Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2024: One Hard Working Little Boat
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Photograph FL 22144 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums
Above we see HM Submarine Untiring (P59), a small Group III U (Undine)-class boat underway, likely on trials in the Tyne in early 1943 as she doesn’t have her deck gun fitted. Launched some 81 years ago this month, her war was short, just under two years, but she made her presence known in the Med and would continue to serve in Greek waters well into the 1950s at which point she was the last of her class.
The U-class
Originally designed in the late 1930s as an unarmed submarine to be used as an OPFOR boat for ASW training of destroyers and escorts, these were nimble little craft that soon became much more.
Coastwise submarines rushed into service as part of the War Emergency 1940 and 1941 programs, the U-class boats were dubbed “short hull” for a reason: their overall length was but 191 feet while submerged displacement was only 700 tons. Compare this to the Royal Navy’s T class (or Triton class) boats that preceded them, which ran 276 feet and displaced over 1,500 tons. Likewise, where the T-class carried 16 fish in 10 tubes as well as a 4-inch QF deck gun, the Undines had to make do with a much smaller “throw” of just 8 torpedoes in four bow tubes (no stern tubes) and a Q.F. 12-pdr. 3-inch/40 AAA gun augmented by a trio of .303 Vickers guns.
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U class submarine
But make no mistake, while small and slow (10 knots max submerged, 11 on the surface) the Undines were deadly. Plus, with a periscope depth of just 12 feet under the surface and a draft while surfaced of just over 14 feet, they were shallow water submarines and proved quite useful in littoral taskings such as landing agents and commandos as well as doing beach and harbor reconnaissance.
Meet Untiring
Simple vessels able to be produced rapidly and in large numbers, most Undines were completed in about a year from keel laying to commissioning. The only Royal Navy warship to bear the name “Untiring,” she was laid down at Vickers Armstrong, Newcastle upon Tyne, on 23 December 1941, launched on 20 January 1943, and commissioned on 9 June 1943.
Her first skipper was LT Robert Boyd, DSC, RN, who had earned the Distinguished Service Cross after serving almost two years under CDR E.D Cayley (DSO and three bars) on Untiring’s sistership, HMS/m Utmost (N 19) earlier in the war and had gone on to command the older submarines HMS/m L-23 and HMS/m H-43 between November 1942 and February 1943.
After completing trials in the Tyne estuary and exercises off Blyth, Untiring set off for Holy Loch in July 1943 to join the 6th Flotilla for torpedo and noise trials along with A/S and attack exercises.
War!
By 23 August, Untiring left Lerwick on her 1st War Patrol, ordered to look for German U-boats in the Norwegian Sea. Four days later she sank the Norwegian halibut trawler M-96-G /Havbris I with gunfire about 50 miles off the Norwegian coast, putting the boat’s 7-man crew ashore in the Shetlands when she returned to Lerwick on 5 September.
Her 2nd War Patrol was to sweep through the Bay of Biscay then head to Gibraltar, where she arrived on 3 October, bound for service in the Med.
Leaving “The Rock” a week later for her 3rd Patrol off the coast of German-occupied southern France where she unsuccessfully attacked the German U-boat U-616 with four torpedoes off Toulon on 15 October, followed by an attack on two barges on 19 October and an unidentified escorted merchant vessel two days later– without any confirmed kills.
Headed out from Algiers (assigned to 8th Flotilla, HMS Maidstone) for her 4th War Patrol on 4 November, Untiring headed for the Italian Riviera. She put in at Malta (where she shifted to 10th Flotilla, HMS Talbot) on the 23rd having had no luck.
Her 5th War Patrol in December 1943 included sinking the German net layer Netztender 44/Prudente (396 GRT) inside Monaco harbor and surviving a six-hour duel off Cape da Noli with German UJ boats (auxiliary submarine chasers) and destroyers.
She sank the German barge F296 off the Sestri Levanto Lighthouse in early January 1944 during her 6th Patrol and added the barges FP 352/Jean Suzon and FP 358/St. Antoine later that month to her tally while on her 7th, surviving 14 depth charges dropped by escorts in the latter attack.
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HMS Untiring, 1944, likely at Malta
While her 8th Patrol (14-26 February 1944 off southern France) yielded no joy, her 9th Patrol in April in the same waters saw her sink the German auxiliary minesweeper M 6022/Enseigne south of Cannes followed by the German merchant Diana (1454 GRT, ex-Greek Mairi Deftereou) south of Oneglia the next afternoon.
On her 10th Patrol, also conducted off Southern France, she zapped the German auxiliary submarine chaser UJ 6075 (ex-Clairvoyant) off Toulon on 27 April then was battered by no less than 82 depth charges dropped by her sister, with LT Boyd noting, “The first pattern had been unpleasantly close causing some minor damage.” Nonetheless, Untiring lived up to her name and proceeded three days later to torpedo and sink the German merchant Astrée (2147 GRT) off the Cape Bear Lighthouse.
Her 11th Patrol proved uneventful and, while she attacked a German UJ boat off Toulon on her 12th Patrol in early June, it was likewise fruitless. Not to be deterred, Boyd found UJ 6078/La Havraise (398 GRT) about 12 nautical miles southwest of La Ciotat on 10 June and sent the subchaser to the bottom.
