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.

A Long Peacetime Career

Truncheon went on to a substantial postwar career with the Royal Navy before being sold to Israel in 1968, following her sister submarines HMS Turpin and HMS Totem, which had made the same journey a few years earlier. 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.

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.