German U-Boat Fired — He Torpedoed Back Laughing, Butchered 19 Enemy Ships
The Mediterranean Sea on the night of May 24, 1941, offered neither comfort nor sanctuary to the men hunting beneath its restless surface. Fifty miles east of Syracuse, Sicily, the dark ocean surged in violent, relentless swells, lifting and dropping the cramped steel hull of His Majesty’s Submarine Upholder. Through the narrow optic of his attack periscope, Lieutenant Commander Malcolm David Wanklin stared into the gloom, tracking eighteen thousand tons of armored mass cutting through the water at a relentless eighteen knots.
The Italian troopship Conte Rosso was steaming toward North Africa, her massive decks carrying nearly three thousand soldiers destined to reinforce Axis lines in the desert. She was not traveling alone; five modern destroyers surrounded the flagship in an impenetrable, interlocking defensive screen, slicing the water like a swarm of angry wasps. Inside Upholder’s control room, the air was dense, humid, and heavy with the mingled stench of battery acid, diesel oil, stale sweat, and human tension.
Wanklin was operating under conditions that standard naval doctrine considered entirely unmanageable. The submarine’s primary underwater ears, her ASDIC sonar set, had suffered a catastrophic failure hours earlier and remained completely dead. He could neither hear the approaching escorts nor track their sweeping movements beneath the surface, leaving him essentially blind and deaf in a lethal environment.
To make matters worse, Upholder was down to her final two torpedoes, with the vast target rapidly closing the distance from four thousand yards down to three thousand, then two thousand. At that moment, the razor-sharp bow of an Italian destroyer appeared directly in the periscope glass, carving the sea at thirty knots on a direct collision course. Wanklin immediately ordered the periscope lowered, holding his breath as the massive warship passed barely twenty feet directly over the submarine’s conning tower.
The terrifying rumble of the destroyer’s twin screws vibrated through the steel hull, vibrating tools off the racks and shaking the plates beneath the crew’s feet. When Wanklin raised the scope again seconds later, he could clearly see the orange glow of a lit cigarette flicked from the destroyer’s fantail into the foaming wake. Any sane commander faced with zero sonar, two weapons, and a destroyer passing within arm’s reach would have aborted the attack and taken his vessel deep.
Instead, Wanklin did the unthinkable: he kept his periscope locked on the center of the convoy and ordered the boat to press forward into the teeth of the escort screen. Submarine commanders hunting heavily escorted convoys in the shallow, clear waters of the Mediterranean suffered from an abysmal eight percent survival rate per patrol. Wanklin was already on his sixth operational patrol in four months, pushing far past the statistical limits of human survival and military probability.
The cold mathematics of underwater combat were unmistakably aligned against the young commander. Without sonar, eighty-six percent of Royal Navy submarine captains would have formally broken off the engagement to preserve their boat and crew. Firing only two torpedoes at extreme range against a zig-zagging liner meant the mathematical probability of scoring a decisive hit hovered around a dismal eleven percent.
The enemy convoy maintained a steady cruising speed of eighteen knots, whereas Upholder could manage a maximum submerged speed of only eight knots for an hour before exhausting her batteries. He possessed no ability to outrun an escort, and if he missed his target, reloading the empty tubes before five destroyers tore his boat to pieces was impossible. A single depth charge exploding within thirty feet of the hull meant instantaneous destruction for all thirty-three officers and ratings sealed inside.
There was no margin for human error, no backup plan, and no hope of outside rescue; there was only the ruthless geometry of the firing angle. The mathematics insisted that David Wanklin and his crew were already dead men breathing borrowed air beneath the Sicilian waves. Yet within minutes, he would send the massive Conte Rosso straight to the sea floor, endure a relentless counter-attack, and return home with quiet modesty.
Over the following sixteen months, this quiet officer would systematically sink nineteen enemy vessels totaling over one hundred and twenty-eight thousand tons of vital shipping. He would achieve three confirmed kills against enemy submarines in the rarest form of underwater duel, single-handedly strangling the logistics lines feeding Erwin Rommel’s Panzer armies. He did all this while resembling an untidy Old Testament prophet, known for singing ribald sea shanties and possessing a bizarre parlor trick of wrapping his legs behind his neck.