Untiring’s 13th War Patrol in early July, also off Southern France, saw an unsuccessful attack on a German auxiliary patrol vessel. On this trip, she carried the COPP 2 (Combined Operations Pilotage Party 2) commando team– including an attached U.S. Marine colonel– set to conduct a reconnaissance of le de Port Cros to the east of Toulon on the eve of the upcoming Dragoon landings. As noted by COPP Survey, “They were who was originally to be taken close to shore by canoe. However, the mission got downgraded to a periscope-only reconnaissance.”
Her 14th Patrol, conducted in late July, involved, as U-boat.net says, a “special operation off north Corsica,” although Brooks Richards’s otherwise minutely detailed Secret Flotillas does not mention anything about Untiring during this period although sisters HMS Unbroken, Urge, and Utmost were well-documented as clandestine agent and spy runners in the Med by Richards.
Shifting to operations off Greece in October for her 15th War Patrol, Untiring fired fish at the German torpedo boat TA 18 (former Italian Solferino) off the Kassandra peninsula unsuccessfully on the 4th then settled for sinking an 80-ton Greek caique the next day via gunfire then duked it out with a pair of German UJ boats that responded.
Ordered back to Rothesay in late October for refit, she arrived there (joining the 7th Flotilla, HMS Cyclops) by way of Gibraltar in early December. There, LT Boyd left his boat for command of the HMS Otway (N 51). Untiring’s new skipper, LT George Edward Lynton Foster Edsell, RN, who had commanded the submarine HMS Proteus (N 29), would be her last British captain.
Post-War
Following the boat’s refit, which would last until 28 May 1945– some three weeks past VE-Day– Untiring was dispatched back to the Med and arrived at Piraeus, Greece in July after stops at Gibraltar and Malta.
There, at 1030 on 25 July 1945, Untiring was decommissioned by the Royal Navy and turned over to the Royal Hellenic Navy, being renamed first Amfitríti (Amphitrite) and then Xifias (Swordfish), joining five other U and V-boats loaned to the Greeks.
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The six British boats would make up the post-war Greek submarine program, as shown by this 1946 Jane’s entry, including Untiring/Xifias.
Untiring was returned to the Brits in December 1953 (initially recommissioned under one Lt. C.A.J. French) and tasked for a few years as a floating schoolship for National Service midshipmen before she was sent to the bottom off the Devon Coast off Start Point in July 1957 for continued use as a sonar target. Ironically, in this last act, she fulfilled the class’s original intent, to serve as a training boat for ASW work.
As for the rest of the class, the Undines had an impressive record with many racking up high tonnage counts. For instance, HMS/m Upholder (P37), had 93,031 GRT on her scoreboard from 14 vessels, mostly Italian transports but also including two submarines and a destroyer.
The RN loaned several of the class to allies with three boats (Ursula/V1, Unbroken/V2, Unison/V3) going to the Soviets late in the war, two (P41/Uredd, and Varne/Ula) operated by the Free Norwegians, one (P47/Dolfijn) to the Dutch, and two to the Poles (P52/Dzik and Urchin/Sokol).
Of the 49 Undines completed during the war (at least five ordered boas were canceled), no less than 19 were lost through a variety of enemy actions, blue-on-blue incidents, and accidents– a ratio of more than one out of three.
The balance left post-war was not of a type the Admiralty wanted but their small size and simple nature– they were designed as training boats after all– made them ideal to supply to overseas allies who had lost their subs during the conflict. Meanwhile, the Brits quickly disposed of everything else.
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Royal Navy U class submarines in Jane’s 1946 edition, noting that “most are expected to be discarded in the near future.”
The last of the class in active RN service, HMS/m Uther (P62), was sold for scrap in 1950, making Untiring the final Undine in British service when she returned in 1953.
The last holdout of the nearly 50 mighty British U-class boats, HNoMS Ula (P66), ex HMS/m Varne, continued in Norwegian service until 1965, when she was broken up, ironically, in Hamburg, having served just 23 years, most of them for King Haakon VII.
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HNoMS Ula (P66), ex HMSm Varne in Norwegian service
Epilogue
Untiring’s first (and remarkably successful) skipper, Robert Boyd, added a DSO in 1944 to his circa 1942 DSC for his wartime exploits underway. Following the command of Otway as mentioned above, he would go on to become the “old man” on the cruiser HMS Frobisher and the submarine tender HMS Forth (A187) after the war. He retired on 10 June 1959 at the rank of captain, capping 22 years of service in the Royal Navy. Robert passed away in 1985 in Portugal.
Her last wartime British skipper, George Edward Lynton Foster, would go on to command the submarine HMS Vivid and leave the RN in 1950 as an LCDR after 12 years of service for a career in real estate in California.
The Royal Navy has not had a second Untiring on its navy list and I can find no monuments to her. As for her patrol reports and deck logs, they are in the National Archives at Kew.
As for her hulk, she is located at 177 feet in Bigbury Bay and is a popular, somewhat complicated due to her depth, recreational dive.
Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.
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