Engineering:Grampus-class submarine

Short description: Type of British submarines in service before and during WWII

The Grampus-class submarines were a group of minelaying submarines built for the Royal Navy in the late 1930s. These boats are sometimes referred to as the Porpoise class from the single prototype, HMS Porpoise built in 1932. Five boats to a modified design were built between 1936 and 1938. The ships were all named after marine mammals.

Design

The naval mines were stored in a special "gallery" with a conveyor belt built into the outer casing as pioneered by the converted M-class submarine . These boats were of a saddle tank type.

Service

Boats of this class were used extensively in the Mediterranean, particularly as part of the supply effort to the besieged island of Malta in a service nicknamed the "magic carpet".

Only one, , survived the war.

Boats in class

Ship	Builder	Launched	Fate
	Vickers, Barrow	30 August 1932	Sunk by Japanese aircraft in the Malacca straits, 16 January 1945.
	Chatham Dockyard	25 February 1936	Sunk by Italian torpedo boats and off Sicily 16 June 1940.
	Vickers, Barrow	29 August 1935	Sunk 30 July 1940 by German aircraft near Norway.
	Vickers, Barrow	21 July 1936	Arrived Newport to be broken up 17 March 1946.
	Scotts	2 December 1937	Sunk by Italian torpedo boat Generale Achille Papa off Cyrenaica 30 July 1941.
	Chatham Dockyard	27 September 1938	Captured by the Germans in the Kattegat 4 May 1940 after sustaining mine damage, commissioned as the UB, scuttled 3 May 1945, but later raised and scrapped.

References

• Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1922-1946
• - page from U-boat.net
• - page from rnsubs.co.uk