HMS Upholder (P37)

The U class was not designed to do what Upholder did. The boats were conceived as small, cheap vessels to replace the ageing H class in the unglamorous work of training anti-submarine crews, and their qualities were all modest: about 540 tonnes standard, 11 knots on the surface, six 21-inch torpedo tubes and a single 3-inch gun, with a complement of 27 to 31 men. Forty-nine were built under the war emergency programmes.

What made them the right boats was geography. The central Mediterranean is shallow, and its water is famously clear: a large T-class submarine could be seen from the air lying on the bottom, and had no room to manoeuvre in the depths available. A small boat could work the narrows between Sicily and Tunisia where the convoys had to pass — and that, not the training role, is where the U class spent its war.

Upholder was completed at Barrow in 1940 and had one commanding officer for the whole of her life: Lieutenant-Commander Malcolm David Wanklyn, a tall, quiet, bearded officer who did not look like the popular idea of a submarine ace and did not behave like one either.

His start was unpromising. The first patrols produced very little, and in a service that measured a captain by tonnage there was a real question whether he would be replaced. What changed was not the man but the method: Wanklyn developed a way of attacking that relied on getting close, holding the periscope down, and firing on a solution worked out in his head from a handful of brief looks. It was slower and more dangerous than the textbook approach, and it worked.

Upholder’s base was Malta, and her flotilla — the 10th Submarine Flotilla — operated from an island under siege, bombed daily, short of food, fuel and torpedoes. The boats sailed from Grand Harbour, worked the convoy routes to Tripoli and Benghazi, and came back to a base that might be under attack when they arrived.

The target was the line that kept Rommel’s army alive. Everything the Axis had in North Africa — fuel, ammunition, vehicles and above all men — crossed from Italy by sea, escorted by the destroyers and torpedo boats of the Regia Marina. The submarines of the 10th Flotilla were the sharpest instrument the British had for cutting it, and Upholder was the sharpest boat in the flotilla.

On the night of 24 May 1941 Upholder found a heavily escorted convoy carrying troops to Libya. Her ASDIC was defective and most of her torpedoes were gone; she attacked anyway, on the surface at night, pressing through the escort screen to reach the transports.

She hit the liner Conte Rosso, 17,879 tons, which sank with heavy loss of life, and then endured a long and accurate depth-charging from the escorts before getting clear. Wanklyn was awarded the Victoria Cross for the patrol — the citation resting not on the single sinking but on the manner of the attack and on the sustained record of the boat.

The most destructive night came on 18 September 1941. Upholder intercepted a convoy carrying reinforcements to North Africa and, within a few hours, sank two sister ships: the Neptunia of 19,475 tons and the Oceania of 19,507 tons, both large, fast liners converted to carry troops.

Nearly 40,000 tons of shipping went down in a single action, and with it a substantial part of a division’s worth of men and equipment intended for Rommel. It was the kind of blow the Axis supply line could not absorb, and it was struck by a boat that displaced 540 tonnes and carried a crew of thirty.

Merchant tonnage was the mission, but Upholder also took warships. She sank the destroyer Libeccio while the Italians were recovering survivors after the destruction of the Duisburg convoy in November 1941, and two submarines — the Tricheco and the Ammiraglio Saint-Bon — along with an auxiliary minesweeper.

The final tally over her career was 93,031 tonnes of enemy shipping: three troopships, six cargo vessels, an auxiliary transport, four warships. No other British submarine of the war came close, and the total was achieved in roughly sixteen months of operations by a boat that was, on every specification that matters, a small one.

Upholder sailed from Malta on 6 April 1942 on what would have been her twenty-fifth patrol, and did not return. She was lost with all hands on or about 14 April, somewhere off the North African coast.

What killed her is not established. The traditional attribution is to depth charges from the Italian torpedo boat Pegaso north-east of Tripoli; later research has questioned it, pointing variously to a German air attack on a submerged contact that day and to an Italian minefield, and noting that the recorded attacks took place well outside her patrol area. Her wreck has never been found. The Admiralty, which as a rule declined to single out individual ships, broke its own convention to issue a special communiqué on her loss — the only such tribute of its kind in the submarine service.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• Sydney Hart, Submarine Upholder (Oldbourne Press).
• Vincent P. O’Hara, Struggle for the Middle Sea (Naval Institute Press).
• Paul Kemp, The T-Class Submarine: The Classic British Design and British Submarines in World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).