HMS Uproar (P31): Standing By for the Bismarck

Constructed at Barrow, Renamed Twice

HMS Uproar was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down on 30 April 1940, launched on 27 November 1940 and commissioned on 2 April 1941, originally simply designated P31. She was briefly renamed Ulleswater in February 1943 before finally settling on the name Uproar that April, a submarine that changed identity twice before finding the one she would keep.

The muddle had a cause. Submarines had been given numbers rather than names since 1940, and in late 1942 Churchill overruled that and ordered names back, which left the Admiralty hunting for several dozen words beginning with U at short notice. Ulleswater was tried, presumably because somebody thought a lake sounded dignified, and was then dropped in favour of Uproar. HMS Ultimatum went through the same process at the same time and ended up with a name chosen by her own captain.

A Small Part in a Famous Hunt

While still known as P31, Uproar received orders during the pursuit of the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941 to take up a position west of Stadlandet in support of the interception effort, a small but genuine role in one of the most famous naval hunts of the entire war, even though detailed combat records from that specific deployment have not survived.

What she was doing there is clear enough even without the records. Stadlandet is on the Norwegian coast, and the concern in May 1941 was not only finding Bismarck but stopping her getting home. A damaged German battleship running for a Norwegian or Baltic port would take that route, so submarines were spread along it as a fence: not to hunt her, but to be in the way if she came.

It is worth remembering how new she was. P31 had commissioned on 2 April 1941 and this was the following month. Her first operational task was to sit off Norway on the off chance that the most powerful warship in Europe might come past, which for a boat of six hundred tons with four torpedo tubes is a considerable proposition.

Malta and the Mediterranean

Based at Malta with the 10th Flotilla for most of the war, Uproar sustained damage during an air raid while in port but continued operating after repairs. She sank the Italian patrol vessel D-15, or Brindisi, the merchant ships Chietti and Marin Sanudo, and damaged German tankers, while also taking part in the Malta supply operations Harpoon and Vigorous in June 1942.

Those two need a word, because June 1942 was the point at which Malta nearly starved. Harpoon came from the west out of Gibraltar and Vigorous from the east out of Alexandria, both aimed at the same island at the same time on the theory that the Axis could not stop both. It very nearly stopped both. Of seventeen merchant ships that set out, two got through.

The submarines' job in those operations was to lie off the Italian naval bases and report or attack anything that came out, which is the least visible and most useful thing a boat can do during a convoy battle. Uproar was one of the 10th Flotilla at Malta, working alongside HMS Upholder and HMS Urge in the months when that flotilla was being destroyed almost as fast as it could be reinforced.

Among her sinkings was the small Italian passenger ship Andrea Sgarallino, which was carrying both troops and civilians, only four of whom survived, a difficult episode that reflects the harsh and often morally complicated realities of submarine warfare in waters where civilian and military traffic could be difficult to distinguish.

The Andrea Sgarallino

This deserves setting out properly, because it is the hardest thing in her record and because the details matter to how it is judged.

On 22 September 1943 the Sgarallino was making the short crossing between Piombino on the mainland and Portoferraio on Elba, a route she had worked for years. Uproar torpedoed her and she broke in two and sank. Something over three hundred people died. Four survived.

Who was aboard is the part usually got wrong. Italian accounts of the sinking describe roughly two hundred soldiers and about a hundred civilians, not three hundred civilians. She was carrying troops as well as islanders going home, which is precisely the mixture that makes this kind of killing so intractable.

The context is the Italian armistice, which had been signed a fortnight earlier. Italy had changed sides, German forces had seized what they could of Italian territory and shipping, and the waters round Elba were now German-controlled. The Sgarallino had been obliged to take on military camouflage livery, and Italian accounts record a German military flag among what was visible. Through a periscope, at a distance, in September 1943, she looked like what the Germans had made her look like.

That is an explanation and it is not an excuse, and it should not be offered as one. Three hundred people are dead either way, most of them Italian, most of them by then technically on the Allied side, and the ones who were civilians were simply going home. It is said that there was not a family on Elba without a relative in her.

It is worth adding that the submarine had no way of knowing any of it. A periscope gives a few seconds of a grey shape at a distance, and there is no method by which a captain in 1943 could have counted the people on her decks or established that half of them were islanders. The decision that killed three hundred people was taken on a silhouette, a paint scheme and a flag, in a war where those were the only evidence available.

The island has not forgotten. On the fifty-eighth anniversary in 2001 the new pier at Portoferraio was dedicated to the victims, and there is a square at Marina di Campo named for them. A plaque marks the wreck. Whether the attack was justified is still argued in Italy, and it is not something a British article ought to settle in its own favour.

The End of Her Service

HMS Uproar survived the war and was placed in reserve at Portsmouth on 28 June 1945, before being sold for scrap in February 1946 and broken up at Inverkeithing, closing out the career of a submarine whose story began with a famous battleship hunt and ended, more quietly, on a Scottish scrapyard slipway.

She was five years old when she was sold, which was the fate of nearly all of them. The U class were small, cheap and built for a specific war in a specific sea, and once that war was over there was nothing for them to do: too short-ranged for the Atlantic, too small for the Pacific, and too numerous to keep. HMS Upstart was lent to Greece and lasted a few years longer. Most simply went to Inverkeithing and Troon in 1945 and 1946 and were gone before their crews had finished being demobilised.

What she leaves is a record that runs from standing guard off Norway for the Bismarck to a ferry full of people off Elba. Both were the same job done by the same boat under the same orders, and only one of them is comfortable to read about.