HMS Seraph (P219)

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HMS Seraph (P219) (ex P69)
Royal Navy
HMS Seraph
General data
Ship type : Submarine
Ship class : Seraph class ( S class )
Navy : Royal Navy
Builder : Vickers-Armstrong ( Barrow )
Keel laying : August 16, 1940
Launch : October 25, 1941
Commissioning: June 10, 1942
Whereabouts: Scrapped in 1965
Technical specifications

(see Seraph class )

The HMS Seraph was a submarine of the British Royal Navy in World War II and after.

The submarine was instrumental in several spectacular secret missions during the war.

history

The Seraph (see Seraph ) was a third batch of the successful S-Class boat . This lot is also known as the Seraph class .

She was laid down on August 16, 1940 at Vickers-Armstrong in Barrow-in-Furness, northwest England , launched on October 25, 1941 and was commissioned by the Royal Navy on June 10, 1942.

Shortly after the commissioning, the new building was ordered off the Norwegian coast. The two-week patrol went without incident or combat success.

Then the submarine was ordered into the Mediterranean .

On the march into the new operational area, the Seraph was mistakenly attacked by a British Whitley bomber off Cape Finisterre . The submarine survived the attack unscathed.

When she arrived in the Mediterranean, the Seraph was assigned to the 8th submarine flotilla . She took part in several secret special operations in the years that followed.

Operation Flagpole

see: Operation Flagpole

Mark W. Clark

During the last two weeks of September 1942, under the command of Lt. Norman Limbury Auchinleck "Bill" Jewell used the seraph off Algeria for observation. The reconnaissance mission was one of the extensive preparations for the US landings in French North Africa, known as Operation Torch .

After returning to the base in Gibraltar , the submarine was entrusted with the secret mission Flagpole .

On October 19, 1942, the submarine ran out. On board were three British commando units and their weapons, boats and radio equipment as well as the US Major General Mark W. Clark . Clark was the Deputy Commander in Chief of the US Forces in Europe General Dwight D. Eisenhower . His task was to negotiate secretly with high Vichy-French officers and thus also to prepare politically for the upcoming landing.

On October 20, the submarine reached the Algerian coast, where the passengers were dropped off.

The US emissary's mission was clearly successful. Although the invasion fleet was already on the march during the secret negotiations and Clark did not inform his French interlocutors of the exact time and the concrete goals of the landing, the resistance of the French troops during the US invasion of French North Africa that followed on November 8, 1942 was very strong low.

Clark returned to the Seraph on October 25, 1942 . On the same day the British submarine reached the base in Gibraltar, completing Operation Flagpole .

Operation Kingpin

President Roosevelt with Giraud

As early as October 27, 1942, the Seraph left the base again to run off the French Mediterranean coast, where another secret mission was to be carried out.

On November 5, she received the signal to approach the coast and take in the French General Henri Giraud (alias:  Kingpin ) about 32 kilometers from Toulon .

Giraud had fled German captivity six months earlier and made his way to southern France under sometimes adventurous conditions. Although he was politically close to Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain , he categorically rejected any collaboration with the German Reich .

Since the British supported Giraud's political opponent General Charles de Gaulle , he was only in contact with the Americans and officially refused any cooperation with the British. The US Navy had but at this time no own submarine in the affected sea area available. That is why a diplomatic compromise was agreed. The HMS Seraph was placed under pro forma American command for the duration of the mission and was given the name USS Seraph . US officer Captain Jerauld Wright took command from Lt. Jewell.

On 7 November 1942, the French general was to a Catalina - flying boat passed that brought him to Gibraltar.

Unsuccessful patrol in the Mediterranean

On November 24, 1942, the Seraph ran again under Jewell's command on a patrol. The combat mission did not achieve any success:

  • On November 29, 30  nautical miles west of the Aegadian island of Marettimo, the Italian troop carrier Citta di Tunisi  (5419  GRT ) was unsuccessfully attacked with four torpedoes .
  • On December 4, the handle Seraph 20 nautical miles west of Marettimo at 37 ° 59 '  N , 11 ° 35'  O the German van Ankara  (4768 BRT) to. All four torpedoes missed their target.
  • On December 23, she tried 40 nautical miles off Bône  (Algeria) at 37 ° 17 '  N , 8 ° 27'  O a Rammangriff against the Italian submarine Alagi . The Italian submarine escaped. The Seraph was damaged and had to be withdrawn to Blyth in England for repairs .