Malcolm David Wanklin had entered the world on June 28, 1911, in Kolkata, British India, born into an affluent engineering family of considerable prestige. That fortune vanished overnight when a catastrophic maritime shipwreck destroyed the family’s primary assets, forcing his parents to rebuild their lives from complete ruin. At the age of six, the young boy met his uncle, a decorated Royal Navy destroyer captain who had famously rammed and sunk an enemy U-boat during the Great War.
The boy had looked up at the battle-hardened officer and asked a single, curious question: “Did it hurt the submarine?” The uncle laughed heartily before offering a piece of advice: “It hurt them a great deal more than it hurt us, my boy.” That childhood conversation planted a foundational philosophy that would guide Wanklin’s entire adult life: if you are willing to absorb more damage than the enemy anticipates, you can achieve the impossible.
Understanding how an introverted, color-blind outsider who initially missed thirty consecutive torpedo shots became Britain’s most lethal ace requires examining his foundational struggles. In 1925, a fourteen-year-old Wanklin stood before a Royal Navy medical board attempting to gain entrance into the naval college at Dartmouth. The examining physician quickly detected significant red-green color blindness, a condition that triggered an automatic, non-negotiable disqualification under strict Admiralty regulations.
Instead of accepting defeat and departing the examination room, the determined boy asked the senior medical officer a profoundly unorthodox question. “Can you teach me the difference between the colors I see and what is actually there in reality?” Intrigued by the boy’s sheer audacity and intellect, the chief medical officer spent three intensive weeks coaching him to decode chromatic illusions through contrast, tone, and contextual cues.
Wanklin passed the entrance examination not because his biological eyesight changed, but because he learned to navigate a permanent handicap through deliberate mental compensation. He subsequently graduated near the absolute top of his class at Dartmouth, excelling in navigation, mathematics, and tactical geometry. Classmates remembered him as a solemn, solitary figure who avoided communal team sports, unaware they were observing a mind training itself to solve instinctual problems through pure logic.
His trial by combat began on July 18, 1940, in the shallow, mine-infested waters of the North Sea off Terschelling Island. Commanding HMS H-31, an obsolete submarine left over from the First World War, Wanklin had patrolled for weeks through miserable weather without finding a target. At dawn, lookouts sighted three German anti-submarine trawlers steaming in close formation, heavily armed and actively scanning the shallows for Allied intruders.
Standard naval doctrine dictated that small, highly maneuverable auxiliary vessels should never be engaged with precious torpedoes because they were too difficult to strike. Wanklin disregarded the doctrine, spending over an hour carefully maneuvering his obsolete boat not simply to get closer, but to establish a geometrically flawless firing position. He waited patiently until all three German trawlers overlapped during their synchronized zigzag pattern, creating a singular visual profile that lasted only sixty seconds.
At a range of nine hundred yards, he discharged a single torpedo that struck the German submarine chaser UJ-126 dead center, blowing her apart in four minutes. Eight heavy depth charges detonated around his boat during the furious counter-attack, yet Wanklin brought the old vessel home without taking significant damage. His formal patrol report consisted of brief, matter-of-fact sentences, noting that the crew behaved well and omitting any mention of heroic maneuvers.
Despite that early success, Wanklin faced a devastating professional crisis during the early months of 1941 after taking command of HMS Upholder in Malta. Over the course of five grueling Mediterranean patrols, he fired thirty precious torpedoes and managed to achieve only a single confirmed hit against enemy shipping. His flotilla commander, Captain George “Shrimp” Simpson, faced severe pressure from senior Admiralty officials to relieve the young officer of his sea command immediately.
Submarine captains with a three percent accuracy rate were routinely reassigned to desk duties or instructional posts ashore without hesitation. Simpson, however, possessed an extraordinary eye for talent and noticed a peculiar, redeeming pattern hidden inside Wanklin’s string of expensive failures. The young commander spent his off-duty hours filling dense notebooks with intricate mathematical equations, recalculating speed-distance-time triangles and refining his torpedo firing angles.
Wanklin was not offering hollow excuses or blaming his equipment; he was methodically debugging his own cognitive errors like an analytical machine. Simpson chose to grant him one final operational opportunity, quietly ensuring that Upholder received meticulously calibrated torpedoes and priority access to decrypted Ultra intelligence. That administrative faith yielded monumental dividends almost immediately during the submarine’s sixth patrol into the contested waters of the central Mediterranean.
