HMS Untiring (P59): A Halibut Boat Sunk by Accident

Constructed at Newcastle

HMS Untiring was built by Vickers Armstrong at Newcastle-on-Tyne, launched on 20 January 1943 and commissioned on 9 June 1943 under Lieutenant Robert Boyd, a U-class submarine that would go on to fifteen war patrols, chiefly in the Mediterranean after initial operations off Norway and in the Bay of Biscay.

Fifteen war patrols is a great deal for a boat commissioned in June 1943, and it says something about how hard these small submarines were worked. A U-class boat was about 640 tons, some 191 feet long, with a crew of around thirty-three living in a single steel tube with no privacy and very little air. She was designed before the war as an unarmed training target and pressed into a shooting war because she was what Britain had.

An Unfortunate Start

During her shakedown cruise off Norway on 27 August 1943, Untiring sank the Norwegian fishing vessel Havbris I while it was out fishing for halibut, a remarkably awkward opening note for a submarine that would soon go on to far more legitimate targets.

What Happened to the Seven Men on the Halibut Boat

The story has an ending that the awkwardness usually swallows, and it is worth having. Nobody aboard the Havbris I was killed.

She was a Norwegian fishing vessel, registration M-96-G, under a master named Andreas Strandkleiv, working about fifty-five miles off the Norwegian coast, and Untiring sank her with gunfire on 27 August 1943. Her crew of seven were taken aboard the submarine, and ten days later they were landed in the Shetlands. Not one of them was hurt.

Put those seven men inside a U-class submarine and consider the arrangements. She had a crew of about thirty-three in a hull with bunks slung between the torpedo tubes and no spare space of any kind. Adding seven Norwegian fishermen, who spoke little or no English, for the remainder of a war patrol, is not a small thing. They will have been fed, given somewhere to sleep by somebody who then had nowhere, and taken along while the submarine got on with her job.

As to why she sank a fishing boat at all: it was not a mistake in the sense of misidentifying her. Boats working that far offshore in occupied Norwegian waters did so with German permission, the catch fed the occupation, and fishing vessels were routinely used as lookouts, so they were considered fair targets. HMS Upstart was doing precisely the same thing to French fishing boats off Marseilles at the same period, and it is not a comfortable part of the record in either case.

What makes this one different is Shetland. Those islands were the British end of the clandestine boat traffic to occupied Norway, the route that carried agents, weapons and refugees back and forth throughout the war. Landing seven Norwegian fishermen there was landing them among their own countrymen. Untiring took their livelihood and their boat, and then delivered them somewhere they would be looked after, which is a considerably better outcome than most such encounters produced.

Real Successes in the Mediterranean

Untiring redeemed herself with a solid run of Mediterranean successes: Netztender 44, a German net layer also known as Prudente, on 14 December 1943; the barge F 296 off Genoa on 6 January 1944; the barges FP 352 and FP 358, known as Jean Suzon and St Antoine, off Cape Drammont on 31 January 1944; the auxiliary minesweeper M 6022, or Enseigne, on 11 April 1944; the auxiliary submarine chaser UJ 6075, or Clairvoyant, off Toulon on 27 April 1944; the merchant vessels Diana and Astrée that April and May; and finally the auxiliary submarine chaser UJ 6078, or La Havraise, on 10 June 1944, a productive run against a mix of naval auxiliaries and merchant shipping.

Read that list again for the names rather than the types. Prudente. Jean Suzon. St Antoine. Enseigne. Clairvoyant. La Havraise. Almost every vessel she sank in 1944 was French, and had been taken over by the Germans, given a numbered designation and put to work as a net layer, a minesweeper or a submarine chaser against the Allies.

That was the pattern all along that coast after 1940. Germany did not have the ships to patrol the French Mediterranean shore, so she requisitioned French tugs, trawlers and coastal craft, put German crews or German officers aboard, and used them. So Untiring's war consisted largely of sinking French vessels, off France, on behalf of France, which is one of the stranger consequences of an occupation.

The Toulon and Genoa entries mark the same campaign that HMS Ultimatum was fighting from Algiers: blockading the coast, cutting the supply route down to the German forces in Italy, and picking off the small craft that kept it running. It was unglamorous, it was continuous, and by mid-1944 it had made the whole coast unusable.

A Long Retirement Under Two Flags

Untiring was loaned to the Royal Hellenic Navy in July 1945 under the name Xifias, serving with the Greek fleet for seven years before returning to British control in 1952.

Xifias is Greek for swordfish, and the loan was part of the same pattern that saw British submarines go to the Netherlands, France and later Israel: allied navies that had lost their boats and the yards to build more, and a Royal Navy with a surplus of small submarines it no longer wanted. Greece in 1945 was entering a civil war with a fleet that had spent five years operating from exile. HMS Sanguine went the same way, to a different navy, thirteen years later.

She was finally sunk as an Asdic training target off Start Point on 25 July 1957, and today rests in 53 metres of water near Salcombe in good condition, a popular dive site for those wanting to visit the submarine that once, memorably, sank a fishing boat by mistake.

Being expended as an Asdic target is a better end than it sounds, and it is why she is still there to visit. A worn-out submarine was worth more to the Royal Navy as something to practise finding than as scrap, and the ones chosen for it were picked because they were still sound. She was sunk off Start Point on 25 July 1957 and lies in about fifty-three metres in good condition.

It is worth saying that she is not a war grave. Nobody died in her and nobody is aboard, which is precisely why she can be dived and enjoyed in a way that the wrecks of boats lost with their crews cannot and should not be. Fourteen years after she stopped a Norwegian halibut boat and carried her crew home, she was put quietly on the bottom off the South Devon coast, and divers have been going down to look at her ever since.

She had been in existence for fourteen years and had served three navies, if you count the Royal Navy twice either side of the Greek loan. For a boat of six hundred and forty tons designed in the 1930s as a target for other people to practise on, there is a certain circular quality to finishing as exactly that, off Devon, on the orders of the service that built her.