangian, after the Norse guard of the Byzantine emperors, which suggests he was working from a fairly wide range of reference at the time.

For what it is worth, the committee were wrong. A submarine crew will make an affectionate joke of a slightly ridiculous name faster than they will warm to a dignified one, and a boat called Tiptoe attracted a great deal of goodwill over the next quarter of a century, including, as things turned out, a present from a ballerina.

She departed her builders' yard on 10 June 1944, arrived at Holy Loch the next day, and was commissioned on 12 June.

Late to the Far East

After completing training, Tiptoe deployed to Trincomalee in Ceylon, arriving on 1 March 1945. Her first patrol, a reconnaissance off Burma and the Andaman Islands, passed largely without incident, but her second, in May and June 1945, brought sinkings of Japanese coasters and, on 1 June 1945, the merchant vessel Tobi Maru, along with depth-charge damage of her own.

Thirteen Charges and Nothing Left to Fight With

Those coasters were gun actions, and the logbook figures are worth quoting because they show what such an engagement really involved. On 15 May, off Sumbawa, she fired thirty-two rounds and hit nineteen times. Two days later, at Sepeh, eleven rounds and nine hits. That is careful shooting from a moving platform with a small crew on an exposed casing, and each one of those engagements was a decision to sit on the surface in daylight within sight of a hostile coast.

Tobi Maru went to a torpedo instead, a single stern shot into her engine room on 1 June. The reply was thirteen depth charges from her escort, and the damage they did was more serious than the sentence in the record suggests. Every one of Tiptoe's torpedo tubes was put out of action by air leaks, and her Asdic set flooded.

Consider what that meant. She was in the Flores Sea, several thousand miles from any dockyard that could help her, with no working torpedo tubes and no sonar, which left her a gun, a periscope and a pair of ears. She finished the patrol and brought herself home to Fremantle anyway. There is no medal for that and it is the kind of thing submariners regarded as simply the job.

Her third patrol, in July and August 1945, saw her working alongside HMS Trump to destroy further small Japanese vessels, including an 800-ton coastal tanker in the Sunda Strait.

The largest ship she ever sank rarely gets a mention at all. On 3 August 1945, off the Sunda Strait, Tiptoe fired four torpedoes at the merchant Tencho Maru and hit with two. Tencho Maru was 2,716 tons, which is very nearly three times the tonnage of everything else in her entire war record added together. She took four depth charges for it.

The joint work with HMS Trump is worth a word too, because these were not tidy affairs. On 2 August the two boats surfaced together and shot up a pair of sea trucks, sixty rounds apiece. On 9 August they took on the oiler, eighty rounds between them, hitting roughly half the time. Two submarines lying on the surface in the Sunda Strait in daylight, firing more than a hundred and forty rounds of three-inch, six days before the war ended.

It reads as recklessness at this distance and it was not. There was nothing left afloat in those waters worth a torpedo, torpedoes had to be carried out from Australia, and the ships that mattered were small enough to sink with a gun. So the boats surfaced and did it the hard way, and they covered each other while they did.

A Surprisingly Glamorous Peacetime

Tiptoe's postwar career took a colourful turn. She took part in a Royal Fleet review in 1947 attended by King George VI, demonstrating diving, surfacing and gunnery.

She featured in the 1950 film Morning Departure, itself inspired by the Thetis disaster of a decade earlier, and in 1952 the celebrated ballerina Moira Shearer presented her crew with a pair of ballet shoes, an eccentric but fondly remembered gift.

Both of those deserve their proper detail. In Morning Departure she played the fictional HMS Trojan, the boat that goes down on a mine with John Mills and Richard Attenborough aboard. Filming finished, and days later HMS Truculent was run down in the Thames Estuary and sank with the loss of sixty-four men. The producers came very close to shelving the picture altogether. They released it instead with a caption at the front saying the film had been completed before the loss, that they had given earnest consideration to whether it should be shown so soon, and that they offered it as a tribute to the officers and men of His Majesty's submarines.

Which means Tiptoe spent 1950 playing a submarine trapped on the bottom while the Navy was burying the crew of a real one, and there is nothing comfortable about that at all.

The ballet shoes were not just any ballet shoes. Moira Shearer gave the boat the pair she had worn in The Red Shoes, which had come out four years earlier and was the most famous ballet film ever made. A dancer presenting a submarine called Tiptoe with the shoes she danced in is the sort of thing that could not be invented, and the crew kept them.

Then she disappeared for two years. Between July 1952 and September 1954 Tiptoe went through the Super-T conversion at Chatham, one of eight all-welded T boats rebuilt for a different kind of war. Her pressure hull was cut through and a new twenty-foot section let into it aft of the control room, carrying an extra pair of electric motors and their switchgear. More batteries went in below the control room, the diesels were supercharged for another three hundred horsepower, and the gun, the external torpedo tubes and the old conning tower all came off, replaced by a smooth fin and a reshaped bow.

The point of all of it was speed underwater. A wartime submarine was a surface ship that could submerge; the Super-T boats were the Royal Navy's first serious attempt at the opposite, built to run fast and quietly at depth against Soviet submarines rather than sit on the surface shooting at coasters. HMS Tabard and HMS Truncheon went through the same programme. It is why a submarine launched in 1944 was still a front-line boat in 1965.

She also took part in submarine escape trials off Malta in 1962.

Those trials were rather more than a footnote. Seven men left Tiptoe and came up from a depth of 260 feet, which at the time was pushing at the limit of what anybody believed a man could survive without equipment beyond an escape suit and a hood.

The whole exercise existed because of boats like Truculent and the older losses before her. Every escape system the Royal Navy has ever fitted was proven by volunteers doing it for real, in the open sea, from a submarine deliberately sitting on the bottom. Those seven men were testing whether the drill worked so that somebody else, one day, would find that it did.

A Run of Bumps and a Long Retirement

Tiptoe's later years included a 1955 collision in Tromso harbour, running aground in the Firth of Clyde in 1964, and a collision with HMS Yarmouth in 1965, a submarine that seemed to attract minor mishaps the way others attracted decorations.

She was finally decommissioned on 29 August 1969, by which point she was the last T-class submarine in Royal Navy service, and was laid up at Portsmouth before being sold in 1971 and broken up there in 1975, with her anchor preserved today at Blyth in Northumberland.

That collision has a second half to it. She struck HMS Yarmouth on 13 July 1965 and went to Cammell Laird to be put right, and her commanding officer was reprimanded for it, which is the point at which a run of bad luck stops being funny. Yarmouth herself went in for a major modernisation the following year and was still in service seventeen years later, pulling survivors out of the water in the Falklands.

On the T-class distinction, one qualification is needed so that it is not overstated. Tiptoe was the last T boat in Royal Navy service, and she was not the last T boat afloat. HMS Truncheon had been sold to Israel the year before and went on serving for years after Tiptoe paid off, so the world's last serving T-class submarine flew a different flag.

The published record does not agree about her final disposal either. The commonly quoted dates for her sale and breaking up are the ones repeated in most accounts, but the submarine reference sources put the scrapping several years later and differ over when exactly she paid off, and there is no way to reconcile them from what is publicly available.

The anchor at Blyth is a good place to leave her. Blyth was where British submariners trained from the First World War onwards, and the memorial there carries the names of the boats and the men who did not come back. Tiptoe did come back, from everything, for twenty-five years, which given some of the company she kept is an achievement in itself.