On April 25, 1941, operating near the island of Lampedusa, Wanklin sighted the Italian merchant vessel Antonietta steaming under the protection of an armed escort. Abandoning his previous habit of firing single shots from long range, he boldly drove Upholder to within seven hundred yards before unleashing a four-torpedo spread. The first weapon struck the freighter amidships with devastating force, while Wanklin coolly countermanded the launch of the remaining tubes to conserve ammunition.
The following morning, he located two Axis transports that had been disabled and abandoned in shallow coastal water following an attack by RAF bombers. Surfacing in broad daylight, Wanklin placed a boarding party onto a transport laden with vehicles and supplies bound for Rommel’s forces in North Africa. His sailors seized critical intelligence documents and secret operational ciphers before setting internal scuttling charges that blew the abandoned merchantman apart.
During the chaotic withdrawal, Upholder ran hard aground on an uncharted sandbank in twenty-nine feet of water while an enemy destroyer patrolled nearby. Maintaining total composure, Wanklin systematically flooded his forward tanks, threw the diesel engines into full reverse, and ripped the boat free with seconds to spare. Captain Simpson read the resulting patrol log and realized his quiet officer had transformed into a warrior whose calculated aggressiveness bordered on genius.
Days later, cruising off the coast of Tripoli, Wanklin detected a massive convoy of five Axis troop transports racing at seventeen knots. Because Upholder could manage only ten knots on the surface, catching the convoy from astern was physically impossible under standard operating principles. Standard operational doctrine instructed the captain to transmit a sighting report to headquarters, mark the enemy position, and abandon the chase.
Wanklin refused to break contact, spending two hours computing the convoy’s destination, speed, and return trajectory before setting an ambush across their projected path. Six hours later, as the evening sun dipped below the horizon, the Axis convoy returned precisely where his calculations predicted they would appear. Operating in failing light, he fired three torpedoes into the overlapping silhouettes of the two largest vessels, scoring catastrophic hits on both targets.
The German liner Leverkusen took two torpedoes directly into her engineering spaces and slipped beneath the dark Mediterranean waters in eighteen minutes. The transport Arcturus sat dead in the water, listing heavily to port, while escorting warships dropped depth charges and scrambled to shield the survivors. Wanklin calmly surfaced in the darkness, maneuvered Upholder to point-blank range, and sent the crippled Arcturus to the bottom with his final torpedo.
That single patrol erased three major enemy ships totaling nineteen thousand tons from the Axis inventory, completely vindicating Captain Simpson’s personal faith. By May 1941, David Wanklin had calibrated his instincts, mastered the lethal geometry of submarine warfare, and prepared to strike the enemy’s main artery. The stage was set for the fateful encounter on May 24, where the fate of thousands of Axis soldiers hung on his decisions.
At two o’clock in the morning, Upholder rolled heavily upon the surface fifty miles off Syracuse, charging her depleted batteries in rough seas. Four-foot swells broke relentlessly across the low-slung casing, throwing heavy spray into the faces of the bridge lookouts scanning the pitch-black horizon. At a quarter past three, the starboard lookout spotted faint smudges of dark coal smoke rising against the faintly illuminated eastern skyline.
Wanklin immediately ordered the crew to diving stations, determined to conduct an aggressive surface approach to maximize his speed and visual range. His plan was violently disrupted minutes later when the moon broke through the cloud cover, illuminating Upholder’s dark silhouette on the crest of a swell. An Italian destroyer spotted the submarine at two thousand yards and turned sharply toward her, forcing Wanklin to order an immediate emergency crash dive.
Upholder slipped beneath the violent waves in forty-five seconds, descending into the dark, silent world where only steel and hydrophones mattered. The heavy ocean swell made depth keeping exceptionally hazardous, forcing the submarine to pitch wildly and blinding the periscope with churning white water. Every time Wanklin raised the search periscope, the boat lurched, preventing him from obtaining a stable navigational bearing on the target for more than seconds.
At twenty past four, the convoy materialized clearly through the spray, dominated by the towering, grey profile of the troopship Conte Rosso. Surrounding the eighteen-thousand-ton liner were five destroyers operating in a rigid pentagonal screen designed to detect and destroy any submerged intruder. The physical gap between the patrolling escorts was barely six hundred yards wide, offering virtually zero margin for an approaching submarine without working sonar.
