One Submarine’s Secret War Against the Axis: HMS Triumph, SOE and MI9 in the Mediterranean, 1941

224 pages

Dr Andrew Boyd

This book describes the final year in the life of HM Submarine Triumph following her arrival in the Mediterranean in January 1941. Its author Gav Don is a former Royal Navy officer turned professional writer, primarily on business topics.  He is also the nephew of Triumph’s gunnery officer and the book reflects 15 years’ research culminating in the discovery of her wreck in 2023.  Don emphasises in his Introduction how his research, motivated initially by family loss, extended far beyond official records and histories, embracing private papers and memorabilia of all sorts, including an extraordinary number of surviving family letters. He aimed to produce the most comprehensive and authentic story possible of one submarine and her crew (largely unchanged through this last year) and the operations they conducted.  There is a fine foreword by Lord Janvrin, also a former naval officer before becoming a diplomat and private secretary to Elizabeth II.  Throughout 1941, his father’s younger brother was Triumph’s First Lieutenant and second in command and died with her when she was sunk in the Aegean in January 1942.  Like Don, Janvrin describes how his uncle’s death and the unanswered questions around Triumph’s loss haunted his family for decades.

 Triumph was the fifth T-class submarine and commissioned in May 1939.  She had conducted nine war patrols in home waters by the end of 1940 before arriving in Gibraltar, for a Mediterranean deployment expected to last a year, now under the command of Lieutenant Commander Wilfred (Sammy) Woods, a distinguished future admiral.  She had been lucky to survive striking a German mine shortly after the outbreak of war which blew off her bow but failed to penetrate her pressure hull. The only lasting consequence after repairs was the loss of her two external bow torpedo tubes, reducing her maximum salvo from ten to eight.

The book opens dramatically with an account of Triumph’s successful snap attack at the end of June 1941, 30 miles north of Alexandria, leading to the destruction of the Italian submarine Salpa by a combination of gun and torpedo. This episode vividly underlines constant themes in Triumph’s Mediterranean war: the intense pressure on the captain to make instant decisions, involving fiendish calculations of opportunity versus risk; the need for perfect teamwork in executing his decisions; and the often sheer brutality of submarine war – kill or be killed. Don’s understanding and explanation of the mathematics of submarine attack demonstrated here and throughout the book are one of its strengths. There were no survivors from Salpa. Six months later it would be Triumph’s turn. Meanwhile the fine line between success and disaster was reinforced just days after Salpa‘s demise. The enthusiastic sinking of two small Italian vessels by gunfire in a night-time sortie off the Libyan coast provoked counter fire from a shore battery which damaged Triumph’s forward ballast tank and came within feet of detonating nearby torpedoes in their tubes.

Subsequent early chapters provide an excellent description of the T-class, the factors driving their design, what it was really like to serve in one, and the differing levels of support and recreation available in the key submarine bases at Malta and Alexandria. Don is good at explaining the changing role of the Royal Navy submarine force as the strategic context of the Mediterranean theatre evolved through 1941. He is especially perceptive in describing the Greek campaign and its consequences.  Don also underlines how dangerous submarine service was with a casualty rate only rivalled by that of Bomber Command aircrew.  When Triumph entered the Mediterranean, one third of the 2,500 men in the Royal Navy’s seagoing submarine service at the start of the war were already dead. A year later it was half. Based on 1940 experience, the prospects of a submarine surviving a year of operations in the Mediterranean were about one in five. This partly reflected the greater threat from air surveillance in its often clearer waters but also from extensive mining.  As Don says, Triumph’s crew knew all this and must have felt they were embarked on a suicide mission.

 Triumph completed 11 successful war patrols in 1941, all but the last under Woods, before sailing from Alexandria for the final time on Boxing Day. Her fighting record across these patrols, vividly described in detail by Don, was extraordinarily varied and by any standard impressive. In addition to Salpa, she sank an armed merchant cruiser, two substantial merchant ships, five coasters and eight minor vessels. There was a substantial toll of damaged ships too. But attack on Axis warships and supply lines was only one part of her story.  From her first arrival in the Mediterranean, she was a key participant, and often innovator, in a range of special operations – hence ‘secret war’ in the book’s title. In March, in preparation for the potential capture of the island of Rhodes, Triumph conducted the world’s first ever beach reconnaissance involving the landing and recovery of specialist personnel by collapsible canoe or Folboat. This was a model for numerous future pre-invasion recce operations in all war theatres. The following month she acted as navigation marker for a commando raid on Bardia, pioneering another vital future submarine role.  Thereafter, she landed and recovered intelligence agents in Greece and later Yugoslavia, evacuated escapees from Greece and, in August, deployed a commando party which successfully destroyed the huge seven-arch railway bridge at Torrente Furiano in northern Sicily. All these special operations were difficult and dangerous, none went smoothly, and many hard lessons were learnt.  What comes across is the remarkable versatility and reliability of a T-class submarine and the professionalism and adaptability of Triumph’s crew in executing entirely novel tasks. The contrast with the single role predictability of the average German U-boat patrol is striking.

 Triumph was programmed to return home in December but pressure on submarine availability caused by war with Japan led inexorably to one final patrol. Its primary purpose was to resupply the hub established by the escape organisation MI9 on the island of Antiparos for collecting escapees from the mainland before moving them on to Egypt. After landing supplies, Triumph would conduct an anti-shipping patrol in the area around Cape Sounion south of Athens before returning to pick up escapees 10 days later.  She duly made the first rendezvous on the night of 29 December before departing for her patrol area, never to be seen again. Despite significant Admiralty research postwar, her fate was unknown for more than 80 years. As Don notes, she was one of a ‘lost flotilla’ of more than 20 boats with no established grave and nowhere for families to focus their mourning.

Don devotes a third of his book to setting the scene for this patrol and establishing how Triumph was lost. His comprehensive account of the Antiparos hub and its personalities is fascinating if largely incidental to Triumph’s story. He vividly demonstrates that, while intelligence and covert action in this theatre had many successes, the operations were too often hampered by internecine agency rivalries. He also reminds us, as perhaps too few historians covering this topic do, that professionalism and heroism were sometimes accompanied by gross irresponsibility and selfishness. Don’s account of Triumph’s final hours is both a masterly forensic examination and deeply moving. Once her wreck was located, 10 miles southwest of Sounion, he could link its condition with two other vital pieces of evidence: a failed torpedo attack on an Italian tug and barge just south of Sounion early on 10 January; and the existence of two separate lines of Italian mines revealed in postwar records. He argues convincingly that Triumph detected and avoided the first line during her attack but probably missed the second, setting off a mine which then detonated a torpedo she was reloading.

Don would like this book to stand as a tribute not just to Triumph but to all 78 Royal Navy submarines lost in the war. He has wonderfully achieved that aim. Highly recommended.