HMS Truncheon (P353): The World's Last Serving T-Class Boat

Completed as the War Ended

HMS Truncheon was a Group Three T-class submarine that entered service in the final months of the Second World War, a boat of 1,290 tons surfaced and 1,560 tons submerged, armed with ten torpedo tubes, a 4-inch deck gun and three anti-aircraft machine guns, too late to see the combat her class had been designed for.

The dates make the point sharper than the phrase does. She was laid down at Devonport Dockyard on 5 November 1942, launched on 22 February 1944 and completed on 25 May 1945, which is seventeen days after the war in Europe ended. Her first commanding officer, Acting Lieutenant Commander Robert Julian Clutterbuck, had been appointed in 1944 and already held a DSO. She was handed over into a peace nobody had built her for, at a moment when the Royal Navy was about to have a great many more submarines than it could possibly want.

She was working up when the shooting stopped, and in October 1945 she was sent out to the Far East, where the war had ended two months earlier. What she did there is not recorded in any source worth relying on, which is true of a great deal of her twenty years under the White Ensign. She was among the boats kept rather than scrapped, and she was fitted with a snorkel mast, the German idea that let a diesel submarine run her engines while remaining submerged. That fitting was the first sign of where she was going.

What she was, though, was one of the good ones. The T class had been designed in 1935 and fifty-three were built, and they did the bulk of the Royal Navy's submarine fighting: HMS Tally-Ho sinking a Japanese cruiser in the Malacca Strait, HMS Thorough becoming the first submarine to circumnavigate the world. The last of them, Truncheon's group, were built with all-welded pressure hulls rather than riveted ones. That sounds like a detail for the yard rather than the crew. It decided the whole of the rest of her life.

Rebuilt Into Something Else

A welded hull is stronger than a riveted one and, crucially, it can be cut open and a new section welded into it. From 1948 the Royal Navy took eight of the all-welded Group Three T boats into Chatham Dockyard and rebuilt them into what everybody called the Super-Ts. Truncheon was one of the eight, along with Taciturn, Turpin, HMS Totem, HMS Tabard, Thermopylae, HMS Tiptoe and HMS Trump. The riveted boats could not take the stretch. Five of them were given a much lighter treatment from December 1950, losing their guns and external tubes and gaining a sail and better batteries, but no new hull section and no extra motors.

The work was drastic. A new section of hull, varying from boat to boat between about fourteen feet and some twenty, was let into the middle of each one to carry an extra pair of main motors and their switchgear. A fourth battery of 112 cells went in under the control room deck, taking her to 448 cells. Everything on the outside that caused drag came off: the 4-inch gun, the machine guns, the external bow torpedo tubes, the cluttered casing. The old conning tower was replaced by a smooth, symmetrical sail of the kind every submarine has worn since. Truncheon had her first round of streamlining in 1950 and 1951, including an American JT sonar set, and then went back to Chatham for the full stretch.

The point of all this was speed underwater. A T class boat as built could manage under nine knots submerged and not for long. A Super-T could do fifteen and better, and stay at three knots for around thirty-two hours. That is not a refit, it is a change of purpose: she had been designed to sit off a coast and torpedo merchant ships, and she came out able to run with a fleet and chase other submarines. The Royal Navy had looked at the German Type XXI and at what the Soviet Union was building from the same drawings, and concluded that the submarine that mattered now was one that stayed under and went fast.

There is a date for that conclusion. In January 1948 it was formally accepted that the main operational job of the British submarine force was no longer to sink merchant ships but to intercept Soviet submarines coming out of their bases in northern Russia to attack Allied shipping. Britain had spent two wars being nearly strangled by submarines and had decided that the best answer to one was another. It is a complete inversion of what the T class was drawn for, it was settled inside three years of the war ending, and Truncheon was cut in half at Chatham because of it. Everything British submarines did for the next forty years follows from that decision.

A Long Peacetime Career

Truncheon went on to a substantial postwar career with the Royal Navy before being sold to Israel in the middle 1960s, in the same purchase that took her sister submarines HMS Turpin and HMS Totem. All three went together on paper and separately in practice, each handed over as she came out of refit, and Truncheon was the last of them. She was commissioned into the Israeli Sea Corps as INS Dolphin, taking up a new life in a navy that would come to rely heavily on this generation of British-built boats.

Israel wanted these three boats specifically, and the rebuild is why. A navy in the eastern Mediterranean in the middle 1960s needed something that could work quietly in shallow, crowded water against neighbours with far larger surface fleets, and there was very little available: nobody sells submarines lightly, the Americans were not selling any, and the Super-Ts were modern enough to be useful and old enough to be sold. Totem was additionally fitted with an airlock so that naval commandos could leave and return while she was dived.

The handovers were spread across three years. Turpin went first and became Leviathan. Totem was commissioned as INS Dakar on 10 November 1967. Truncheon was the last, renamed Dolphin in January 1968.

That month is the one to sit with. Dakar sailed from Portsmouth on 9 January 1968 with sixty-nine men aboard, sent her last signal shortly after midnight on 25 January, and was not found for thirty-one years. HMS Totem carries the full account of what happened to her and of the wreck located in 1999 between Crete and Cyprus. Israel's submarine service took delivery of one of these boats and lost another in the same few weeks, and the two submarines were sisters, built to the same drawings and rebuilt in the same dockyard by the same hands.

The Last of Her Kind

Truncheon was finally scrapped in 1977, and at the time of her decommissioning she held a truly notable distinction: she was the only T-class submarine still in service anywhere in the world, the last survivor of a class that had first entered Royal Navy service in the late 1930s, bringing to a close nearly four decades in which some version of the T-class had remained operational somewhere on the globe.

She kept going for nine years under the Israeli flag, through the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and on until 1977, by which time the boats replacing her were German-designed and built at Barrow. Thirty-two years after Devonport handed her over, and forty-two years after the design was drawn, she was the last T class submarine at sea anywhere in the world.

It is a strange thing to be last at. She was completed too late for the war she was built for, cut in half and rebuilt for a war that never came, and sold to a navy that had her in commission through a war of its own. The class she belonged to sank more enemy tonnage than any other British submarine class, and the boat that outlasted every one of them never fired a torpedo in anger under any flag. Somebody has to be the one who turns the lights off.