HMS Seraph (P219) - Other Missions

Other Missions

By late April 1943 Seraph was back in the Mediterranean operating east of Sardinia and on 27 April she fired a salvo of three torpedoes at a merchant ship off the Strait of Bonifacio but was not successful. Again on the last two days of that month she made similar attacks but none of these was successful, and Seraph ended up being depth-charged each time. She was not damaged during these engagements, with no lives lost.

On July, during the Allied invasion of Sicily, she acted as a guide ship for the invasion force.

For the remainder of 1943 the Seraph operated against German and Italian forces in the Mediterranean theater and attacked several convoys, but her performance in that area was lackluster, sinking only a few small ships.

In December, 1943, she sailed to Chatham for a much needed refit, after which she operated in the eastern Atlantic and Norwegian Sea, until she carried out her final patrol in the English Channel, serving as a guide ship to the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944, before her conversion as a training boat for anti-submarine warfare operations.

The Admiralty had received intelligence in early 1944 about new U-boats which were reported to be able to achieve a top speed of around 16 knots (30 km/h) underwater, compared to the 9 knots (17 km/h) of the fastest existing U-boats. As these new XXI-class U-boats were considered to pose a major threat, Seraph was modified at Devonport as a matter of urgency to have a high underwater speed so that trials and exercises could be carried out against a submarine having a similar underwater speed; for example in developing new tactics.

The submarine was streamlined by careful attention to the attachments on the outside of the hull, the size of the bridge reduced, the gun was removed along with one of the periscopes and the radar mast, and torpedo tubes blanked over. The motors were upgraded and higher capacity batteries fitted along with replacement of the propellors with the coarser pitched type used on the larger T class submarines.