Qualla: HMS Sunfish (81S)

HMS Sunfish (81S): Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The aircrew were at least eighty miles off their assigned patrol line, and the submarine was diving instead of staying surfaced to flash recognition signals. So a Liberator of RAF Coastal Command attacked it as a U-boat, and the submarine sank with all hands - fifty Soviet sailors and one British liaison officer. That submarine was HMS Sunfish. She had spent the first five years of the Second World War hunting German ships in northern waters, then been transferred to the Soviet Navy in 1944 as V-1, and was making passage from Dundee to Murmansk under her new flag on 27 July 1944 when the Liberator found her. Both the Royal Navy and the RAF inquiries afterward found the aircrew fully responsible. It made no difference to anyone aboard.

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HMS Sunfish (81S): The Twelve Little S-Boats

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sunfish was a Royal Navy S-class submarine - the 1931 group, the most-built British submarine class of the Second World War. She was launched at Chatham on 30 September 1936. By 1939 she was one of the twelve boats memorialized in the wardroom song 'Twelve Little S-Boats,' a lita...

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HMS Sunfish (81S): A Good War

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sunfish had what the trade called a busy war. Under Lieutenant Commander J.E. Slaughter for most of her career, she went after the most heavily defended German shipping lanes. In February 1940 she attacked a German U-boat and missed. In April 1940, during the German invasion of N...

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HMS Sunfish (81S): Loan to the Soviets

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1944 the Royal Navy transferred Sunfish to the Soviet Navy as part of the strange Anglo-Soviet wartime cooperation in northern waters. The Soviet North Fleet badly needed submarine hulls to operate out of Polyarny near Murmansk, and the British loaned several elderly S- and U-...

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HMS Sunfish (81S): Out of the Lane

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 27 July she did not behave as expected. For reasons that never came out clearly - Fisanovich was an aggressive commander, and there is some suggestion he wanted to go U-boat hunting on his way home - V-1 was found at least eighty miles outside her assigned patrol corridor by a...

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HMS Sunfish (81S): A Memorial in Dundee

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The men of V-1 - they were V-1 by then, not Sunfish - are commemorated together at the Dundee International Submarine Memorial. The memorial stands in the city from which the boat sailed on her final passage, and lists the fifty Soviet submariners alongside Petty Officer Telegrap...

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