HMS Unison (P43): Struck by Friendly Fire From an American Tanker

Built at Barrow

HMS Unison was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, her keel laid on 30 December 1940, launched on 5 November 1941 and commissioned on 19 February 1942, originally known informally as Ulysses before formally being renamed Unison in 1943, a third-group U-class submarine that went on to serve across a truly wide spread of theatres.

From the Arctic to Malta

Unison's early patrols took her on anti-U-boat operations northeast of the Shetland Islands in March 1942, before escorting the Arctic convoys PQ 15 and QP 11 to northern Russia that April and May, a demanding change of climate from the Mediterranean waters she would soon come to know well.

The word escorting there needs qualifying, because a submarine does not escort anything in the ordinary sense. She cannot keep station on a convoy, she cannot chase off an aircraft, and she is close to useless against a U-boat that does not oblige by surfacing in front of her.

What she was there for was the German heavy ships. Tirpitz, Scheer, Hipper and Lutzow were sitting in the Norwegian fjords, and the entire nightmare of the Arctic convoys was that they would come out and get among the merchantmen. So British submarines were stationed along the exits from those fjords and across the likely approach routes, not to protect the convoy directly but to be in the way, and to report. A submarine that sights a battleship and gets a signal off has done her job even if she never fires.

QP 11 is worth knowing about in that connection. It is the convoy during which the cruiser HMS Edinburgh, carrying Soviet gold westward as payment for supplies, was torpedoed and eventually lost. Unison was in those waters that April, in a sea where the water temperature gives a man in it a few minutes, and then went to the Mediterranean six weeks later.

In June 1942 she took part in Operation Harpoon, the supply convoy to Malta, attacking the Italian cruisers Raimondo Montecuccoli and Emanuele Filiberto Duca d'Aosta near Sardinia with four torpedoes, though no hits were obtained.

She sank the Italian merchant vessels Enrichetta, Marco Foscarini and Terni during further Mediterranean and Ionian Sea patrols.

Harpoon puts her in one of the worst convoy battles of the war. It was run in June 1942 simultaneously with Vigorous from the other end of the Mediterranean, on the theory that the Axis could not stop two convoys at once, and of the seventeen merchant ships that set out between them only two reached Malta. HMS Uproar was working the same operation.

Her own part in it was an attack on two Italian cruisers with four torpedoes and no hits, which sounds like failure and is not quite. A submarine that fires at a cruiser squadron forces it to turn, to scatter and to spend time hunting her instead of the convoy, and the time bought is often worth more than the ship missed. HMS Ultimatum was doing the same work out of Malta in the same months.

A Dangerous Case of Mistaken Identity

On 2 August 1943, Unison suffered a serious friendly-fire incident when she was fired on in error by the American tanker Yankee Arrow, sustaining pressure hull damage in the attack.

The officer of the watch was killed and three further crew members, including her commanding officer, Lieutenant Anthony Daniell, were severely injured, a heavy and painful cost inflicted not by the enemy but by an ally's mistake, the kind of tragedy that deserves to be acknowledged honestly rather than glossed over.

Why an Oil Tanker Had Guns

That closing thought is the right one, and the incident repays understanding rather than simply condemning. The Yankee Arrow was a merchant tanker, and by 1943 merchant ships were armed. They carried guns and trained gunners precisely because unescorted merchantmen were being sunk by submarines in enormous numbers, and their standing instruction was blunt: a submarine is hostile until proved otherwise, and you will not get the chance to prove it.

From the tanker's bridge, a submarine on the surface in a war zone is the thing that has been killing merchant seamen for four years. There was no reliable way to identify one at distance, recognition signals took time that a merchant crew did not believe they had, and the men behind that gun had every reason to shoot first. They were wrong, and they were wrong for entirely comprehensible reasons.

The cost fell where it always does. The Officer of the Watch was killed outright: he would have been on the bridge, which is the only place anybody is when a submarine is on the surface, and it is the part of her that gunfire reaches. Three more were badly hurt, including the commanding officer.

And it is worth knowing who he was. Lieutenant Anthony Daniell held the Distinguished Service Order and the Distinguished Service Cross and Bar, which made him one of the most decorated submarine captains in the flotilla. He had survived the Arctic and the Mediterranean and the Italian anti-submarine forces, and he was severely wounded by an American oil tanker.

A hull damaged by gunfire is also a particular problem for a submarine, because the pressure hull is the one thing that has to be perfect. A hole a destroyer could ignore is, for a boat that intends to go to three hundred feet, a reason to go home.

Service Under a Different Flag

HMS Unison was transferred on loan to the Soviet Union on 26 June 1944 and renamed V-3, serving in Soviet colours for five years before being returned to Britain in 1949 and scrapped at Stockton in May 1950, closing out the career of a submarine whose war had taken her from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and, briefly, into an entirely different navy altogether.

She did not go alone. HMS Ursula was handed over to the Soviet Union on exactly the same day, 26 June 1944, and became V-4 while Unison became V-3. They were part of a single transfer, and the reason for it was political rather than naval.

When Italy surrendered in 1943 the Soviet Union claimed a share of the captured Italian fleet. Britain and the United States were not willing to hand Italian warships over while the war was still being fought, so the compromise was to lend equivalent British and American ships instead. A battleship, a cruiser, some destroyers and four U-class submarines went north in 1944, and Unison was one of them.

Five years under the Soviet flag and then home to be cut up at Stockton in 1950. She was eight years old and had served in the Arctic, the Mediterranean and the Soviet Northern Fleet, been shot by an ally, and worn a Jolly Roger for the ships she sank. HMS Opossum explains what that flag meant and why submarines flew it.