Recognizing that attempting to avoid the destroyers would disrupt his firing calculations, Wanklin chose to ignore the escort screen entirely during his final approach. He focused his mind exclusively on the Conte Rosso’s movements, methodically recording her speed, compass heading, and eight-minute zigzag schedule through the optic. The charging destroyers were relegated to background noise, because allowing fear of the escorts to enter his calculations would guarantee a missed shot.
At thirty-five minutes past four, Wanklin began his terminal attack run, closing the distance to four thousand yards in absolute tactical silence. Through the periscope glass, he watched an enemy destroyer heading directly toward his position, its massive bow wave foaming white in the dawn light. He lowered the periscope just as the warship’s thumping screws passed twenty feet above Upholder’s hull, shaking the submarine from stem to stern.
The violent wake knocked Upholder down to sixty feet, forcing Wanklin to blow internal tanks to regain periscope depth in the surging sea. Rising too quickly toward the surface, he flooded his forward trim tanks, arresting the boat’s upward momentum at precisely twenty-seven feet beneath the waves. Peering through the lens, he caught sight of an enemy sailor casually flicking a cigarette into the sea before turning his attention back to the target.
At forty-eight minutes past four, Wanklin finalized his tactical solution: target speed eighteen knots, track angle one hundred and ten degrees, range twenty-five hundred yards. As he prepared to shoot, a second destroyer approached from the port quarter, slowing down to conduct active sonar pinging in the immediate area. Knowing that taking evasive action would destroy his firing solution, Wanklin held his course and speed, refusing to yield his position to the hunter.
By fifty-two minutes past four, the massive grey hull of the Conte Rosso filled the entire field of view through Upholder’s attack periscope. The submarine was rolling four degrees from side to side in the heavy swell, which threatened to alter the torpedoes’ trajectory upon leaving the tubes. Wanklin timed the roll of the vessel, waiting for the upward swing of the hull to ensure his weapons ran straight and true toward the liner.
“Stand by tubes one and two,” Wanklin called out quietly across the hushed control room, his voice steady, calm, and entirely devoid of panic. “Fire one.” The submarine lurched as high-pressure air expelled the first torpedo into the sea, followed twelve seconds later by the release of the second. Wanklin immediately ordered the helmsman to take the boat down to one hundred and fifty feet, flooding negative tanks to initiate a rapid descent.
For forty-eight agonizing seconds, the men inside Upholder stood motionless in the dim red emergency lighting, listening to the high-pitched whine of their torpedoes. Then, a massive detonation shook the submarine like an iron bell, followed twenty-two seconds later by a second, equally violent underwater blast. The distinct, horrifying sounds of tearing bulkheads, collapsing compartments, and escaping high-pressure steam echoed through the ocean as the Conte Rosso began to founder.
Ten seconds later, the surviving Italian destroyers converged on Upholder’s estimated position, unleashing a relentless barrage of heavy depth charges into the deep. The first pattern of four depth charges detonated within seventy feet of the submarine’s hull, shattering internal light bulbs and showering the crew with cork. Steel hull plates buckled inward under the immense hydraulic pressure before springing back into shape with deafening metallic groans that terrified the trapped crew.
Wanklin stood beside the periscope well with his arms folded across his chest, calmly observing his men as the underwater bombardment continued unabated. When a young seaman began hyperventilating in sheer terror, Wanklin placed a reassuring hand upon the man’s shoulder, remaining silent until the sailor’s breathing slowed. Over the next half hour, thirty-seven depth charges detonated around the boat, nine of them close enough for the crew to hear the mechanical firing pins snap.
By twenty-four minutes past five, the depth charge attacks ceased as the Italian destroyers turned away to rescue survivors from the sunken troopship. Inside Upholder, the air had grown thin, foul, and hot, while the main electrical batteries registered a dangerously low forty percent charge remaining. In the forward compartment, an overwhelmed sailor began silently unfastening the conning tower hatch clips, his mind broken by the terror of the sustained bombardment.
Wanklin approached the sailor calmly, speaking in a quiet, conversational tone that cut straight through the man’s panic without causing a scene. “We are going to periscope depth in five minutes, lad,” Wanklin said softly. “You can wait five minutes with the rest of us.” The sailor’s trembling hands dropped from the heavy steel dogs, and he stepped back from the hatch, nodding silently in complete, subdued obedience.
