HMS ''Taku'' was a

British T class submarine The Royal Navy's T class (or ''Triton'' class) of diesel-electric submarines was designed in the 1930s to replace the O, P, and R classes. Fifty-three members of the class were built just before and during the Second World War, where they p ...

built by

Cammell Laird Cammell Laird is a British shipbuilding company. It was formed from the merger of Laird Brothers of Birkenhead and Johnson Cammell & Co of Sheffield at the turn of the twentieth century. The company also built railway rolling stock until 1929, ...

Birkenhead Birkenhead (; cy, Penbedw) is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, Merseyside, England; historically, it was part of Cheshire until 1974. The town is on the Wirral Peninsula, along the south bank of the River Mersey, opposite Liver ...

. She was laid down on 18 November 1937 and was commissioned on 3 October 1940.

Career

''Taku'' served in home waters and the

Mediterranean The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the e ...

. In April 1940, she mistook HMS ''Ashanti'' for a German destroyer and fired several torpedoes at her. All the torpedoes missed. In an attack on a German convoy in May, she damaged the German torpedo boat , and in November, launched a failed attack on the German tanker ''Gedania''. Assigned to the Mediterranean in 1941, she scored numerous kills, including the Italian merchantmen ''Cagliari'' and ''Silvio Scaroni'', the Italian passenger/cargo ship ''Caldea'', the German munitions transport ''Tilly L. M. Russ'', the Italian auxiliary minesweeper ''Vincenso P.'', the Italian tankers ''Arca'' and ''Delfin'', and the Greek sailing vessels ''Niki'', ''Lora'' and a small vessel which was unidentified. She also attacked, but failed to hit, the German merchant ship ''Menes'' and the Italian tanker ''Cerere''. Reassigned to operate off the Scandinavian coast in 1944, ''Taku'' sank the German merchantmen ''Rheinhausen'' and ''Hans Bornhofen'', and badly damaged the German freighter ''Harm Fritzen''. In March, she attacked a convoy, but missed her target, the ex-Norwegian ''Kriegsmarine'' transport ''Moshill''. ''Taku'' struck a mine in April 1944, and was damaged. After the end of the war, she was sold for scrap in November 1946 and broken up in South Wales.HMS Taku
Uboat.net

References

* * * * * * * British T-class submarines of the Royal Navy Ships built on the River Mersey 1939 ships World War II submarines of the United Kingdom {{UK-mil-submarine-stub