HMS Tuna (N94): Delivering the Cockleshell Heroes

Laid Down at Greenock

HMS Tuna was built by Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Greenock, launched on 10 May 1940 and commissioned on 1 August 1940, a T-class submarine that would go on to combine conventional anti-shipping patrols with two of the more celebrated special operations of the entire war.

A Beacon for the Vagsoy Raid

Across 21 war patrols in the Bay of Biscay and Norwegian waters, Tuna sank the captured Norwegian merchant vessel Tirranna on 22 September 1940, then carrying Allied prisoners, the German catapult ship Ostmark and the French tug Chassiron, and in December 1941 served as a navigational beacon guiding the commando raid on the Norwegian island of Vagsoy during Operation Archery, a role every bit as important as any torpedo attack.

That beacon job is worth understanding. A commando raid on a Norwegian island in December arrives before dawn, in the dark, on a coast of near-identical fjords and headlands, and getting the landing craft to the right beach at the right minute is the difference between a raid and a shambles. A submarine, sitting exactly where she has been told to sit, showing a shaded light to seaward, gives the force a fixed point to run from. She cannot move and she cannot hide, and if the raid goes wrong she is the closest British object to the enemy.

The Tirranna belongs to a much darker category, and it is right that the record flags it. She was a Norwegian ship taken as a prize by a German raider, and she was carrying Allied prisoners when Tuna sank her in September 1940. It happened repeatedly: HMS Tigris sank a ship carrying Greek prisoners of war in 1943, and HMS Tradewind torpedoed one carrying Allied prisoners and Javanese labourers in 1944 with the loss of over five thousand lives. In every case the submarine had no possible way of knowing.

The Cockleshell Heroes

Tuna's most famous mission came in the first week of December 1942, when, under Lieutenant Commander Dick Raikes, she carried twelve Royal Marines commandos to the mouth of the Gironde estuary and launched them by canoe for Operation Frankton, the legendary raid on shipping in Bordeaux harbour that became known to history as the story of the Cockleshell Heroes.

Bad weather and enemy minefields delayed her arrival by a day, a small but genuine complication in an operation that demanded split-second timing, yet the mission went ahead regardless, becoming one of the most celebrated special operations raids of the entire war.

Ten Men Went. Two Came Back.

Celebrated is the word that always gets used, and it does a great deal of work. The facts underneath it are these.

Tuna sailed at the end of November and, after the delay caused by weather and minefields, put the canoes into the water on the night of 7 December 1942, off the mouth of the Gironde. Six canoes had been embarked. One, Cachalot, was damaged as it was being got out through the hatch, so her two men stayed aboard and went home in the submarine, which must have been the worst journey of their lives. Ten men went on in five canoes.

Their orders were to paddle roughly sixty miles up the Gironde estuary, at night, against the tide, hiding by day, and to attach limpet mines to German blockade runners in Bordeaux harbour. They were led by Major Herbert Hasler, known as Blondie. They damaged six ships.

Two of the ten survived. Hasler and Marine Bill Sparks got out through occupied France and Spain and eventually home. Sergeant Samuel Wallace and Marine Robert Ewart were captured almost immediately and were shot at Blanquefort on 12 December 1942, five days after they left the submarine. Corporal Laver, Marine Mills, Lieutenant MacKinnon and Marine Conway were captured later and shot in Paris in March 1943. Two more, Sheard and Moffatt, died in the water from cold when their canoe was swamped.

The executions were carried out under Hitler's Commando Order of October 1942, which directed that Allied commandos were to be killed even if they surrendered in uniform. These men were in uniform. They were shot anyway, and the order was one of the charges at Nuremberg afterwards.

It is worth holding on to what Tuna's part in it actually was. Her crew watched ten men paddle away from the side of the submarine into the dark, off an enemy coast, with a hundred miles of estuary in front of them and no possibility of being picked up again, and then dived and went home. HMS Stygian did the equivalent job at Singapore three years later.

Sinking a U-Boat

Tuna added a clear-cut combat success to her record on 7 April 1943, sinking the German submarine U-644 in the Norwegian Sea, alongside unsuccessful attacks on U-302, the Italian submarine Brin, and two further unidentified submarines during her career.

The U-644 attack is worth having in detail because of how close it was. At three minutes past nine on the evening of 7 April 1943, south-east of Jan Mayen island, Tuna heard diesel engine noise. Two minutes later she sighted the source: a U-boat on the surface, running at eleven knots, at a range of five hundred yards.

Five hundred yards is nothing. That is close enough to see men on the bridge. At nine minutes past, Tuna fired: six torpedoes were ordered and five left the tubes, the sixth failing. U-644 was destroyed.

What followed is the part that stays with you. Tuna surfaced into the wreckage and the fuel oil to look for survivors. Two bodies were in the water. There was also one man alive, swimming, and they could see him, and he drowned and went under before the submarine could reach him. Nobody was saved.

One submarine sinking another was uncommon and almost always happened exactly like this, with the victim on the surface and the attacker dived and unheard. HMS Venturer remains the only boat that ever did it with both submerged, which is a different order of problem altogether.

The End of Her Service

HMS Tuna was decommissioned to reserve on 1 September 1945 and sold for scrap that December, broken up at Briton Ferry in Wales in June 1946, closing out the career of a submarine whose quiet insertion missions proved every bit as historically significant as the ships she sank.

That is a fair verdict, and it is worth saying why. Tuna made twenty-one war patrols and sank a handful of ships, which by the standards of this queue is a modest record. What she is remembered for is putting other people ashore and then leaving: guiding a commando raid onto a Norwegian island, and launching five canoes into the mouth of the Gironde.

Frankton is usually credited to the Royal Marines, and rightly. But the operation did not start at the estuary. It started in a submarine, with men lifting canoes through a hatch designed for torpedoes, in the dark, in a swell, off a defended coast, and it could not have happened any other way. She was broken up at Briton Ferry in 1946, six years old, and there is no memorial to her anywhere.