Operation Mincemeat

see: Operation Mincemeat

After the US landings in western North Africa and the British offensives in the east, the surrender of the German / Italian forces in the war in North Africa was imminent. The next logical step was an Allied invasion of the difficult-to-defend southern Mediterranean flank of the Axis . This fact was of course known to the German defense long before the defeat in Africa. So the question was not whether the Allies would attack in southern Europe , but where exactly. Since the British Secret Intelligence Service knew that the other side assumed that there would be an invasion against the soft southern coasts, but did not know where, a deception was initiated with Operation Mincemeat , the protagonist of which was a male corpse lying on dry ice was. The dead man had the cover name Major Martin .

On April 19, 1943, the Seraph left its base to conduct Operation Mincemeat . On April 30, the corpse, equipped with forged secret papers and clad in a British uniform, was thrown into the sea off the southern Spanish coast near Huelva . The papers contained misinformation about imminent Allied landings in the Balkans and Sardinia . The drop point was chosen so that the current drove the body to the Spanish coast, where it was found. The British assumed that the neutral Spaniards would inform their friendly Germans about the body, which they were right. The German defense investigated the body and found the information obtained to be credible.

The operation was very successful because, contrary to the Italian assessment of the situation, the Germans withdrew several units such as mine-layers and minesweepers from Sicily . A decision that was probably much more fatal for the Wehrmacht was that shortly before the beginning of the battle in the Kursk Arc, two tank divisions were moved from the Eastern Front to Greece . In truth, the Allies began Operation Husky on July 10, 1943 and landed in Sicily, as originally expected by the Axis reconnaissance.

A feature film about the secret service operation was produced in 1956 under the title The Man Who Never Was (Eng .: The man who never existed ). In the film, HMS Scythian took on the role of HMS Seraph .

Further missions and post-war history

After the secret operations, the Seraph patrolled the Mediterranean. She took part in the landing in Sicily as a security vehicle.

For September 10, 1943, Lt. Jewel the sinking of five smaller units east of Corsica . On November 5, 1943, the Greek sailing ship Aghios Militiades  (150 GRT) with the deck gun was sunk east of Crete . The following day, the HMS Seraph sank the Greek sailing ship Narkyssos off Karpathos .

In December 1943 the submarine was ordered back to Chatham for necessary repairs and modifications. The Seraph did not return to active combat, but was converted to a training target.

In order to be able to simulate the new and fast German Type XXI boats , all superstructures and all armament that were unnecessary for operation were removed. This made the submarine lighter and more streamlined. Furthermore, the accumulators were replaced by more powerful models. As a result, the underwater speed could be increased to 12 knots . The German boats were nevertheless significantly faster.

The Royal Navy used the converted submarine as a target for training their anti-submarine units. The Seraph remained in this role even after the end of the war until it was decommissioned. The hull, optimized for higher underwater speeds, also served to research new, more modern submarine concepts. The knowledge gained was used in the development of the first British nuclear submarines .

The HMS Seraph was decommissioned on October 21, 1962. It reached Briton Ferry in Wales on December 20, 1965 and was subsequently broken up there. Parts of its tower have been preserved to this day and are exhibited in the USA on the grounds of the Charleston Military Academy ( South Carolina ). Mark W. Clark was the school's principal from 1954 to 1965.

See also

Web links

Commons : British S-Class Submarines  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

literature

  • Erminio Bagnasco: Submarines in World War II. (Technology - Classes - Types. A Comprehensive Encyclopedia). 5th edition. Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-613-01252-9 .
  • Robert Hutchinson: KAMPF UNDER WASSER - Submarines from 1776 to today , Motorbuchverlag, Stuttgart, 1st edition 2006, ISBN 3-613-02585-X .
  • Anthony Preston: The history of the submarines , Karl Müller Verlag, Erlangen, German edition 1998, ISBN 3-86070-697-7 .

Explanations and references

  1. ↑ a b The uboat.net specifies June 10, 1942 for the Seraph to be commissioned. Hutchinson (see literature ) gives May 27, 1942.
  2. ↑ HMS is the abbreviation for His / Her Majesty's Ship and the name prefix of British ships. HMS means His / Her Majesty's Ship .
  3. ↑ Wright later rose to Admiral and was NATO Commander in Chief of the Navy in the Atlantic from 1954 to 1960 .