HMS Torbay (N79): A Victoria Cross Earned in Corfu Harbour

The Build: Chatham

HMS Torbay was built at Chatham Dockyard, launched on 9 April 1940 and commissioned on 14 January 1941 under Lieutenant Commander Anthony Cecil Capel Miers, a T-class submarine of 1,090 tons surfaced displacement that went on to compile one of the more formidable, and more controversial, combat records of any British submarine in the Mediterranean.

A Formidable Tally

Over the course of her Mediterranean service, Torbay sank 17 merchant ships totalling some 38,000 tons, five warships including the Italian submarine Jantina, and 24 sailing vessels, alongside torpedoing and damaging the French tanker Alberta and the Italian oiler Strombo, and conducting special operations that included landing commando teams behind enemy lines in Libya.

That is one of the heaviest scorecards any British submarine compiled, and it is worth setting beside the others. HMS Upholder sank more and is the boat everybody names. HMS Parthian fought the Mediterranean from the first month to the last. HMS Splendid sank more tonnage than anybody during the decisive months of 1942 and 1943. Torbay belongs in that company, and she got there faster and more aggressively than any of them.

One of the officers aboard for a great deal of it is somebody who appears elsewhere in this story. Torbay's first lieutenant was Paul Chapman, barely twenty-one when he took the job, and the first lieutenant of a submarine is the man who holds her at the depth the captain asks for while the captain looks through the periscope. He later got a command of his own, HMS Upstart, and forty years after the war he sat down and wrote the whole Torbay story up. He is why a good deal of what follows is known at all.

The Corfu Harbour Raid

Torbay's most celebrated action came on 4 March 1942, when Miers took her into Corfu Harbour itself and fired torpedoes at a destroyer and two 5,000-ton transport ships, scoring hits on the supply vessels before withstanding some 40 depth charges during his withdrawal, a daring piece of submarine handling that earned him the Victoria Cross.

Seventeen Hours Inside a Defended Harbour

The citation is worth reading, because the summary does not begin to convey what he did. Torbay was inside the enemy's harbour for seventeen hours.

He took her up the South Corfu Channel on the night of 4 March after sighting a convoy going in, and then, because a submarine that has been running dived needs power, he charged his batteries on the surface, inside the harbour, in full moonlight, under the enemy's guns. There is no version of that which is not appalling to contemplate. A submarine on the surface at night in a defended anchorage is a large black object on a lit sea with nowhere to go.

Then he could not see his targets, so he waited. For several hours, submerged, inside the harbour, while it got light. And on the morning of 5 March he attacked in full daylight in a glassy calm, which is the worst possible condition for a submarine because a periscope in a flat sea leaves a visible feather of wake that anybody looking will spot.

The citation puts it plainly: the raid was "planned with full knowledge of the great hazards to be expected during seventeen hours in waters closely patrolled by the enemy". He then had to withdraw down a long channel with anti-submarine craft all round him and aircraft overhead, taking some forty depth charges on the way out. He came home.

A Difficult Chapter

Torbay's record cannot honestly be told without acknowledging a properly troubling episode.

In July 1941, Miers is recorded, in his own official logs, as having ordered his crew to open fire with a Lewis gun on German soldiers in a rubber raft after their vessels had been attacked, an action that drew a formal reprimand at the time and that stands today as a serious and disputed stain on an otherwise celebrated record, one that later historians have continued to debate in the context of the wartime pressures and conventions of submarine warfare in the Mediterranean.

The record deserves setting down exactly, because vagueness serves nobody here. In July 1941 Torbay attacked vessels carrying a German garrison. Men got off into a rubber raft, and Miers ordered them engaged with a Lewis gun. His own patrol log records it in these words: "Submarine cast off, and with the Lewis gun accounted for the soldiers in the rubber raft to prevent them from regaining their ship." Paul Chapman, watching, wrote that everything and everybody was destroyed by one sort of gunfire or another.

Two things about that are worth holding on to. The first is that Miers made no attempt whatever to hide it. He wrote it in the official log, in plain language, and sent it up the chain, which is not the behaviour of a man who believed he had committed a crime. He evidently thought soldiers who could regain their ship were still combatants.

The second is how the Navy responded, and it is not creditable. Flag Officer Submarines raised the matter with the Admiralty, and the concern recorded was the risk of German reprisals against British submariners. The Admiralty then sent Miers a strongly worded letter advising him not to repeat the practices of his last patrol. He was told to stop, on grounds that were substantially practical, and he kept his command.

Seven months later the same officer was awarded the Victoria Cross, and it is not a contradiction so much as an uncomfortable fact about the same man. Both things are in the record because he put one of them there himself.

The End of Her Service

Torbay went on to serve in the Pacific Far East before the war's end, and was sold for breaking on 19 December 1945, scrapped at Briton Ferry in Wales in March 1947, bringing to a close the career of a submarine whose story combines genuine heroism with an episode that deserves to be remembered honestly rather than airbrushed away.

Miers went a long way afterwards. He served in the United States, commanded the 1st Submarine Squadron from the depot ship HMS Forth, and finished his sea career in command of the aircraft carrier HMS Theseus, which is about as far from a T-class submarine as the Royal Navy could send him. He became a Rear Admiral and Flag Officer Middle East, and was knighted.

He also spent fourteen years, from 1967 to 1981, as National President of the Submarine Old Comrades Association, which says something about how the submarine service itself regarded him. Whatever historians make of July 1941, the men who had done the same job did not disown him.

That last line of the record is the right one and worth restating. A submarine can have both of these things in her history at once, and the useful thing to do with a difficult record is to publish it accurately rather than choose which half to keep.