HMS Simoom was an S class submarine

British S class submarine (1931)

The S-class submarines of the Royal Navy were originally designed and built during the modernisation of the submarine force in the early 1930s to meet the need for smaller boats to patrol the restricted waters of the North Sea and the Mediterranean Sea replacing the British H class submarines...

 of the Royal Navy

Royal Navy

The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...

, and part of the Third Group built of that class. She was built by Cammell Laird and launched on October 12, 1942.

Career

She served in the Mediterranean, where she unsuccessfully attacked an unidentified merchant ship and later fired upon the Italian light cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi. The torpedoes missed the cruiser but hit and sank the destroyer Vincenzo Gioberti instead.

Details after this are sketchy. She possibly sank the Italian merchant (in German service) Trapani and the Greek sailing vessel Trias.

Sinking

Simoom went on patrol from Port Said to the Aegean

Aegean Sea

The Aegean Sea[p] is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea located between the southern Balkan and Anatolian peninsulas, i.e., between the mainlands of Greece and Turkey. In the north, it is connected to the Marmara Sea and Black Sea by the Dardanelles and Bosporus...

 on November 2, 1943. On the 5th she was diverted to the entrance of the Dardanelles

Dardanelles

The Dardanelles , formerly known as the Hellespont, is a narrow strait in northwestern Turkey connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara. It is one of the Turkish Straits, along with its counterpart the Bosphorus. It is located at approximately...

. Ten days later she was sent ordered to return to port, but never arrived. On 15 November German radio broadcasts stated that a submarine had been destroyed in the Aegean and that several of the crew had been rescued. It is unlikely that this was Simoom, as she would have been miles out of position, nor did any of the claimed survivors state that they were from Simoom. It is more likely that the submarine struck a mine or was lost through an accident.