HMS Totem (P352): Lost as INS Dakar

Completed as the War Ended

HMS Totem was a Group 3 T-class submarine that entered service in the final months of the Second World War, too late to see the wartime action her class had been built for, and instead going on to a long and eventful peacetime career.

The bare facts of her building are worth having. She was ordered from Devonport Dockyard on 30 May 1942, laid down that October, launched on 28 September 1943 and commissioned on 9 January 1945 under Lieutenant Commander Michael Beauchamp St John, DSC.

And she was not quite as late as that sounds. Totem made a war patrol off the Norwegian coast near Bergen in April 1945, went out to the Far East, and sailed from Fremantle for the Java Sea on 13 August 1945. She was recalled two days later, because Japan surrendered while she was on her way to her patrol area. She missed the war by roughly the length of a passage.

The Totem That Was Not Aboard

The thing everybody remembers about her has nothing to do with any of that. During a visit to Canada in 1945 the Cowichan people of Vancouver Island presented the boat with a totem pole. It was a real one, carved and given, and it was carried on the front of her fin when she was in harbour. A story grew up around it in the way these things do among submarine crews: so long as the totem sailed with her, no harm would come to the boat.

For twenty-two years nothing did. And when she sailed from Portsmouth in January 1968 under another flag and another name, the totem was not aboard her. It had stayed in Britain and it is in the Royal Navy Submarine Museum at Gosport today.

Nobody sensible thinks a piece of carved cedar keeps a submarine afloat, and it should be said plainly that the coincidence is a coincidence. It is also the reason a great many submariners who never went near her know her name.

A Substantial Postwar Rebuild

Between 1951 and May 1953, Totem underwent extensive conversion at Chatham Dockyard, gaining a 14-foot hull extension, additional electric motors, a streamlined profile and updated radar and sonar, work that pushed her top speed beyond 18 knots.

That rebuild is the reason she had a career at all. Eight of the newer all-welded T boats went through the Super-T conversion, and it was not a refit so much as a reconstruction. The pressure hull was cut through and a new section let in to carry an extra pair of electric motors and their switchgear, more batteries went in below the control room, the gun and the external torpedo tubes came off and the old conning tower was replaced by a smooth fin.

The hull section varied from boat to boat, between about fourteen feet and some twenty, and Totem got the shorter one. HMS Tiptoe had twenty feet and spent over two years at Chatham getting them. HMS Tabard and HMS Truncheon went through the same programme.

Eighteen knots underwater is the figure that matters. A wartime T-class boat could manage perhaps nine and only for a few minutes, which meant a submerged submarine could not run away from anything. Doubling that speed turned a boat designed to ambush merchant ships into one that could realistically hunt another submarine, which was the entire point of the exercise and the reason a 1943 hull was still worth spending money on in 1951.

She took part in the 1953 Coronation Fleet Review, and in early 1955 conducted Operation Defiant, a Barents Sea patrol gathering intelligence on Soviet naval forces during which she was heavily depth-charged, a tense reminder that Cold War intelligence work could be every bit as dangerous as wartime combat patrols.

It got closer than the summary suggests. Totem was detected by Soviet forces, depth-charged, and crash-dived to 280 feet to break contact. In getting clear she drifted into a minefield and came out the other side of it unharmed.

The point that is easy to miss is that none of this could be admitted. In 1955 Britain and the Soviet Union were not at war, so a British submarine being hunted and bombed inside Soviet home waters was an incident neither government wanted to discuss and neither did. The crew came home, said nothing, and got no recognition of any kind, and the patrol reports stayed closed for decades.

That was the arrangement for the whole of the Cold War. A submarine sent north to listen was sent to a place where being found meant being attacked and where being sunk would have been explained to the public as an accident. Several of the men who did that work spent their lives unable to tell their families where they had been.

Sold to Israel

In 1965, Totem was sold to Israel alongside her sister submarines Truncheon and Turpin, and after modification with an airlock for naval commando operations, she was commissioned into the Israeli Sea Corps as INS Dakar on 10 November 1967 under Lieutenant Commander Ya'acov Ra'anan.