Five minutes later, Wanklin raised the search periscope into the morning light, finding the surface littered with floating wreckage, overturned lifeboats, and oil slicks. The mighty Conte Rosso had vanished into twenty-two hundred feet of water, taking more than thirteen hundred enemy soldiers down with her shattered steel hull. Turning to his first lieutenant, Wanklin casually ordered a return course to Malta, remarking that breakfast would be served promptly at seven hundred hours.
When Upholder arrived at the Lazaretto Creek submarine base in Malta the following morning, Captain Simpson met the boat carrying a celebratory bottle of gin. When asked about the results of the patrol, Wanklin downplayed the engagement, reporting only that he believed he had scored a hit before going deep. Only after Simpson confirmed the sinking through decrypted enemy communications did Wanklin acknowledge the victory, before heading to his quarters to sleep for sixteen uninterrupted hours.
The Italian Admiralty launched an exhaustive internal investigation, convinced that British intelligence had obtained their secret convoy routes through high-level espionage within naval headquarters. They never suspected that a solitary British submarine commander had simply driven straight through their destroyer screen without sonar and attacked them at point-blank range. When junior submarine officers in Malta later asked Wanklin how he navigated the impossible escort screen, he offered a characteristic reply: “I fired at the big one.”
By the end of 1941, David Wanklin had become the most decorated and respected submarine commander serving in the ranks of the Royal Navy. He was awarded the prestigious Victoria Cross and the Distinguished Service Order with two bars, his exploits celebrated across newspapers and BBC radio broadcasts. His wife, Betty, only learned of his heroic combat record through national news reports, as his personal letters home never mentioned operational matters due to military censorship.
By March 1942, Wanklin had completed twenty-seven combat patrols, sinking nineteen Axis merchant ships, three enemy submarines, and a destroyer while damaging an enemy cruiser. The relentless physical and psychological toll of submarine warfare had left the young commander severely gaunt, exhausted, and suffering from uncontrollable tremors in his hands. Captain Simpson ordered him to relinquish command and return to Great Britain for mandatory rest, but one critical supply convoy required an immediate interception.
Wanklin agreed to undertake one final operational mission, promising his devoted crew that patrol number twenty-eight would be their last before heading home. Upholder departed the bomb-ravaged harbor of Malta on April 6, 1942, flying her proud Jolly Roger emblazoned with nineteen white victory bars. The submarine slipped past the Grand Harbour breakwater, turned her bow toward the contested coast of Tripoli, and descended beneath the surface for the final time.
On April 14, 1942, an Axis reconnaissance aircraft reportedly spotted a submerged submarine operating off the Libyan coastline and directed naval forces to the scene. The Italian torpedo boat Pegaso arrived shortly thereafter, dropping a heavy pattern of depth charges across the area without establishing firm sonar contact. No floating debris or telltale oil slicks were ever observed, and the Italian captain made no official claim of having destroyed an enemy vessel that afternoon.
HMS Upholder never transmitted another operational report and was officially declared overdue and presumed lost with all thirty-three hands on April 20, 1942. Malcolm David Wanklin was thirty years old at the time of his death, leaving behind no known grave beneath the restless Mediterranean waters he dominated. His name is permanently etched into the bronze panels of the Portsmouth Naval Memorial alongside thousands of other British sailors who have no resting place but the sea.
In 1986, the Royal Navy honored his enduring memory by commissioning a new diesel-electric patrol submarine bearing the storied name HMS Upholder. That vessel later transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy as HMCS Chicoutimi, continuing to serve as an active reminder of an extraordinary maritime heritage. Yet beyond the physical ships and stone memorials, Wanklin’s true legacy rests in how he approached the terrifying realities of combat under the sea.
Submarine warfare is governed by cold calculations, where most commanders rationally choose to abort missions when their equipment fails or the defensive odds become insurmountable. Wanklin looked at the same impossible odds and chose to act anyway, understanding that retreating meant allowing enemy supplies to reach the battlefield unchallenged. He was never a reckless man, nor was he devoid of fear; his hands trembled constantly in the quiet hours between his combat patrols.
Instead, David Wanklin possessed a rare and profound quality that he once described in a wartime interview as the single essential trait of a submariner: imperturbability. It was the extraordinary mental discipline required to remain completely functional, rational, and lethal while the physical world collapsed into fire and darkness around him. That unwavering discipline allowed a color-blind officer to overcome impossible odds, master the geometry of war, and carve his name into naval history.
