Malta under siege and the base of the famous ‘Fighting Tenth’, however, offered few comforts, and in a renowned exchange between Captain Shrimp Simpson and Flag Officer Submarines (Horton), after the former had been taken to task for inviting HMS Turbulent, in the same signal that provided vital routing instructions, ‘to bring plenty of booze’, retorted to his senior:
‘Sir, I would have you know that in all the time I have commanded the Tenth Submarine Flotilla, never have I known anything like the disastrous series of misses that have occurred during the last month. This has coincided with Lazaretto’s supply of refreshment being completely exhausted. The two matters are not disconnected. I consider that anything to relieve the staleness of my overstrained COs is a matter of the most vital importance.’28
Ben Bryant commented: ‘Malta at the end of the siege was dreary; men who are subjected to considerable strain do not readily relax and regain their resilience when all is dull and depressing; they go stale. A stale CO would be that second or two slower, the second or so that makes the difference between success and failure.’29
Bromage’s action in Sahib in speeding up at the crucial moment was an example of the second between life and death. After one aircraft bomb (dropped on the area of torpedo discharge disturbance) and 56 depth-charges, Sahib managed to stagger to the surface, and the crew abandoned ship to be subsequently picked up and made prisoners of war by the Italians.
During each of the World Wars a number of British submariners became prisoners of war: 152 during the First, and 359 during the Second. To read the accounts of the manner in which they survived attack and remained alive to go into captivity is to appreciate the significance of the expression ‘a hair’s breadth’ in war. To put this into context, every 2 feet of depth for a submarine equates to an extra pound per square inch of pressure on the hull, so at the 500-foot depth at which HMS Splendid (Lieutenant Ian McGeoch DSO DSC) began her recovery from a depth-charge attack by the German frigate Hermes that felt as ‘if a gigantic sea-terrier had grabbed the submarine by the scruff of the neck with intent to kill’30, she would have been subjected to 2501b per square inch. For her to reach the surface before flooding water under this tremendous pressure overcame the reserve of buoyancy required to maintain upward momentum, was a miracle, and testimony to McGeoch’s speed of reaction. He and two-thirds of his crew became Italian POWs.
Others who survived from submarines attacked on the surface rather than dived were spared the gut-wrenching minutes of wondering whether the pressure hull would remain sufficiently intact to avoid its becoming their tomb, but their shortened experiences were nevertheless just as terrifying.
One of the unluckiest submarines to suffer such a fate was HMS E20 in the Sea of Marmara in November 1915. She had been working with HMS H1 as ‘chummy boat’31 and although they had both been surprised by the presence of FS Turquoise, they became a threesome. Part of the process of working together, in addition to conducting local water-space management and co-ordinating tasking, was to arrange a rendezvous to agree future tasking. HMS E20 was waiting for Turquoise in the agreed position when, at about 5pm in glassy conditions with a slight haze, the party on the upper deck, enjoying a leisurely smoke, suddenly spotted a periscope soon followed by the wake of a torpedo. The subsequent explosion blew the British submarine in half. Lieutenant AN Tebbs RN, the First Lieutenant, describes how ‘the wire for the heel of the foremast caught my foot and carried me down with the boat to a considerable depth. A rather curious fact was that the air which must have been forced out of the fore-hatch enabled me to take a breath before I actually got to the surface, and before I had got clear of the boat itself.’ Eight other men survived and were picked up by their attacker, U-14, an Austrian-built boat manned mainly by Germans. ‘We were treated with the utmost kindness and courtesy. Everything that could be done for our comfort was done.’ Tebbs was to learn the circumstances of HMS E20’s loss from U-14’s CO:
“‘You have the Frenchman to thank. We knew where you would be this evening from the Turquoise’s chart.” Some ten days previous to our being sunk we had arranged the rendezvous for the 4th/5th, and in the meantime, without informing us, she had attempted to go down the Straits once more, owing I believe, to lack of fuel. His periscope was shot away, and he surrendered his boat… On his chart was found, in writing, the time and place of the intended meeting with us.’32
Tebbs and his colleagues became Turkish POWs.
The experience of being well-treated once picked up was universal, but until that moment of recovery there was little respite from attack even though the submarine was evidently ‘hors de combat’. McGeoch in Splendid lost 18 men out of his crew of 48 through the continued shelling of the Hermes, and Bromage in Sahib reported that although it was obvious that his submarine was being abandoned, she still came under heavy attack from two escorts and a Ju88 aircraft. After he had been rescued Bromage thanked the CO of Climene for not firing to hit his stricken submarine, but the latter said he had been! What this demonstrates, despite the gracious charm shown by his enemy when Bromage had been rescued, was the determination to sink the hated submarine without regard for the survival of the crew. A similar plight befell HMS E13 when she ran aground in 1914 when attempting to enter the Baltic. Although in the neutral waters of Denmark she was repeatedly attacked by two German destroyers, and her crew fired upon by machine-gun when they attempted to swim to safety. It was only through the intervention of a Danish destroyer that the other half of the crew was not massacred.
In a similar vein, no comparison between the two wars would be complete without a brief mention of two actions that have been branded by some commentators as ‘war crimes’. Each involves British submarine commanding officers. They were those of Herbert in Baralong33 in 1915 and Miers in Torbay34 in 1942. Both ordered the shooting of apparently unarmed survivors following attacks conducted by them (albeit Herbert was in command of a Q-ship). Their thought processes were very similar to those who pressed home attacks with men in the water – while they remained a perceived threat, and until their contribution could be guaranteed to be at an end, they were subject to the ultimate penalty simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ben Bryant reinforces this message: ‘Submarining is often painted as a brutal game, but submariners are no more brutal than anyone else. Nobody should criticise the submariner unless he himself has been hunted, for it is when harassed that an animal becomes vicious.’35 Both Herbert and Miers had been hunted, and were in the classic mould of submarine commanding officers.
In both wars there could have been few greater responsibilities given to a young man than to command a submarine. Onboard he was a ‘Dictator’ simply because it was his judgement and actions alone that could bring success, failure or death. As Captain Fell, a ‘Captain Teacher’ on two occasions, put it, ‘He has no one to hold his hand, to advise or correct a fatal move. His eye alone can see, and his instinct sense, the correct and only tactic to pursue; on him rests all responsibility.’36 Dictator, yes, full of determination, yes, but as Ben Bryant points out, ‘no man relies more completely upon each and every member of his crew. A good submarine crew is far more than a team; they are as near as possible during attack, a single composite body using the CO as their eye and their director.’37
So perhaps there is after all an explanation of ‘The Trade’, but let a United States Air Force Officer have the last word on the subject. Colonel Bradley Gaylord was on board HMS Seraph for ‘Operation Kingpin’ in 1942 (the pick-up of General Giraud from Vichy France) when he noted in his diary:
‘How could you have claustrophobia among these smiling boys whose easy informality was so apparently a thin cover for the rigid discipline on which every man knows his life depends upon the other fellow.