Israel had good reason to want her. A small country with a long coastline and no strategic depth gets a great deal from submarines, which can sit off a hostile coast for weeks and cannot be found from the air, and the airlock fitted for swimmers made her a delivery system for special forces as well as a torpedo platform. Three second-hand British boats were an enormous step up from what the Israeli Sea Corps had.

She was also carrying sixty-nine men against a normal complement of about sixty. That is not sinister and it is worth explaining: a delivery voyage carries the crew who will operate her plus the people still training on her plus, often, dockyard and technical staff. It does mean that when she was lost, nine more men died than the boat was designed to hold.

Lost With All Hands

Dakar departed Portsmouth on 9 January 1968 bound for Haifa, carrying 69 men, considerably more than her normal complement. Her last position report, placing her east of Crete, came at 06:10 on 24 January 1968; further transmissions that followed lacked position data, and her final message was sent shortly after midnight on 25 January.

Despite an extensive multinational search, nothing was found of the boat herself for more than thirty years, an agonising and unresolved loss for the families involved. It was not until 28 May 1999 that the wreck was finally located, at a depth of around 3,000 metres between Crete and Cyprus, by the Nauticos Corporation.

One piece of her did come back, and it caused more grief than it settled. On 9 February 1969, just over a year after she disappeared, Dakar's stern emergency marker buoy washed ashore at Khan Yunis, near Gaza.

An emergency buoy is designed to be released from a bottomed submarine and float to the surface on a cable, carrying a light and a telephone, so that rescuers can find her and speak to the men inside. Finding one adrift means the boat let it go, or lost it, and it tells you almost nothing about where she is, because a buoy that parts from its cable will then drift for as long as the sea cares to carry it.

What it did do was concentrate the search off the Israeli and Egyptian coasts, hundreds of miles from where she actually lay, and it kept hope alive in a particularly cruel way for the families. Thirty years later the wreck was found between Crete and Cyprus, which is roughly where she had reported herself on 24 January 1968 and a very long way from Gaza.

Investigators concluded she had suddenly and rapidly dived beyond her maximum depth limit, suffering a catastrophic hull rupture, though the underlying cause was never definitively established.

She was not the only one. 1968 took four submarines from four different navies. Dakar went down in the last week of January; the French Minerve was lost off Toulon on 27 January, three days later, and was not found until 2019; the Soviet K-129 went down in the Pacific in March; and USS Scorpion was lost in the Atlantic in May.

There is no common cause and no conspiracy in that, and people have looked hard for both. Four navies were running large numbers of ageing or heavily modified submarines very hard, in deep water, with crews and equipment stretched, and the sea does the rest. What the coincidence did produce was a serious international rethink of submarine escape and rescue, which is why purpose-built rescue submersibles exist at all.

It is worth remembering how little help would have been available in any case. Dakar lies in three thousand metres of water. Nothing in 1968 could have reached her, and nothing today could rescue anybody from that depth either. Below a few hundred feet the question is never rescue, it is only recovery, and often not even that. When HMS Reclaim found HMS Affray in the Channel seventeen years earlier, at a small fraction of that depth, all seventy-five aboard were long dead and everybody had known they would be.

Her conning tower was recovered in 2000 and now stands as a memorial at Haifa's Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum, a permanent tribute to the 69 men lost aboard her.

So there are two memorials to the same submarine, about two thousand miles apart. Her conning tower stands in Haifa under an Israeli flag with sixty-nine names attached to it. Her totem pole stands in a museum in Gosport, a few hundred yards from the water she sailed from.

Between them they cover the whole of her: a British boat that was finished too late for one war, rebuilt for a colder one, sent to listen where she was not supposed to be, sold on, and lost on a delivery voyage before she had done a day of the work she was bought for. Twenty-three years of service and the last ten weeks of it under a flag she had worn for a matter of months.